According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2021 (the most recent) which ranks countries on a scale from 0 (most corrupt) to 100 (least corrupt), Ukraine comes in at 32, in a tie for 122nd place with Eswatini. Russia scores 29, in a tie with Mali for 136th place. The worst is South Sudan, rank 180, with a score of 11,
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Here’s Zelenskyy himself in his previous life as an actor on the topic of corruption:
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Good actor. And he took the advise he gave, it would seem.
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Russia is very good at creating events that support their narrative, a recent example being:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/1674639619-russia-affiliated-journalist-paid-for-quran-burning-in-sweden
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I have never heard of i24 News. They do seem to have an axe to grind.
“Swedish journalist Chang Frick, affiliated with Russian propagandist channel RT” – propagandist? Like the New York Times, maybe?
“Affiliated” – means what exactly? “Frick, who denies having any ties with RT since 2014”. By this standard, i24 News would assert that someone who had a cup of coffee with Biden 8 years ago is now a full member of the Biden Crime Family.
There is one piece of genuine news in that piece: “If I, by paying 320 kroner in an administrative fee to the police, sabotaged the application, it was probably on very shaky ground from the beginning,” he [Frick] told Swedish media." So Swedish police are quite happy to let anyone burn the Koran as long as they get an “administrative fee”. No wonder the good Muslims in Turkey are cheesed off!
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Just update The Peace of Westphalia with reallocation of territorial land value according to a census based on the assortative migration. In effect just replace prisons with exile by according land value to exilees which they bring with them to any destination polity.
I am at present sitting at the Denver Airport witnessing the vast waste of human movement that could be put to the purpose of averting another 30 years war. Actually it’s worse than a waste. It’s promoting the conditions for that bloodiest of European conflicts here in America.
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Opinion against our involvement in Ukraine is seemingly mounting. Here’s a piece from American Greatness.
The West Is Prosecuting Its Crusade Against Russia with Stunning Naïveté
This week the West crossed several red lines, bringing us ever closer to a nightmare scenario.
January 28, 2023
American and NATO efforts to assist Ukraine in its conflict with Russia have escalated alarmingly since Putin launched his invasion almost one year ago. We began by doing virtually nothing to help Ukraine, except rhetorically and by way of offering Ukrainian leaders a one-way flight into exile. Since then we have imposed history-making economic and financial sanctions against Russia, and we have progressively taken on the responsibilities of funding, supplying, training, and providing intelligence for the Ukrainian security forces. It is an open question whether the average Ukrainian soldier now serves under Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Joe Biden.
Needless to say, the more deeply the United States and its NATO allies intervene in Ukraine, the greater the risk Russia will perceive the conflict, as indeed it already seems to, as a proxy war between itself and the West.
Putin will argue that the United States and NATO are “in” Ukraine for one reason and one reason only: to weaken Russia, which is the greatest obstacle to Western hegemony worldwide. The West will regard this assertion as the purest nonsense, of course, but the problem is that, from the Russian perspective, it seems eminently plausible.
If Putin’s compatriots think he’s right about the stakes, then the danger of major escalation on the Russian side, even the use of nuclear weapons, becomes unacceptably high—or, rather, any sane, rational observer in the West might be tempted to conclude as much.
This week the West crossed several red lines, bringing us closer to this nightmare scenario.
The United States decided to authorize the shipping of M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine, which, from the Russian perspective, is bad; but worse was to come. The Germans decided tosend their own Leopard tanks to Ukraine. As if to underline the message that Germany, and German arms, “stand with” Ukraine, the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbockdeclared: “we are fighting a war against Russia.” This contradicted numerous other statements that had come out of the German government, reassuring Germans and their international partners that Germany was not a belligerent in the conflict. Baerbock’s idle boast may have been primarily a poor choice of words, therefore, but its impact in Russia was profound. The Russian Foreign Ministry accused the West of prosecuting a premeditated war against Russia and added ominously: “Don’t say later that we didn’t warn you.”
