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In a recent appearance on Russia’s state-run television, Russian political scientist Sergey Mikheyev suggested that the country’s “empire” should grow to encompass three American states.

“I want the Russian empire with Alaska, Hawaii, California, Finland, and Poland,” he said, as translated by Gerashchenko for the clip he shared. “Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.”

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    “I want the Russian empire with Alaska, Hawaii, California, Finland, and Poland,” he said, as translated by Gerashchenko for the clip he shared. “Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.”

    This guy sounds exactly like Donald Trump.

    • rayyy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The orange menace would be only too happy to oblige Putin’s every whim, after all, he is one of Trump’s main dictator heroes.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Lets say Russia magically is able to land on US soil completely intact after passing through the US Navy infested waters of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Lets just assume they can so we can continue this crazy thought experiment.

    To take territory you need boots on the ground, troops, tanks, APCs, etc. These are transported by troop transport aircraft and large ships that are naval landing craft. For Russia that would be the Ropucha-class. Each of these ships can carry about 10 tanks and about 310 troops (per ship).

    So how many of these ship does Russia have? Hundreds, right? Nope: 11. Thats it. So assuming a full load of every ship thats about 110 tanks and about 3500ish troops. And all of that assumes all 11 ships will make it alive to US soil.

    This is just how crazy this Russian claim of taking US States is.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s supposed to make actual Kremlin policy seem sane and moderate to the domestic audience.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I think you forget that we have 24 hour satellite surveillance all over the globe.

        If you think Russia could send a large fraction of its blue water navy to one single point on the globe while also mustering all those troops and equipment on the ground in Russia beforehand without the US knowing about it weeks before hand, you don’t have a good grasp on the level of technology employed in today’s military.

        • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Hmm, Pearl Harbor and the place where the 10th mountain train to fight in snow.

          Ok Ivan, good luck. You’re gonna need it.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Also its alaska. Russia would be operating out of what, vladivastok maybe to take similarly shitty US ports in alaska.

        If russia wants shitty coastal wilderness at uninhabitable climates they already have them.

      • carbrewr84@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska? It’s about 50ish miles. Last I checked, it’s also not a great place to start a ground invasion. The US could blow the shit out of that area of Alaska and nothing much would be missed.

        • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska?

          The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.

          Since you asked where, here it is on a map

          Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.

    • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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      8 months ago

      NAVY stands for Never Again Volunteer Yourself.

      And after basic training and almost dying because of medical stuff unrelated to military service forced me out of the military, I took that to heart. Especially given who won the election in the years following my enlistment. No way was I going back. I’m still adamant to never reenlist, and I will always tell others NOT to enlist in the current US military unless major systemic changes are made so you don’t have to think to yourself “are we the baddies?” when in your bunk. I will happily tell anyone a recruiter is talking to about my experience, my family’s general military experience, and that with current volatility even if you agree with what they’re doing today, your enlistment will last longer than one administration and tomorrow you could be bombing Gaza and Ukraine right alongside other fascists.

      All that said, If a foreign country invaded the us, you bet your ass I would be joining up with my ex-military friends for some good old fashioned minutemen militia. I’ve seen their equipment and what Russia is using in Ukraine. Russians would fail against well armed civilians (the ones who also have training, not just money).

      The biggest flaw with Red Dawn isn’t that guerilla style combat tactics from teenagers and random adults could repel an enemy invasion coughvietnamcough, it’s that the enemy forces would never have made it to the mainland in such force in the first place.

    • deafboy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      No. First you make the inhabitants ask russia for brotherly help. Invitation > invasion.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      after passing through the US Navy infested waters of the Atlantic or the Pacific.

      It’s something about 4 kilometers from Russia to US. Or 86 km between mainlands.

      • ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        My first thought was Putin’s well on the way with Texas and Florida, but California might be a challenge.

      • Edwardthefma99✡@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Why dose every one think trump and Russia are friends the steel document was proven to be fake trump hates Russia he probably would decimate there military if given the chance

        • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Maybe because he has expressed his admiration for Putin on more than one occasion, has sworn to pull all support for NATO, which was founded to defend against a Russian threat, around the time of the election the Russians hacked email accounts of prominent Democrats thus helping Trump’s campaign efforts, or because Trump chose to believe Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agency in the matter of Russian influence in the 2016 election, Trump’s national security advisor was forced to resign after he had inappropriate contact with Russia to discuss sanctions then lied about it, and because there is a boatload of circumstantial evidence, like relations his family has had with people close to Russia. Maybe for those reasons or it could be people are just really unfair to poor Mr. Trump.

