Pro-Ukraine Propaganda Reaches Deranged Levels of Fail
(metro.co.uk)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (14)
sorted by:
What makes this even funnier is that he could keel over dead tomorrow and it would change nothing. The West seems to be laboring under a collective delusion that all you have to do is get rid of Putin and suddenly Russia will become a pro-globalist neoliberal fagtopia like the rest of Europe.
It won't.
Some people in the West have difficulty in grasping the concept of an oligarchy.
That is to say there's a lot of people of the same mind and policy as Putin in Russia, is there? I can certainly imagine a lot of people close to him would gladly carry on his agendas.
Putin is a strongman, but he's not an autocrat. He has a political class that he answers to, and their interests inform his policy decisions. That's not to say he's not in charge: he certainly is. But the Russian oligarchy is much bigger than just him.
Isn't there opposition politicians in Russia who have literally said the war was mismanaged, and they should have genocided the Ukrainians with chemical weapons from day one?
Yes. That's the other thing liberal Westerners refuse to understand about Russia. The Western media loves to style pro-Western guys like Garry Kasparov and Alexei Navalny as "Russian Opposition Leader" but those guys never got more than a few percent of the vote in any Russian election. Not even in Russia can you rig a vote that extravagantly, so the lack of support is genuine.
The second biggest political party in Russia is the Communist party, and it has been since the fall of communism. Their perennial candidate is Gennady Zyuganov, who gets between 10-15% of the vote in every presidential election (except the one he didn't run in). If there is a leader of Russia's opposition, it's that guy. There are communist mayors of some major Russian cities, and they have the second biggest number of seats in almost every legislature, national and regional.
The other big opposition party is the Liberal Democracts, who are neither liberal nor democratic. They're the ultranationalist hard-liners you mentioned who are advocating scorched-Earth in Ukraine.
If anything, Putin is a moderating force on the military. Imagine if someone like Medvedev was in charge. Ukraine would be a giant crater.