If Russia lays down its weapons...

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1. Russia did not send a request to join NATO. Putin unofficially showed interest but then withdrew. It wasn't 1999, it was early 2000s.
2. "Once a bad country, always a bad country" - counter-examples: Germany, Japan.
3. The rest is so ridiculous that not worth responding. Are you in Russia, watching only state TV and cut out from all other information?

No, that's former German Chancellor, Angela Merkal.

Who's the guy on the right?

That isn't what I heard.
pootin spat the dummy when he had to "stand in line".
He may have had reasons for that, however.

My best guess is that it is "The Turtle".

pootin. <disingenuous>
No idea.

Don't recognize him.

Francois Hollande?



French president in 2012-2017.

You are jumping to conclusions based on information you see and hear in the news.

I do not know the ins and outs on either side but what I do know is that our news is so manipulative and one sided that I take what they say as faked even if it is true!

What I will say is if you want to findout ask both the Ukranian and the Russian people who live in your country and are in daily contact with their loved ones back home so you will get a balanced picture about what had been happening. Never look at the news as in the west they act like a one sided propaganda machine.

You are intelligent. (If you are a slow but deep thinker you can do this. Some people are quick "Surface" thinkers who do excellent in exams but may struggle to do this, but if you can do this).

[And now it gets exciting!

Gather all the information you can from both sides... Whatever you can find however obscure.. ALWAYS TAKE A TOTALLY NEUTRAL STANCE AND RID ONESELF FROM ALL PRE-CONCIEVED THOUGHTS AND IDEAS BEFORE DOING ONES RESEARCH AND ALWAYS BE FLEXIBLE TO TAKE ON A WHOLE NEW STANCE IF THE PATRERNS OF INFORMATION OVERLAP AND SEND YOU IN ANOTHER DIRECTION FROM THE ONE YOU WERE IN BEFORE.
Now keep gathering more and more information however obscure.
Spend days just lying down thinking about everything you have recieved. Start forming grid-like patterns of information in your mind and as if each grid is like a transparancy, start overlapping one on top of another. The information that was gained that is a "One off" and does not tally to the information that is repeated so one can see it as a whole lined up "Square" of information put to one side. Keep it in mind but do not include it in the grid just yet. (Do this all mentally. Writing things down brings later confusion as one may later questionthe patterns recieved where one ends up having to start the process again).
Now after one has roots of patterns building up so these are reliable "Truths" one
starts to sift through the bits onehas put aside. Often as time passes some of these bits get extra information added to tally them in and they form patterns of their own which tie into the original patterns. Others that do not tie into anything, at this point, and only then, dissregard. These are the lies. The fabricated falsehoods that the media set up or others set up.

The whole process takes anything from a few days or weeks to many years and do not be in a hurry, but it is a reliable way to reach the truth. One has to be a slow but deep thinker to do this as the thought goes through many levels so is slow to sift.
I call it three dimentional thinking. I call the quick brained people who come out with surface answers very quickly two dimentional thinkers, and yes, they are essential for society too! We need them and the "Sifters" or "Dreamers" at the same time. The 2D thinkers seem more suseptable to propaganda which the 3D thinkers seem less suseptable to but it is the 2D thinkers who are better as "Front men" (And women).

But if you can think in pattern grids and can keep adding depths of multiple grids as layers then this subject will be a goodone to cover, but you first have to rid yourself of all personal pre-concieved preferences and become completely neutral to make it work, as personal pre-concieved conclusions will precent these patterns from forming any depth and one will be stuck with a 2D "Surface thought".

^ That's pretty off-topic, isn't it?
I actually do what you recommend to do.
I talk to Ukrainians and to Russians, not just ones living in my country - I've been in both countries and talked to random people on trains there. I know the cultural differences between the two.
I do have a pretty well-maintained structure of general knowledge and use diverse sources of information, in various languages, to take errors, manipulations and lies into account.
Also, I do care for meta-information: knowledge of the information's source tells a lot about how to interpret it.

And this quote still holds super firmly. Even better than the original one.

Any objective person having actual contact with the news in question is much more credible than some ideologue journalist who gathers his/her impressions in a third-hand way.

I learned this from having actual contact with folks of different ethnic groups. In almost all cases, the stereotypes were debunked through this actual human contact.

That's a problem regularily discussed by both Ukrainian sources and independent Russian press:
People from Ukraine call relatives in Russia on the phone and talk about what is happening to them and they are met with systematic denial.

It's hard to accept an information that your fatherland is committing a genocide on your relatives. All the psychological defenses launch so the facts can't reach you. It's human nature - that's why it's so hard to take responsibility for the dark cards of our own histories.

And, well. I'm part Russian. I've been raised by people who grew up in a world of lies and terror. In terms of modern psychology - I've suffered from multi-generational C-PTSD. It required years of therapy for me to overcome it.
There are psychological defenses you grow to adapt to it, to survive - but also to enable more of it

Putin spoke about going back to the glories of Peter the Great's time----that's the bottom line....

Peter the Great was a relatively "western"-oriented Tsar from the late 17th-early 18th century. He wanted to modernize Russia, get it away from its medieval situation. However, he also wanted to spread Russian hegemony over a vast area.

It's understandable why a Russian would want to use his example----but it doesn't mean Ukraine and its allies have to lay down and play dead under the onslaught of Russian aggression. Peter the Great himself would have respected the resistance offered by Ukraine.

Harkening back to Peter the Great----means that Putin has the intention of expanding Russia's Sphere of Influence through violence.

We have to move forward----and stop with all this harkening back to "past glories" and all that.