In a recent appearance on Russia’s state-run television, Russian political scientist Sergey Mikheyev suggested that the country’s “empire” should grow to encompass three American states.
“I want the Russian empire with Alaska, Hawaii, California, Finland, and Poland,” he said, as translated by Gerashchenko for the clip he shared. “Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.”
“I want the Russian empire with Alaska, Hawaii, California, Finland, and Poland,” he said, as translated by Gerashchenko for the clip he shared. “Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.”
This guy sounds exactly like Donald Trump.
The orange menace would be only too happy to oblige Putin’s every whim, after all, he is one of Trump’s main dictator heroes.
All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.
Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.
This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.
The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.
Hexbear users are real quiet when posts like this come around.
Isn’t even just hexbear these days. The Genocide Joe crowd posts nonstop anti-Israel, anti-Biden articles, but as soon as a Republican says something like “finish the job” they’re radio silent.
Do we need to actively condemn genocide twice or are you just trying to call us all Russian Shills?
There is the russian shill.
So is MoveOn.org a Russian shill too?
Are the Russians in the room with you?
I am not denying a genocide is going on. I’m tired of the narrative I see where one political party is bad yet there is radio silence about the other side being complicit as well or rooting on the death of Palestinians.
What did you think about “finish the problem” from Trump?
It’s widely accepted that this does not qualify as genocide. Why do people keep on insisting the false narratives?
I think Trump is bad. You can have a political position that isn’t team based.
But you cannot have a political position that isn’t team based nor benefits Trump, because the both sides bad argument shows a pretty clear bias in favor of the much much worse side.
That’s because you’re worried about your team.
If you’re worried about either team then you should be voting responsibly against the christofascist racist authoritarian. Nobody is going to benefit from that kind of leader, historically it has been shown to be the end of entire nations, which is exactly what some bad faith arguments here on Lemmy want to happen.
Be careful, they might show up and start posting gifts and emojis, thus negating everything you say, or any evidence of wrongdoing you may present!
Its totally all media lies and checks notes you being a racist cishet white male, regardless if you are any of those, and therefore your entire worldview is irrelevant and wrong. Oh and if you’re from AmEriKa (the K is important to them, it makes them feel smugly superior) then anything you say is automatically wrong and you’re an imperialist pig who deserves to die. Even if you actively protest against things. Because you aren’t violently rioting.Which they TOTALLY would be doing… Not that their parents would let them out past sunset since teenagers have a curfew.
And even if you agree with them, go kill yourself because you’re probably older than they are and old people killed the world so you are also at fault despite the fact that the modern problems of the world are millenia in the making, centuries of intentional planning, and decades of underhanded subversion by people who died long ago or are old enough to remember the moon landing.
Or just mute them like I do and never have to read another response as they scream pointlessly into the void since lemmy doesn’t hide my posts from them, just theirs from me. Every so often someone will tell me what’s being said but honestly the only thing I care to do when they show up is either pretend they don’t exist or make fun of their insane bullshit.
Dear god, imagine if they called me a Chud and posted pig shit resting on balls. I would be completely devastated, might never recover.
It does seem comforting knowing that the hexbear people are such a tiny fringe minority that they’re likely to have very little impact unless they are or become domestic terrorists in any significant number (I could see a few of them suicide-bombing in major cities, coordinated, but they’ll Darwin themselves out of existence eventually without leaving any real impact on this earth.)
Lets say Russia magically is able to land on US soil completely intact after passing through the US Navy infested waters of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Lets just assume they can so we can continue this crazy thought experiment.
To take territory you need boots on the ground, troops, tanks, APCs, etc. These are transported by troop transport aircraft and large ships that are naval landing craft. For Russia that would be the Ropucha-class. Each of these ships can carry about 10 tanks and about 310 troops (per ship).
So how many of these ship does Russia have? Hundreds, right? Nope: 11. Thats it. So assuming a full load of every ship thats about 110 tanks and about 3500ish troops. And all of that assumes all 11 ships will make it alive to US soil.
This is just how crazy this Russian claim of taking US States is.
It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s supposed to make actual Kremlin policy seem sane and moderate to the domestic audience.
You forget that Alaska is like 2 miles from Russia
I think you forget that we have 24 hour satellite surveillance all over the globe.
If you think Russia could send a large fraction of its blue water navy to one single point on the globe while also mustering all those troops and equipment on the ground in Russia beforehand without the US knowing about it weeks before hand, you don’t have a good grasp on the level of technology employed in today’s military.
