How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

**panama hat** · 03-02-2021, 02:15 AM

Originally Posted by Klondyke

We have missed

Nah, you have missed most everything that doesn't come from Pravda

Originally Posted by Backspin

You know oil and gas are 2 different things right ?

Well done, Skidmark - hence the words o&g. Not og . . . you're not THAT dense, are you . . . oh, you are.

Originally Posted by Backspin

I am still fucking looking for the number

Yes, it's be a good idea to talk about numbers when you have the numbers instead of AGAIN looking like an idiot. Are you actually saying what you mean to be saying this time, cretin? Or will you backtrack and say you were thinking of something different but meant something else again.

You're in your 30s, ffs, do learn to discuss like an adult

**sabang** · 03-02-2021, 02:46 AM

Big bad Vlad, will not be Had
This irks uncle Sam, a Tad

**harrybarracuda** · 03-02-2021, 10:59 AM

Originally Posted by russellsimpson

This is why imo when Putin came along and started to restore dignity in the country he was welcomed. And still is.

Using nationalistic chest beating to allow a populist to rape a country of its wealth has long since worn out its welcome. Why do you think he has to rig every election nowadays; beat jail or kill anyone who opposes him; and attacks any form of public protest (and even that is wearing thin as we can see)?

**Backspin** · 03-02-2021, 11:27 AM

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Using nationalistic chest beating to allow a populist to rape a country of its wealth has long since worn out its welcome. Why do you think he has to rig every election nowadays; beat jail or kill anyone who opposes him; and attacks any form of public protest (and even that is wearing thin as we can see)?

The Russian treasury has never been more flush with cash. Nearly the lowest debt in the G20

**lom** · 03-02-2021, 12:34 PM

Originally Posted by Backspin

The Russian treasury has never been more flush with cash.

Then just imagine how much there could have been in it if Vlad hadn't siphoned off a lot!

**panama hat** · 03-02-2021, 12:48 PM

Originally Posted by Backspin

The Russian treasury has never been more flush with cash. Nearly the lowest debt in the G20

Originally Posted by lom

Then just imagine how much there could have been in it if Vlad hadn't siphoned off a lot!

The mind boggles . . . add billions and billions . . . and the 'low' debt . . . of course, there are no social services, it's a third-world society/country

**sabang** · 03-02-2021, 01:12 PM

Is He really the richest man in the Universe?

**Backspin** · 03-02-2021, 01:58 PM

Originally Posted by sabang

Is He really the richest man in the Universe?

Even with the Panama papers and changing the banking laws in Switzerland. They still cant find his alleged billions. He is probably right in that Clinton Romney range. 250 million dollars tops

**HermantheGerman** · 03-02-2021, 02:26 PM

Originally Posted by Backspin

The Russian treasury has never been more flush with cash. Nearly the lowest debt in the G20

Have you ever looked in the mirror and asked yourself: "Why am I so God damned stupid!".

Natural resources used by the economy of Russia account for 95.7% of national wealth.

Putin needs idiots like you. This way the distribution of national wealth will always be a one way street.

You boast about Russia's gold reserves?! How stupid can anyone be to make such a idiotic comparison. Russia sits on a gold mine and still other countries (like Germany) have more gold. I can keep on comparing for ever, but you are too dumb to understand anything.
I don't need to play any number games because any imbecile who has passed grade 5 knows that Russia is the "richest and poorest country in the world".
Thanks to idiots like you (must be your russian genes

) Russia will never get up on its feet.

Natural Resources, Economy of Russia

Natural Resources of Russia

Natural resources potential of Russia is over 20% of the world’s reserves. This fact places Russia on a special place among industrialized countries. Natural resources used by the economy of Russia account for 95.7% of national wealth. There are large deposits of fuel and energy resources: oil, natural gas, coal and uranium ore.

Russia is ranked first in the world by gas reserves (32% of world’s reserves, 30% of world production), the second in oil production (10% share of world production), the third - in coal reserves (22 coal basins, 115 fields, including those in European Russia - about 15.6% in Siberia - 66.8% in the Far East - 12.9%, in the Urals - 4.3%). In terms of reserves of iron ores Russia takes the first place, in tin – the second, lead - the third. Russia also occupies a leading position in the world in wood provision.

In 2005 Russia was the richest country in gold reserves.

In Russia there are five major oil and gas provinces located in European part of the country and in Western Siberia in 10 regions and 11 provinces and republics: West Siberian, Volga-Urals, Timan-Pechora, the North Caucasus and the Caspian Sea area.

