Try getting 64,000 likes on anything and you’ll probably fail. But in Russia, all you need is to mock the death of a child and happy fans flock to you. This is a moral catastrophe of great proportions.
Every – and I mean every – bombing victim, especially young or otherwise helpless provokes a barrage of these posts on Russian social media with tens of thousands of likes each, excited, happy comments, smileys, hearts, etc. Of course, they’d be so much more excited if the dead little girl were from California.
The only scenarios where this whole thing gets solved are 1) somebody takes away Russia’s nukes, digs a ditch around the perimeter, fills it with crocodiles, and turns Russia into North Korea and 2) somebody comes up with a positive, non-paranoid explanation for why Russian history has always sucked and why nobody respects Russia.
Clarissa's Blog 
“2) somebody comes up with a positive, non-paranoid explanation for why Russian history has always sucked and why nobody respects Russia. ”
I think Russia was fairly well respected up until 2022. I don’t think it’s a matter of respect really, but maybe more a matter of needing to be the center of attention.
The first thing that came to my mind when Putin started talking about fully invading Ukraine was how badly they must need the attention. The US’ attention was fully focused on China, they had gotten away with stealing Crimea from Ukraine without facing any serious repercussions, Europeans were about to open a second larger gas pipeline and were incredibly appeasing and compromising on everything; I even think if they had focused on southern Ukraine they could have gotten away with that too; but no, they had to go for the spectacular invasion. What else could they have possibly wanted?
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“ussia was fairly well respected up until 2022”
two points:
first – it’s not enough…. for a deluded narcissist it’s never enough…. there’s some weird and ridiculous standard that can never be met
second – what do they mean by ‘respect’…. leading up to and during the first days of the invasion a note I kept hearing from russian supporters and their shills was how this was such a great thing that the world would notice and respect a russia that could throw its weight around…. my hypothesis is that at some level for most russians ‘respect’ = fear, if that’s the case then they don’t want to get rich doing business
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I’ll answer in a separate post because it’s an important point.
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For Americans, there are only a few types of countries:
1) The ones on the labels of the stuff you buy: made in China, made in Vietnam, made in Taiwan. Made in India.
2) The ones you visit on vacation if you have a lot of disposable income.
3) The ones we invade.
Russia is none of those, so may as well not exist?
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… but it makes no sense to me that a country as large as Russia would even care about that.
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Regarding what is wrong with Russia, I have just read this great analysis by
Andrey Piontkovsky from his speech at American conference in 2018 (see info about this author below). It’s a bit long, since it’s not a blog post but a conference presentation, but imo worth it. If the link doesn’t work, just copy words to Google and 1st link should do the job.
The Post-intelligentsia and the Russian Catastrophe of the 21st Century
Andrey Piontkovsky
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cdclv.unlv.edu/archives/articles/pionkovksy_intelligentsia_eng.pdf
The Russian version of this text is here:
Постинтеллигенция и русская катастрофа XXI века
http://www2.kasparov.ru./material.php?id=64E1317C46B69
Andrey Piontkovsky (born in 1940) is a Russian academic, political writer, and analyst, and a member of the International PEN Club. He graduated from the Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, holds a PhD in applied mathematics, and is a member of the American Mathematical Society. He has been for many years a regular political commentator for the BBC World Service and Radio Liberty. Piontkovsky is the author of several books on the Putin presidency, including Another Look into Putin’s Soul and Russian Identity published by the Hudson Institute. After Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office found evidence of “extremism” in his writings, Piontkovsky had to leave Russia in 2016 to evade imminent arrest. Since June 2017, he has been a Senior Adviser of the Free Russia Foundation, and a Hudson Institute Visiting Fellow. The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Donner Foundation for providing support during his work on this project.
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Piontkovsky is one of exactly 3 completely pro-Ukrainian Russians in the Russian-speaking public space. He’s great and he’s doing all he can. But it’s literally him, Feygin and Nevzorov, and that’s it. For a country of 140,000,000, it’s very slim pickings.
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If you enter the title in Google, the full pdf file is in the 2nd link with “unlv.edu” . Hope it’ll work here now too:
Click to access pionkovksy_intelligentsia_eng.pdf
The 1st link is “tandfonline.com” and it doesn’t give free access to full text.
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