The General Russia Thread

Nowadays, what do Russians nowadays think of what happened in Southeastern Europe two decades ago?

edited 23rd Apr '17 10:44:00 AM by HallowHawk

Not much, really. We had our own troubles to think about at the time.

edited 23rd Apr '17 10:54:10 AM by KnitTie

Chechnya won't go to war over not being allowed to persecute homosexuals and Kadyrov being told to tone down his persecution of homosexuals isn't going to spark a civil war.

Putting some restrains or at least criticizing harmful attitudes of the local dipshit warlord isn't going to start a fucking war, specially over something that shouldn't have been an issue to begin with.

There isn't a single shred of evidence pointing out that Kadyrov would start another Chechen war over being told by the Kremlin to respect the rights of their citizens and that his homophobia is a reason to go to war to instead of keep being paid by the Kremlin to keep Chechnya under control.

Just to get this straight: Putin has the power to march into another country, supposedly to "protect the rights" of the Russians living there, but it has not the power to march into a country which already belongs to Russia to protect the rights of the citizens there? What is the point of having a "strongman" as a leader when said strongman doesn't even have control over his own country?

Or al least, if it does start a war, you could reach a reasonable conclusion that a war was coming soon regardless-reigning in a warlord should not immediately provoke a civil war unless it was going to happen anyway.

edited 23rd Apr '17 11:14:05 AM by ViperMagnum357

So? The Russian military is big, plus lots of countries would be willing to help out in such an endeavour. If the local society wishes to resist an attempt to stop such slaughter by using violence I invite them to try. If the society resists with violence then it can be met with violence. If every one of them that thinks this is okay has to be engaged on the battlefield and if need be killed I'm okay with that.

We marched into Nazi germany and forced the Germans at gunpoint to the let people out of the camps, I fail to see why that can't be done again. Yes a lot of Nazis had to die for that to happen, but I'm okay with that.

A war could very likely happen in Chechnya if the central government meddles with Kadyrov's domestic policies.

The differences between the Crimea and the North Caucasus should be much easier to spot, honestly. The former is not inhabited by warlike, clannish, tribal people who hold their traditions above everything else and can put up one hell of a fight if they think someone tries to force them to do something which they are against.

Leveling Chechnya to the ground would definitely result in much more innocents killed than wrongdoers punished, especially regarding the LGBT-people in question.

edited 23rd Apr '17 11:21:56 AM by Lordforlorn

Someone willing to put up a fight to protect a practice that deliberately kidnaps, tortures and kills people for who they are has frankly thrown away their right to live.

edited 23rd Apr '17 11:24:57 AM by Elle

Absolutely true, but unfortunately they can fight very well if they want to, and the resulting conflict would likely kill much more innocents than wrongdoers.

What, are the only two options here "systematic destruction of the LGBT people occur" or "wipe out Chechenya off the map and salt the earth"? Intervention does not mean you'll have to destroy an entire region.

Greater intervention or any other armed conflict is practically impossible without wide-scale destruction and mass-killing there.

edited 23rd Apr '17 11:41:35 AM by Lordforlorn

You seem to regard the people there is nothing but savage brutes, it's kinda disturbing. They're people, people with certain belfries and ideas (horrible and wrong beliefs and ideas), they're not anime, they can be taught to be better and I suspect that many more of them are better than you think with your rather disturbing dismissal of an entire people group as savages.

So we don't level the place, we've dealt with genocidal nuts and cultures that push people to try and wipe out other people groups before. We pacify and educate, it was done in Kosovo, it was done in Bosnia, it was done in Northern Ireland, we can do it successfully.

That's total bollocks.

edited 23rd Apr '17 11:44:25 AM by Silasw

Yeah, look at what happened in the Chechen Wars or any other great armed conflicts there.

Of course, not all of them are like that. But claiming that most of their society is built upon such or similar principles is colossal naivity.

This "we-will-kill-the-main-bad-guys-and-educate-the-rest-to-be-good"-policy is very nice in conception, but tends to lead to catastrophic results if applied in the wrong places. See Afghanistan, for example.

edited 23rd Apr '17 11:52:58 AM by Lordforlorn

So...you think the UK was wrong to oppose Hitler? You think that the UN was wrong to intervene in the Balkan wars, and act when similar atrocities happened there? And in this case, this is Russian territory, it is not a foreign country, everything which happens there is YOUR responsibility.