In addition, metal ores are mined on the country’s territory ores: iron, nickel, copper, aluminum, tin, polymetals, chromium, tungsten, gold, and silver. There is a great variety of non-metallic ores: phosphates, apatites, talc, asbestos, mica, potash and salt, diamonds, amber, precious and semiprecious stones. Very common are construction materials: sand, clay, limestone, marble, granite and other materials.

Russia Natural Resources

**harrybarracuda** · 03-02-2021, 02:45 PM

Originally Posted by sabang

Is He really the richest man in the Universe?

I doubt he is far off it, since he's had his grubby hands on the russky bank accounts for nigh on two decades.

**bsnub** · 03-02-2021, 03:05 PM

He sure made all of his cronies rich. Not one of the Russian oligarchs is a legitimate businessman. The lot of them are crooks who got rich plundering the wealth of the USSR.

**Backspin** · 03-02-2021, 10:40 PM

Originally Posted by bsnub

He sure made all of his cronies rich. Not one of the Russian oligarchs is a legitimate businessman. The lot of them are crooks who got rich plundering the wealth of the USSR.

Sergey Galitsky

A truck driver, banker, and sailor

By 1994, the 27-year-old Galitsky had already worked as a mover and a bank employee. He then took out a loan with his partners, and launched a wholesale perfume and cosmetics business, Transasia. The company grew quickly and in 1995 received the exclusive rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products in southern Russia. However, P&G required a separate company to sell P&G brands. Galitsky’s partners used Transasia for this while Galitsky created a new company, Tander, which would eventually become Magnit.\

Retired sailor Vladimir Gordeichuk, who would rise to become the second in command at Magnit, began working at Tander as a truck driver. He joined the company as a driver in 1996, and then was given a local sales position, rising to become head of sales. Three years later, he was an executive director. Galitsky came up with the ideas, and Gordeichuk executed them. But Gordeichuk was also interested in philosophy: “I could be at work until 11pm, then get up at 4am, begin to read Hegel or Nietzsche, then go back to the office and at 9am call a team meeting for a group discussion. I tried to systematize things by employing a philosophical approach,” he said.

By 2005, Magnit, which was run out of the southern Russian city of Krasnodar (where Galitsky lives), had become (Rus) the country’s largest retailer by number of stores, but it was barely visible in Moscow and St Petersburg, where Magnit’s main rival, Pyaterochka, was expanding aggressively. “I don’t care where I make my rubles,” Galitsky said at the time.
From a managerial point of view, Magnit resembled an army and all decisions were taken at the highest level. During its period of rapid growth, this helped Magnit to open stores quickly: the company would just find a retail space of about 350 square meters, put up a cheap sign, paint the walls, and the store would open. No one could compete with them in terms of speed, recalled Ilya Yakubson, the former CEO of DIXY, another major Russian retailer.

Much of Magnit’s optimization was linked to technological innovation. The company built an IT system that automatically created orders for products in its distribution centers. Thanks to this technology, Magnit became one of only two Russian companies to be named (Rus) three times to Forbes’ list of the world’s 100 most innovative companies.
During all these years, there was something new every day, Galitsky recalled in his conversation with The Bell. “It was an unbelievable time, when you go to bed only in order to make the morning come sooner,” he said. “I didn’t eat breakfast at home at the weekend once during those 24 years.”

**HermantheGerman** · 05-02-2021, 07:02 PM

Originally Posted by Backspin

You are so amazingly stupid. Every air head and their dog thinks that natural resources are just as simple as digging or drilling a hole and out comes instant cashflow and riches......

Exactly ! Only the dumb ass Russians are too stupid to lay a pipeline. It took a little country like Switzerland to lay North Stream II.
Why have the Russians not done it themselves from the beginning? Suka!
Why can't the Russians finish it (over a year now) after the Swiss have left? Svolach!

Yes you are right, getting natural resources out of the ground ain't easy. The Russians are failing every day

One barrel is spilled , one barrel for Putin, one barrel for Ivan Oilnotanov

, and a few drops for Babushka, and if Babushka dares to protest she gets locked up.

**harrybarracuda** · 05-02-2021, 07:22 PM

Pesonally I'm just hoping the rumours of Putin's Parkinsons are true. It would a fitting punishment.

**Klondyke** · 05-02-2021, 10:20 PM

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Pesonally I'm just hoping the rumours of Putin's Parkinsons are true

Pesonally, I think it's a dream of Western powers...It's so tiring to invent new and new stories about poisoning, meddling, trillions, palaces, you name it...

**Klondyke** · 05-02-2021, 10:52 PM

And what's more: his approval rate is dropping...(but might be that they exaggerate...)

New research, conducted by the Levada Center – a polling company registered as a foreign agent over receiving Western funding in the past – found that 64 percent of the 1,600 people surveyed backed Putin’s performance, down from 65 percent in the last poll, conducted in November.

