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Europe will lose all credibility if Russia wins in Ukraine, warns French president Macron
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Yeah because Russia was not capitulated. They were a disfunctional, but sovereign country. You cannot dictate anything on them. You can lead by example or make suggestions, but ultimately it's the will of the people that matters. In that regard the situation is rather similar to Germany post WW1. A people not yet ready for democracy and no one there to force them to. In Germany's case it took the entire to be bombed to the ground, millions dead and being occupied by 4 not so emphatic countries.
I wouldn't compare interwar Germany and post-USSR Russia this way. On the one hand, post-WWI Germany absolutely had dictates placed on them that were big enough and were meant to cripple the country. On the other hand, WWI wasn't about democracy, but that the autocrats ruling Germany wanted colonial empires, like the autocrats ruling the Entente had.
Yes, electing Hitler was not the correct path, but I guess it's hard to see any path at all when English tourists laugh at the cheap prices at the café you work at while you wouldn't be able to afford even one of them from your wages.
Russia did not turn out better, since there was no real regime change after the end of the USSR. Putin was in the KGB. I'm sure most people who are in power now were in the elite in the USSR as well.
It's not "the people not yet ready for democracy", it's that the instruments of power had the same people manning them. If it was just the people, a lot of the US seems "not yet ready for democracy" with being hell-bent on electing a dictator.
Actually Putin became president about ten years after the USSR collapsed, so there may have been a window of opportunity
Yeltsin was a highly placed party member as well before becoming president. You could say he was liberal, but so was Orbán during his first term.
Good point. I'm not sure if the first president could've been not a highly placed party member, though, that'd be more like a revolution
That's my point exactly. No revolution ever happened, the same power structures that kept the USSR working the way it did keep Russia in the same path.