Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "William Spaniel" channel.

  1. "Peak freeze" in Ukraine is certainly not the end of February but first or second week of February. So it's basically now, and it's not freezing very well.
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  2. That is a somewhat silly leap of logic. Because Ukraine in this context is none of these things, well it is one of these things, nationality, but it's not an ideology and not an ethnicity. Ukraine is a state that comprises its citizens, who are multi ethnic and have a variety of ideologies. So you would suggest that subjugation and oppression is worse than death, which I assure you we aren't that suicidal. You can recover from slavery, you can't recover from death. The calculation here is different. That we need to push Russia back hard because otherwise they'll come back deadlier, they need to be shown their place in the world, namely that they don't have the right to interfere in their neighbours' business. You can't have a truce with Russia, and you can't count on it not sacrificing millions of its own citizens. We'll definitely need a NATO membership going forward for protection, but for that, our territorial integrity in internationally recognised borders needs to be restored.
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  3. I disagree. Yes investments in Mariupol, but they aren't nearly enough to actually rebuild a destroyed city; and in turn they may be seen as diverted from the corresponding projects within Russia proper, because it's been suffering from quality housing and infrastructure shortage for the entirety of its modern existence, and it's gotten nominally worse with people gaining means to actually acquire a home from payouts to the soldiers and the families of the fallen. The advantage of building out Mariupol as opposed to say Arkhangelsk, Nizhny Novgorod or Yekaterinburg is that russians would be re-populating the city replacing Ukrainians many of whom haven't survived or had to flee and making it less likely for the city to be successfully re-integrated into Ukraine.
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  4.  @zirconiumdiamond1416  The money likely won't be actually lost, because at the end all the damage claims will be counted up and all the rebuilding that Ukraine isn't going to have to do because russia already did, will be counted against the reparations that russia is going to owe. It's less conceivable that Ukraine will recapture the city by force and thus possibly undo the rebuilding, and more likely that it returns to Ukraine as a part of negotiated settlement, if at all. It also gives russia a possible foothold to destabilise Ukraine in the future, apparently about 87 thousand original residents haven't survived, and more have fled, so the city is repopulated with russians. If that isn't a "good investment" from their point of view, i don't know what is.
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  5.  @irinasandlers1337  I would say Russia didn't WANT to join NATO. Putin made some public gestures in that direction around that time, but it was purely a PR move, to just signal what sort of a nice upstanding guy and real democrat he is supposed to be, a sort of illusion that many Western leaders were mislead by. It's betrayed by the fact that he never entered negotiations, never filed the paperwork, never made a single tangible step towards it. In contrast, Ukrainian Pres. Kuchma did think joining NATO was potentially a way forward to Ukraine, now that it was defenceless after it was forced to give up the nukes, and lead with liberalisation and openness reforms which would enable that in the future. In part as a result of such reforms and the overall trajectory, his own corruption schemes became public, Orange Revolution happened and his party was voted out. He will be remembered relatively fondly though in the grand scheme of things, since he did steward economic recovery and important reforms both, and when it was his time to go, he went. But these sort of reforms are not something Putin would ever implement. His course of action was consolidation of power, which runs completely counter to the sorts of reforms that NATO demands of you. Ultimately even first wanting to join NATO and then rallying against it is hardly a contradiction per se: if you have a powerful potential enemy, wouldn't you want to make them an ally instead? The problem with NATO ultimately isn't that it could attack Russia, but that it would weaken his control of Ukraine and other neighbours, so in a way the confrontation became real; but it's also self-inflicted by Putin, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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  6. ​ @SatanicBunny666 most of those years were spent in a frozen conflict situation with minimal casualties and a very limited band of destruction. It had been nothing like the full scale phase of war.
