Anyone Else Want to Poke the Russian Bear With a Stick?
Face it, Russia and Putin did not do what they did from a position of power. They did it because they are desperate. Here is my take on Russia in the 21st Century:
Russia's only claim to fame is post WWII western capitalists needed a straw man to justify their colonial ambitions and to scare their own workers into submission, so they gave the USSR half of Europe and illusions of grandeur. Now, relics of the Cold War like Putin are butt hurt because they don't get to strut around in big parades with big missiles that make them feel like well endowed super studs. Well, sorry to rain on your parade, all you ex-KGB officers who decided that Russia had to regain its manhood after the Clintons put an end to genocide committed by Slavs in the Balkans. Yes, I know that you believe that you have a god given right to commit ethic purges in order to make way for more glorious genetically superior people like yourselves. But you were just the lackeys of folks like the Kochs and Rockefellers. And now your once "great" colonial superpower has outlived its purpose. The ghost of the former USSR needs to go crawl in a hole and become Russia, just another member of the European Union with quaint local customs and way too much winter weather and a finite supply of oil and a cache of nuclear weapons that will keep you safe from invasion but will not allow you to take over the world no matter how many elections you hack or U.S. presidents you blackmail.
That does not mean that we should not take ex-KGB Russia seriously. A cornered bear can be dangerous. And humans are the most dangerous animals of all.
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They also have had a knack historically for throwing wrenches into democratic governments. Back in Weimar the KDP vs. SPD split was a clusterfuck for the German left, with the KDP basically being stooges for Stalin (and literally saying there was no difference between social democracy and fascism 
).
