Originally posted by Technologist
Educate me if I’m so stupid I shouldn’t bring it up.
1. The only reason why Russia retook the Crimea is because it contains (it really just
is) a critical naval base that was at risk. It was at risk because the US had fostered a coup that deposed the legitimate Russian-friendly Ukrainian government - this is common knowledge if you don't take US media at face value. There's an audio recording of Victoria Nuland and the then-ambassador to Ukraine talking about who should be in the 'new government', you should be able to find it even on Youtube. Search "victoria nuland fuck the EU".
2. Crimea has existed as a Russian territory far longer than Ukraine has existed as a state, and the only reason it's part of the Ukraine is because Kruschev gave them stewardship in the days of the Soviet Union. Since its collapse in the 90s, the people of the Crimea have regularly petitioned to rejoin Russia with over 90% turning up to vote yes, but it's always been rejected by the Ukrainian government.
3. Russian Spetznaz entering the Crimea were simply to enable the referendum to be run (which was observed by several foreign bodies, the only one with complaints about the process was the US... who didn't even send an observer) and to enforce the (almost-guaranteed) outcome. Not a single shot was fired.
3. 'Russia invading' has always been a stupid canard to cover for the fact that the US used another colour revolution to overthrow the government and destroy the state, and to cover the coup-imposed government's utter embarrassment at getting dominated by the rebels in the East (see - Debaltseve cauldrons for example). There were never Russian military entering into the conflict and likely will not be in the future, though it's an open secret that Russia supplies arms to the rebels.
Originally posted by Technologist
Are you mad because I said you have a hard on for Putin? Why be angry? Wave your Putin flag proudly.
At this point it's frustrating that you people cannot understand what factors of the situation are important and just fall back on cold-war era programming; "Russia bad!" any time they're mentioned even in passing. Russia's not even relevant to this conversation, we were talking about the credibility of the US intelligence services and Falco deflected saying "we should believe them because Russia is worse". I literally spent 10 pages asking him for evidence for "Russia interfering in our elections" in the last thread and he finally came out with "because the CIA said so", which is just mind-numbing. You don't have to have an opinion on Russia at all to know it's not wise to take any intelligence agency at face value.
You goobers seem to think this is a zero-sum game where you have to back US or Russian intelligence agencies -
NEITHER IS YOUR FRIEND, and you're going to get burned if you start trusting them just because they're attacking someone you don't like.
