Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "VICE News" channel.

  1.  @thirtythree504  Did he say that?
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  2. Nothing to do with it.
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  3. Bring in compulsory voting. Best way to limit extremism.
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  4.  @schweppesoriginal9265  It's called "disputed territory" for a reason.
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  5.  @schweppesoriginal9265  It means I belongs to both or it belongs to neither. Otherwise they’ll have think of something else.
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  6.  @Sircleanfpv  Yes, let's be hysterical about it. That should help.
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  7.  @Zappina  I remember he said something like that about a week ago. I remember he stopped short but I can’t remember exactly what he said.
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  8.  @Zappina  You have to look at how this started. After the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1991, all the old Soviet states and client states in Eastern Europe had to sort out their alliances. When Bill Clinton was elected he asked George Kennan for advice. Kennan, who had dealt with the Soviet Union and been a diplomat for four decades told him, “Whatever you do, don’t isolate Russia.” Someone must have got into his ear because he set about doing just that. Shortly afterwards, countries that had been Warsaw Pact members applied for and got membership to NATO. Western equipment like the Swedish SAAB Gripen is very popular in some places. The NATO border was moving east. Soon Russia applied and was immediately rejected. In 2008, at a NATO meeting in Bucharest, attended by Vladimir Putin, Georgia and Ukraine were granted provisional membership of NATO. Putin was incandescent. This would be like Canada joining the WarPac. In a word: unacceptable. Putin was having none of it. Shortly afterwards, Georgian President Mikhael Saakhashvili decided that being a provisional member of NATO meant he could start making territorial claims. Georgia laid on a minor invasion of South Ossetia and were soundly beaten by the Russian army. Saakhashvili appealed to then president George W. Bush, saying that Georgia was in danger of being wiped off the map and that he needed American nuclear weapons in Georgian soil. Bush thought about it for a few days and in what was the best decision of his political career, elected to stay out of it and Georgia continues to be not wiped off the map to this day. That doesn’t stop the hysterical narrative from continuing in Eastern Europe. At the 2016 NATO conference in Warsaw, Latvian chiefs insisted that Russia was going to wipe them off the map. This comes from people who lead armies. They are also supposed to be on our side. It would be nice if they could keep a level head about it. In 2014 there was a series of Euromaidan riots in Kiev (I don’t care about the spelling. I’m telling this story!), which resulted in hundreds of people being killed over a period of a few weeks. They wanted less cooperation with Russia and more with the EU. Then-president of the Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, who was moderately pro-Russian, was ousted in a parliamentary vote that was not held according to proper procedures and fled for his life to Russia. He was subsequently convicted in a kangaroo court and sentenced in absentia. This was, in effect, a coup d’état. The immediate result was that the two ethnically-Russian oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to secede from the Ukraine, though that does not mean they are now part of Russia. These are the parts known as “rebel held areas”. At about the same time, Russia took over the Crimea. At the heart of this rampaging nationalism. The only thing nationalism does is start wars. It never brings about a good result. But if you know anything about Eastern Europe, you will know that it is an absolute hotbed of nationalism. Any time you hear someone say, “We just want to live in peace on our land”, you know you’re dealing with nationalism. The plain fact is that these are disputed territories. They either belong to both or they belong to neither. That has to be sorted out. War hungry nationalists need to be singled out for who they are and isolated before the worst happens. It’s a bit hard with Putin because we know he’s a nationalist but Russia isn’t about to throw him out. The circuit breaker on so much of this was Angela Merkel (“the Pomeranian Grenadier”), who had mostly positive dealings with Putin and managed to keep him on a leash. Since Germany and Russia are each the other’s largest trading partners, Germany will continue to play a major role. But whether or not the leadership talent exists to do it well is a bit of an unknown at this stage. Meanwhile, someone - preferably someone in the EU - has to do the same thing with Ukraine. Footnote: for anyone who thinks that I’m saying people shouldn’t love their country, I’m not. As a very wise school friend of mine once said, the difference between a patriot and a nationalist is that a patriot loves their country and a nationalist hates everyone else’s.
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  9. And the people of Russia?
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