

- Russia probe told reporters.
Took half a year for them to realize Russia ain’t gonna turn on China. If not for China - they’d probably be on verge of default by now.
You’d be better seeing fall of USSR as cautionary tale of letting senile morons run a country to the ground.
That’s a really bad take.
Yes, people on previously Soviet-occupied territories that were occupied by Germans in WW2 often first met nazis with flowers as liberators, and even captured Soviet generals would at first slip some words that were quite critical of Soviet leadership.
But, as time passed on, the attitudes changed, so there was increase in guerilla activity and also some initial collaborators became rebels. That is simply because people started realizing how nazis were worse than anything.
I’ll say most Ukrainians wish both sides “best of luck” (source: I’m Ukrainian) - to Israel because they supplied Lancet and Orlan technologies to Russia, to Iran because they supplied Shaheds and ballistic missiles to Russia, so these things are what directly impacted our lives and made them much worse.
As for why Zelensky sings praises for Taco Don from time to time - I don’t believe that latter one can be swayed to help Ukraine (and Zelensky probably doesn’t believe that too) but there’s still Congress, that is somewhat cooperative from time to time, and we really need these sanctions that Taco Don now tries to delay and dilute.
Farmers in New Zealand are organized into cooperative, probably the biggest and most successful cooperative there is, and there’s almost zero subsidizing from state for them.
That’s what he says.
Ukrainian special services, on the other hand, point out servers and most Telegram employees residing in St. Petersburg and claim that he made few dozen visits to Russia since his alleged flight from there.
The fact that Russian delegation in Istanbul among other things demanded that “both sides will refrain from suing each other in court” just tells that they know really good how fucked they’d be in Hague.
There’s some older article I found: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk-dutch-spy-agencies-curb-intel-flow-to-austria-over-russia-ties-mp-idUSKCN1RL2CL/
And if I didn’t dream it up (can’t find exact source, sorry) Austria whilst not in NATO was part of NATO intelligence sharing network back in 2022, but they were booted at some point due to leaking info to Russia.
Thank you Austria, but we still remember how you leaked NATO intelligence to Russia, so get bent.
Well, they’ve been going for a while now. I’m Ukrainian-speaking in daily life (and has been for my whole life), but I’m fairly fluent in Russian simply because it was everywhere - TV, Internet, music, and foreign companies didn’t even bother with Ukrainian-speaking demographics when shipping their products (i mean, for example, markings on appliances and such) or releasing software with Ukrainian language until we had laws that demanded that, they just did Russian, because “they’ll understand it anyway”.
While I remained Ukrainian-speaking, some people bought the idea of Russian culture being trendy and modern in contrast to Ukrainian being portrayed as rural and simpleton. And that was just “long war” , before it even went into open hostility - there were years, decades, even centuries of such conditioning, but also periodic revivals of Ukrainian culture.