The General Russia Thread

Edited.

By the way the Belogord oblast lost a village yesterday to Russian dissidents. Novaya Tavolzhanka has been lost control of.

Ngl this is kind of weird how easy this has been...

Like I don't think anyone expected stuff like that.

Edited by miraculous on Jun 5th 2023 at 2:52:52 AM

Ukraines Nova kakhovka Dam has been destroyed. Both sides have accused the other of destroying it.

This also will impact the Nuclear Plant under Russian occupation as well.

Personally knowing Russia and Putin has acted it’s likely them. Meaning they’ve likely reached a point they’ll destroy Ukraine if they can’t have it.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Jun 6th 2023 at 6:48:53 AM

Bit sensationalist are we?

Edited by kkhohoho on Jun 6th 2023 at 8:36:11 AM

Moscot Times: Russian Lawmakers Vote to Ban Gender Reassignment.

Zhirinovsky lives on through the neural net! From the St Petersburg Economic Forum:

Expanding on my question I asked earlier in this thread on why Muscovites aren't being drafted for the "special military operation" in Ukraine, I take it that may include ethnic minorities (Ukrainians who've been living there prior to 2022, Tatars, Armenians, Azeris, Belrussians, Georgians, Uzbeks, Jews, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, et al) living in Moscow too?

I ask because I started remembering the discussions in the War in Ukraine thread on how primarily conscripting non-Russians to fight in the "special military operation" is a display of racism in Russia. I mean, it's one thing to speak a different language and have a different skin color but is that really how you're seen as "Russian" in Russia? I mean, considering Russia's history of incrporating ethnic groups and I know Russia alone isn't unique on this but how exactly can you differentiate "Russians" from "non-Russians" in Russia if the ethnic composition of Russia came from various ethnic groups migrating to modern-day European Russia, followed by the annexation of Siberia? By now, the descendants of those conquered when the Russian Empire pushed toward the Pacific Ocean tend not to see themselves as separate from the descendants of those who conquered them so why go after people deemed as "non-Russians" by conscripting them to fight and die in Ukraine?

It should not be seen as a thought terminating cliché, but let's not forget that racist are not known for their rationality.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 18th 2023 at 4:49:00 PM

It's more that a community of people with the numbers and resources to support the regime self-identify as "Russian", and have the social influence to exclude others from participating in that identity. Whoever they are, they are the ones who get excluded from the military draft (or however that works over there).

It's got basically nothing to do with formal definitions of ethnicity, and everything to do with the distribution of social power.

But since it's Muscovites who aren't being conscripted (as I was told, it's for Putin and his cronies to use them to stay in power as Moscow is the capital), I assume that those conscripted will also include "Russians" that hail from cities that aren't "Russian"?

The point is that who is allowed to claim they are "Russian" is a fluid and changing social dynamic that depends more on how powerful each social faction is than on any objective factors. In other words, ethnicity, like race, doesn't really exist except as a social construct, and social constructs are after the fact justifications of the distribution of social power, not guidelines that determine anything themselves.

x2 Most likely it's true. Russia has always been The Grand Duchy of Moscow (and I guess St. Petersburg also counts because of czars' brief stint at westernization) and all the other places they subjugated.

That said, I'm not really sure what you're asking exactly. Russian ethnicity is pretty well defined.

And the fact that they went out of their way to kidnap Ukrainian children to raise them as Russians, combined with these news of draft being most intense in "non-Russian" regions, leads me to believe that Putin does at least to a degree believe in the "white birthrates" talking point that his allies in the west are spewing.

Edited by StyxD on Jun 18th 2023 at 6:15:00 PM

I don't see how that's different from any other imperialistic nation-state, all nations built on expansion (i.e all of them) have cores and peripheries. What is gained by emphasizing this?

This is the historical context of how Russia came to be, something I've seen emphasized by Russians themselves (ie. Moscow draining the rest of the land).

Not all countries have a stark geographical division like this in their history, ex. USA's imperial expansion didn't look like Washington DC conquering everything around it.

Edited by StyxD on Jun 18th 2023 at 6:33:36 PM

Is mostly capital power, usually they are a line in who get to go to war because they want to and who because it needed and russia is VERY depended of the capital because the centralization, so muscovites are the group you cant piss around as the movilization show.

Edited by unknowing on Jun 18th 2023 at 12:36:55 PM

The city is actually a massive drain on the rest of Russia. It costs the rest of Russia a shitload to maintain the living standard of Moscow.

Contrast with Washington DC which is far from the most expensive city in the USA.

Eh, Moscow gives eight times more money to the federal budget than any other region.

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jun 18th 2023 at 9:13:06 PM

I think someone once posted a link to a psge listing the region budgets, someone could fish it out again maybe?

Budget is here: https://budget.permkrai.ru/compare_budgets/mainfactors

Top contributors: https://www.tatar-inform.ru/news/tatarstan-otpravil-trillion-rublei-v-moskvu-razbiraemsya-mnogo-eto-ili-malo-5863622

Recipients: https://top-rf.ru/places/564-dotatsionnye-regiony.html

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jun 18th 2023 at 9:52:57 PM

Kind of random, but TIL that "пиндос"/"пендос" (?) was originally a slur for Pontic Greeks before it somehow transformed into a slur for Americans.

Not exactly. There were several ethnically and culturally entirely Russian states around Moscow back then (Pskov, Novgorod, Suzdal, Beloozero, Rostov etc.). These were later indeed conquered by Moscow, but saying that these were not Russian is like saying that the Ancient Greek city states weren’t all actually Greek just because some were at times conquered by others.

I wasn't clear in my post.

I was agreeing with Hallow Hawk that ethnic Russians outside of the capital regions are in increased jeopardy of being conscripted compared to people from Moscow.

At the same time, I'm not convinced that there isn't a racial component to the conscription.

I wasn't claiming that those outside of Moscow are not ethnic Russians.

Well, it seems like it's still the case the Chechnya (sp?) is one of the biggest deficit republics, although I am a little more surprised that Crimea 9 years after the annexion is still there too.

What I find noteworthy though is that the most subsidized federal subjects are, for the most part, less Russian than the state as a whole. And most of the exceptions seem to be places with plenty of natural resources. In practice, it means that present-day Russia is not really a colonial construct, as unlike in actual colonies wealth/money flows from the centre to the minority regions. Which means that these minority regions would face economic crisis if they were separated from the rest of the state, which would explain why there isn't much separatism today.

Yes, as we have seen recently, most violent separatists today are of “let’s separate the minority republics from us” variety.

After the FSB opened a criminal case against  Yevgeny Prigozhin (the leader of the Wagner group), accusing him of "armed mutiny,"  Prigozhin declared in an audio clip that  his forces had left Ukraine and were entering the southern Russian city of Rostov.

Emergency protocols were earlier implemented in Rostov, involving the full mobilization of the local security services.

Also:

Update: Russia ordered the arrest of  Prigozhin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/23/wagner-chief-accuses-russias-military-of-attack-and-says-evil-leadership-must-be-stopped

Edited by jawal on Jun 23rd 2023 at 1:39:15 PM