Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Putin is obviously a wise man, WinXP is the best OS so far, and still works, I still use it on a dozen of PCs

and with Opera, you can still use the Internet

I should advise HE Putin on tips to update and harden security without the silly Windows Update bloatware

PS: The internet is not a CIA project, it's a PENTAGON/DARPA project

Ukraine, China & 2024 retirement plans: Key takeaways from Putin's 15th annual press chat

19 Dec, 2019

At his annual year-end press conference, Vladimir Putin addressed his presumed retirement in 2024, the situation in Ukraine, domestic issues around healthcare and demographics, and relations with China, among many other topics.

Thursday's Moscow event was the 15th in as many years of Putin's presidency, and finished up as one of the longest. The Russian president sat for four hours and 18 minutes, taking around 80 questions from 57 journalists, of which he answered about 77. Some 1,895 reporters representing Russian and foreign media received accreditation for the conference, with many more watching online.

The climate crisis was the first topic. Putin appeared to cast doubt upon the Western mainstream scientific consensus that humans are responsible for the transformation, but he acknowledged the problem exists. “No one knows the reasons for global climate change,” he remarked. “It's hard, if it's even possible, to estimate human impact but it doesn't mean that we should sit around & do nothing.”

Ukraine
Only last week, the president held his first meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris. At the press conference, Putin said he was “alarmed” by Zelensky's post-meeting statements about reviewing the Minsk accords, but says he is open to another summit (which Russian media speculates will happen in April).

We have nothing except the Minsk agreement. If we revisit this we are at a dead end.

The deal, crafted in the Belarusian capital in 2015, requires Kiev to alter its Constitution and grant “special status” to the mainly Russian-speaking Donbass region.

Although his predecessor Petro Poroshenko (now Ukraine's de facto opposition leader) signed up to the plan, it's implementation is considered impossible for Zelensky. Even if he somehow got it through Parliament, he lacks the strength to face down extreme nationalists who would surely take to the streets in protest. If this happened a “third Maidan” is possible, potentially leaving Ukraine in complete anarchy and threatening the business interests of Ukrainian oligarchs, including Zelensky's own sponsor, the billionaire Igor Kolomoysky.

Also on the subject of Ukraine, Putin stated that Russia wants to negotiate a new gas transit arrangement with its neighbor (despite the NordStream 2 direct pipeline to Germany soon coming online). Putin said he would like to ensure Ukrainian consumers get reasonably priced gas & that supplies to Europe are guaranteed.

2024 end of term: Speculations swirl
Next year, the president will approach the midway point of his final term in the Kremlin. As a result, speculation about the 2024 transition of power is growing. Putin says he wants to remove the word “consecutive” from the Russian Constitution's rules on presidential term limits. So, basically, any president can serve two periods (like the US) before being blocked from standing again. The US introduced these restrictions after experiencing its own four-time president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Interestingly, Putin has repeatedly invited comparisons between himself and the erstwhile US leader, going all the way back to the mid-2000s.

Indeed, many in Russia argue that the president rescued his country from the chaotic, anarchic, and destitute 1990s in a similar fashion to how Roosevelt dragged America out of the Great Depression.

Such a change would presumably mean Putin will have to retire in 2024. And Russian journalists, and analysts, have interpreted it this way. However, some US/UK media reporters, on the Russia beat, believe it may be a “cunning way” of resetting the rules so Putin can have another term, or terms, before the new limits apply. Although sources in Moscow ridiculed this theory on Thursday night.

Putin also floated the possibility of Russia switching to a more parliamentary style of government which would give the prime minister (currently Dmitry Medvedev) more control, ending the “hyper-presidential” system introduced by Boris Yeltsin in 1993 (with US support). A move like this would mean future leaders won't have Putin's sort of power, as the presidency would be downgraded.

He also referenced Russia's demographic problems (the population fell this year after a decade of small rises), noting how the number of potential young mothers, aged 21-29, has fallen by four million. This is the effect of the 1990s economic carnage which crushed birth rates, as many people worried about basic survival.