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  7.  @irinasandlers1337  They say in history, there are no givens... (история не знает сослагательного наклонения) - speculating is a thankless task. But the legs of the revolution and the corresponding counter-revolution that then allowed the Donbas insurgence and the Crimea secession grow from many a place, but leading in numerous ways to Yanukovich specifically. It has long been a course of action that Russia chose, to interfere with Ukraine in many a way. One key feature of the Yanukovich system (and not only his, it's inherited but it got so much worse and so much more dangerous under him due to corruption and reshuffling of courts and power structures in his favour etc, he single-handedly undid so much progress and made it even worse) is the centralised system of government - where the regional governors are assigned by Kyiv rather than locally elected. So they know when there's a government change on the charges of corruption, especially a revolutionary one, there is going to be a grand sweep, and they'll be gone, probably locked up and lose everything. This is why a number of those allied with Yanukovich and with Russia and why you can't investigate what happened in Odessa, since all the evidence is gone - regional government was implicated, so it had cleaned things up real good. Poroshenko fixed it, but not out of his own accord - he was forced to by Russia under Minsk agreements! Russia thought Ukraine where at least some regional corruption is possible is more amenable to their goals than one which is cleaned up completely, but the result is the more internationally renowned, more resilient system that can effectively prevent collapse of the whole state no matter what. Sometimes the way things work out, the causal chain reactions, it's absurd, you can't make this shit up! Russia deems itself strong - it calls itself a "federation" on paper, but in reality there are no federative features left at all, uprooted one by one, it's all controlled by one guy and a handful of his cronies. And it considers this centralised structure a strength rather than a weakness, and it's deeply mistaken. Russia doesn't understand democracy, why it's workable if you're super thorough with it, why it's the most robust and adaptable system of governance. Or how to build international and domestic relationships based on mutual benefit rather than on force, corruption and trickery. Indeed, Ukraine as of 20 years ago was very amenable to deeply economically integrate with Russia and follow its lead, had it shown itself to be that, cooperative rather than hostile. Russia could have been one of the wealthiest countries on Earth as a democracy, and a reliable partner of EU and Ukraine. I think about these things a lot and the sheer tragedy, i can't hold back my tears. And then i recall the destruction that so many cities in Ukraine are experiencing now and i cry more. I see in the future an emergence of a much stronger Ukraine, one where the political system has earned a deserved trust of the population, and a stronger economy, but it'll be a difficult way there and things might go wrong yet. And we'll suffer a lot of loss.
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  8.  @Gravemind2016  Your point kind of disproves itself. For one Mengele in particular wasn't indicted in the course of the Nürnberg trials. He was also able to escape prosecution when attention did turn to him decades later. He is also explicitly a criminal against humanity and a war criminal under the narrowest of definitions because he tortured and murdered people that were put into his care. Whom he of course requested to be put into his care such that he can torture them. The way this is going to play out, a lot of military command will be indicted, special services. Also Soloviev and maybe 3-5 top of his peers. I'm almost certain Anton Krasovsky is going to be among them in spite of being a nobody purely because things he pushed were just that particular level of outrageous. Another special example will be Maria Lvova-Belova. I am quite certain nobody from the central bank is going to be indicted. Nobody has been punished for merely trying to keep the country afloat in war in Germany or indeed elsewhere where international jurisdiction took up on war crime cleanup. Look sure the WHOLE country is at fault, not just a handful people, but you have to draw the line somewhere. You need that country to rebuild itself under a new order, one that respects human rights and isn't a threat to its neighbours, and these will be among the people that you're going to need to talk to and accomplish it with. Even if you hate their guts for a good reason - just as long as they can be compelled to carry this new order, they'll have to do. You can't just uproot the whole society in one fell swoop, it'll need to be reformed and this is going to take decades. It took all the way until about early 1990s in Germany for 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung' to take a truly society wide hold; by that point most people who may have implicated themselves, have died of natural causes. But it did work out fairly well all things considered didn't it.
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  9.  @gmw3083  every time someone mentions Ritter and Mearsheimer as "CREDIBLE SOURCES" I get a laughing fit.
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  10. Fundamentally FSB need not get their own hands dirty. Just discover a scheme and interfere with it for a while and then stop and let it happen.
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  11. ​ @TouringWolf42 well we're not fighting on foreign territory so aircraft carriers aren't in high demand. They're also a little too easy to lose to Russian weapons, too attractive a target.
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  12.  @irinasandlers1337  Word is Yanukovich did EXACTLY THAT, merely that Putin didn't have a plan yet how to respond, was hesitant and unprepared. Ultimately Kuchma's outcome was that things got better after he left. Yanukovich's outcome was that things got put into motion that would run Ukraine head first into war, and it was directly his fault, all of it.
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  13.  @moritamikamikara3879  The fish rots from the head down, as they say. Russian police has always been somewhat on the corrupt side, and then there was a staff churn which did the rest. Eventually people go, either due to age or because they don't feel at home in the organisation, and get replaced by ones more fitting the role so to say. It actually started this transformation in the 80s if not earlier, but in the 90s, things just clicked into place. You'll notice this in entirely different contexts as well. Like when say Electronic Arts got underrun by the Clorox Gang, the mental poison of it gradually dripped down into the studios and people started noticing pervasive changes and a resulting churn there at the lower levels as well.
