- Ukraine downed a Russian Su-34 fighter jet over Kursk amid an ongoing territorial push.
- The Su-34, worth around $36 million, is Russia’s most efficient fighter bomber with advanced tech.
- Ukraine has previously held long kill streaks with Russian Su-34s.
Wait, did Russians really believe the U.S. was supposed to fix it after the collapse of the USSR?
That’s not how government works what the hell is wrong with people over there
I’m exaggerating for the sake of argument, but I’ve seen tankies and russians on youtube make this argument unironically to justify why russia had the right to do whatever it wanted to recover its empire and that they had a right to revenge for the “decade of humiliation” and shock therapy.
I don’t see anyone seriously making these arguments. What I do see is a nasty situation in Eastern Europe thanks to decades of privatization and looting of the domestic economies. There’s a reflexive anti-Americanism that suggests simply divorcing from the western economy will restore the eastern states to a more normal economic path. But Putin isn’t exactly Lenin (or even Khrushchev), so there’s no reason to believe a Russian capitalist oligarch looting the Bulgarian or Estonian economy would somehow benefit anymore more than the UK/US doing it.
For what it’s worth the west had a history of helping in these events, we did fuck all for them really when the Soviet Union broke apart.
It wasn’t our job, but it woulda gone a LONG fucking way to bettering relations.
I could see feeling bitter we didn’t help but to take it as far as blaming us for their woes is just classic “it’s their fault” mentality.
Look at Japan and Germany as examples of how it may have played out.
But Japan and Germany were occupied, the US had skin in the game, influence over russia was more hands-off.
Although funny enough that’s what we promised to do in Japan after WWII.
https://youtu.be/YzRWPGSaKDk
They did experience rapid economic growth, and did move to a democratic government, though as usual the right wing leadership took hold both here and there, and we just wanted Japan as a military base to counter those commie Russians, and they wanted to nullify the treaty preventing them from having a standing army
Don’t know about “expect”, but at the time there seemed to be popular hope that with the collapse of USSR they would get some of that sweet western prosperity. When that did not come to pass even when by all accounts the Russian government of that time was trying to lean into normalized relations with the west, then some “the west still keeps us down” narrative is unsurprising. It was in the midst of continued economic struggle that Putin came along and started reasserting a more nationalistic philosophy in Russia.
While it might not have been reasonable to expect, in retrospect it might have been in NATO’s best interest to be more proactive in helping Russia during that window where they were actually friendly. They might have managed to avert Putin’s rise to power.