#russian federation

[auroraluciferi]

According to open source researchers, soldiers with roots in poorer regions such as Buryatia and Dagestan are disproportionately represented among Russian casualties in Ukraine.

“Most of the soldiers and officers of the ground forces and the airborne forces come from poor Russian towns and villages,” military specialist Pavel Luzin told Al Jazeera.

“This social-economic stratification has a long-term tradition in the Russian armed forces because young men from the cities with relatively good education serve in other military branches … but the infantry consists of badly-educated soldiers from poor families and regions.”

Buryatia, in Siberia, was once a part of Mongolia that was conquered by Cossacks in the 17th century.

“We can’t determine our own politics – if we had a real federation, the head of our republic could say no, Buryats won’t fight in this criminal war. But he keeps providing cannon fodder for Putin,” Victoria Maladaeva, of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

“Buryatia, like the other ethnic republics, is governed by the colonial policies of Moscow,” Maladaeva continued.

“Our languages and history are disappearing off the face of the Earth, while Moscow sucks all the money and resources out of the provinces. Moscow is a beautiful city but it’s such a facade of all of Russia, because if you go just a little further, the houses are falling apart, there are no roads, there’s no work.”

[autokratorissa]

Some bullet-point level thoughts on the war in Ukraine, at the end of its first day. Sorry if there are any typos or unfinished thoughts; I don't have the time or energy and just want to publish this tonight.

1. I didn't expect war to break out until around midnight (GMT) on the 23rd/24th, and even then I wasn't totally convinced, though I wasn't surprised to see the news when I woke up today. Why I didn't expect a full-scale, direct state-to-state conflict to erupt I don't know. I'll probably give it more thought over the coming days. I definitely gave too little credence to American intelligence reports; the reason for that is hopefully fairly obvious, namely that the US lies constantly and cannot be trusted on anything. But that's not an excuse: lies are largely as discernable and communicative as truths in politics, and with a decent awareness of the realities which underlie a political crisis they are not usually that difficult to notice nor understand. Russia too has been lying, but I've not been caught off-guard by Russian lies (other than the major one that they were not going to go to war, but ultimately that's inaccessible to civilians); I have by American.

The more general reason why so many people are so shocked is, I think, that people have become used to an international order dominated by the United States, such that state-to-state conflicts of this scale just don't really happen independently or without the assent of the US. The existence of this war, and the apparent acceptance by the NATO powers that Ukraine is to be abandoned, is a stark demonstration that the world has changed. It will change much more rapidly and much more decisively in the following years because of this, and because of the realisation of it. This produces many opportunities and many dangers, both for bourgeois states of all kinds and for the working class of all countries. We are now fully entering a period of major change which has been emerging since 2016 and earlier.

2. The all but ubiquitous response, from across the political spectrum (including anti-capitalists I see online), that this war is to a significant degree because of Putin being either (1) insane, (2) irrational, (3) a megalomaniac, (4) a pan-Slavist with an ideological desire for a "Greater Russia" or "restored Soviet Union", or all of the above and more, is stupid, and you shouldn't put any serious weight behind the things people who think that say on this. It betrays an utter absence of geopolitical comprehension, or, depending on the person, more likely a deliberate decision to obfuscate geopolitics and thereby better drum up anti-Russian sentiment. Any Russian leader, of any political persuasion---fascist, liberal, communist, it doesn't matter---would have invaded Ukraine at this juncture, or at minimum broadly followed the same general strategy post-2014. This war has nothing to do with ideology or even with economics; it is solely about geopolitics and Russia's ultimate military security. The same things which have driven Russia to war drove states to war thousands of years ago, and will continue to drive states to war for as long as states exist. Geopolitics is in no way dependent upon, or significantly affected by, the personalities of politicians or the ideologies of governments, and only moderately by the mode of production in which countries predominantly operate.

