It’s exactly what I said. Russians will manufacture as many of these dissidents as they like, and the US will keep exchanging them for warlords, spies, and murderers again and again. It works, so why not keep trying if Americans refuse to learn?
Negotiating with Terrorists
Clarissa's Blog 
I notice that according to Russian media, the accused Americans in these situations always plead “guilty” to “treason.”
Dreidel
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“naturalized American citizen”
It’s my understanding she still has russian citizenship so my, maybe unpopular, decision is that there’s nothing the US can/should do.
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How does it occur to people to go traveling in Russia? She can’t possibly not know what’s going on. Why go? It’s completely nuts.
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It does seem like the US state dept travel warnings should come with a very clear “and if you go there anyway and something bad happens to you, there’s nothing we can do about it, you’re on your own”
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The golden rule is: Americans should never go to Russia for any reason….except maybe if you’re a hockey player.
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I used to know a hockey player who did.
Still wouldn’t recommend.
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I suspect that Trump will off Putin a simple deal. The US withdraws from the Nato alliance in return for Russia’s complete and total withdraw from all Ukrainian lands including Crimea.
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I am not a US citizen but if I were – this would be one of the reasons I would NOT vote for Trump – because I believe he is actually capable of making such an offer.
I do not think Putin will take him up on this offer though. Not sure if you are aware, but at some point Russia changed its constitution and included a bunch of Ukrainian regions into Russia, including territories that were never under the control of either Russia directly or indirectly via “Donbass separatists”. So no matter what they say, by now Russia is fighting not “against NATO” * but for the psychological survival of the empire. Great Russians losing to Ukrainian untermenshen (sarcasm) will be too much of the psychological trauma for the Empire. And having to rewrite the constitution back will definitely be considered losing.
Imagine the US officially declaring Sonora part of the US, invading it and then being unable to keep it due to the resistance of the Mexicans… This is not a random hypothetical – the more I interact with the US conservatives, the more I feel that many of them overidentify with the Russians EXACTLY BECAUSE BOTH ARE IMPERIALISTS. And then them believing Russian propaganda is secondary to that, a psychological defense mechanism.
*NATO has been 130km from St.Petersburg since 2004. And Baltic people were often called Nazis in … Russian folklore. 🙂
V07
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What resistance, though? We are seeing right now in the Kursk region that there’s zero resistance. No groups coming out to protest under Russian flags like Ukrainians did in occupied Kherson. No grandmas throwing themselves in the way of tanks. Conscripts surrendering in droves. People in the streets saying, “we don’t care what flag we live under.”
There’s no nation-state in Russia. And no nation-state means people don’t know how to care about this kind of thing. They just want to be fed at a minimum level and that’s all they want from life.
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In the above analogy, US = Russia and Mexico = Ukraine, so the poster was talking about the Ukrainians’ resistance.
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Thank you, I noticed. My argument is that “the survival of Russia” is not an idea that excites and motivates many Russians. They don’t seem to care much. They just follow orders and receive payments.
I highly recommend asking a Russian person of any age how they feel about the Russian flag, what the stripes mean, and what order they appear in. They are often unable to answer. They don’t know the national anthem. It’s simply not a nation-state because nobody tried to make it one.
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As for Pro-Russia US conservatives, I’m not seeing any desire for a strong American empire in them. These are people in the Buchanan tradition of conservatism who want zero participation of the US in expanding or even maintaining their global interests. I’m not disputing your personal experience but mine has been different. These types of conservatives are so anti-American, they remind me of self-avowed Communists at Yale. They say identical things and rubbish America passionately.
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Russia is indeed not a nation-state, it is an empire that is fighting for imperial reasons, not nation-state reasons. The reasons the empire as a whole fights also may differ from the reasons individual Russians fight.
Some US conservatives consider it US holy right to tweak Central and South America, by force if necessary.
v07
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I honestly don’t see either of these things. The US Pro-Russian conservatives are mortally offended by US sanctions on Venezuela, for example. And other than closing the borders, I haven’t seen any of them advocating for any US involvement in Central America. When Kamala Harris declared that immigration will be solved by improving the living conditions in Central America, they hated that.
As for imperialism and colonialism, I don’t use this terminology for anything that happened after the 1940s collapse of the British Empire. I don’t think it’s useful because the differences are larger than similarities, and using the outdated terminology ties us to a framework that doesn’t let us see new developments.
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The US empire seems pretty strong, though. I mean, how many people rely on US companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple? It’s only the Chinese who have built their own alternatives.
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But you aren’t therefore your opinion of American politics like Israeli politics just a fart in the wind.
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