Putin’s approval rating drops slightly to 64%, while Navalny overtakes Communist Party leader in new Russian opinion poll — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

**russellsimpson** · 06-02-2021, 01:45 AM

Sample group 1600 people out of 144M. Putin support down one percent. Technically this allows the statement to be true. The smaller the numbers involved the more useless it is to bother calculating percentage increases and the more likely it is that we're dealing with shysters, ingrates and other and sundry assorted lower life forms whose sole purpose on the planet is to deceive and confuse. Classless leeches.

So holey molley and ten hail Marie's.

Nothing happening here folks . Please move along.

**harrybarracuda** · 06-02-2021, 03:03 AM

How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?-sc210205-gif

**Backspin** · 06-02-2021, 05:06 AM

^ Navalny is one big dog and pony show sponsored by the Western powers.

Russia has the 5th or 6th most billionaires in the world. It's the biggest country in the world. And yet , you really think that Putin has everyone scared straight except for one attention whoring e-grifter named Alexey Navalny ? Really ?

Maybe ... just maybe... There is a political consensus in Russia ?

**OhOh** · 08-02-2021, 07:27 PM

Western pundits believed post-Maidan Ukraine would serve as an ‘example’ for Russia – in reality, it’s become a cautionary tale

6 Feb, 2021 07:40

"Many Russian liberals and foreign pundits saw Ukraine's 2014 'Maidan' as an event that would inspire change in Moscow. Today, as an increasingly dysfunctional Kiev clamps down on free speech, it looks more like a cautionary tale. In May 2014, newly elected Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko promised that he would rapidly bring peace to his country. "The anti-terrorist operation cannot and should not last two or three months. It should and will last hours," he said.

Nearly 60,000 hours later, the war into which the badly named "anti-terrorist operation" morphed is still going on. Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky similarly promised to bring the fighting to an end. "My main goal… is that I want to end the war. This is my mission within these five years," he told journalists. But he has been equally unsuccessful.

Zelensky resoundingly defeated Poroshenko in the 2019 presidential election, in which the incumbent won a plurality of votes only in the far west of the country. By portraying himself as a candidate not only of peace, but also of national unity, Zelensky was able to attract the votes of a large number of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the south and east of the country who had been alienated by Poroshenko’s increasingly nationalistic tone.

Unfortunately, since then Zelensky has betrayed those voters time after time.
Not only has he failed to take any of the steps required to bring the war to an end – most notably, the concessions demanded in the 2015 Minsk II agreements – but his government has also further suppressed the language rights of Ukrainians and is now clamping down on the opposition media.

In January 2020, liberal Russian pundits lined up to praise Zelensky’s new year’s speech. Zelensky was said to have promoted an image of national unity, seeking to overcome linguistic and other differences which had been accentuated by his predecessor’s nationalist policies. "It doesn’t matter what your street is called as long as it is clean and asphalted," said Zelensky, in a line which seemed to suggest that his government would bring an end to the habit of changing street names from those of communist heroes to those of nationalist icons like Stepan Bandera.

In fact, it hasn’t. Not only has Zelensky failed to provide clean and asphalted streets, but it’s since become clear that what he really meant was not that he would bring an end to forcible Ukrainization, but that Russian speakers should just shut up and stop complaining about it, since, after all, none of that stuff actually "matters."

Thus, Zelensky has done nothing to reverse the 2019 law on official languages, which sharply restricts the use of Russian. Most notably, on January 16 a new rule came into effect which obliges all service providers (shops, restaurants, etc.) to offer their services in Ukrainian by default. Meanwhile, censorship in Ukraine has reached new levels of silliness, prohibiting for instance a book about the Vikings by an American author because it referred to ancient Kievan Rus’ as "Russia."

Now Zelensky has gone even further, banning three television stations owned by opposition politician Taras Kozak, on the grounds that they are spreading Russian disinformation. Zelensky claims that he supports freedom of speech but not "propaganda financed by the aggressors." "These media have become one of the tools in the war against Ukraine, so they are blocked in order to protect national security," said Zelensky’s spokesperson Yuliia Mendel.

The fact that the ban comes at a moment when Zelensky’s popularity is plummeting, and when Kozak’s party Opposition Platform – For Life is leading in national opinion polls may be entirely coincidental. But then again it may not. The move smacks of political desperation.

It is also, of course, deeply undemocratic in character. Had former president Viktor Yanukovich, who was overthrown in the February 2014 Maidan revolution, ever attempted such a thing, Ukrainian liberals and their Western allies would have cried huge screams of outrage. Now, however, they are silent, or even supportive. The US Embassy in Kiev, for instance, issued a statement that it backed the measure as designed "to counter Russia’s malign influence."