Home front
Closer to home, responding to calls for Vladimir Lenin to be taken out of his Red Square mausoleum and buried, Putin (who has always made it clear he's not a fan of the Bolshevik revolutionary) wasn't very keen. He insisted there's “no need to touch him” whilst people are still alive who remember the USSR in a positive fashion and continue to celebrate Soviet achievements within their lifetimes.

Regarding journalist Ivan Golunov, whose June arrest on spurious drug charges caused outrage in Russia, Putin pointed out that five police have been fired, with criminal cases opened against them. He rejected the idea of “cleansing” police ranks, likening such a notion to the 1937 Stalinist purges.

A reporter from BBC Russia asked Putin to comment on his daughters, following media reports on their alleged business and work interests. Putin, who generally avoids discussing his family publicly, didn't answer the question.

Looking abroad: US & China
Putin commented on the impeachment of US President Donald Trump. “I'm not so sure he'll be leaving (office),” he quipped, blaming Democrat skulduggery and lingering resentment over Hillary Clinton's 2016 defeat. “They accused him of plotting with Russia, and when that turned out not to be true, they made up smears about Ukraine.”

Asked about China, the president made it clear that Russia doesn't have a military alliance with Beijing and isn't planning to start one. He says Moscow is helping the Chinese with defensive military upgrades in the spirit of partnership, not in the sense of NATO-style binding promises.

https://www.rt.com/news/476437-putin...nference-2024/

29 December 2019
Putin thanks Trump for helping prevent terrorist attacks in Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with his American counterpart Donald Trump. This was reported on the Kremlin website.

During the conversation, the head of state thanked the US president for the information that helped prevent the commission of terrorist attacks in Russia. Information was transmitted through special services.

The leaders of the two states also discussed issues of common interest and agreed on cooperation in the fight against terrorism.

In November, Putin at a meeting with officers and prosecutors on the occasion of their appointment to higher posts and the assignment of higher military (special) ranks to them, said that the FSB (Federal Security Service) had prevented 39 terrorist crimes since the beginning of the year. According to the head of state, good results have been achieved in other areas of work, in particular in countering foreign intelligence services.

https://lenta.ru/news/2019/12/29/putin_trump/

The Russians preparing the New Year attacks were detained on a tip from the United States

Suspected of preparing terrorist attacks in St. Petersburg, the Russians were detained on the basis of information from American intelligence agencies. On Sunday, December 29, reports TASS with reference to the Center for Public Relations (CSP) of the FSB .

Reportedly, intelligence officers received data on the preparation of crimes from colleagues from the United States. On December 27, the FSB detained two Russian citizens planning to carry out terrorist attacks during the New Year holidays in crowded places.

Criminal proceedings have been instituted under the articles of the Criminal Code “Preparing for the commission of a crime”, “Terrorism” and “Participation in the activities of terrorist organizations”. The suspects were seized materials confirming their preparation for the commission of crimes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a telephone conversation with US leader Donald Trump, thanked him for the information that helped prevent terrorist attacks in Russia.

https://lenta.ru/news/2019/12/29/america/

Putin’s Russia Is 20 Years Old and Stronger Than Ever. Or Is It?

Two decades after he rose to power, Vladimir Putin has restored the country’s global reach—but at home, risks are growing.

By Henry Meyer December 28, 2019

A few months after his astonishing rise to power, Vladimir Putin, then 47, was eager to please at his first Kremlin summit with an American counterpart: Bill Clinton.

The retired KGB colonel’s charm offensive started with an elaborate dinner of wild boar and goose, followed by a tour of his private quarters and a jazz concert that entertained his saxophone-playing guest until midnight. At some point, Putin would later say, he dropped a bombshell by asking if Russia could someday join NATO, the Western military alliance created to counter Moscow’s global machinations after World War II.