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  14. This comment seems to forget that Russia had the largest and most lasting success in the south of Ukraine, particularly forces attacking from Crimean direction to capture Melitopol and Kherson, and then link up with Donbas forces. And then look at the geography where Crimea connects to Ukraine, it's marshes, lakes and lagoons, mostly unpassable save for 2-3 little thin connections, basically funnels, looks like an ideal trap for an attacker. Ukrainian armed forces say they were facing an absolutely overwhelming force, they say 14 times their size, so their only choice was to run basically. While you were looking at Kyiv, they took the south and did it swiftly and in force. Melitopol on first of March, Kherson a day later, Enerhodar another 3 days later, Tokmak also around that time, by March 11th, they destroyed Volnovakha and Mariupol was fully encircled as well. In contrast the attack on Kyiv failed completely. So which was the first target of the war? If Kyiv was more important, why did they try to capture it with forces spread so thin? A city of 3 million people, you need massive forces. There were so few fighters and supplies and weaponry and so fast and loose, that the failure there is hardly a surprise, success imaginable (especially to Putin's yes-men) but realistically more of a long shot. Kyiv was a legitimate goal, but not nearly as important as the south. Ultimately had they managed to capture Kyiv, make the current government silently disappear, and Boyko/Medvedchuk government take their place; from there on, Russian forces would only have to suppress dissent, not fight a war. You don't need to do much when you have a puppet government accomplishing the goals for you. But the real war was in the south. Oh also aren't VDV show-offs with little to no actual fight experience?
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  15.  @SukacitaYeremia  Well "nobody" "knows" whom Bulgaria produces artillery shells for, but like, everyone knows... and yet it apparently hasn't caused much of a stir or anything.
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  16. Me I'd rather eat a nuke soon if that's what the choices lead to. Because otherwise you can never get rid of that risk. If nuclear blackmail works until it doesn't, nukes are going to actually fly guaranteed to make good on what is initially a bluff. It's better not to give blackmail a chance from the get go.
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  17. @Beat Mymeat the problem is also there is no enforcement method against Russia that would be necessarily effective and palatable to possible guarantor countries.
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  18. He didn't say "democracy". He said "managed democracy" which is a slightly sarcastic obvious euphemism, which does not at all imply to say that it's a democracy. Oh look, a Wikipedia article!
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  19. There's a number of countries with valuable resources but very few of them are Norway. Arguably just one. They call it the resource curse. Even very sane countries experienced it numerous times at a smaller scale, Netherlands etc. Your largest and most endless resource is people, and it pays to invest in that, since even a limited number of people can have their output grow effectively without bound. However when you find a resource in the ground that you only need to dig up to get rich while involving a small number of people, well it tends to pull all investment away from all other possible areas and towards that, and then things end up turning out worse for the people.
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  20. It's sunday.
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  21.  @irinasandlers1337  I wasn't fond of him before, but looking retrospectively, how do i put it, he wasn't perfect but given the overall remarkably shitty political legacy we started out with - and Russia other core post-Soviet countries as well, as of dissolution of Soviet Union, and being cut from various corners of the same piece of cloth - it could have been worse, SO MUCH WORSE. And worse came - Yanukovich. And then you look at Russia and Belarus both and you see what sort of bullets we dodged at such a crucial time. I think this is the sort of re-evaluation that i gained and that other Ukrainians will gain with time.
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  22.  @justshokh  Well fact of the matter is we're all in this together, and we get the consequences together. Including consequences that are yet to come not a few months or a year or two down the line, but 20, 30, 40 years, generations. You can't just sell out a neighbour to a despotic regime and expect it to end well, we have historic precedent over here, several. Selling out the future and the country i know well, used to live in, remember the streets, have friends, speak the languages, to pacify your inner neurotic - not with me. As a matter of fact we wouldn't have had a nuclear threat had we shown Kremlin a harder stance leading up. Germany's corrupt Schröder and incompetent Merkel made Germany appear like a Russian pawn that would tilt Europe in support and help Russia effectively bypass sanctions, and this formed a key leverage in Putin's plan. Then he tested us in 2014 and prior and we just watched and danced around the issue such as to not inconvenience or "endanger" ourselves. It was prime time to take a small risk back then and avoid the larger one we're having now; and second best time is now to take a somewhat larger risk and avoid a yet bigger one next time. And Putin isn't the only hazard we have to concern ourselves with, when Putin tests us and we show weakness, others take notice.
