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Eastern Europe & South Caucasus Vladimir Putin Russian President
- Thread starter Kenneth Erwin Engelhardt
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Eastern Europe & South Caucasus
FYI, "off the coast of Estonia en route to Saint Petersburg" is not the same as "in Estonia". If the yacht was in Estonia, it would be seized.As Wagner threatens to enter Moscow, Putin has allegedly bugged out to St Petersburg:
Putin's superyacht "Killer Whale" pka "Graceful" is supposedly in Estonia:
'Putin's £100m superyacht renamed Killer Whale and seen off Estonia'
Pictures showed Killer Whale travelling north, thought to be en route to Putin's home town of St Petersburg, and out of the clutches of Western governments sanctioning Russian oligarchs.www.dailymail.co.uk
Vladimir Putinâs Superyacht Graceful Has A New Name: âKiller Whaleâ
The Russian president’s superyacht was spotted off the coast of Estonia, escorted by a Russian Coast Guard vessel.www.forbes.com
Tallinn is very close to St Petersburg, a mere 6 hour drive. If his "Killer Whale" is still there, it will be trivial for Putin to reach his superyacht from St. Petersburg.
I still never got over that cringey-ass pic of him shirtless horseback riding. for a pseudo-dictator he sure is a cornball. that parody picture of Chelsea Handler topless was pretty fun, tho.
@Sailfish There you go, Putin did apparently bug out and his officials were lying about it. Putin uses a non-detectable plane whenever he wants to bug out:
From Valdai it's a 6 hour drive to Estonia where Putin's "Killer Whale" yacht is supposedly located.
The Russian government’s Il-96-300PU aircraft took off from Vnukovo Airport at 14:16 local time and headed for Valdai, one of Putin’s residences, it said.
However, Hajun said it was not known who was on board the plane, although it was an aircraft which has been used by the Russian dictator several times.
The plane reportedly disappeared from radars near the Russian city of Tver (about 150 kilometers from Valdai), the independent Russian website Important Stories (IStories) said on Telegram on June 24. The media outlet claims that the plane is “equipped to control the armed forces.”
While commenting on Putin’s whereabouts to the state-controlled TASS news agency, his press secretary Dmitry Peskov said his boss “is working in the Kremlin.”
The Ukrainian online publication Ukrainska Pravda cites an unnamed source in the Ukrainian special services who states that “Putin is leaving Moscow, he is being taken to Valdai.”
The Insider, a Russian investigative journalism project, also writes that as of 3 p.m. local time, another Russian special forces aircraft had landed in St. Petersburg.
Putin's plane reportedly departs from Moscow to Valdai, disappears from radars – media
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's plane left Moscow on the afternoon of June 24 amid an ongoing rebellion led by PMC Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Belarusian Hajun monitoring project said on Telegram on June 24, citing data from the Flightradar24 service.www.yahoo.com
From Valdai it's a 6 hour drive to Estonia where Putin's "Killer Whale" yacht is supposedly located.
This is how Putin buys the support of his people: in a country where monthly wages are $500, $2500 is a lot of money.
Yet, after 23 years leading Russia, Putin’s hold on power is still firm as fighting intensifies in southern and eastern Ukraine. He learned long ago, indeed from the outset of his rule in 2000, that, as author Masha Gessen has put it, “wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things.”
He has always used war — in Chechnya, in Georgia and in Ukraine — to unite Russians in the simplistic myths of nationalism and to usher them to the simplistic conclusion that his increasingly repressive rule is so essential that it must be eternal.
Still, as far as possible, the war must be invisible, banished to places like Ulan-Ude, near Lake Baikal, not far from the Mongolian border. That is done, in part, by paying recruits about $2,500 a month, a huge sum in a region where a monthly salary of $500 is more typical.
“Money is the main reason people go to fight,” Rolikova said. “The contracts being offered volunteers are crazy by our standards.”
But all of the money that Putin showers on remotest Russia only brings the war into sharper relief. It is etched in the fearful faces of young recruits lining up at the airport for flights to Moscow, and from there overland to Rostov-on-Don and into Ukraine. It is in the freshly turned soil of cemeteries where young men are laid to rest. It is in the air, a pall of dread.
...
In Moscow, a world away from Ulan-Ude, Western sanctions appear to have had little effect beyond stores such as Dior, which have signs saying, “Closed for technical reasons,” and the comical renaming of departed Western businesses, such as “Stars” for Starbucks.
The subway is spotless; restaurants offering a popular Japanese-Russian fusion cuisine overflow; people make contactless payments for most things using their phones; there is a ridiculous concentration of luxury cars; the internet functions impeccably, as it does in all of Russia.
The war is nowhere to be seen, other than in the billboards from the Ministry of Defense and, until recently, Prigozhin’s Wagner Group (now of uncertain future) that try to lure recruits with slogans such as “Heroes are not born, they become heroes.”
