what happened to the großrossiya thread

[regexcellent]

That's my impression. NATO looking for something to do, Clinton having this big hammer called the US military and everything looking like a nail.

[Dinner]

I heard different stories ... about Yeltsin building Putin up as his successor, against a contender who promised more democracy in russia.
And the 2nd Chechnya war having been started started as a propaganda tool to support Putin against said rival in the upcoming elections (to give the russians the feeling of an external threat and present Putin as the strong man russia needs in these times)

PBS's Frontline did an excellent fact filled piece on that full of first hand accounts, documents, and testimony. Frankly, PBS is one of the best, least partisan, and most fact based news sources in the country so I am inclined to believe them.

[Dinner]

It's hard to cry about NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. Oh man, those poor Serbs, not being allowed to kill all the Albanians.

And Bosnians, and Croats, and Slovenes. Slobo wanted to set up a new Serbian dominated state which would have upset Tito's delicate balance of power between the main ethnic, religious, and national groups in Yugoslavia and that didn't sit well with the other nationalities so they decided to take their marbles and leave while they could. Slobo didn't like that idea so he decided to start a war and grab as much land as he could even if he had to kill everyone else who happened to be on that land.

[C0ckney]

blagojevich had a colourful career even before he became governer of illinois.

[Dinner]

It is kind of odd how it turned Slobo into Blagojevich.

[C0ckney]

blaming your phone again i see.

[Hauldren Collider]

I think that may be my favorite typo of all time

[onodera]

I heard different stories ... about Yeltsin building Putin up as his successor, against a contender who promised more democracy in russia.
And the 2nd Chechnya war having been started started as a propaganda tool to support Putin against said rival in the upcoming elections (to give the russians the feeling of an external threat and present Putin as the strong man russia needs in these times)

Do you know the name of that contender?

[Dinner]

There is a link to the video with the names some where in this thread. I would have posted it and it would be a link to Frontline.

[onodera]

There is a link to the video with the names some where in this thread. I would have posted it and it would be a link to Frontline.

Putin's Way? There's a transcript, but there are no names: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...transcript-74/

[The Mad Monk]

One Professional Russian Troll Tells All

...
RFE/RL: So what did your department do?

Burkhard: Our department commented on posts. Every city and village in Russia has its own municipal website with its own comments forum. People would write something on the forum -- some kind of news -- and our task was to comment on it. We did it by dividing into teams of three. One of us would be the "villain," the person who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, in order to bring a feeling of authenticity to what we're doing. The other two enter into a debate with him -- "No, you're not right; everything here is totally correct." One of them should provide some kind of graphic or image that fits in the context, and the other has to post a link to some content that supports his argument. You see? Villain, picture, link.

RFE/RL: So all three of you sit together, agreeing on who's going to do what in this performance?

Burkhard: Yeah, that's the kind of absurdity that goes on. We don't talk too much, because everyone is busy. A single comment isn't supposed to be less than 200 characters. You have to just sit there and type and type, endlessly. We don't talk, because we can see for ourselves what the others are writing, but in fact you don't even have to really read it, because it's all nonsense. The news gets written, someone else comments on it, but I think real people don't bother reading any of it at all.

So in this way, our little threesome traverses the country, stopping at every forum, starting with Kaliningrad and ending in Vladivostok. We create the illusion of actual activity on these forums. We write something, we answer each other. There are keywords, tags, that are needed for search engines. We're given five keywords -- for example, "Shoigu," "defense minister," "Russian army." All three of us have to make sure these keywords appear all over the place in our comments. They can't even be conjugated or declined. Sometimes it's very hard to write when you can't use any declensions!
...

More in the link above.

[pchang]

Paiktis is like that Princess on The Royals who is shagging everything in sight in order to lash out at her mom (The Queen). I sorry to tell you this Paiktis, but Putin is just not that into you.

[Bereta_Eder]

It's at times like that that not knowing what the hell you're talking about is a blessing.

[Bereta_Eder]

Wasn't it onefoot the one who said how Britain and France's stance of supporting pr!cks facilitated the break up of Yugoslavia?
Slobo was bad simply because he had the whole of the yugoslav army at his disposal. The goal of ethnic pure balkans states isn't new.
It has started long ago and things shouldn't be seen with myopic eyes like something of a dissonance in the force but as the 3rd balkan war.

Nevertheless, push sh!t to shove, then having no distinct role for NATO to play after the collapse of the warsaw pact and things led to where they led.

NATO (and the US) was trying to sell itself as the new world policeman or rather a villain with no opposing force. Things have changed now. This only lasted about what? 10 years?

And of course Germany's role of immediately recognizing Croatia's independence (its favorite during ww2) didn't help things much.
Greece played a nefarious role as well because concrete interests were masked by sentimentality.

However, the point is that NATO (or some of its members) played a clear offensive role against a sovereign country leading to a defacto change of borders.

The justification for why that happened could be to stop an ethnic cleansing (and the culrpits for it certaintly don't stop at the face of slobo but involve other actors as well, british forces training UCK is one facet of it) but it could also be that NATO was under an existential threat. Very much the same as when the Ukraine crisis flaired up.

When the very reason for one's existence has vanished, one tends to want to find another one fast. Or help create it.

The continuing existence of NATO serves mainly american interests since it assures a hegemony of sorts and of the highest importance (defensive, sovereign etc that very often "bleeds" to corporate interests). And one has to admit that a viable alternative has not yet been found by current national elites.

After Yugoslavia and definitely after Ukraine, its demise (that logically had to happen after the collapse of the Warsaw pact) has been comfortably postponed.

[Bereta_Eder]

The missle shield is several things...it is a response to possible Iranian missles...a hedge to the future against the nuclearization of the entire middle east...protection against terrorist obtaing a nuclear missle. It is NOT, however, any kind of a defense against Russia's abilities to launch a massive strike. And no...it wasn't scrapped. It was put on hold for a while, but not scrapped.

Russia's current gov doesn't think so.
It was also agreed, I think, that the Baltics were not to be allowed to NATO.
Sure they might wanted to, but I think that there was a pact for them not to.