Ukraine must be either a neutral or allied state for Russia to have geopolitical stability. That is an absolute red line that Russia will never, ever give ground on; to do so would be to effectively accept a relationship of subordination to Western powers. Ukraine lies squarely within the Russian sphere of influence; it does not lie inside the sphere of influence of any other great power, and so for Ukraine to be aligned with a country other than Russia is an ultimately offensive action against Russia's geopolitical position. The West understands this (whether or not they properly did in 2008 or 2014 is more questionable; the stupidity of politicians is an ever-present factor). Any claim that they don't is a lie to villainise Russia in the eyes of the public by presenting rational political choices as irrational paranoia, or greed, or baseless aggression, or whatever else.

3. As such, this is not a war for land or resources. The seizure of Crimea was for land (control over Sevastopol, a vital naval port for the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and therefore access to the Black Sea); this war is not. Russia will not, if it is militarily victorious (and I would be amazed if it isn't in the short to medium term), annex significant territories from Ukraine. It may annex small border regions, but honestly, I don't think that's likely. Russia's sole concern is, as they have openly stated, the demilitarisation of Ukraine--- which means the installation of a government which will not enter into negotiations with NATO or be armed or otherwise militarily connected to NATO or NATO states. This could be achieved (indeed would be best achieved) by a genuinely neutral and independent government, but the opportunity for that ended, ultimately, a long time ago, when the USA and NATO decided that it would not give ground and that Ukraine must be Western-aligned. Should Zelenskyy's government fall, its successor will inevitably be actively pro-Russian and based on a Russian-language caucus from those regions of Ukraine east of the Dnieper. This does not mean that it will actively be a Russian puppet or more or less appointed by a Russian occupation force; this is, of course, more than possible as an outcome, but it would be less stable in the long run and more prone to facing a guerilla war in the aftermath of Russian withdrawal, which strikes me as the greatest difficulty facing Russia in the long term. All the same, it's probably the most likely future.

4. The economic warfare that NATO is about to engage in against Russia, potentially freezing them out of the international financial system on Ukrainian request, as Zelenskiyy has called for, may well be the final split in the international imperialist chain. The "global economy" might begin to seriously fracture into distinct regions; the preconditions for a world war. The general crisis in imperialism which this war, and more specifically its economic consequences, is likely to produce will be the most severe since 1939. It will return imperialism to a level of crisis condition that has not been seen since the period before the last world war. Crisis conditions returned economically in 1979, political crisis conditions began to return post-2008; this will plunge both to a new nadir.

5. Ukraine is not a fascist state and the fascist presence in the country is massively overstated by some of the online left keen to present the country as a bogeyman. Even if it was, it should not change our analysis of the war in the slightest. At the same time, however, Russia's stated aim of the denazification of Ukraine is not an absurd thing for the leader of a country like Russia to make; it reassures a population rightfully scared of fascists on their borders in one of the only two countries in the world to vote against the condemnation of Nazism at the UN. That Ukraine voted against is not because the state or government is itself fascistic, but because the country has been in a state of war for nearly a decade and fascist forces are important to its security. Such things are in themselves evidence of the severe damage that has been done to the integrity and sovereignty of the Ukrainian state even before the current invasion, but they do not reflect fascist dominance within the country. To suggest otherwise is to abandon class analysis in favour of the allure of symbols. Where is the political dominance of the petty bourgeoisie in Kyiv? Where was the strong communist working class that preceded it? Any reasonable analysis of fascism shows you that Ukraine is no more fascist than the United States is--- which is to say, more than most countries, but not to the degree of different class relations from liberal states.

6. I've seen the term "campism" being thrown around a lot amongst the online left (or, rather, the tiny and unrepresentative sliver of it that I see). The relegation of the study and comprehension of geopolitics to a buzzword is equal parts unsurprising and depressing.

The small number of people who genuinely do "support" (obviously in a totally inconsequential way) Russia have a terrible understanding of what the interests of the working class are. The interests of the workers never lie in bourgeois war, and the Russian government is, to put it extremely mildly, no friend of the working class, either domestic or international. But genuine support for Russia is vanishingly low amongst communists; confusion of anti-imperialism with support for a non-Western imperialist bloc or state is often a deliberate decision of those keen to see the worst in groups (Marxist-Leninists, anti-colonial nationalist governments, etc.) that elements of the Western left detest, in large part because of their own political ignorance. The intellectual and rhetorical genuflection of prefacing opposition to NATO with a condemnation of an encircled foreign power is also pathetic, and a product of manufactured consent. Opposition to NATO and to war is not dependent upon the character or actions of those states which oppose the Organisation, nor are your own personal credentials as a glorious, pure leftist. Nor is revolutionary defeatism, for that matter.

