“First, they went after the anti-war voices. Now there are none left, and the repressive machine cannot be stopped,” said the Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann.

…

Schulmann describes the divide as a struggle between two rival camps – the veteran propagandists tightly bound to the defence ministry and the Kremlin, known as the “loyalists”, and the sprawling grassroots movement of ultranationalist war supporters known as the “militarists” or Z-bloggers, after the letter that has become a symbol of the invasion.

I wouldn’t trust Schulmann, like most russian “liberals” they always have excuses for the behaviour of their society:

I continue to think that they started the war by mistake, based on incorrect information. This happens with autocracies: an information bubble forms, they live in it, they encourage loyalty over competence, good news is brought to the boss and he thinks that now is the right time to do Crimea 2.0, only even bigger and better, with a mighty strike on foreign territory [Donbas and Crimea is not foreign territory?] .

This was from 2024, 10 years after the russian annexation of Crimea, the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Schulmann, being the russian that she is, doesn’t even consider the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas as war.

And who the fuck is “they”? 85% of russians (with adjustments for preference falsification!) supported the annexation of Crimea and 65% of russians (at minimum, as per researchers, the real number is higher, even with preference falsification adjustments) supported the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

1.5 million Ukrainians having to leave the russian occupied parts of Donbas (including my family) and Crimea is no big deal for the russian “liberal” Ekaterina Schulmann.

This is what many Westerners don’t understand; if this is the attitude of an allegedly opposition minded russian, can you imagine what goes through the head of the median russian?

Get fucked, russians!

Kostroma is pretty far from the frontlines, further than Moscow.

China and russia should foot the bill.

An assumption based on undeniable facts:

• Certain professions are still subject to exist control in Cuba
• The average Cuban salary does not allow a citizen to get a passport, let alone pay for the ticket

I will note that you where very cavalier without you “Trump pressure”, I merely pointed out that you are not aware of factors that would lead to Ukraine to vote with the US beyond “Trump pressure”.

India, a russian ally, has been very public about their opposition to recruitment by the russians and India does not have exit restrictions for specific professions.

Think whatever you want. It honestly sounds like you are unwilling to consider that you might not be seeing the full picture.

It doesn’t need government cooperation, and I haven’t seen anything that indicates it except social media accounts that can’t think of an alternative

Are you sure about this? Note that I didn’t mention anything about the process.

I said that there is no way this is happening without the authorization (if not direct, committed support) of the Cuban government. This is a country that still has exit restrictions on certain types of professions.

They see a military age male, suddenly getting a large amount of money that their salary clearly can’t support (they know this because they would have to validate their profession to give them a passport to leave the country), getting a passport and flying to russia and they can’t connect the dots?

But yes, Russia is recruiting from poverty stricken areas, and often the people signing up aren’t told they’re going to war or even joining a military till they get to Russia.

I am well aware of that. But do you see the difference between Uzbekistan and Cuba? Specifically how getting from Cuba to russia without the authorization and support of the Cuban government is very unlikely compared to say Uzbekistan.

So why shouldn’t Ukraine (which is where I live btw) not treat Cuba like an enemy state? What’s your logic here?

The Cuban government has sent thousands of Cubans to fight for the russians.

https://kyivindependent.com/exclusive-1-076-cubans-identified-fighting-for-russia-ukraine-says-96-dead-or-disappeared/

The Cuban foreign ministry didn’t deny their presence, they claim they have nothing to do with this (which is clearly bullshit, Cuba is an island and average salaries are way too low to get an international passport).

Considering the above, why shouldn’t Ukraine treat Cuba as an enemy state (like North Korea)?

That’s why I said your original point is misleading, there are legitimate reasons for Ukraine to support sanctions against an enemy state.

My would you require strong pressure to diplomatically oppose a country that is directly aiding a genocidal imperialist invader (while also pretending to oppose imperialism)?

What is your logic here?

If anything it makes perfect sense to support sanctions against your enemy (i.e. Cuba).

The framing of Ukraine yielding to “strong pressure” is somewhat misleading.