Honestly, Lordforlorn, I think it's time you stopped digging yourself deeper and admitted that the reason why Russia doesn't want to put a stop to the persecution of LGBT people in Chechnya is because we simply don't care. We don't care about Chechens in general, and we don't care about LGBT Chechens in particular. We don't care about anyone from the regious, because for the majority of us they are all just scary un-Russian brown people who come to our cities to commit crimes and steal our jobs, and the ones that stay in their mountains keep receiving welfare handouts from our government that they don't deserve. It's very callous and bigoted of us to reduce an entire region to a bunch of "scary furriner" stereotyped, but anti-Caucasian prejudice has been a fact of life in modern Russia for the last 20 years.

Plus, your comments about how the Chechens are basically orks who cannot be reasoned with are actualy kinda racist and very baloney.

edited 23rd Apr '17 12:02:10 PM by KnitTie

The problem with Afghanistan wasn't cultural, it was political and nuclear. The US government didn't give proper support due to also getting drawn into Iraq and the campaign couldn't be carried out properly due to Pakistan sheltering the Taliban and being immune to invasion due to having nuclear weapons.

The US failed to kill the "main bad guys" in Afghanistan because it couldn't send ground troops into Pakistan, it them compounded that failure by failing at the education part by not properly supporting the building up of Afghanistan with good people and instead allying with a number of warlords and allowing elections with candidates that would undermine the stabilisation process.

I'm not saying Russians care much about them. But this whole "Putyin-could-solve-everything-if-he-wanted-to"-approach is a huge and mistaken oversimplification of the whole problem.

And no, they are not orcs, and they don't born as Kadyrov-like bastards, but the problems of their society I mentioned are there, just like in several other cases across the globe. Pointing out these and their effect on the issue is not racism.

In part that's true, but that doesn't change that killing the warlords and trying to bring our principles there is absolutely not likely to result in major changes. The Russians are actually doing the former with the Caucasian Emirate, with new warlords popping up after old ones are killed...

edited 23rd Apr '17 12:34:15 PM by Lordforlorn

Thing is their society is part of Russian society, you think they weren't encouraged to start this slaughter by Russia's own actions against LGBT people?

They're not "our principles" they're basic universal principles of human rights.

edited 23rd Apr '17 12:20:07 PM by Silasw

As Knit has already pointed out, they are not much considered to be a part of the Russian society.

And yes, they are, but many people living in these societies don't think so, unfortunately.

That still doesn't mean that Russians would care much about homosexual Chechens, even tough they should, as the area is a part of Russia. But there are other factors which have to be taken into account.

edited 23rd Apr '17 12:30:41 PM by Lordforlorn

The problem, Lordforlorn, is that intentional or not, you keep making it sound like no intervention is the only acceptable answer and that peace is more important than intervention. You also seem to have a tendency to keep coming off as more pro-Putin than even the grudgingly resigned actual Russians in this thread.

I'm saying that the lack of care is only one of the reasons why there is no intervention, and that others should have been mentioned by the article.

And maybe I'm more pro-Putyin than Knit or others here, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to support him in every case, and it shouldn't be a reason for stigmatisation either...

Kinda hard to not fall hard on your head when all the answers you gave revolve around the notion that any sort of intervention, violent or not, would result in a civil war.

Kadyrov may be a dipshit but he ain't stupid, I hope, starting a civil war over this type of behavior is counter productive towards his own goals.

As Knit said, the problem is exactly because no one really cares and it shows.

The thing is, I don't think he is smart enough. He would just behave like an offended child, who happens to control a private army of professional killers. Not a good combination.

edited 23rd Apr '17 2:03:17 PM by Lordforlorn

Then odds are his army of professional killers are gonna toss his body in a ditch when they realize he's gonna try and fight the Russian military in a suicidal war.

Not necessarily. While the Russian army did improve since the last Chechen war, so did Kadyrov's thugs, who also know that the terrain is ideal for defensive guerilla warfare (which is one of the main reasons why most wars were so bloody and desperate there).