7. Which brings us on to what the attitude of the working class should be towards the war. The answer is revolutionary defeatism: workers should refuse to load munitions into ships, protest against "their own" government waging war and against all escalation, organise for the withdrawal of any deployed military forces, resist media campaigns against "enemy" states, etc. The workers can never identify themselves with "their own" bourgeois government; that way lies ruin.

Any argument that seeks to oppose such a tactic on the basis of what might happen to Ukraine ("we could never do that, it would hand Ukraine over to Putin!") is a distraction; opportunism at best, and more likely outright anti-worker. If opposition to war was done on this basis there could never be a war we could oppose. It also implicitly endorses one's "own" imperialist bloc: why is Ukraine yours to hand over or not in the first place? The best outcome in the best of all possible worlds is an independent Ukraine with a workers' government allied to a Russian workers' government and to western workers' governments. But that's not going to happen, and in the meantime your country is accelerating the march to war, or at least to the preparation for the next one.

Equally, the working class should never fail to understand why states act in the way they do; much the same pressures will be placed on a workers' state should it one day arise, and either way, knowing why your opponent does what they do is never a bad thing. Dismissal of geopolitics as "bourgeois" or not our concern is dangerous idiocy.

Bourgeois war is against proletarian interests. Our goals must be peace and the weakening of "our own" governments. This war may go on, in various forms (the state-to-state conflict will likely end relatively soon), for another decade or more, and its consequences may well be disastrous. The answer to that is never anything other than working class solidarity; have solidarity with the Ukrainian proletariat, not the bourgeois state that rules them, and oppose the Russian state, absolutely, but do not oppose the Russian proletariat, who have more in common with Ukrainians and Americans than any of us will ever have with any of the politicians in war rooms or presidential offices right now. Our opposition to foreign bourgeois states must never be done in a way that helps "our own" bourgeois state; resist the attempts to use this war as a reason to further isolate and harm Russia, because it will always fall hardest upon their workers, who are the ones who ultimately must end this and all wars.

[safije]

Moscow Cathedral Mosque, Russian Federation

©️ Alexander Sacalevic

[expositionartblog]

This particular rashist war criminal lives in Rostov region,,Russian Federation.

Rostov is adjacent to Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Ukraine. It is the site of several “filtration camps” – part of the machinery of the Russian fascist genocide of the Ukrainian people.

[barbarian15]

This sounds like the laziest attempt to justify starting a war with Russia.

[wgm-beautiful-world]

Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation - Building in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation

[ekpliktikos]

biologičarka: -dakle, od čega se sastoji srce?? da li iko zna?

*ja koja dižem ruku*

ona: -evo, kaži nam ti, divna

ja (divna): -pa, srce je veoma komplikovane građe...

*biologičarka potvrdno klima glavom, dok su sve oči uprte u mene*

ja: -međutim, tu su prvenstveno...

*наставница евидентно шокирана, цело одељење умире од смеха*

ја у себи: ко вели, ваљда је очекивала да кажем да имам неке шупљине, канале, цеви и шта ти ја знам. али боље да ми је срце испуњено, мајку му!

[vigilantsycamore]

I couldn’t decide which version of this to make so I did both

[goetzburggraf]

there are some cracks in this aging image

[pretordh]

In St. Petersburg, a girl doused herself with red paint in front of the City Duma building, she was detained. Another protest against the war was successfully suppressed. Fascists.

[russianfigureskatinghell]

Bestie, they weren't not allowed on purpose, they failed!!!

Do you know how bad you have to be for the ISU of all people to say you suck??? 😭

(psst ISU! Do American judges next!!)

