The House voted Friday in a bipartisan manner to advance a key foreign aid package, a significant step in sending aid to Ukraine and Israel and setting up a final vote as soon as Saturday.
@#47 ... Vlad wants the Soviet Union back.. ...
OpEd: Vladimir Putin: The rebuilding of Soviet' Russia (2014)
www.bbc.com
... This was President Boris Yeltsin's fifth premier in 16 months, and one confused party leader got the name wrong. He said he would support the candidacy of Stepashin - the surname of the recently sacked prime minister - rather than that of his little-known successor, before making an embarrassing correction.
If even leading Duma deputies couldn't remember the new prime minister's name, you couldn't blame the rest of the world if it didn't pay much attention to his speech. He was unlikely to head the Russian government for more than a couple of months anyway, so why bother?
That man was a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, and he has been in charge of the world's largest country, as president or prime minister, ever since. Few realised it at the time, because few were listening, but that speech provided a blueprint for pretty much everything he has done, for how he would re-shape a country that was perilously close to total collapse. ...
The once-mighty Russian army had lost a war in Chechnya, a place with fewer inhabitants than Russia had soldiers. Three former Warsaw Pact allies had joined Nato, bringing the Western alliance up to Russia's borders.
Meanwhile, the country was led by Yeltsin, an irascible drunkard in fragile health. The situation was desperate, but Putin had a plan. ...
When Putin spoke to the Duma, his homeland was a different, and less respected place. He spoke the language of a man who yearned for the lost certainties, who longed for a time when Moscow was to be reckoned with. He did not say it explicitly, but he was clearly stung by Russia's failure to stop Nato driving the forces of its ally, Serbia, out of Kosovo just months previously.
"Russia has been a great power for centuries, and remains so. It has always had and still has legitimate zones of interest ... We should not drop our guard in this respect, neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored," he said.
His domestic policy was to restore stability, to end what he called the "revolutions", that had brought Russia low. His foreign policy was to regain Russia's place in world affairs.
Those two core aims have driven everything he has done since. If only people had been listening, none of his actions would have come as a surprise to them. ...
imo, interesting OpEd, worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
@#44 ... WE initiated the failure of democracy in Ukraine, by implementing the Maidan coup/revolution/civil war process ...
Euromaidan
en.wikipedia.org
... Euromaidan ... or the Maidan Uprising,[87] was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv.[emphasis mine]
The protests were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign the European Union"Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union.
Ukraine's parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU,[88] but Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it.[89] ...
So, it appears that the Maidan protest was because the Russian-backed (owned) leader of Ukraine failed to follow the direction he received from the People of Ukraine , but instead chose to obey Russia's dictum.
And the people of Ukraine did not like that.
What ever happened to fmr Pres Yanukovych?
Viktor Yanukovych
en.wikipedia.org
... On 24 February 2014, the new government issued a warrant for Yanukovych's arrest, accusing him of being responsible for the killing of protestors.[21]
Yanukovych went into exile in Russia, claiming to still be the legitimate head of state.[22]
On 18 June 2015, Yanukovych was officially deprived of the title of president by parliament.[23] On 24 January 2019, he was sentenced in absentia to a thirteen year prison term for high treason by a Ukrainian court.[24] In various polling conducted since his departure from office, Yanukovych was ranked the least popular president in Ukraine's independent history.[25][26][27][28][29] Yanukovych has also given his name to a collective term for blunders made by Ukrainian politicians: Yanukisms.[30] ...
Oh, Russia took him in.
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