They move them to Iraq and then over the border into Iran as part of their regime change efforts. After maybe giving them some additional training if necessary.
Honestly if there has to be corruption I'd far prefer building trains that don't justify it in usage capacity than the usual road and car kickback nonsense. In fact I think the whole idea of needing to justify cost with high ridership is capitalist bullshit. Are there a certain amount of people in an area? Yes? They should be connected by rail. Doesn't matter if the terrain the rail has to pass through is expensive in terms of construction. As long as it's bigger than a hamlet or small town of 1000 it should have some form of rail service or at least a rapid regular bus to a nearby rail station within 15 minutes ride.
This is a very suspicious both sides type of line to take.
Modern Russia is not really capable of much more than slapping and deterring the worst Hitlerite NATO-joining impulses of some of its slated for regime change neighbors like Georgia and the Ukraine invasion is admittedly a bit of a boondoggle that on its own should show you how much of a threat they are considering how long they're taking to deal with an existential threat like that on their border. Yeah they've exerted some influence on countries around them. That's not imperialism, that's something that's been going on pre-capitalism and doesn't meet Lenin's definition. Before the mid 2000s one could argue Russia was still too weak, too corrupt, too reeling from the 90s plundering by the west (when it had been victimized by imperialist powers) and before that they were part of the USSR from 1918 until the 90s came. And before that they got their asses handed to them by Japan doing imperialism against them. Sure there was some 1800s stuff but that's too far removed to qualify for the state that is modern Russia given what it has been born out of and gone through.
Please avoid liberal thought-terminating 'both Moscow and Washington' type takes unless you can support them with evidence.
Apple instating ads, Google trying to lock down Android from sideloading. What is this cursed timeline? Oh right, late stage capitalism where even the niches businesses carved out for themselves blur and dissolve to give way to the quest for ever greater profits.
Even things without microprocessors should be assumed to be potentially backdoored when from the west and evaluated for risk including in a systemic non-individual way. For example stuff such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) (non-US but they understand the principles very well now and have for decades)
Lots of tricks that can be played with resonance, lighting things up with radio frequencies. That kind of spying is one but also potentially causing failure of devices. Say get your enemy to buy a bunch then when combat comes, blast the right frequency from something you smuggled into a warehouse years ago, their infrastructure crumbles due to tiny failures that are hard to understand at first. Western book of dirty intelligence tricks is pretty sophisticated.
Also I'd like to point out that there is ZERO evidence that China has used hardware backdoors. They do hacking yes. But zero credible evidence they like the US undermine their industry by doing implants. These stories pop up from time to time about supermicro or whoever and cause this big stir in infosec and then without additional evidence beyond "CIA/NSA/FBI claim" they vanish. Why don't they publish the receipt? Where is the proof? Where are the independent experts who can confirm this? These stories then quietly slink away with the feds never mentioning them again. The point being to sew distrust in Chinese products and to keep people within the western ecosystem.
Often in front of Congress or the EU parliament or whatever intelligence ghouls or military will state that "Huawei is a national security threat" or similar. But this is vague and the truth they won't ever say in the spotlight is it's not a threat because of backdoors, it's a threat because it undermines western monopolies on hardware, first disclosures of security vulnerabilities, and so on which together enable the western empire of hackers to do NSA global surveillance, hacking, intelligence gathering and maintain primacy. Their national security threat is not being able to spy on others so they undermine confidence in Chinese tech to keep people on their backdoored tech, their tech that has NSA/FBI officers who know first about privately disclosed vulnerabilities that can be exploited before patching by western intelligence. Their tech that they can do mail interception on to install NSA hardware backdoors in because it comes from western shipping locations. They fear the Chinese do the same but there is zero proof and given the scrutiny China faces I tend to doubt they'd undermine their selling points displacing the west by doing such practices which would get them caught red-handed. Hacking is enough for China because they have no need or interest to spy on everyone all the time like the control-freak west. They do targeted operations.
What can we say but the State dept/CIA keep their ears to the ground. Always co-opt, better than generating yourself because it has an authentic confirmed resonance and origin so no one can trace it back to you and you already know via the marketplace of ideas that it has some merit.
If Trump thinks there's even a chance he loses control of one house of congress in the mid-terms he's going to push HARD for this to happen before the election so whatever happens can be implemented in terms of congress allocating funds or signing bills to incorporate it.
I think it could just be simple "if we actually own it we have an absolute say on ANYTHING that goes on and our mineral extraction and military assets cannot be kicked out EVER" whereas there's this fear that China will give them a better deal and they'll down the road in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years when the US is weaker make a deal with them, push the US out and that'll be it. But if the US seizes it, buys, etc, digs in like a tick then in 10 years, 20 years when the US is weaker they still have absolute control of the minerals and their exploitation strategy. They still have absolute control of it for military uses in missile interception against Russia and China over the north pole.
So it's consolidation of assets, power, land, the great climate fortress while the US still has maximum power. The time to build a fortress and defenses is not when you're already under attack and flagging but when you're strongest and can make your boundaries as big as possible. Critically for the US strategy to control China it's part of ensuring they have control of key raw minerals on top of markets that they can be gatekeeper for and force China to play by their say-so or else they turn off the supplies and turn off China's manufacturing economy.