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  23. Interesting comment, i like it, but i don't see it being the case. Simply because it's true under a working assumption that Russia can push Germany asymptotically towards near total subservience by frogboiling. I would suggest that this is not the case, that there is a deeply ingrained solidarity of German citizens with the US and let's say France and other substantial players that you can't outright dissolve, a strong and natural soft power, so there is a hard limit to how far Russia could push Germany, and they could never push Germany quite enough to achieve these sorts of goals. There is of course also a degree of similarly ingrained Russia-solidarity and general US-skepticism in Germany, but these sentiments all co-exist without one necessarily dominating.
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  24.  @FilmFactry  looks like Othelo or Go to me.
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  25. I like that you represent Prigozhin in the uniform of his culinary company. 4:35 Prigozhin: Salt yours? SALT MINE. 5:30 OMG WHAT WHY IS THIS SO PERFECT! 4:45 Stop. Sledgehammertime! (keywords: Wagner, Nuzhin, sledgehammer, EU, violin-case) May i relay a little bit of an observation made by i think colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon at The Telegraph. Shortly after mutiny announcement videos by Prigozhin, there was a public video message by Surovikin, urging Prigozhin to stand down, published barely within hours. So this journalist notes that some things are highly unusual about it, for one Surovikin doesn't appear to behave quite right, also he's unshaven which never happens, and most damningly he's not wearing his shoulder rank insignia, while being in uniform. He concludes that by that point early on in the coup, Surovikin was likely already arrested and stripped of rank, and the video message may have not been entirely voluntary. In a voice message to the world after the mutiny, Prigozhin said they actually split up right up front. He headed a group that captured Rostov on Don; while Utkin headed the Moscow storm path. There has been a video message today as well. I think he would be wise not to let us know his location, but he isn't what one would call missing.
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  26. "Banned in China" is a bit of a stretch. It just operates in China under a different name and with separate content.
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  27. @@ZeeterPiehan You know what Putin could never manufacture? A total commitment by all those 145 million people to fight a full scale war they haven't even voted for, one that they started on foreign soil. Russia already used this logic against Finland - "we're many, we'll just Zerg rush them and there's bloody nothing they could do." Turns out, there was quite a fair bit that Finland could do.
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  28.  @akkoismydaughter3573  well there's more than one hazard. It's not like you're choosing between a nuke and no nuke in a vacuum. Unfortunately Russians aren't about to leave well enough alone, there has been one mass murder after another on occupied territories. People are constantly at gun point, being checked for suspected allegiance and disappeared, a Hrushevsky tome on your bookshelf or one suspicious phonebook contact can be a death sentence, and it's not a clean process in any shape or form. There's no reasoning with systemic evil. You think it's a coincidence that they're staffing paramilitaries with prisoners now? A nuke may very well be a lesser evil. And have you forgotten that the entire city of Mariupol has been wiped out, there's probably 100 000 under the rubble; we'll be assessing human cost from each and every ongoing day of occupation for decades to come. Do you think people in Mariupol felt better about being wiped out slowly over the course of weeks rather than in one fell swoop?
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  29.  @Gravemind2016  Unfortunately, competent economics work does not count as a war crime. Nor should it.
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  30. I think they'll cleave the front at Melitopol. Reaching Mariupol is remarkably hard, it's too close to Russia and too well connected to Donetsk, and the dug in frontlines in the area will be challenging. Besides the city is destroyed, they wouldn't be retaking much. Melitopol is only a short distance from Zapo and bordered by a lagoon in the south. Once they have it, nothing gets through, and there are a lot of people suffering from occupation in this city. Taking Melitopol actually opens the option to retake Enerhodar and Crimea. Simultaneously they will be cleaning up the northern edge of Luhansk province to kill some supply lines and keep the enemy guessing, and in other locations like Bahmut. Currently, Kherson, Zapo and Crimea provinces are expected to actually be undersupplied by Russia, because Ukraine has a clear precision artillery shot at the railway south of Donetsk city. So only distant slow and shitty coastal road connection can be used.
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  31.  @mynjeri5469  "Documentary" by GRU agent, ex RT. Why don't you watch the actual footage of the event captured on site, many hours of, rather than chewed down bites with soundbites and quotes of their own collaborators. It's a lot more complicated than that. Not even worth watching the "doc" since their previous "doc" was distinguished by doctoring evidence. Best effort accounts are available from RFE-RL, May 2nd Group/KHRP, Council of Europe International Advisory Panel.