These may be found next to a multitude of new high-rise developments with English names such as “Trendy Towers” or “High Life.” For all of Putin’s efforts to vilify the West, it still lives in the Russian imagination as a chimera of cool.
I first visited Moscow four decades ago, when it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the penury of communism. Gazing at Moscow today, it is possible to discern why Putin earned so much respect from his countrymen. He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also modernized it while leaving the thread to Russia’s past unbroken.
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Being ideological, the war is doubly intractable. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, told me. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”
Anti-Western invective has attained phantasmagorical proportions. It is part of an emergent state ideology that is setting a course for possibly decades of confrontation.
Thirty years after Russia — in the midst of the ardent liberal hopes of the 1990s — adopted a constitution whose Article 13 said, “No ideology shall be proclaimed as State ideology,” Putin’s Russia is hurtling toward a new official ideology of conservative values.
The possibility of an amendment rescinding Article 13 has been raised by Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko, among others.
This anti-Western ideology is based around the Orthodox Church, the fatherland, the family and the “priority of the spiritual over the material,” as laid out in Putin’s decree on spiritual and moral values issued in November.
The enemy, it proclaims, is the United States and “other unfriendly foreign states,” intent on the cultivation of “selfishness, permissiveness, immorality, the denial of the ideals of patriotism” and “destruction of the traditional family through the promotion of nontraditional sexual relations.”
If the West was portrayed during the Cold War as the nightmarish home of ruthless capitalism, it is now, as Russia sees it, the home of sex changes, the rampages of drag queens, barbaric gender debates and an LGBTQ+ takeover.
“For how long should Russia tolerate open warfare from the West using Ukrainian meat?,” Sergei Karaganov, a well-connected Russian foreign policy expert, asked in an interview.
“There is a high risk of nuclear war, and it is increasing,” he said. “The war is a prolonged Cuban missile crisis, but this time with Western leaders who reject normal values of motherhood, parenthood, gender, love of country, faith, God.”
...
Putin will no doubt use this ideological onslaught and the war in Ukraine relentlessly in the run-up to Russia’s next presidential election, in March 2024. His reelection, nearly inevitable, would be for a renewable six-year term.
...
Putin almost certainly has enough of his country, and enough cash, behind him to pursue the war for at least another 18 months to two years, three Western ambassadors to Russia told me in Moscow.
Putin’s Forever War
ULAN-UDE, Russia — Through towering pine forests and untouched meadows, the road to Lake Baikal in southern Siberia winds past cemeteries where bright plastic flowers mark the graves of Russians killed in Ukraine. Far from the Potemkin paradise of Moscow, the war is ever visible. On the eastern...
Assley Butsmell
Remarkable Onion
Western media has been decrying how Putin wants to bring soviet union back like Xinnie wants to bring back a true communism, but neither my Russian friend (who is now a naturalized citizen in the US) and I believe that for second. I think Putin is genuinely mentally unwell, and a few footages he shared with me via russian/Ukrainian telegram server showed Putin making some random rants about "alcoholism" and "drugs" with his eyes almost glazed.
All things considered, Russians have no choice but to "support" war because back when there was a protest in 2018, no one in western hemisphere bothered to send them support, and with repeated rejection from previous request to join EU, the public feels that the whole west is against them (which it is kind of), and considering the state propaganda and censorship, they have nowhere else to go, ideologically.
All things considered, Russians have no choice but to "support" war because back when there was a protest in 2018, no one in western hemisphere bothered to send them support, and with repeated rejection from previous request to join EU, the public feels that the whole west is against them (which it is kind of), and considering the state propaganda and censorship, they have nowhere else to go, ideologically.
Americans be tweaking though
FTFY
Putin's crib with his private church and the underground blast-proof bunker:
This video was pretty interesting showing his office (I bet it's all staged just for the interview, but still, it gives an insight into his aesthetics of what a busy Statesman looks like)
According to this clip I found of an interview that Putin did with film director Oliver Stone, Putin has survived 5 confirmed assassination attempts... but this only gave him a "live and let die" attitude, where he kills off people in his clique whom he doesn't trust, but also threatens someone like Elon Musk because he views him as a threat to the future economic gains of Russia. This is typical Russian black humour: "They say that those who are destined to be hanged are not going to drown"
This video was pretty interesting showing his office (I bet it's all staged just for the interview, but still, it gives an insight into his aesthetics of what a busy Statesman looks like)
According to this clip I found of an interview that Putin did with film director Oliver Stone, Putin has survived 5 confirmed assassination attempts... but this only gave him a "live and let die" attitude, where he kills off people in his clique whom he doesn't trust, but also threatens someone like Elon Musk because he views him as a threat to the future economic gains of Russia. This is typical Russian black humour: "They say that those who are destined to be hanged are not going to drown"
Putin has moved his yacht to Sochi:
I don't understand this move at all. The Black Sea is a minefield right now. Why is Putin moving his yacht there of all places?!
