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Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

theguardian.com

71–80 of 149 posts

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#71
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also shut down Europe. Who has the power in this situation?

The US is trying to grab it; they're actively threatening with sanctions to dozens companies that are building a new gas pipeline at the moment ( https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3... ), and they're successful in that some companies have backed out. The pipeline is already mostly finished though. But basically the US is trying to stop it because it'll reduce the dependency of Europe on Ameri…

Or you could think of it as the US helping (some of) its NATO allies in Europe. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have been vocally against Nord Stream 2. Just because Western Europe is for it doesn't mean all the other countries in Europe are as well. Even the previous president of the European Council came out against it.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#72

> by a coterie of former KGB officers, or "siloviki" "Siloviki" are not exactly KGB officers, "silovik" is a name for every security, military or intelligence serviceman which is accurately described in the linked article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/20/west-p... It's fun to see how Guardian keeps playing Chinese whispers.

The article gets the gist across. If articles were written with caveats and exactness galore, it wouldn't be readable.

As a Russian national sharing most of anti-Putin sentiments I can tell that Guardian tends to provide an oversimplified picture of Russia. Most importantly this very article misses the fact that there were many actors in Russian political theatre at the time when Putin became prime minister. For instance, the article tells nothing about the involvement of oligarch Boris Berezovsky in the coup. But yes, I get your point, reading fairy tales is far more entertaining than reading chronicles.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article gets the gist across. If articles were written with caveats and exactness galore, it wouldn't be readable.

As a Russian national sharing most of anti-Putin sentiments I can tell that Guardian tends to provide an oversimplified picture of Russia. Most importantly this very article misses the fact that there were many actors in Russian political theatre at the time when Putin became prime minister. For instance, the article tells nothing about the involvement of oligarch Boris Berezovsky in the coup. But yes, I get your poi…

It's an article about a book that surely will cover that info if you buy and read it.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#74
post #2

I’m often wondering if Putin is, in fact, the most powerful person in the world by a very large margin. He might not have a billion people or a space force, but he plays everyone like a fiddle.

That's utter bullshit and i'll tell you why: Russia has been severly weakened by democratic Europe. They have lost an insane amount of area since the fall of USSR and Europe has never been "closer" to Moscow, their capital. They are now getting punished for actions of last resort. Eg. Invading Ukraine, because otherwise their entire naval fleed would be rendered useless, since it couln't even go out. Russia is weak,…

I worry about Russian nuclear materials disappearing into the black market. We have no deal with them. And they are run in a very ramshackle manner.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article gets the gist across. If articles were written with caveats and exactness galore, it wouldn't be readable.

As a Russian national sharing most of anti-Putin sentiments I can tell that Guardian tends to provide an oversimplified picture of Russia. Most importantly this very article misses the fact that there were many actors in Russian political theatre at the time when Putin became prime minister. For instance, the article tells nothing about the involvement of oligarch Boris Berezovsky in the coup. But yes, I get your poi…

The article is a book review. What do you think of the book that is being reviewed? Does it go into enough detail, and get its facts straight?

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#76
post #49
post #39

Putin and his friends do a pretty decent job of running an old-school oligarchy. That's not really the problem, there is nothing groundbreaking in their approach. The problem is that the "Western" bloc (if there ever was such a thing, really) is currently ruled by elites that fundamentally share those values: weak collective institutions, strong private corporations, the bottom line as the final measure of virtue, an…

I see your point with respect to the US, there's a very corporatist oligarchic tendency on the right, but I really don't see that in Europe at all. Europe has gone to great lengths to stand up to corporations, and that includes many European conservatives of which I count myself one. There's a much broader acceptance among moderate European conservatives that regulation is essential to well functioning market economi…

Republicans are anti-Russian from a military perspective, because some of their traditional interests are rooted in that industrial area and will always benefit from a heightened state of military urgency. That's the "John Bolton" wing, basically, which is mad at Trump for squandering their best opportunities of payday (you can't sell weaponry without an enemy, and it's hard to get a credible enemy when the key guy is so friendly to all the best candidates). That drives a lot of their other objections to Putin's reach.