[kneedeepincynade]

Putin, not our favourite politician, not even our favourite Russian but still a valuable ally and while his speech are not the best he is still a friend of the multipolar world

The post is machine translated

Translation is at the bottom

The collective is on telegram

⚠️ VLADIMIR PUTIN A WANG YI: "LA COOPERAZIONE CON LA CINA È MOLTO IMPORTANTE PER LA RUSSIA" ⚠️

🇨🇳 Oggi, 22 febbraio, Wang Yi - Direttore dell'Ufficio Generale della Commissione Centrale per gli Affari Esteri del Partito Comunista Cinese - ha incontrato a Mosca, oltre a Patrušev e Lavrov, anche Vladimir Putin, Presidente della Federazione Russa 🇷🇺

🇷🇺 Il Presidente Russo ha affermato che le Relazioni Internazionali, ad oggi, sono complicate, e che le tensioni globali si sono acuite dopo il crollo del Sistema Bipolare. Pertanto, a questo proposito, la Cooperazione con la Cina è molto importante per la Russia 💕

🥰 Vladimir Putin ha colto l'occasione dell'incontro con Wang Yi per "trasmettere i migliori auguri al nostro amico, al mio amico, il Presidente della Repubblica Popolare Cinese, il Compagno Xi Jinping" ⭐️

😘 Le relazioni con la Repubblica Popolare Cinese sono un fattore molto importante per la stabilizzazione della situazione internazionale, ha affermato il Presidente Russo 🇷🇺

🇷🇺 Vladimir Putin ha dichiarato che la Cooperazione con la Cina copre ogni sfera e settore, non solo in ambito nazionale, ma anche in ambito internazionale, vedasi le Nazioni Unite, i BRICS e l'Organizzazione per la Cooperazione di Shanghai ⭐️

📊 L'obiettivo congiunto tra Russia e Cina di raggiungere un fatturato commerciale pari a 200 miliardi di dollari entro il 2024 potrebbe diventare già realtà a breve, ha affermato il Presidente Russo:

💬 "Abbiamo fissato l'obiettivo di raggiungere un fatturato di 200 miliardi di dollari nel 2024, l'anno scorso valeva già 185 miliardi di dollari, e ci sono tutti i presupposti per credere che raggiungeremo i nostri obiettivi anche prima del previsto" 📈

🥰 Infine, Putin ha affermato che aspetta il Presidente Xi Jinping in Russia, una visita di cui si parla da tempo, che dovrebbe avvenire in primavera, forse già a marzo. Il Presidente Russo ha dichiarato che un incontro personale con il Compagno Xi Jinping darà un ulteriore impulso allo sviluppo delle Relazioni tra Cina e Russia 🥰

🔍 Per chi volesse approfondire il Tema della Cooperazione Sino-Russa, può rifarsi a:

🔺Master-Post del Collettivo Shaoshan sui Rapporti tra Cina e Russia ❤️

🌸 Iscriviti 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

⚠️ VLADIMIR PUTIN TO WANG YI: "COOPERATION WITH CHINA IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR RUSSIA" ⚠️

🇨🇳 Today, February 22, Wang Yi - Director of the General Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs of the Communist Party of China - met in Moscow, in addition to Patrushev and Lavrov, also Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation 🇷🇺

🇷🇺 The Russian President said that International Relations are complicated to date, and that global tensions have escalated after the collapse of the Bipolar System. Therefore, Cooperation with China is very important for Russia in this regard 💕

🥰 Vladimir Putin took the opportunity of meeting Wang Yi to "send best wishes to our friend, my friend, the President of the People's Republic of China, Comrade Xi Jinping" ⭐️

😘 Relations with the People's Republic of China are a very important factor in stabilizing the international situation, said the Russian President 🇷🇺

🇷🇺 Vladimir Putin stated that Cooperation with China covers every sphere and sector, not only nationally, but also internationally, see the United Nations, the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization ⭐️

📊 The joint goal between Russia and China to reach a trade turnover of 200 billion dollars by 2024 could already become a reality soon, said the Russian President:

💬 "We have set a goal of reaching $200 billion in revenue in 2024, last year it was already worth $185 billion, and there is every reason to believe that we will reach our goals even sooner than expected" 📈

🥰 Finally, Putin said that he is waiting for President Xi Jinping to come to Russia, a visit that has been talked about for some time, which should take place in the spring, perhaps as early as March. Russian President said a personal meeting with Comrade Xi Jinping will give further impetus to the development of relations between China and Russia 🥰

🔍 For those wishing to learn more about the Sino-Russian Cooperation theme, they can refer to:

🔺Master-Post of the Shaoshan Collective on Relations between China and Russia ❤️

🌸 Subscribe 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

[evyrob]

Two Vladimirs, two animal lovers

Are you a cat or a dog person?

