We can't kill Russia. We have to kill Putin's Russia, though - that's the only path to modernization that Russia has.
As smjjames has asked though do you have any idea of how to do that given that Putin has just strengthened himself hugely, is immensely popular and has an iron grip on the Russian political system?
"That mistake will not be made twice", "Russia has some dark days coming", what does this even mean? What can we do? Punish Russia through international sanctions? Undermine them every chance we get? Antagonise them even further?
Yes, exactly.
This is meaningless. There is nothing we can do that won't just make everything so much worse. If we antagonise Russia any more they'll build up a bloc of support to counter us and they'd get it - just look at the situation over Syria.
It is not meaningless. The world should hardly roll over for the whims of Putin's steadily growing fascist tendencies. As for support, Russia's running low on opportunity. His way of gaining allies involves rather destructive bargains. He got Crimea, but in doing so lost the rest of Ukraine. I guarantee that once things start to settle Ukraine is going to jump ship for NATO as soon as they can. As for what goes on in Georgia (and Chechnya, for that matter), it's the kind of situation that works well in the short term and then eventually blows up in your face later.
And for the record, Putin isn't some demigod. He's another corrupt strongman politician who's previous job experience was in trying to fuck up dissidents. He's nothing special, he just has a highly conservative nation with significant resources at his beck and call.
I agree with Owlbread. We can't kill Russia, and frankly, we don't want that. We need to show support for Putin's victims, but we also need to give Russia a path toward becoming a modern, respectful state.
The geopolitical reality at this point is that such a path is going to be closed after this, and won't re-open until Putin and his power structure are solidly removed from controlling Russia. No politician is going to go out there and say we should do the exact same things that got us burned by Russia the first time it was tried. Russia also does not, by and large, want to be a modern, respectful state. Liberalism and socialism as it is known in free nations barely exists there and is not supported by a large part of the population. All the major parties are authoritarian and not too dissimilar. The nation's problems are blamed on scapegoat groups rather than the actual sources of whatever the issue is. Putin is popular there for a reason.
You have correctly identified the thing that must be done - we need to remove Putin and his power structure and the rest of the establishment of gangsters that have governed Russia as a
mafia state since the collapse of the USSR. Yet you still aren't identifying
how we go about this.
I put that text in bold because I wanted to highlight just how much I agreed with it. That just puts it perfectly.
People like Knit Tie are in an extreme minority in Russia, as exemplified by the other Russian forumites we have here, or pseudo-Russian in the case of Guardian G.I. (He's Byelorusian, da? One of them is, anyway. They kind of meld together after a while.)
Ukrainian Ranger describes pseudo-Russian people as Soviets. He has regularly stated that this is not Ukraine vs Russia, rather a Ukraine vs Soviet conflict. Guys like Putin and so on with neo-Soviet ambitions are not "Russian nationalists" as he sees them, they are more like neo-Soviets.
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