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  32.  @mynjeri5469  You don't understand Ukraine. It's going to get rebuilt, no ifs and buts, not up for debate.
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  33. According to Kravchuk, the choice was between giving up the nukes and being choked by international sanctions like Iraq and Iran. Because you can't just read the letter of the agreement and the history as it unfolded, but also that alternatives aren't this simple. Under sanctions, Ukraine wouldn't have survived and recovered economically as it did in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s. Even regardless of upkeep/refurbishment possibility and refitting them under domestic C&C, because Russia held onto the Soviet nuclear C&C facility. I don't know whether you can even call this "negotiation", if you are given no choice.
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  34. In 2007 Putin voiced a threat about joining NATO. Most people wanted to kep things paceful, and it seemed like if we were to go through with this, Putin would try to prevent it by some something akin to Transnistria or Abkhasia, creating a conflict region. But the threat profile wasn't well defined. When in 2014 it turned out that what he was waiting for was an opportunity and excuses were just that, well. Now we know we NEED the protection. But we also don't know that if we had it, we would be able to rely on it. After all, all sorts of agreements appear to work just as long as they aren't being challenged.
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  35.  @trevoropalinski  This is the Maersheimer thesis but everyone else disagrees with it, it is based on a MASSIVE leap of logic "this is how it used to be, thus this is how it must be". We are in the 21st century and Russia is a major nuclear power with all the resources it needs, it would survive just fine. The problem is Putin. Strong Ukraine developing towards Norwegian economic model, with ever increasing standard of living, democratic, is a hazard personally for Putin, people in Russia would necessarily start pushing for having the same in their country.
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  36. Russia no longer has oligarchs. Oligarchs of the 90s had political power. Oligarchs today breathe when FSB allows them to. They basically hold the money in escrow for Putin. Developing Ukraine was a hazard to Putin personally. His throne would get shaky if the former left leg of Soviet Union got more developed than Russia itself. Ukraine was set to follow the Norway model, very promising indeed. Russia is suffering gravely from Dutch Disease, where hydrocarbons and other natural resources cause a developmental regression.
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  37. There are no "oligarchs" any longer. That would imply these people have some sort of influence, while they're just lackeys carrying the money purse. Also it can survive just fine, merely not thrive. Most people have learned to live in poverty and that's just how it's going to stay. Suffering of many propping up the well-being of a few.
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  38. Unfortunately the wells that have that trait of being able to sustain fatal damage, also have a less fortunate trait that they are way too far to reach with what Ukraine has at its disposal. Though what isn't, may yet be - Ukraine has prior experience manufacturing ICBMs in an underground city in Dnipro. There are guidance systems engineers in Kyiv and rocket scientists in Kharkiv and elsewhere.
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  39.  @javierfrancia1938  Russia has been able to mislead a lot of people into believing that it's great by claiming to be the successor of Soviet Union; in reality a third of Soviet military-industrial complex was Russian, a third was Ukrainian, a third everyone else taken together. And Ukraine bore a lot of higher tech end of things. All ended up with incomplete, somewhat dysfunctional bits and bobs. What Russia had going for itself after separation is master plans for all Soviet equipment (but not necessarily the know-how to produce it), practical control over nuclear warheads, larger population than Ukraine (but not more educated) and hydrocarbon dollars. But the riches aren't worth much if they're stolen along the way. Ukraine and Russia inherited a similar degree of corruption, but while Ukraine continuously reduced it starting mid 2000s, Russia built it up, since this became the instrument of the ruling apparatus for holding onto power. Thus any possible claim about the alleged advantage of Russia by "orders of magnitude", is exaggerated by orders of magnitude. And larger is not always better. Russia has 3 times the population for 4+ times the border length and a couple dozen times the area - thus the physical extent is not an asset, it's a burden, since people are spread thin; many of them in climate and nature ill fit to sustain life, plus huge infrastructure overhead to connect them to necessities. And yet these people are needed where they are for the functioning of the state. Lay off the "Soros media" claim. You know who pushes Ukrainians into this war? Kremlin. It's not like there's Soros-adjacent media in Russia left (if there are, name them), so who pushed them to invade? And if some country invaded yours, don't you believe you and most of your mates would go hard on defending it?
