fresco
boosted
RE: https://mastodon.social/@justinlachance/115950136182655354
This is completely nuts:
Not being able to take Greenland, US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent now thinks the US should go after the Canadian province of Alberta, 6.6 percent of Canada’s territory, which should belong to the US.
This US regime is an enemy of the democratic world.
This is straight out of #vladimirputin as of early 2014 - presumably the plan would be to infiltrate paramilitaries over the border into #alberta but claim that they were entirely local - as in #crimea and #donbas .
Case study in the misery of #geopolitics - elsewhere I mentioned the ongoing #Iran riots[^1], to which a classic comment guy replied “ah yes, Muricans and Jews meddling!”
The problem here a complete and rather arrogant blindness of this Western (but also very much Russian and Chinese) “experts” to the fact that even your “average brown people in Iran” have brains and can simply get pissed off when there’s shortages of food or hyperinflation (as in case of Iran right now).
We had the same thing in 1980’s in communist #Poland when you had to queue overnight to get meat or basic groceries from shops because there was an artificial shortage of everything. I had no clue what people in the world were saying about this because it was 1980’s and we also had censorship as an added bonus. Only after communism collapsed we learned that in addition to all people who were understanding and compassionate, there was a whole bunch of “geopolitical” morons who naturally argued that it’s just all just CIA staged coups etc. You certainly couldn’t t see that from your couch 5000 km away, but even your average Eastern Europeans can get genuinely pissed off by decades of totalitarian and completely dysfunctional governance.
In short, when judging protests in foreign countries always try to get the full context before actually making your judgement. I’ve learned this hard way, which is why I never blanket condemned 2023-2024 Polish farmer’s protests against Ukrainian grain imports – that is until at some point there was a clearly visible Russian infiltration into these protests, at which stage I started to point this out publicly. And yes, there are protests obviously controlled from outside and we had a fantastic case studies in #Donbas in 2014 - groups of barely interested people with identical placards who come and disappear in an organised way. Or a classic riot caused by disinformation, as happened in Southport but these are short lived - you can’t have thousands of people sitting on #Euromaidan in winter for three months for a covert salary, that simply doesn’t happen.
P.S. below is a 1988 photo I’ve done on one of such protests in Kraków using a Smena camera and having absolutely zero clue about photography ☺️
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
boosted
Giving up territory in Ukraine is also condemning people living there to live under Russian rule, a harsh dictatorship with limited freedoms, no room for opposition, bad economy etcetera. I don't think many people prefer Russia above living in Ukraine as part of the EU in the near future.
#russia #ukraine #donbas #geopolitics #EU @geopolitics
Giving up territory in Ukraine is also condemning people living there to live under Russian rule, a harsh dictatorship with limited freedoms, no room for opposition, bad economy etcetera. I don't think many people prefer Russia above living in Ukraine as part of the EU in the near future.
#russia #ukraine #donbas #geopolitics #EU @geopolitics
Wir müssen einen weiteren 5km langen Anti-Drohnen-Tunnel im #Donbas bauen lassen, um unsere Arbeit vor Ort sicherer fortsetzen zu können. Ihr könnt hier Spenden (mit Bescheinigung) und die #Ukraine wieder etwas sicherer machen. Danke! https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=HSVKF4F7SXSGC
Alex Akselrod
boosted
#Putin’s proposal for #LandGrab shifted Trump’s [limited] attention back to #Zelensky.
In Alaska, Putin proposed that #Ukraine hand over the remainder of the #Donbas region to #Russia to stop the fighting.
…Already, #Trump has signaled he may pressure Zelensky to give up the land….
“President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump posted late Sunday.
#PutinsPuppet#StandWithUkraine
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/world/europe/putin-trump-zelensky-ukraine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The territory proposal by #Putin has renewed the possibility of friction between Washington & Kyiv, which Moscow would welcome after celebrating the Oval Office blowup between the American and Ukrainian leaders earlier this year.
“It’s a very smart ploy by Putin,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Gabuev said the proposal could be a “poison pill” designed to weaken #Ukraine internally or get #Trump to walk away from #Zelensky if the Ukrainian leader refuses.
Ukraine’s Constitution bars ceding #territory other than through a nationwide referendum. A recent poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 78% of Ukrainians were against transferring territory controlled by #Ukraine to #Russia.
The Kremlin typically sees the #Donbas as comprising the Donetsk & Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. Moscow has taken nearly all of #Luhansk, but despite trying for more than a decade, it hasn’t managed to wrest control of the #Donetsk region.
#Putin’s proposal for #LandGrab shifted Trump’s [limited] attention back to #Zelensky.
In Alaska, Putin proposed that #Ukraine hand over the remainder of the #Donbas region to #Russia to stop the fighting.
…Already, #Trump has signaled he may pressure Zelensky to give up the land….
“President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump posted late Sunday.
#PutinsPuppet#StandWithUkraine
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/world/europe/putin-trump-zelensky-ukraine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
...infiltrating the #Military hub of #Покровск ( #Pokrowsk.) 1) From there, it'll be relatively easy to reach
#Слованск (#Sloviansk,)
#Краматорск ( #Kramatorsk,)
#Павлоград (#Pavlohrad,) and
#Запорожье ( #Zaporizhzhia.)
Even if the front line were then frozen, Russia would be in a position to attack #Izyum and other cities in the #Donbas and #Donetsk region from the back at a further point in time.
If you ask me, most of the points of a deal between the two hegemonic powers, #Russia and the...