Not to mention every other citizen is armed
That doesn’t matter at all
Not even a little bit? Okay…
If civilian gun ownership was enough to stop a military then the US would never have gotten a standing military. Like what the 2nd amendment was intended for
I’d love to see Putin spend a week in the wrong part of Los Angeles and have his a__ handed to him by some Mexican American gang, or black gang. You want California, dude? As a white (non-Russian) living here, I have had gangs threatened to shoot me about five times now, because I accepted a job assignment in an area they considered to be their turf.
Yeah good luck with that.
Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.
wtf is that supposed to mean
Genocide I imagine.
They’ll bring soap and schampo. Conditioner not included!
Projection.
In WWII, a lot of Russians got damage from easily preventable things that the Finns didn’t, as we had saunas and better equipment. Something as simple as getting dry, clean socks and getting to wash your feet can be incredibly important. Just hygiene in general. Not to mention how a good sauna can improve moral.
If anyone was stinky in Winter War, it was definitely the Russians. Not the Finns. (weather at -30 in this photo)
Photo from this article with lots of other photos: https://www.life.com/history/the-coldest-front-lifes-coverage-of-the-winter-war/
That naked guy holding the bucket is probably the most Russian thing I’ve ever seen and I’m Ukrainian.
Protecting the Russian speakers right?
Anyone taking this seriously should think again. Of course Russia isn’t going to invade the US, it would be suicide on too many levels to count. This is just posturing to tile up their own base, get people to still believe in the supposed might of mother Russia.
It’s the same bullshit coming from the Republican party as well
Why do people insist on partisan rhetoric? Your point could have been made better without the constant, cliche, stereotypical anti-Republican partisan rhetoric that you find in every comment about everything.
probably because republicans also do very similar things. Just look at the recent CPAC and it’s mess of “we’re going to overthrow democracy and instantiate a christian nation”
And they thought Ukraine was hard to conquer it will be like 1776 every body and her brother killing the invaders
There is a 50/50 chance the MAGA crazies will side with Russia.
Why dose every one think trump and Russia are friends the steel document was proven to be fake trump hates Russia he probably would decimate there military if given the chance
Maybe because he has expressed his admiration for Putin on more than one occasion, has sworn to pull all support for NATO, which was founded to defend against a Russian threat, around the time of the election the Russians hacked email accounts of prominent Democrats thus helping Trump’s campaign efforts, or because Trump chose to believe Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agency in the matter of Russian influence in the 2016 election, Trump’s national security advisor was forced to resign after he had inappropriate contact with Russia to discuss sanctions then lied about it, and because there is a boatload of circumstantial evidence, like relations his family has had with people close to Russia. Maybe for those reasons or it could be people are just really unfair to poor Mr. Trump.
I could absolutely see Turnip Dump willingly “trade” those states to Russia to get something else in return, if he won a 2nd term as President.
That is to say, he would float the idea to see the response, then say he wouldn’t do it, then turn around and do it anyway.
People who are saying “that would never happen,” answer me this: what happened on 1/6/21? Specifically what happened with a confederate flag in the Capitol building? Something you thought would never happen?
Can someone help me find this out -
Is selling an entire state something that literally anyone can do? Like, can the president do it? Congress? Secretary of State? Library of Congress?
Is this something that’s even possible?
I assume the answer is a hard no, but the only source I could find online is quora and I have a negative amount of trust in that site
I don’t think there’s any real mechanism for it, but they could certainly do it regardless, and ultimately I’m sure it would end up in front of the Supreme Court.
Oh. How will the Pope instruct the court to vote?
“the mean stinky poo-poo man”
This is what you sound like.
Well… maybe if he tried being nicer and didn’t smell quite so fecal, people wouldn’t describe him like that?
He’s obviously a dick, but I feel his own name adequately expresses that at this stage.
Some random guest on Russian state TV wants that, according to a translation done by a Ukrainian. Newsweek then goes with “Russian State TV wants”, implying endorsement of the idea by the Russian government.
Can you imagine if random Fox News guests were quoted as if they spoke for us? Obviously bullshit, right. That’s what this is. Nothing on Russian TV can be taken at face value.
And it wasn’t the host of the program that called it wishful thinking, it was the random guest himself only seconds later. Watch the video clip in the tweet embedded in the article to see it.
Trash journalism, Newsweek. But they knew it’d get clicks because apparently I’m the only person here who spent 25 seconds to watch the video and another 25 seconds to think. We need do better than this, people.
The real interesting bit is the “We’ll clean them”, salivating about ethnic cleansing of all non-Russians. It was a different voice than the guest - I think THAT might have been the host but I can’t tell as I don’t recognize the people involved.
To sum up:
- Russian TV airs some bullshit.
- Ukrainian propagandist carefully selects a tiny segment, puts it into whatever context suits him. Provides translation which no one checks.
- US rag misquotes segment and misattributes statements.
- We sound off on social media.
Bullshit from start to finish.
