Russia’s diplomats were once a key part of President Putin’s foreign policy strategy. But that has all changed.
In the years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomats lost their authority, their role reduced to echoing the Kremlin’s aggressive rhetoric.
BBC Russian asks former diplomats, as well as ex-Kremlin and White House insiders, how Russian diplomacy broke down.
What? Did someone put polonium in its tee?
Nah, Russian diplomacy is at their highest once they realize they could write off the West as a loss instead of sucking up to them, who sees the Russians as Asiatic orcs anyways. Russia is somehow able to be friends with both India and China, they have made huge diplomatic (and military) strides in Africa, and they’re not doing too shabby in SEA or WANA either. That’s almost two continents right there.
Only Russia is not a friend for India and China. Its capabilities are not sufficient to be one anymore. It’s just begging them to make some appearance of friendship for cheap resources and various concessions which can not go on forever.
The USSR is still breaking up. Russian state as it exists now is not sustainable. It was a complete nightmare in the 90s, yes, and was apparently becoming better in the 00s and even 10s, but now we will see what is going to transpire inside Russia after cessation of hostilities with Ukraine, and that is not yet a thing.
The British Bullshit Corporation is one to talk, they’ve been seething about India gaining Independence now for decades, and despite them literally going to the moon they still can’t bring themselves to show any measure of respect
Also lets just magically all forget all these NATO trash “diplomats” walking out of Lavrovs speech at the UN like 13 year olds having a tantrum instead of actually engaging in the one thing they were supposed to do, “diplomacy”. The west is the entity that didn’t even want to negotiate with Russia, NATO is the one who decided to egg Russia on until this happened, despite Ukraine not even being a NATO member.
But yeah sure, whatever BBC, it’s totally Russia’s fault you acted like babies and backtracked on all your agreements
It’s actually hilarious how millennials are refusing to shit themselves in fear over hollow threats of nuclear apocalypse like the boomers did for decades.
Like, I’m going to die a slow death from microplastic poisoning. My kids will slowly cook to death as the earth warms. Instant death by fireball sounds pretty nice.
Your sentiment is not, in fact, new. It existed back then as well.
millennials are refusing to shit themselves in fear
Started good…
Like, I’m going to die a slow death from microplastic poisoning. My kids will slowly cook to death as the earth warms. Instant death by fireball sounds pretty nice.
…And then you wrote this. I see contradiction.
I’m really sorry to piss on your little eco-statement here, but climate change fears are relevant for decadent rich societies only. Most of the actual humanity is still more concerned with poverty, illiteracy, hunger, epidemics and genocide.
But I agree that those threats are hollow now, because people who’d never actually fulfill them are voicing them. Mostly thieves from the Russian “elite”.
In 1984 the threat would be voiced by bureaucratic leaders of a block occupying large part of the globe which was more or less designed from the ground up for playing “Global Thermonuclear War”, you can see than even in the way Soviet military in its every component was being developed starting from the 50s. Those leaders were not even that corrupt, usually (well, such famous Politburo members as Boris Yeltsin and Heydar Aliyev obviously were, but still), what they owned officially and unofficially is upper middle class level, in Western terms.
So maybe boomers were not so cowardly, yes?
The young scions of our age find themselves in a curious juxtaposition to their forbearers, who once trembled at the thought of world-ending calamities unleashed by the fiery engines of the Autarch’s weaponry. These newer souls scoff at such fears, deeming them hollow echoes of a past era, perhaps because they have been raised in the shadow of subtler, yet equally inexorable, dooms. To them, the threat of slow ruin wrought by the invisible maladies that pollute our waters and air, or the gradual inferno that the Sun’s ever-increasing wrath promises to our world, hold more tangible dread. For these youths, the prospect of instantaneous annihilation in a blaze of cosmic fire seems almost a reprieve, a quick severance of life’s Gordian knot, sparing them the prolonged suffering promised by the ills that plague our slowly deteriorating Urth.
idk, I think I prefer the constant fear, at least compared to the bloodthirsty calls for nuclear war to begin over Ukraine because ackstually Russia’s nukes don’t work anymore, and also nuclear war isn’t really that bad anyway
Who is calling for nuclear war exactly? Isn’t the whole reason NATO boots are not on the ground because nobody wants a nuclear war?
I’ve seen this on reddit and other hellholes from time to time
most people tend to have a degree of separation from it, like early on in the war when people were calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine (which would have necessarily meant NATO strikes into Ukraine or Russian territory, which would put us at the closest humanity has ever been to a nuclear exchange); about mid-way through the war when some countries were trying to form a “coalition of the willing” (article is more recent than when I was thinking though) to enter Ukraine that wasn’t technically NATO forces but like, my god, you’re really cutting it fucking close there; and some people nowadays are musing if F-16s could be used from NATO territory
there’s also been some vague threats from time to time over Kaliningrad but luckily that’s never escalated to outright military rhetoric, at least not yet.
Ah yes, Russian diplomacy is so weak that pretty much all of the world outside the west is aligned with Russia
- https://ecfr.eu/publication/united-west-divided-from-the-rest-global-public-opinion-one-year-into-russias-war-on-ukraine/
- https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/27/the-global-south-refuses-pressure-to-side-with-the-west-on-russia/
- https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-viewpoint-krishen-mehta-the-ukraine-war-viewed-from-the-global-south/
- https://archive.is/2023.02.23-211202/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/23/world/russia-ukraine-geopolitics.html
- https://archive.ph/4kbWG
- https://www.eiu.com/n/russias-pockets-of-support-are-growing-in-the-developing-world/
Russian diplomacy is at their weakest, which is why almost every single African country sent a delegation to Moscow.
“Socialism is when multipolar sharia law.”
- Karl “not Lenin enough for Stalin” Marx
Diplomacy isn’t just cozying up to nations that are your friends and and insulting others, it’s having cordial relations with all nations.
