Originally Posted by
dead_pan
+1
I had a weird moment of reverie yesterday when I imagined what would happen if Vlad was removed from power and Russia became a sane, responsible nation. How different would the world be?
How are we to regard Russia and the Russian people in future - assuming we’ve got one? Their general public appear to behave much as any other modern Europeans, yet their soldiers (their own sons and husbands) are corrupt barbarians. The much-vaunted Russian military are showing themselves to be incompetent and ill-equipped thugs whose only real threat to the West is nuclear weapons. Their strutting elite are a bunch of amoral gangsters solely obsessed with accumulating vast personal wealth and possessions. Their government behaves as though the last hundred-odd years never happened, and seem to regard their main enemy as their own people. Much of this was well known before this calamity, but how can we establish any future trust-based relationship with them unless there are seismic changes amounting to a revolution there?