Read more
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...-ever-or-is-it

(The story goes on)

“I don’t mind,” said Clinton Putin. It was June 2000.

Two decades later, Russia’s relations with the United States and its allies were barely more intense, including almost six years of increasingly severe sanctions that triggered the war in Ukraine. But Putin, who had already overtaken 29 leaders of the group of seven when he won the last constitutional six-year term in 2018, seems to be turning the tables, despite what he calls hysterical Russophobia in the West.

At a summit on Ukraine in Paris this month, Putin dominated a room where Angela Merkel from Germany and Emmanuel Macron from France were present. Merkel, Europe’s most powerful politician for almost 15 years, is on the way out. Macron faces crippling strikes and protests at home and calls on NATO to stop seeing Russia as an enemy. (Another NATO founder, Britain, plans to finally leave the EU next month and create new columns on the continent.)

Then, on Tuesday, Putin announced a victory in Russia’s unspoken arms race with the United States, announcing the world’s first use of hypersonic weapons, which he said could hit targets on every continent.

“The Soviet Union has caught up,” said Putin at a meeting in Moscow. “Today we have a situation that is unique in modern history: you are trying to catch up with us.”

Under Putin, Russia restored part of the geopolitical power exercised by the Soviet Union, angering most of the 29 NATO countries. He has deepened relations with China, annexed Crimea from Ukraine, turned the war in Syria, sold advanced air defense systems to NATO member Turkey, and achieved important arms and oil deals with Venezuela’s key U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia – while allegedly interfering with voices in the US, UK and elsewhere.

Russia is again a major power in the Middle East and is expanding in Africa for the first time in a generation. The Kremlin has resumed military ties with regional power Egypt and war-torn Libya, where a strong man backed by Russian mercenaries is fighting for power with a United Nations-backed government in Tripoli.

Despite all of its success abroad, Putin faces growing economic and political risks from the rigid, top-down government system that he has installed in a country that spans eleven time zones. The dilemma for the Kremlin is now to maintain Putinism or “managed democracy” after Putin’s tenure in 2024.

“If you compare Russia today to 2000 when Putin came to power, it’s in a much better position,” said Thomas Graham, a senior Russian political official in the two governments of George W. Bush. “But if you look at it over the next 10 years, how is it going to be maintained?”

Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Putin’s ability to further expand Russia’s global reach is the fact that he does it on a large budget. The anemic and profit-dependent economy he built is less than 8% the size of the United States. It spends more than twice on defense than Russia on everything, including education, health care and policing.

At the same meeting, Putin boasted of gaining the upper hand over new weapons, and his defense minister complained that he had dropped to ninth place in the world next year, compared to seventh place last year, in military spending. Putin’s fiscal caution, especially since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict, has made the government’s balance sheet one of the healthiest in the world. Rating agencies and the International Monetary Fund praise them.

Russia has a budget surplus, is relatively low in debt and has one of the largest foreign exchange and gold reserves. But Putin’s reluctance to boost the economy through a comprehensive stimulus package reflects the bottlenecks and inefficiencies of his state-dominated economy. Russia even decided last year to raise the retirement age to save pensions, which led to major protests.

Growth is expected to be just over 1% this year, and most economists believe that future expansion will reach around 2 for reasons related to the structure of the Putin system, which primarily provides stability % is limited. With global growth of around 3.5%, the IMF expects Russia’s share of global production to halve to 1.7% in 2024 (2013: 3%).

“Nobody would bet that Russia would grow faster than the world economy,” said Sergei Guriev, former chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Russian government advisor who has been criticizing the Kremlin from France since 2013. “This is a direct result of the decision by the political leadership to continue on the path of stagnation.”

Putin has repeatedly vowed to make a “major economic breakthrough” for the population, but real incomes continue to decline, falling 10% in the past five years. According to a survey by the independent Levada Center in November, more than half of the 18- to 24-year-old Russians want to emigrate as career opportunities decrease.