The US response reveals the shallowness of Western assertions that in backing the Maidan revolution and subsequent governments they are supporting democracy, human rights, and a liberal order. In reality, geopolitics seems to be the primary concern. As long as Ukraine remains resolutely anti-Russia, a blind eye will be turned to nearly all and any abuses of democratic principles.

And here’s where the situation becomes rather sad. In the immediate aftermath of the Maidan revolution, it was said that Vladimir Putin’s response was driven by fears that Western-style democracy in Ukraine would provide a positive model which would incite a similar revolution in Russia.'

Western pundits believed post-Maidan Ukraine would serve as an ‘example’ for Russia – in reality, it’s become a cautionary tale — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

**russellsimpson** · 08-02-2021, 08:59 PM

Originally Posted by OhOh

It is also, of course, deeply undemocratic in character. Had former president Viktor Yanukovich, who was overthrown in the February 2014 Maidan revolution, ever attempted such a thing, Ukrainian liberals and their Western allies would have cried huge screams of outrage. Now, however, they are silent, or even supportive. The US Embassy in Kiev, for instance, issued a statement that it backed the measure as designed "to counter Russia’s malign influence."

I agree with this. I think western democracies, and in particular the Americans, had a great deal to do with undermining Mr. Yanukovich. People like Mr. Zelensky seem to have a natural tendency to swing right and I give you its neighbours Poland and Hungary as examples. To comprehend the problems plaguing The Ukraine we have to venture back to at least WW2 where, in the west of the country there was a significant part of the population who were not unwelcoming to the Nazis whereas in the eastern part of the country thousands died defending mother Russia. Folks in this part of the world have excellent memories.

Overall what we are seeing is simply another example of the continuing Cold War which has hardly subsided since the fifties. Had the west pursued a less aggressive path after the fall of the Soviet Union I'm quite sure things would be different today.

That's my pennies worth.

Fire away.

**Klondyke** · 08-02-2021, 10:40 PM

Originally Posted by russellsimpson

People like Mr. Zelensky seem to have a natural tendency to swing right and I give you its neighbours Poland and Hungary as examples.

But that's not why the Mr.Z. is now being impeached...

https://teakdoor.com/world-news/2020...ml#post4219474 (Not only in USA are presidents impeached...)

**harrybarracuda** · 08-02-2021, 11:14 PM

Not only has he failed to take any of the steps required to bring the war to an end

Which presumably involves accepting that Russia's invasion of sovereign territory was acceptable.

Get fucked with your RT nonsense.

**panama hat** · 09-02-2021, 03:04 AM

Originally Posted by russellsimpson

Overall what we are seeing is simply another example of the continuing Cold War which has hardly subsided since the fifties. Had the west pursued a less aggressive path after the fall of the Soviet Union I'm quite sure things would be different today.

It's an ideological difference that drove the issue and now it's a matter of Russian dominance and power. Their previously forced allies are quite happy to have been freed from the yoke of Russian militarism and oppression, add to that the disintegration of the Soviet Union into the 'Stanss' etc... and you have a country that is used to only totalitarian leadership.

They're frightened of themselves and envious of the west.

**Backspin** · 09-02-2021, 04:16 AM

Originally Posted by russellsimpson

I agree with this. I think western democracies, and in particular the Americans, had a great deal to do with undermining Mr. Yanukovich. People like Mr. Zelensky seem to have a natural tendency to swing right and I give you its neighbours Poland and Hungary as examples. To comprehend the problems plaguing The Ukraine we have to venture back to at least WW2 where, in the west of the country there was a significant part of the population who were not unwelcoming to the Nazis whereas in the eastern part of the country thousands died defending mother Russia. Folks in this part of the world have excellent memories.

Overall what we are seeing is simply another example of the continuing Cold War which has hardly subsided since the fifties. Had the west pursued a less aggressive path after the fall of the Soviet Union I'm quite sure things would be different today.

That's my pennies worth.

Fire away.

Gorbachev , Yeltsin, Putin term 1 and Medvedev all tried everything they could to make a proper peace deal with Europe.

A 2 speed NATO would have been perfect and all the aforementioned leaders were open to it. But the US didn't want that. They wanted more war and that's what we have.

They wanted Russia to just grovel and give up territory whenever NATO wanted more. If Russia granted independence and NATO membership to Chechnya , they would just move onto the next territory.

A country is either an empire or part of someone else's. Russia was too big to fit into the EU or nato. It was never going to happen.

But we have laughable fools like Panama skat actually believe it's all a morality play. If only the Russian leadership was nicer guys , then Russia could join the EU and NATO and it would be all one big happy family.

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