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  40.  @polarvortex3294  I don't think you're wrong, but it's difficult to say. So far Russia has been successful in suppressing dissent; however war like this sure isn't helping! But look you can't look in the head of Putin. Anything you imagine him thinking might very well be wrong. What we do know is that he completely lacks ability to trust people, to him, as he quipped once while talking to Venedictov, there are two kinds of people, enemies, and not-yet-enemies, future backstabbers. So he can't ever just retire. So his recipe has been consolidation of power. I also think he's unable to draw a clear line between his own needs and desires, and those of Russia, to him they might as well be one and the same. Whether he imagines himself a deep thinker? Doubt. He sure wants to project this image, but also because it's useful. Taking Kyiv was realistically at best a long shot. They had... how many troops trying to take a city of THREE MILLION? Spread super thin? And while you were distracted looking there, they took the whole south in 2 weeks flat. Melitopol and Kherson fell in days, and then they rapidly linked up and surrounded the whole Azov coast.
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  41.  @laylawilson4135  what good would that piece of paper do? What's the penalty to Russia from just invading anyway?
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  42.  @shiron9230  They said "caused Russia's unemployment rate to crash". You said unemployment hit record low. You two are in agreement. Why is there unemployment? Not because of an economic upturn, no, because of lack of people. Vacancies per person too high is not a good sign, it means the work that needs to be done isn't being done because a person is lacking to be doing it, and there's ongoing economic damage happening due to that. Salaries rising? Yeah but so is inflation! What's the point of foreigners leaving the country? Lack of belief in future economic stability, lack of belief in personal safety, lack of ability to earn money that is of international value and can be used to support the family outside Russia. Remember money transfers out of Russia have been limited in order to artificially stabilise Ruble - regardless of possible economic damage that it can cause.
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  43.  @madeline6951  hold it right there. I have not suggested and don't intend to suggest that getting nuked is worse than cutting Ukraine in half. If we have to eat a nuke then so be it. It doesn't even make sense to comment on the rest of your writing because you're arguing a straw man, we can and will kick Russia out and I would not suggest anything contrary to that. I'm arriving at these conclusions from a different angle, that's all.
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  44.  @stuglife5514  Fact of the matter, none of us know much about the F35, and that's a fact to be cognisant of. I would say strong signs point to it being the future of areal combat, not letting anything that could possibly threaten it come within range of hurting it - which is why quite a few countries are eagre participants in the programme. One shouldn't be too surprised that developing a literal superweapon is costly and expensive.
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  45. I don't think it mattered? First thing they did in Rostov is raid the ammo depots and gain control of the airfield so they could redirect more ammo and for protection. Nobody stopped them and supply problem solved. There isn't really anybody to fight them in Rostov and they knew that. If their plan leaked they should have known the Generals that they wanted to introduce to the sledgehammer wouldn't be there, so it was probably just captured for gravitas and supplies. You can extend this logic. They coldn't fight a full on army anyway but they would't need much ammo to just gain respect and show they mean business. In turn to storm Moscow or something they'd need some actual army to defect to them and they'd redirect their ammo supplies alongside, plus just capture depots, so it wouldn't matter if they have enough up front.
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  46. I thik Professor Spaniel is being a little sneaky and fishing for this comment. He is a game theorist after all.
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  47.  @justshokh  If you don't care whether Ukraine lives, why should i care whether you live?
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  48. Orcs are a Warcraft reference. That's even older than StarCraft.
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  49. I wonder if there was a strategy to that, create plausible deniability by targeting people who aren't at the top of everyone's sight? I mean realistically nobody cares about Berezovsky, not a single tear was shed - and yet he was killed. Not many people cared about Politkovskaya before she died, unfortunately, like people knew about her, but just about on the periphery of their minds. Nemtsov was a fixture in politics and a very sharp mind, but Navalny was the louder and much more visible one since 2011. So i wonder whether they deemed Navalny potentially somehow useful, or too dangerous to draw attention to him by removing him.
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  50. "relatively" does spectacular feats of heavy lifting here, because relative to what. Getting conscripted isn't very safe (hazing deaths are not uncommon), getting sent to the front line in Ukraine is even less safe, having a health condition is quite unsafe, roads buildings and infrastructure crumble from neglect, wealthy people run over people in their large SUVs and evade prosecution by corruption, people get accidentally killed by their drunk neighbours and relatives, kids get killed by bullies, some people get beaten to death by police just randomly, if you're unlucky you might even freeze or starve to death, there's so many tens thousands of "seasonal" deaths every winter not even worth a headline. But yeah if you ignore all that it's "safe".
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