To those who regard these verbal barbs as insignificant, some historical context is needed. For Russians, the preeminent conflict in all of history, and Russia’s finest hour (bar none), came in the “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany. The celebration of the heroic resistance of the Soviet peoples against Hitler’s invasion of their homeland was one of the central themes of Soviet culture, in fact, and antifascism became one of the leading values of the Communist Bloc. Men like Putin grew up in an environment in which the Soviet Union’s Western enemies were constantly derided as “fascists,” in a manner that was designed to link them, in the Soviet mind, with the nation’s all-time greatest enemy: Adolf Hitler.
It does not matter whether such comparisons were fair or reasonable. What matters is that they were a touchstone of Soviet life, and much of that aversion to the West, and to “fascism,” as Russians define it, remains relevant to Russian public and elite opinion today, based on polling evidence. This is precisely why Putin invaded Ukraine claiming that a nationalist and “Nazi” cabal had seized control there and was actively engaged in genocide against ethnic Russians. This was a claim that played on the anti-Western and anti-fascist biases of the Russian people, rooted in history. It was a claim that Putin himself, and people who think like Putin, were primed to regard as plausible.
What effect, then, will it have on Putin’s resolve and Russian public opinion when the German Foreign Minister casually declares war against Russia, and when Germany dispatches its most modern tanks to fight on Ukrainian battlefields? The question answers itself. These intemperate actions are a fulfillment of the worst Russian nightmare: of an aggressive Western campaign to invade and destroy Russia herself (of which Ukraine is a part, in most Russian minds). It is a repeat, in fact, of the German tactics of World War II, which sought to use Ukrainian “nationalists” as cannon fodder against Soviet Russian forces. All this is confirmation, from the Russian point of view, of the extremely high stakes for which they are fighting, and of the fact that they, not Ukraine, are the nation that is targeted for destruction.
Does all of this mean that Russia is bound to “go nuclear” in Ukraine? Not necessarily. Russia is a powerful and resourceful country, despite appearances to the contrary, and it has a long history of acting circumspectly in its encounters with the United States, NATO, and the West—not out of respect so much as fear of Western strength.
In the medium term, it is much more likely that Russia will mobilize more of its reserves and militarize as much of its industrial sector as possible so as to facilitate an all-out effort to defeat the present government and security forces of Ukraine in a spring or summer offensive. And that, of course, will pose to the West even more agonizing questions about the lengths to which we are willing to go to “win” a war in Ukraine that we, by our naïveté and arrogance, helped to provoke, and which we seem to have no earthly idea how to end on favorable terms
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On the other hand, Russia might be listening to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who famously explicitly said the US aim is to weaken Russia – or various Western politicians who have openly talked about eliminating President Putin and breaking up Russia.
Unless one wants to make the case that everything Western politicians say is “purest nonsense”, it seems the Russians might have a point.
Part of the problem may be that US Movers & Shakers are used to negotiating with Republicans, who will always back down and give them everything they want. They may not be capable of negotiating with a real opponent. And yet the only way to stop the escalation and end the killing is to sit down with the Russians and negotiate.
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Agreed.
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Incurious media ignore lack of secondary explosions:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/video-shows-russian-ammo-depot-obliterated-by-strike-ukraine/vi-AA16ZQfl?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=95cc484692214a49b6dee311910ef9fa
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Yeah, curious that. When the gooks blew our ammo dump in DaNang, it went on for days.
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The Ghost of Kiev came back from the dead to do it. We can tell from the theme music.
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"(Corrects to clarify the interception happened near Poland)
Feb 14 (Reuters) - Two Dutch F-35 fighters intercepted a formation of three Russian military aircraft near Poland and escorted them out, the Netherlands’ defence ministry said in a statement late on Monday."
So, misinformation (again). The Russian aircraft were not “over Poland” at all. The write-up is still unclear, but it sounds like the aircraft were over the Baltic Sea heading for the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.
Still, nice to know that the much-berated F-35s were able to fly fast enough to accompany the Russian aircraft on their mission.
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Perhaps the Norwegians should have thought about this before joining the Biden* MalAdministration’s scheme to blow up the German/Russian NordStream pipelines. Bad decisions have bad consequences!
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The F-35’s in this case were not called upon to do any ACM - or they may very well have lost. The F-35 is a lousy fighter.
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This represents a potential fork in the road for China. They have the opportunity to take the position of the only adult in the room. However, I am not confident they will take it. Read down re. 2/24 announcement.
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