Airborne_Again wrote:
But the Balkans and Romania? Why? How would that be in his interest?
To take the piss. To show that he can, and that Europe won’t (or wouldn’t, without NATO) stop him. To bolster his strongman image at home, which (along with threatening/murdering political opponents) is how he retains power.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Stuxnet was just a simply dry run…
Stuxnet was American or Israeli, not Russian, and was targeted at Iran.
I think you are thinking of the Wannacry ransomware and its variants (which were also enabled by the NSA “banking” Windows vulnerabilities and not telling Microsoft. Unfortunately they leaked, and the Russians using this leaked vulnerability was the blowback from keeping the vulnerabilities secret rather than revealing them to the vendor).
I went to a medical conference where an aid agency discussed having trained 20 Afghan surgeons who were all picked off within a year. In another talk by another agency, anyone planning to travel to do aid work in a country with a Russian-installed mobile phone network was advised to turn off their Western mobile before landing and buy a local phone and not dial any Western numbers with it, to avoid being similarly tracked down and murdered. The Skripal case, it seemed, was only the tip of the iceberg. Apparently the chemical weapons establishment at Shikhany was broken into small pieces, all of which were incinerated at a high temperature.
I was left profoundly despondent, with the impression that we were taking part in an undeclared war with Russia. It certainly seems to have an interest in the Middle East and many of the ex soviet nations… I appreciate that the West’s interests in these regions are by no means pure. I hope not to the extent that there is a moral equivalency.
These killings were not encouraged by Russia. Russia tried to control Afghanistan, and gave up. It’s not Russia you have to fear in many countries. The threat is a result of military actions, mainly by US and UK.
Libya under Ghadaffi and Iraq under Saddam Hussein were
better places to live than they are now.
Syria is unstable largely because of foreign intervention
preventing any party enforcing order.
Whether China manages to invest in and exploit Africa without triggering violent hatred remains to be seen.
PS The Ukraine was for long Russian. When the Guards revolted against Peter the First, it was from Kiev that Patrick Gordon marched to crush them.
Maoraigh wrote:
Libya under Ghadaffi and Iraq under Saddam Hussein were
better places to live than they are now.
Most dictatorships are actually pretty good places to live in – if and only if you are on the “right side” of power and can life with the required “dictator is always right” mindset
What you write is disturbing kwlf. I don’t get why Russia would kill Afghan surgeons.
Talibans would do it for fun though 
.
About the polarization of the US :
Most dictatorships are actually pretty good places to live in – if and only if you are on the “right side” of power and can life with the required “dictator is always right” mindset
Yes; many people said the same about communism. It was ok if you were a full time brown-noser, went to the Party meetings and stood up and clapped every 15 mins, reported on any colleague who spoke off-message in the office, etc. Really nice stuff. These regimes are great for the dishonest, the lazy, the envious. They work for a surprisingly long time because you can run a country with only about 5% of the population on your side, and the rest will be terrorised to stay in line. Also most people are basically lazy, non-enterprising, and like a highly structured life with plenty of certainties.
Jujupilote wrote:
What you write is disturbing kwlf. I don’t get why Russia would kill Afghan surgeons.
Same reason as I mentioned before – to take the piss, to show that they can do it with impunity, to scare people into not upsetting them or supporting their opponents. In that particular case, probably to disrupt Western attempts to stablise Afghanistan and discourage Afghans from cooperating with the West.
Russia does this kind of stuff all the time. It poisons dissidents / defectors / political opponents, even outside its own borders – and the reason it poisons them with polonium or nerve agents rather than just shooting them is to leave everyone in absolutely no doubt who was responsible, despite an official denial that it doesn’t actually intend you to believe.
Litvinenko / Skripal made global headlines because the Russian state assassinated (or tried to assassinate) its own former intelligence officers while they were in the UK. When it does it elsewhere, to individuals less noteworthy and by less interesting methods, it isn’t necessarily going to draw such attention – but it definitely goes on.
My next door neighbour is Albanian. She worked at the same place as me for a while so we’d often go to work together, so she told me what it was like there, growing up in the 80s. The Albanian dictatorship was pretty awful, if you did something wrong they would punish your family for it, and people would snitch on you for it (and if you don’t think this would happen if the UK became a dictatorship: think again, people in the UK have been callling the police on their neighbours for incredibly minor ‘covid violations’). She nearly lost her place at university, and had her entire family punished for daring to hold a small party where they danced to Western pop music (one of the kids there snitched). She only avoided it because the rest of her friends who were there “circled the wagons” and lied on her behalf.
A lot of these former Soviet satellite states had absolutely brutal dictatorships.
I don’t think places like Iran are any better if you dare say one thing slightly out of line on religion. They’ve done things like publically execute teenage boys on suspicion of being gay. Repulsive regimes.
What you write is disturbing kwlf. I don’t get why Russia would kill Afghan surgeons.
If Western forces were successful in their objectives in Syria/Afghanistan etc. then this would represent a further loss of influence for Russia, sometimes in its own backyard. Also an economic hit as countries moved from buying Russian to buying Western, in terms of arms and other services such as mobile phone networks.
I agree that it seems very difficult (futile?) to intervene militarily in a foreign country and to make life better for those living inside it. Perhaps this is the Western ‘cover story’ for its interventions. It would be naive to think we would not be glad of opening additional markets. However, aid workers are an extension of soft power, which makes them politically involved whether they want to be or not. And they are very soft targets.