    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      One third of the American colonists helped the Revolutionaries, one third did nothing, and one third helped the British. The conservatives (Monarchists, Loyalists) wanted to stay part of the British Empire. The Revolutionaries were liberal democrats, literally.

  • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.

    Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.

    This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.

    The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.

    • gallopingsnail@lemmy.sdf.org
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      7 months ago

      All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to.

      Come on dawg, you can’t just drop Hawaii in there and not tell us what the fuck the Russians were doing over there!

      • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Sorry- I didn’t know that part off the top of my head But since you asked, Russia’s presence in Hawaii was sort of like its presence in Alaska and California: early 1800s outposts established by agents acting on behalf of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company, which the Russian Crown had granted a monopoly on operations in North America and the Pacific but was unable to back or support such claims.

      • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You mean something like a third Reich?

        Well, yeah. In very real ways WWII was about upending the post-WW1 order (which was punitive of Germany generally). It’s really interesting to understand how crazy the flows of money were, and how badly the US in particular bungled its role as the issuer of the world’s de facto reserve currency at the time- in the aftermath of WWI, Germany and its allies were made to pay reparations, France occupied the industrial territory on their border, and any money France or Belgium or Holland received in reparations promptly went to American banks, to repay war bonds borrowed to finance the fighting (which had, in turn, been spent in American factories on war materiel, weapons, munitions, etc).

        https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower/384034/ (sorry this is paywalled now, it was a really good read when it was available so I’ll summarize briefly)

        By the end of the first world war, all of the belligerent nations’ economies were in tatters, their leadership were forced to inflate their currencies to make payments- but the US declined to inflate its own currency to make it workable for them- and when the US didn’t think about its new role in maintaining a viable world order, it put everyone that owed it anything in the position of paying their debts not in their own inflated currencies, but in US dollars. This essentially collapsed the German economy and its currency, and it was just unnecessary.

  • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Okay, so Alaska I get. Hawaii, well okay middle of nowhere, strategic location.

    But California? The fuck? Good luck with that.

  • ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I’d love to see Putin spend a week in the wrong part of Los Angeles and have his a__ handed to him by some Mexican American gang, or black gang. You want California, dude? As a white (non-Russian) living here, I have had gangs threatened to shoot me about five times now, because I accepted a job assignment in an area they considered to be their turf.

  • hungryphrog
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    8 months ago

    Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.

    wtf is that supposed to mean

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Projection.

      In WWII, a lot of Russians got damage from easily preventable things that the Finns didn’t, as we had saunas and better equipment. Something as simple as getting dry, clean socks and getting to wash your feet can be incredibly important. Just hygiene in general. Not to mention how a good sauna can improve moral.

      If anyone was stinky in Winter War, it was definitely the Russians. Not the Finns. (weather at -30 in this photo)

      Photo from this article with lots of other photos: https://www.life.com/history/the-coldest-front-lifes-coverage-of-the-winter-war/

      • hungryphrog
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        8 months ago

        Oh, so it wasn’t about my armpits. Good to know.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Ah, so your armpits are named Poland and Finland. Are you perhaps the Baltic Sea?

      • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        That naked guy holding the bucket is probably the most Russian thing I’ve ever seen and I’m Ukrainian.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I take slight offense at a Finn being taken for a Russian. It’s a Finnish man just taking a breather from sauna shown in the other image.

          The ability to use the sauna brings with it the possibility of washing clothes as well, at least underwear and socks. This is why saunas were so important, and why the Russians probably stank a bit, as they huddled in the cold without saunas, in dirty clothing. Some from areas who had never even seen such winters.

  • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    Near the end of the clip, the host of the program was quick to deflate Mikheyev’s comment as “wishful thinking” divorced from actual politics.

    “Yes, but again, wishful thinking is one thing and actual politics is another,” the host said.

    Gerashchenko, meanwhile, was less keen to write off the political scientist’s comments as fantasy.

    I mean, glad to see that even some Russian propagandists expect some of their viewers to have functional brain cells.

  • andrewta@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    They should start with Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana. The red necks would grab every gun they have , be the shit show of the century.

  • IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    A big part of belonging to a cult is acting out the communal lie. It’s a way to signal inclusion despite being antithetical to reality.