Thousands of Cubans are taking part in the invasion of Ukraine. The Cuban government claims they have nothing to do with it, but there are legitimate reasons to believe that they are lying.

Russia didn’t escape anything. The breakup of the USSR started due to pressure from occupied countries that were forced to be part of the USSR. In under 10 years, they were back to supporting a KGB dictatorship. 2000 and 2004 victories by putin are generally considered to be legitimate and analysis of subsequent elections do not show falsification/pressure as being a matter for going above 50% support.

But I digress. I would argue even when I was living in the US (Bush II, Obama), there were clear early seeds of support for a “managed democracy” approach. The one that came to mind immediately was lack of voting franchise in Washington DC and another one that I later figured out was regional geographic disenfranchisement.

But I do agree that American polemics about freedom are unconvincing and only serve to enable limitation of freedom.

While I am pretty skeptical of US-style polemics on free speech, I of course support free expression, strong journalistic culture, limiting the influence of oligarch propaganda and significant safeguards to censorship.

That being said there are clear externalities to easy access to digital content distribution platforms that prioritize engagement above all else and do not bear responsibility for their actions.

I of course would never trust the CCP on this, but I think in the long term the externalities inherent to social media distribution will have to be accounted for.

I love how all the tankies joyful post gibberish about how Castro fighting capitalism.

We should drop recognition for the Cuban government. To hell with them.

It’s afraid. It’s afraid!!

I don’t get it.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory unless you have more specific evidence.

When I was living in the US (this was a while ago), I often got the impression that there were a lot of subtle but important similarities to russia (happened to have lived there for some time too, we left as soon we had the option to, this was before they invaded Georgia). The superpower exceptionalism, the fake-religiousity, the support for corruption among the plebs.

That being said I have always been pro-America in a pragmatic, “we deal with what we have” sense.

But the US really is becoming like russia. Putin didn’t just appear out of nowhere, it was very much with the support of russian society and russian genocidal imperialism was a thing under Yeltsin too.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures — a climate investment firm Gates founded — has bankrolled several nuclear startups, including fusion pioneer Commonwealth Fusion Systems

What exactly has CFS pioneered? I am genuinely curious.

Their wikipedia page states that they have yet to demonstrate net power generation (via fusion reactor) with the current target date set for 2027.

Their SPARC concept seems to be based on the ARC concept which is described as having the following key benefit:

The key technical innovation is to use high-temperature superconducting magnets in place of ITER’s low-temperature superconducting magnets. The proposed device would be about half the diameter of the ITER reactor and cheaper to build.

The sentence cites an article titled “Advances in magnet technology could bring cheaper, modular fusion reactors from sci-fi to sci-reality in less than a decade” from August 2015. Less than a decade indeed.

Gate goes on to say the following:

A growing number of big tech companies from Microsoft to Alphabet Inc.’s Google have inked power purchase agreements with nuclear startups [e.g. CFS] to secure future electricity supply. But Gates says there is still a long way off for those startups to deliver electricity at scale.

“Nuclear as a whole won’t be a gigantic contributor to data center electricity until 2035, and that’s assuming everything goes well,” he said.

I honestly don’t understand what the article is trying to say (both explicitly and implicitly). Gates believes that we need to invest more into fusion and fission to compete with china [and change our attitudes to nuclear power]?

I say all of this as someone who is generally supportive of nuclear power (I live in Ukraine, if not for our nuclear power plants, things would be far far worse with our electricity situation).

That’s why the term “committed support [for russian genocidal imperialism]” is arguably a much better characterization of Lula’s views than “turning a blind eye”.

What I read also concerned other regions, not only Crimea.

I will give Lula the benefit of the doubt (I am assuming he knows nothing about russia or Ukraine), but yes, you can kick the russians out of Crimea (under putin or otherwise). If you want to do it, one easy supportive action would have been to allow high impact strikes deep into russian territory from day one of the full scale invasion.

Or not reward them with Nord Stream II after they annexed Crimea in 2014 (Merkel).

Generally speaking, being meek, cowardly and corrupt rarely contributes to any goals (military or otherwise).