It's all bluster from a yapping tied up little dog. I'll give it an ounce of credit the moment it materializes into anything from the vassals who've consistently talked big (remember tariffs?) then immediately folded. Until such time as they take one concrete step that isn't whispering, public statements, and letters to the editor it's all just an empty pressure and publicity campaign.
If Russia or anyone here believes this is anything but politicking in an area that's going to go AFD and cause his coalition to falter in the next elections I present you the:
They'll consider Russia European if it submits to NATO, prostrates itself before them, gives up in Ukraine, admits it was bad and then pays money to help defend them against the US. That's the kind of "deal" these "garden" EU liberals are going to offer Russia and they'll be shocked if Russia doesn't take it.
Makes sense. So many of their soldiers have gambling problems that make them recruitable by foreign intelligence over their debts, but if the debts are to uncle sam they can be aware of it, keep an eye on them and maybe "forgive" the debts for some more years of bonded servitude to the empire or something.
I don't believe it for an instant. He said that while politicking in the East in areas set to see a sweep of the AFD in the next elections. Like all liberal politicians he'll lie and say whatever. He's been saying Russophobic stuff and been very belligerent for years and we're supposed to believe this change of heart? At /most/ it's a recognition of things going badly on the battlefield and trying to shift to a conciliatory tone to try and get that ceasefire and save face and even of that I'm not sure, could just be politicking.
I once saw a comment that psychological studies they did said that that particular number seemed cheaper to customers than 99 cents and it let Walmart seem cheaper because other store has it for .99, they have "double digit rollback" to 88. Whether that's true or not I don't know. But I have seen 77's as well so it might be that. Then again they could be leaning into the Nazism thing but they've definitely been doing this for decades with the 88, 77 price points. It all seems very interesting how other retailers if the psychology is correct haven't adopted doing that, guess they want the extra 11 cents more.
The US banned Kaspersky completely for all private citizens last year, they banned it from government and government contractor computers and openly called it a Russian intelligence op and discouraged all western companies from using it like 5 years ago.
Which is to say yes, China should have done this years ago. Whereas there's zero evidence that Kaspersky actively collaborates with Russian intelligence beyond normal law enforcement capacity of reporting criminal acts (including foreign espionage) they're privy to we know from the Snowden leaks the US uses its companies as a weapon to collect intelligence and we have to assume to be available to shut down the enemy if total war ever came.
Fact is this type of software has privileged access to all files and memory on a computer and as part of normal expected operations may and does submit new files never before seen to centralized servers that in the case of western/NATO/eyes countries are under surveillance and up for grabbing the files from as are those in pissrael. If you're a citizen and you fear your government you should have cybersecurity/anti-malware from an adversary state (very hard in the west with the banning of Kaspersky and limited Chinese public offerings), if you're a government or business you absolutely want a vendor geopolitically aligned with you and not you know part of the all-encompassing spying machine of the west.
Fact is boards and engineering for these companies are filled with "ex" NSA, CIA, FBI people. Even without the Snowden cooperation revelations and such one would have reason to suspect they could go to their old worker who now works there and ask them for a "favor".
This is basic, basic opsec. This is like getting caught with your pants down to still be doing this when you know they're not impartial, when they allow-list western state malware, when they attribute blame to China and Russia with shaky evidence as part of larger geopolitical messaging that's been going on for ten years now.
So looking at it this way:
It's a collection platform for spying on your machines and files for the west
It won't protect you from western backed hacking and spying and malware
it can be updated easily to install western malware (it arguably already is western malware but I mean other more advanced NSA stuff)
They got defeated at the polls as referendums thanks to NIMBYs, your usual liberals who cry about socialism, and of course some capitalists injecting money into propaganda campaigns against them (though they didn't have to spend much).
Or perhaps just taking the money out of the Pentagon pocket, putting it in the CIA pocket and taking out a CIA ghoul device Cuba doesn't possess and which may or may not induce neurological damage at a distance (probably takes months of constant exposure and the CIA shelved it decades ago because it just isn't effective enough but hey now it can have new life after they scrawl some Spanish on it).
They could just say "yeah this is an exceeding of authority BUUT because no one said that before, previously collected tariffs are valid though Trump cannot do this again and they are cancelled going forward".
That wouldn't help with his nonsense about investments in the US (doesn't exist at any appreciable scale as a result of these I think) but it would mean he wouldn't have to give back any money while people like me would still get our cheap slop imports back going forward which is good and of course it would be another L for the empire trying to decouple and rebuild itself.
Russia is the one who has experience fighting starlink's use by Ukraine and having to come up with solutions to blocking it. If Russia didn't provide such assets directly they certainly provided methods, intel, and the info Iran would need to build such jamming assets.
Don't have to. Just bully each one, most fold, make examples out of those who don't with limited strikes, assassinations, kidnappings, sanctions, etc until they fold and move on. Cuba's the only one that cannot really fold. The only thing they can offer the US is total capitulation and installation of a fascist neo-liberal dictatorship for the west.
They move them to Iraq and then over the border into Iran as part of their regime change efforts. After maybe giving them some additional training if necessary.