From an economic perspective, imho they display the same oligopolistic tendencies that Putin's Russia exhibits: lip service to competition and open markets (mostly abroad), ruthless devotion to monopolistic positions and cartels at home. The definition of "free markets" is declined differently depending on circumstances, in opportunistic fashion. I think that's what you mean by "competitive power structures" - they are competing entities, sure, but I personally don't see them as particularly different in the way they behave. Trump lays this bare by dropping the hypocrisy: him and Putin speak the same language, in the same way Putin and Berlusconi did. Both Trump and Berlusconi spent their lives in the trenches of "the Market". I don't think this is a coincidence.

I also disagree on the view of Europe being significantly more anti-corporatist than the US, but I admit that my Anglo-Italian view might be excessively pessimistic in that area and it's a complex discussion anyway, so I won't go there. However, the difference in "softness" towards Putin imho is not there - the Eastern block in the EU, for example, is rabidly anti-Russian for understandable reasons. We simply know that we cannot live without Russian energy at the moment, and that results in some hard pragmatism.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian national sharing most of anti-Putin sentiments I can tell that Guardian tends to provide an oversimplified picture of Russia. Most importantly this very article misses the fact that there were many actors in Russian political theatre at the time when Putin became prime minister. For instance, the article tells nothing about the involvement of oligarch Boris Berezovsky in the coup. But yes, I get your poi…

The article is a book review. What do you think of the book that is being reviewed? Does it go into enough detail, and get its facts straight?

Given all these inaccuracies in this advertising artice I don't feel too much convinced. I'd recommend everyone reading the book by Paul Khlebnikov https://books.google.de/books?id=vb2ZAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y which gives a detailed insider view on Russian politics of that era. BTW, writing this book has costed the guy his life. As for "Putin's People" it looks like an another unwitting attempt to cash in on anti-Putin hysteria.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be the most powerful in current soviet union that is CIS. However I fail to see how he can be the most powerful in the world given that USA surpasses russia in both military and economic might (which are pretty much the same thing if you think about it). Russia has no answer to sanctions and those counter-sanctions are just a delusion. USA can make many other countries respect the sanctions due to dollar bei…

Disclaimer: I'm no politician or economist, but while I do believe the US has military superiority still, they won't be able to wage a large scale war at the moment; they simply cannot afford it. They would have to take out even more loans, and right now the US' money lenders are the UAE and China; given that they are both close to Russia, they may opt to not lend money to fund the US' wars. And even without the thre…

[deleted]

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#79

Nothing I would call "groundbreaking", but I do salute the warning about Russia's money and influence being happily accepted by the west right now. As somebody who grew up in communist eastern europe I fear this russian strategy apparent success. A completely corrupt regime which puts incredibly little value on human rights is agitating people in the west with accounts of (comparatively ) minor incidents and imperfec…

A completely corrupt regime which puts incredibly little value on human rights in it's country . We (as in NATO, but mostly done by the executor of NATO, the US) don't really care about human rights globally either, but we're very adapt at pretending to when it's to our advantage, e.g. when we can use it to mobilize the population against China, or Russia. We're also very good at looking away when it's about our alli…

I always find it funny to see 1-2 people on hn defend russia, that killed thousands of people, kids in moldova, georgia, ukraine, syria. You are just braindead or paid russian troll.

Re: Putin's People – a groundbreaking study that follows the money

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A completely corrupt regime which puts incredibly little value on human rights in it's country . We (as in NATO, but mostly done by the executor of NATO, the US) don't really care about human rights globally either, but we're very adapt at pretending to when it's to our advantage, e.g. when we can use it to mobilize the population against China, or Russia. We're also very good at looking away when it's about our alli…

I always find it funny to see 1-2 people on hn defend russia, that killed thousands of people, kids in moldova, georgia, ukraine, syria. You are just braindead or paid russian troll.

For some reason the people who are most skeptical about absolutely everything else believe anything Russia wants them to.
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