Why put the yacht in a body of water where the Ukrainians with their sea drones have easy access to it? Is Putin trying to provoke them into blowing up his yacht to show how "evil" they were?
I don't understand this move at all. The Black Sea is a minefield right now. Why is Putin moving his yacht there of all places?!
Why put the yacht in a body of water where the Ukrainians with their sea drones have easy access to it? Is Putin trying to provoke them into blowing up his yacht to show how "evil" they were?
In this video after the mutiny, Putin talks about "neutralizing the threat that had arisen", referring to Wagner:
He scares the shit out of everyone around him, but then he's annoyed at the fact that they're now walking on egg-shells whenever they're addressing him:
He scares the shit out of everyone around him, but then he's annoyed at the fact that they're now walking on egg-shells whenever they're addressing him:
Putin is actually a 5'2" manlet who lies about being average height due to his personal insecurities, he threatens sources to claim he is 5'7" but several photos show he is shorter. LMFAO 
Real height exposed
www.express.co.uk
Wearing shoes that make him look taller.
www.dailymail.co.uk
Real height exposed
Left a little short: Putin left red-faced as Kremlin photo gaffe expos
VLADIMIR Putin has been left red-faced after a photo gaffe at the Kremlin showed him looking several inches shorter than some of his female guests.
Putin wears high-heeled shoes while posing with Moscow students
Image conscious Russian president Vladimir Putin was pictured in high heeled shoes at a photo opportunity with students in Moscow on Wednesday.
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Finally my dwarf kings, the W we desperately needed.
What do tankies think of Putin?
Unsurprisingly, they're not fans. Yes, even Tankies hate Putin and see him as a capitalist puppet of the West: "The current manager of a very successful oil company cosplaying as a country. Plays up his far-right tendency for the fans while amassing even more wealth."
This comment made me LMAO, Tankies can't argue about geopolitics because they can't argue around the the fact that Communist countries will eventually develop their own form of imperialism and will, just like capitalist countries, resort to invading other countries or territories to steal their wealth and resources for themselves, a fact that Tankies aggressively deny when they insist that Communism is the answer to Western imperialism:
Unsurprisingly, they're not fans. Yes, even Tankies hate Putin and see him as a capitalist puppet of the West: "The current manager of a very successful oil company cosplaying as a country. Plays up his far-right tendency for the fans while amassing even more wealth."
This comment made me LMAO, Tankies can't argue about geopolitics because they can't argue around the the fact that Communist countries will eventually develop their own form of imperialism and will, just like capitalist countries, resort to invading other countries or territories to steal their wealth and resources for themselves, a fact that Tankies aggressively deny when they insist that Communism is the answer to Western imperialism:
Don't waste your time on Great Men. Putin represents the ruling Russian capitalist class, his particularities don't really matter, it's class struggle that determines the tragectory of the state and of history. The Great Man view of politics/history is an individualistic dead end and not worth engaging in. And frankly, arguing with liberals about geopolitics also isn't worth your time. For every liberal you "win over", you could have trained 100 proletarians in dialectical materialism.
Tmw tankies realize all communists and socialist are historically nationalists who love using corporations to become powerful internationally.
A bleak prediction of Russia-China relations in the future:
Its invasion of Ukraine spectacularly failed in its objective of taking Kyiv in a matter of days. Its battered army is taking huge casualties along a front line that stretches for hundreds of miles.
And it has lost its market for oil and gas in Europe while failing to hold its economies to ransom. You might imagine that things could not get much worse for Russia, and yet as it turns out you would be wrong. There is no situation so bad that Vladimir Putin and his cronies in the Kremlin can’t make it a little bit worse.
With his seizure of foreign assets this week, and with stiff tax rises on the businesses that remain, Russia will now be a pariah state – closed to any foreign investment.
The Russian economy may never recover from this war, at least until there is meaningful regime change. Until then, it seems condemned to be a poor, corrupt state that’s only means of survival is as a mining base for China.
It is a dismal fate, and a far cry from the hopes when communism collapsed two decades ago.
...
We learned recently that the Kremlin has signed a secret order that will allow officials to seize the assets of “naughty” Western companies at cut price rates and is considering fully nationalising some of them as well.
The remaining European and American companies that stayed on in Russia after the war – such as the tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris, Unilever, or the brewer Heineken – may soon be in for a huge shock.
Their assets may be vulnerable to being taken into state control, or shared out among the same group of cronies that have always been the core beneficiaries of Putin’s gangster state.
In this scenario, factories, warehouses and distribution networks would all be completely lost. And, as if that were not bad enough, those businesses that escape expropriation face potentially huge tax rises as the government also starts planning a raid on the corporate sector.
