Thank you for an actually informative reply. Although, if the former SS weren't officially attached, it is still possible that Putin handled them. Look how expertly he handled Trump as an asset. He's definitely able at the task.
ArchimedesTesseract
Riiiiight. How do you explain all those bullet holes on the eastern part of the Berlin Wall? We're a little far removed from then for you to cling to Soviet propaganda. There's way too much testimony and the Stasi's own files were released in the 90s. Are you going to tell me Saddam Hussein didn't model his secret police on that brutal inhuman efficiency? Next, you'll tell me Saddam was just misunderstood? What are you on?
Is that where you call center is, shill?
So the where did the East Germans recruit their completely de-Nazi'd secret police? Pretty much everyone left in Germany at the end of WWII was in the party. The Soviets managed to create the foremost modern police state in East Germany from a blank slate? That's pretty hard to believe. It's entirely plausible and consistent that the SS that got caught behind the Iron Curtain cut a deal and suddenly became fervent communists.
- Russian fascism is also a nationalistic fascist tactic, by your definition.
- Also, Nazism != Anglosphere supremacy, again by your logic.
- Finally, the desire that Russia might stop attacking it's neighbors doesn't have anything to do with ethnic divides/supremacy myths. Ukrainians are your brothers. Stop killing them.
Recall that Putin served in East Germany's Stasi during the Cold War. Shoulder-to-shoulder with former Nazis, doing Nazi things. The guy is such relic that his his only response to opposition to his fascist failed state is to accuse them of fascism? That's straight up projection.
The only thing falling apart is Russia's economy. This is Putin's swan song.
Putin's actions, not words, have convinced me. No one has invaded Russia. Russia has invaded Ukraine. You cannot talk fast enough to change the facts.
You started by claiming this isn't a "full scale invasion", which if the goal is to "demilitarize" Ukraine will require that. Bolstering break-away provinces doesn't require attacks on the capital. Russia has been using hybrid warfare in Ukraine since Crimea, but now this does begin to look like war and not some one-shot retaliatory strike.
The evidence that Russian troops had been massing at the Ukrainian border was overwhelming. Putin himself confirmed that there were troops, otherwise he couldn't confirm that one unit was being withdrawn. So, yeah, the US and Ukrainian governments are quite believable in that regard.
Did you know that the Japanese were emboldened to first-strike Pearl Harbor by their success in crippling the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese War? That's an all-out surprise attack to disable a stronger opponent. You're claiming more of a limited-violence sortie for humanitarian reasons. Isn't that exactly what you accuse NATO of?
I read somewhere that before the big bang, time is a real dimension, not an imaginary number, like it is now. Imaginary in the sense of along the square root of minus one number line, which is orthogonal to the real number line. Are these periods of reversing entropy, like just before the creation of the universe, simply the time dimension periodically extending into the real number line?