[safije]

Dagestan, Russian Federation

[freshthoughts2020]

(THE CORNER® | OPEN MANUAL AUDIO VISUAL)

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Federal Election Commission recently let a US company that was quietly bankrolled by Russian oligarchs off with a slap on the wrist despite discovering that it had illegally funneled Russian funds to US political candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, two Democratic FEC commissioners said in a scathing statement issued Friday.

“Half the Commission chose to reject the recommendation of the agency’s nonpartisan Office of General Counsel and turned a blind eye to the documented use of Russian money for contributions to various federal and state committees in the 2018 elections,” wrote the two commissioners, Ellen Weintraub and Shana Broussard.

Anyone who follows campaign finance knows that the FEC has been toothless for years due to GOP commissioners’ opposition to any enforcement of laws designed to oversee money in politics. But Weintraub and Broussard suggest the agency hit a new low by letting the US firm, American Ethane, off with a deal in which it agreed to pay only a small civil fine.

Though based in Houston, Texas, and run by American CEO John Houghtaling, 88% of American Ethane was owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev. The FEC report said that Nikolaev, an oligarch and Russian billionaire with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is the controlling shareholder. Separately, Nikolaev also underwrote efforts by Maria Butina, a Russian gun rights activist, to cultivate ties with the National Rifle Association officials and with associates of Donald Trump around the time of the 2016 election. In 2018, Butina acknowledged acting as an unregistered Kremlin agent and pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy against the United States. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison but was deported six months later.

According to lobbying disclosures, the company was seeking help from US officials in its efforts to sell US ethane to China and, in 2018, had hired a US lobbying firm, Turnberry Solutions, with close ties to former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski. A year later, Lewandowki officially joined Turnberry, after previously disputing his connections to the firm. Turnberry, which traded on ties to Trump, shut down in 2021, months after he left office.

The FEC investigation began after it received a complaint citing press reports on American Ethane’s ties to Nikolaev and its donations to lawmakers. Weintraub and Broussard noted that the FEC found that American Ethane “made contributions using funds derived from loans from foreign entities ultimately owned by Russian nationals.” Federal law bans foreign funds in US elections, as well as direct corporate donations to candidates. American Ethane seems to have done both. The FEC found that the company made more than $66,000 in donations using money it got from offshore firms in the form of loans. According to an FEC general counsel’s report released last year, the owners of the offshore firms included Alexander Voloshin, a Russian politician and former state power company official, and Roman Abramovich, an infamous Russian oligarch and former owner of the British football powerhouse Chelsea. The money the company used to dole out donations ultimately came from the oligarchs, the FEC said.

During its four-year investigation, the FEC found that the funds initially put up by Abromovich and other Russian nationals were then funneled to Republicans in Louisiana: Sens. John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, a political action committee run by Kennedy, a leadership fund run by House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a PAC backing Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, and the campaigns of Reps. Mike Johnson and Garrett Graves. Other contributions went to state lawmakers. The report didn’t explain why the company focused on Louisiana but the state is home to many natural gas firms, and its lawmakers advocate for the industry.

The lawmakers who received funds have not been accused of knowingly taking Russian money, though the final report from the initial investigation noted, “American Ethane attempted to make more political contributions, but those recipient committees never deposited American Ethane’s checks.”

American Ethane argued that the funds the company first received appeared as loan to the American corporation. Therefore, they claimed the donations it made were not foreign. The FEC rejected that argument. But it still recommended the firm only pay $9,500 as a civil penalty.

“The foreign-influence problem has not gone away in the meantime, to put it mildly,” Weintraub and Broussard wrote. “In this case, it is beyond unfortunate that for three of our colleagues, it was a bridge too far to penalize the use of Russian oligarchs’ money to influence U.S. elections.”