There has never been a worse time to be trying to do business with Russia.
In its desperation, the Kremlin may think this is the smart thing to do. It may well be the only option it has left to finance an increasingly expensive war.
But there are two long-term problems. The first is that it renders the country uninvestable for any foreign company. Expropriation has only ever been attempted by the most desperate regimes, and typically has catastrophic consequences.
President Mugabe expropriated farmland and mines in Zimbabwe, and destroyed what little remained of what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous economies.
In the 1930s, Mexico was a leading oil producer, but after the major oil company assets were seized it was frozen out of global markets, exports halved, and Nazi Germany ended up as its only major customer.
The story always plays out in the same way, and it is always the country that seizes private property that comes off worse.
Even worse, Russia will lose what little access to the rest of the global economy it still has.
Cut off from the rest of the world, and starved of foreign investment, it won’t be able to mobilise either the money or the expertise it will need to rebuild itself even after the war is over.
It is a sorry end for a country that once promised so much.
Only two decades ago, Russia was one of the so-called BRICs – made up of Brazil, Russia, India and China – that fund managers and investment bankers were convinced would dominate the first half of the 21st century.
The performance of the other three countries may have been mixed, to put it mildly, but they have all grown and developed, and China and India, whatever their flaws, are both vastly wealthier than they were twenty years ago.
By contrast Putin’s Russia has been a dismal failure.
In reality, it does not make much difference any more what the outcome of the war is.
Even if there is a negotiated settlement with Ukraine, Russia no longer has any hope of getting back to normal in the near future. Once assets are taken without compensation, no one will ever want to invest in the country soon, and even if they did their shareholders may not allow them.
There is little chance, either, that Russia will produce any significant companies of its own, outside of the energy and minerals sectors.
There is only one fate that awaits it.
Russia will become an exploit for the Chinese economy, and since Beijing will be the only buyer for its raw materials it won’t even get a very good price.
It will be dirt-poor, chaotic, and under-developed – think Argentina, but with a rubbish football team and lots of snow. It is a cruel outcome, but exactly what Putin has now condemned his country to.
Russia - A mining base for China
Russia’s transformation into a wholly-owned subsidiary of China is now complete
Its invasion of Ukraine spectacularly failed in its objective of taking Kyiv in a matter of days. Its battered army is taking huge casualties along a front line that stretches for hundreds of miles.
What it was like working at the Olivye, Putin's palace in Crimea
In a 2019 investigation, the independent Russian outlet Proekt reported the palace at Olivye was a vast complex and included a competition-standard ice-hockey rink, swimming pools, saunas, a 60-bed staff dormitory with marble walls and a marble elevator, and a winter garden.
Satellite images of the site also appeared to show woodlands, beaches, a small port, and a helipad.
"It's a fantasy place," Brizhaty said, according to The Telegraph's translation of an interview he gave the independent Russian outlet TV Rain. "There are fitness halls, fountains, beautiful parks, tea houses, barbecue zones and beaches."
Armed divers also scoured the beach for assassins, he told TV Rain.
One key aspect of the compound was that no matter their actual job, every single member of staff there was a security officer, Brizhaty told Insider.
"Everybody who works there — a person who is cutting the grass or washing the linen — works for the FSO," he said. The whole place was like a "little town," he said.
While Brizhaty had long quietly supported the views of the dissident Russian campaigner Alexei Navalny, he says that as far as he knew, everybody else there was loyal.
"Some people truly believe that they are doing an important job," he said, adding: "They don't notice the luxury, or they believe that the president has a right to have this luxury."
Brizhaty said he earned 68,000 rubles, or about $700, a month but said a sharp-elbowed working culture kept him on his toes.
While some co-workers were more agreeable, many appeared to take a leaf out of Putin's book.
"There are people there who are like him. It's hard to explain," he said.
"They are trying to find faults with you," he added. "You have to watch everything you are saying in front of them because every word may be used against you."
"The thing is, this is the kind of service where nothing happens," he continued. "And the only way to make a career and to promote yourself is to tell on others."
A former guard at one of Putin's luxury palaces says it was like a toxic 'little town' where everyone was snitching on each other
Vitaly Brizhaty, a dissident former FSO officer, worked to protect Putin at his Crimea palace, where lackeys vied for power behind 10-foot-high walls.
Putin revokes Russia’s ratification of nuclear test ban treaty
What he said:
What he said:
No, this is the last thing, it's the new thing now.
Russia threatens Poland will lose its statehood:
www.reuters.com
Putin ally warns 'enemy' Poland: you risk losing your statehood
A top ally of President Vladimir Putin warned Poland on Thursday that the NATO member state was now considered a "dangerous enemy" by Russia and could end up losing its statehood if it continued on its current course.