Comments by "Stephen Hill" (@stephenhill545) on "The strategy to make sure Putin's forces fail | Oleksiy Goncharenko, Sir Richard Barrons" video.

@appstratum9747 truth isn't very important in Russia.
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@Bersztipflag you are the arrogant ones. You think you have the birthright to be an empire. Everybody else decolonised. You say you decide ukraine's future, you say they speak broken Russian, you are beneath contempt.
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NATO has 6,000 tanks and 24,000 warplanes, and huge naval assets not unusable soviet stocks either. It doesn't out spend russia by ten to one for nothing. It is perfectly capable of destroying russia's conventional assets in pretty quick time. It will have 300, 000 troops ready to deploy to meet any threat from Russia. The total reserves at its disposal number 5 million troops. The smerch has an accuracy of 600 to 800m. The haymar is 1 to 5m. Etc. Etc.
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@craigsips8677 you would hope so. Their military budget is the same as russia's and they have nato technologies.
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Russia took territory off finland too, but Finland won. Nobodybin their right mind would rather live in Russia than Finland.
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@fidelvera7190 you throw a list out, but they are separate cases. In the case of Syria, for instance, the US was anti-Is Is and backing the democratic rebel forces against the dictator Assad. The Iraq and afghan interventions were under a very different administration, a neo-con one, which was reacting to the 9/11 terror attack. I personally disagree with those interventions because they were Ill thought out, and you can't make people be democracies. Did you mention Libya? That was an Anglo-French policy, because they feared a refugee crisis, so they wanted to stop gadhaffis forces from winning. But I'm happy for you to tell me why you think russia is doing a good job in Syria and ukraine, where it is actively engaged.
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It's true. The enslavement of 44, 000,000 people is something worth taking a small risk for. But the show of force should have been before the invasion of course. He wouldn't have had to back down at all.
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@throughput6674 yes, I have. I know a family where the father only watches state media and the daughter has fled to Georgia. The state is very present in people's lives, and putin is never criticised. The state passed a law earlier this year which makes independent journalism impossible. Rain closed. Dissent is impossible now and denunciations are being encouraged by the state. I feel sorry for you living there.
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@justinneill5003 putin is a reflection of how russians see the world and their role in it. They voted for him again and again. They believe in might is right. It is a macho violent culture at heart, and they want the world to fear them. They confuse fear with respect. You can forget the pretty ballerinas.
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@cliveengel5744 most Britons are ultimately prepared to risk that to stop a tyrant. We like to think we're all like Churchill. We're not of course, but we share his sentiments about it being better to perish than live in slavery. Freedom is very dear to our hearts.
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@cliveengel5744 in the Crimea War it was enough to pin the russian army and cut its trade off by blockading the baltic and the bosphorus. I think natos air and naval assets can manage that. Russia doesn't have a fleet. Thanks to ukraine by the way there.
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They like this loneliness. They like playing the victim. They never admit anything is their fault because the victim can't be to blame. They even wiped out the first two years of world war 2, so they play the victim role rather than apologising to Finland and the other states they annexed for their aggression toward them.
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Poland may have it. If belorussia joins in, I think Poland might too. And Poland has much more to offer militarily than belorus.
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@dragonade85 they did some really bad stuff in belorus too in the tsarist era. I believe they killed 50 percent of the population of belorus, and tried to wipe out its culture and language. Russia has always been rather dacist. I'm sure that's why they talk about fascism so much.
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Because putin is an evil man, and the Russians like people like that. They adore stalin, and he was also an insane psychopath.
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Chamberlain described the Czechs as a people in a far away land who we know very little about. Two years later his nation was caught up in an existential struggle for its very survival. Ignoring the problem didn't make it go away.
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Russia doesn't have a strong economy, but it's government doesn't have to worry too much about public opinion, which our governments are sensitive to. Its a strength and a weakness at the same time. A normal government could mobilise as it has democratic legitimacy. People in Russia fear putin, but he fears them too.
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Which western country would you be referring to? There are rather a lot of them, and they all have their own wide range of media outlets?
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@fuzzb0x436 no. He can spell.
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The government knows the seriousness of the matter. That is the important thing here. Fortunately the US has the means to help Ukraine.
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