“If a western country experienced this reality, the government would likely be replaced in an election,” Guriev said over the phone from Paris. “But in Russia they somehow manage to get away with it.”

Against the backdrop of growing discontent, Levada said Putin’s approval rate, which was almost 90% given the patriotic zeal that erupted after the annexation of Crimea, has dropped to 68%. And this number is falsified by the lack of political competition and the reluctance of voters to putin’s voice criticism in a telephone survey. (All mobile phone calls to Russia are now being recorded and will be stored in special collection points for a time under a new counter-terrorism law.)

Putin has cleverly managed to use the state’s oppressive powers subtly and demonstrably to prevent the rise of a challenger or an opposition mass media. The main critic in his first two terms, former billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been detained for a past decade. His outspoken opponent, Alexei Navalny, was detained with virtually no interruption for unauthorized rallies.

Nevertheless, most older Russians who survived the lost decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and triggered a deeper economic slump than the American Great Depression saw Putin as a savior to reverse the collapse and restore law and order.

On December 30, 1999, Putin, then the youngest of the prime ministers, said that the former superpower would need 15 years and 8% growth to reach today’s GDP per capita is not even “among the world leaders. “

A day later, on New Year’s Eve, a battered president, Boris Yeltsin, resigned and asked Putin to “take care of Russia”. With a new leadership – and rising oil prices – Russia grew over the next eight years and an average of 7 percent in 2012, Portugal would almost have caught this measure before falling back. Nominal gross domestic product (GDP) would peak at 8th this year before falling to 11th in 2018. This roughly corresponds to South Korea with only 35% of the Russian population.

With the help of China and other countries, Putin has created barricades to protect the Russian economy from the uncertainties of the US dollar-dominated financial system and the effects of additional sanctions. Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, says Russia can continue to stand above its weight in connection with Putin’s tactical skills in global affairs.

“GDP is not the absolute measure of all economic things,” said Trenin. “The fundamental resilience of the economy is much more important. his ability to absorb strong shocks; Moscow’s solid finances; its low external debt; the Kremlin’s ability to mobilize in the face of external threats; and the relative abundance of resources Moscow needs to support its foreign policy. “

Russia’s longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin begins to deal with the issue of 2024, people near the Kremlin say.

While Putin has repeatedly ruled out changing the constitution to allow for another term, no other way to remain in power seems to be a sure thing during his annual press conference. The stage is set for what could prove to be his riskiest chess game of all.

– With the support of Samuel Dodge, Ilya Arkhipov and Anna Andrianova.

To contact the author of this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net

How to contact the editor responsible for this story: Gregory White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net

https://www.archyde.com/putins-russi...ever-or-is-it/

Rather to cancel the anniversary of WWII liberation than to invite dangerous Mr. Putin - Poland

'Remember the past & honor the dead': Former president Walesa slams Poland's failure to commemorate Warsaw's WWII liberation
17 Jan, 2020

While the anniversary of Warsaw's liberation is largely overlooked in modern-day Poland, it's worth paying respect to the sacrifice of the Red Army, former president and democracy hero Lech Walesa acknowledged on RT.

It's been exactly 75 years since the Soviet Union's 1st Byelorussian Front and the allied Polish 1st Army defeated the last remaining pocket of Nazi resistance, ending the five-year occupation of Warsaw. But the milestone event, in which 22,000 Soviet and 3,100 Polish soldiers lost their lives, is no longer an occasion for Poland to celebrate, it seems.

While local press maintained a deafening silence about the anniversary – except for several outlets trying to play down its significance – the government did not celebrate it either, limiting commemorations to a pair of privately organized events.

Remarkably, this policy didn't sit well with Walesa, Poland's first post-communist president and recipient of multiple Western awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize.

If I were in power, I would allow myself to be invited – I would invite myself because we must remember the past, respect the past, remember that many people have died, and deserved gratitude and recognition.

