Quote:
Originally Posted by RizzyKing
Russia needs more time to be a nation we can build a more balanced relationship with, only time will remove the old soviet attitudes and diehards and we haven't given the time. All we have done in the west is progress further and further east right onto Russia's doorstep and now other nations and their populations will pay for it.
All this mad Vlad and evil Putin crap is a smokescreen for us to avoid taking any responsibility for a problem we did everything to create as the west has always done is it any wonder Russia has got more nervous and angry over the years.
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I think this "evil Putin crap" is because of his own actions. I know it's fashionable to engage in moral relativism and create a situation where we're as bad as each other but this is not the case.
Russia is
148 on the Press Freedom Index. Look at some of the countries above it. They don't have fair elections and Putin's political opponents often find themselves facing criminal charges. Reporters die in Russia for doing their jobs. Also whilst Russia has found a love for referendums on self-determination, albeit at gunpoint, in Crimea it is not a right they wish to afford to those in Chechnya. I'll remind you that the UK has offered many of it's people the right to break away with Scotland being only the most recent example.
Finally the fate of Eastern European countries should not be up to Russia to decide. This idea that the West is moving further and further to Russia's borders, as if it these
sovereign nations were Russia's land, is cold war thinking and quite troubling. It should be up to the people to decide and the majority of them seem to want to join NATO. Maybe those closest to Russia remember what living under their rule was like the last time and have no desire to revisit that?
Remember when the Berlin Wall fell the people behind those walls headed West.