General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Russia is not our Adversary [View all]SunSeeker
(51,550 posts)That doesn't mean we should go to war with Russia, but we should not sugarcoat what their intentions are with us. They want to degrade us as a country. That makes them our adversary.
As with any murderous kleptocrat, Putin is horribly threatened by free elections, a free press, and other countries setting an example that his people might follow. That is why he wants to install authoritarian rulers all over the world.
Putin used the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings ("Russia's 9/11" to justify his brutal invasion of Chechnya, making himself a national hero, while postponing elections that he was on the road to losing had they been held before the apartment bombings. Putin's FSB (former KGB) planted the apartment bombs, not the Chechens. And the people who tried to expose the Moscow apartment bombings ended up dead, including Sergei Yushenkov, and Alexander Litvinenko, who was famously poisoned. It is all laid out in this excellent documentary:
He knows that if his people come to believe he killed Russians as they slept in their apartments in a false flag operation meant to keep him in office, he would be done for. That is why he killed all those journalists investigating that bombing. He is not leading a country, he is leading the world's largest criminal enterprise, the Kremlin, who all pay fealty to him. He is the richest man in the world, worth well over $200B that we know of, made off stealing his own county's assets (Rosneft), and he wants to be richer. He has already stolen all there is to steal in Russia. We are in his sights.
Certainly we can try to negotiate with him, and float that "Suez canal in the Ukraine" idea, but we need to always understand that he is a criminal and our adversary.
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