Poland has been trying to wipe out certain parts of its history for quite some time. Last year, it went so far as to invite Angela Merkel to the commemoration of the 1939 Nazi invasion, but refused to invite Vladimir Putin to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces.

"If I were in power, I would invite Putin," Walesa told RT. "I would look for positive solutions so that both countries benefited and сould prevent other powers from capitalizing on our mistakes."

The former president, who rose to prominence as leader of the Western-backed, anti-communist Solidarity movement, claimed, however, that there was "another perspective of World War II" under which Poland had fallen "into the captivity of the Soviet Union for 50 years."

he Soviet operation to liberate Warsaw began on January 14, 1945, when the 61st Army crossed the Vistula River and crushed German defenses on the outskirts of the city. Days later, it emerged that the capital stood empty and deserted as the Nazi command had ordered its destruction.

Many civilians had to flee Warsaw, others were persecuted or displaced by the retreating Germans. Those who survived say they rejoiced at the liberation and cheerfully greeted Soviet and Polish soldiers as they entered the city.

'Remember the past & honor the dead': Former president Walesa slams Poland's failure to commemorate Warsaw's WWII liberation — RT World News

Originally Posted by Klondyke

Rather to cancel the anniversary of WWII liberation than to invite dangerous Mr. Putin - Poland

Fair enough, given the history between the two nations

Twenty Years Later – How Did Putin Do?

That's pretty easy:

- Eliminated opposition and filled the judiciary and parliament with lackies
- Murdered or jailed journalists who tried to expose his evil deeds
- Stole billions of dollars of Russian assets via an arcane network of oligarchs, shell companies and other devious financial instruments
- Illegally annexed part of a sovereign nation

etc. etc. etc.

Originally Posted by panama hat

Fair enough, given the history between the two nations

Without the Russian sacrifice all the Poland population could speak a good Deutsch nowadays, not needed to learn English when applying for the shitty jobs in UK...

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Twenty Years Later – How Did gollilocks Do?

That's pretty easy:

- Eliminated opposition and filled the judiciary and parliament with lackies ✔(Supreme Court, Dept of ....)
- Murdered or jailed journalists who tried to expose his evil deeds ✔ ( too many to list)
- Stole billions of dollars of ameristani citizens assets via an arcane network of oligarchs, shell companies and other devious financial instruments ✔ ( too many to list)
- Illegally annexed part of a sovereign nation ✔ ( too many to list)

etc. etc. etc.

FIFY.

Originally Posted by Klondyke

Without the Russian sacrifice all the Poland population could speak a good Deutsch nowadays, not needed to learn English when applying for the shitty jobs in UK...

So, Russia did Poland a dis-service in the end . . . and just imagine, you'd struggle your way through German instead of English now

Originally Posted by OhOh

FIFY.

What's the weather like on your planet?

Because it clearly isn't Earth.

^Hurting much?

Originally Posted by OhOh

^Hurting much?

Yes, from laughing at your witless drivel.

^I'm glad I helped to make your day, excellent.

OhOh comparing Dotard to Putin the Poisoner is pretty effing hilarious.

Putin would be insulted if he knew.

The Russians are coming!

Tucker: Adam Schiff practices his theatrics | On Air Videos | Fox News

whilst:

ALEXANDER SCHALLENBERG (Austria foreign minister)
"Our values are also our interests"

In this interview, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg talks about partners and competitors on the world stage and why he sees the preservation of the European model of life as a central task for the future.
From 25.01.2020

----

Is Russia part of this Western value society? Or at least a potential part?

There was, of course, the hope that this would develop in this direction. Russia has chosen its own path, but as far as this is concerned, I am always very happy to quote a phrase from the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He has said that in the long term there will be no security and stability in Europe against Russia, but only with Russia.

"Unsere Werte sind auch unsere Interessen" - Wiener Zeitung Online

Originally Posted by Klondyke

Is Russia part of this Western value society?

No. Simple

Originally Posted by panama hat

No. Simple

They have far better values?