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Notes -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum has indicated that it works poorly with Russia.
The Iran deal, the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back and the long list of self proclaimed US exceptionalism gives the rest of the world strong reasons not to trust the US.
Fact check. All those people just wanted to get rich and we never invaded any of those countries.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
Honestly thought about doing a top-level posts. Polands economical miracle sums up this entire war. Russia offered their colonial possessions nothing and once every 50 years a famine. The West offered wealth. Maybe if Russia didn’t want colonies and offered economic development all these Slovak countries would want to be friends with them.
Mershemere meet Poland. Maybe he could study their economy and realize why no one wants to be friends with Russia.
The Russians built Ukraine's heavy industry in the Soviet period, it was a key industrial region of the USSR. It had a lot of power infrastructure, which is ironically making it harder for the Russians to destroy it, now that consumption is much less. Post breakup, Russia paid off all of Ukraine's share of Soviet debt and supplied cheap gas. The attached article makes the case that Russia supplying gas at below market rates limited Ukrainian economic modernization and encouraged corruption. Nevertheless, that could be said about all economic aid.
'Russia offered their colonial possessions nothing' is false. They made a generous offer in 2013, promising to bail out the indebted Ukrainian economy with bond purchases and lower gas prices. They were consistently supplying below market price gas back in the 2000s and 1990s, keeping Ukraine from complete economic collapse.
The reason Ukraine didn't want to be friends with Russia is not because Russia was not willing to provide but because US-based, US-aligned NGOs like the Endowment for Democracy and Open Society Foundation were paying billions to politically influence the country directly, manipulating media, education and governance.
Isn’t Ukraine under Russia control at 1/3 the income of Poland joining the EU and at a slower growth pace? Like look at the data. And besides the fact Russia literally starved Ukraine.
The whole western whore analogy your trying to make makes no sense. Does Japan not have their own culture?
Ukraine under direct Russian control was doing fairly well. Their income only recovered to 1991 levels in 2006. Have a look at Russia. Would oh-so-corrupt and incompetent Russian governance really have hurt Ukraine that much?
Look at this data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=UA-RU
It was a mistake to break up the Soviet Union completely, these countries were not supposed to be separate. Their economies were interlinked, there was no sound political basis for self-government in most of them. Ukraine inherited huge heavy industry that it didn't need, without the domestic energy to use it properly. I reckon that if you told Ukrainians in 1991 'if you elect for independence and freedom from hated Russia your economy will crater, won't even recover for 16 years, your country will depopulate, get brain-drained and go from rough parity with Russia to half their income' they would've thought again about independence.
And now they're looking at hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded because... why? So they can aspire towards reaching the level of income Russia already has in 15 or 20 years, provided they get EU membership at some later date? The above graph doesn't even count the war damage, which is going to be severe.
Well they do but it was heavily manipulated by the US who rewrote their constitution. You know how they have this weird censorship of genitals in Japanese pornography? Like tiny lines that don't cover anything, even though the actual content can be rather more perverse than showing a penis. That's because of the tortured interplay between the US officially enforcing freedom of speech and pre-existing Japanese obscenity laws. Or to put it another way, can you spot any differences in Japanese culture between 1944 and 1954?
Yeah, yeah. Median monthly salary in Russia is around 400-500 USD
https://tass.com/economy/1301957
Just a little lower in Ukraine. Somehow this huge GDP and revenues from exporting raw materials didn't translate in passable living standards for people outside of several large cities.
According to World Population Review, Russia's median income is $5500 to Ukraine's $4400, which is a fairly substantial difference.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country
Consider also that if it weren't for Russian aid and debt relief, Ukraine's situation pre-2014 would've been much worse. Cheap energy is good - nobody is saying that the fad of refusing to buy Russian gas imports is a great opportunity for Germany since they'll be able to 'reform their economy'.
Adjust it for the cost of living which will make the difference negligible (of course, the war made everything costlier, but Russia can make drop a few nukes on Ukraine to make life there completely miserable).
Russian "aid" enriched Ukrainian oligarchs, barely anything of it dripped down to the general population, and reliance on Russian gas made investment in domestic production unprofitable. People talking about Russia relieving Soviet debt apparently forget the fact that Russia got most of Soviet assets, but also a lot of countries had debts before Soviet Union — now they had to repay Russia.
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