From the Korean air incident: "As a result of the incident...President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making American satellite-based radio navigation Global Positioning System freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good."
This is strongly politicized in Poland, there have been many commissions and expertises, and despite most Poles thinking all the worst about Russia - majority (me included) does not believe it to be on purpose.
"Amid the endless political struggle, it is easy to lose perspective on the Smolensk Air Disaster as, first and foremost, a plane crash. Had the President not been on board to politicize the tragedy, it would have been obvious to everyone that the flight that day was a disaster waiting to happen. A poorly trained and unqualified crew was charged with flying VIPs into an ill-equipped, decrepit airport amid extremely dense fog."
“The plane was staying overnight in a hotel, as is often the case for large passenger aircraft relaxing between shifts,” the Kremlin spokesperson said.
“Unfortunately it had a few drinks, the window was open, and it fell out. Our thoughts are with the victims”.
I think a fundamental part of the reasons that Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR. They are ideologically and politically distinct entities, even as much as some in the current state of Russia might wish for the old days.
> Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR.
Do you think that invading your neighbours might be a contributing factor? We are in a thread about Russia shooting down an airliner, again. It’s pretty amazing to claim equal culpability here.
Russia legally declared itself a successor to USSR, took the UN seat, nuclear weapons, assumed debt and foreign assets, kept contacts with former communist allies like Cuba, so it’s not completely wrong. The topic of admission of Russia to NATO demonstrates this very well: Putin thought that Moscow is peer to Washington D.C. and needed special invitation (as if USSR resolved hostilities and wanted to partner with the Western bloc). NATO was treating him like any other country in Eastern Europe: apply and we will think about it — didn’t even bother to formally invite (IIRC Stoltenberg basically said in one of the interviews that even if the door was closed, the doorbell was working).
I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning. USSR was a dictatorship, but not a colonial state. As a matter of fact it even prioritized the reduction of inequality between the republics of the union for several decades.
I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning.
Which per Wikipedia is simply:
A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule.
And which was a perfectly reasonable description of the situation in all the peripheral republics, as well as many constituent parts of the RSFSR itself.
The fact that it might have also provided subsidies to some of the republics at various times (when not withholding food and/or engaging in massive, violent repressive actions against them) is entirely irrelevant to this definition. Recall that the Western colonial powers always bragged about all the infrastructure they built in their colonies, and South Africa always tried to point out the subsidies it provided its Bantustans, etc.
It is not a reasonable description, because there was no „foreign“ rule in USSR. E.g. Russia was not ruling over Ukraine, both were equal parts of the union and both Russian and Ukrainian republican governments were subjects to the rule of the communist party and union government. Same as Germany not being a colony of EU or contemporary Australia not being a colony of the Commonwealth. Russian colonial empire has fallen in 1917-1922 during the civil war.
I think this is highly debatable, as even the European part of Russia hosted no less than dozens of different ethnicities. What you say makes little sense in the context of Russian and generally eastern European history.
Russia created the USSR as a legal framework to exert power over its neighbors. This was engineered by Stalin himself.
The most important feature of Russian culture is the sentiment that Russia is great but the world is conspiring to put it down. That's 100% the same in present day Russia as it was in the USSR. They're the same.
All a matter of perspective. Those "engineering failures" were in fact a case of criminal negligence which, by the way, none of the actually responsible people has gone to jail for. As for "firing missiles at civilians", this latest incident reportedly happened to a rerouted plane, in airspace that was being actively contested by enemy drones at that time. Not saying that this isn't a tragedy, or that the Russian military is not to blame, but there are also lots of blanket allegations and generalizations thrown around in this thread, that just seem out of place in a supposedly discerning and intelligent community.
