Russia on Monday threatened to strike British military facilities and said it would hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid sharply rising tensions over comments by senior Western officials about possibly deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine.
After summoning the British ambassador to the Foreign Ministry, Moscow warned that Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory with U.K.-supplied weapons could bring retaliatory strikes against British military facilities and equipment on Ukrainian soil or elsewhere.
The remarks came on the eve of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration to a fifth term in office and in a week when Moscow on Thursday will celebrate Victory Day, its most important secular holiday, marking its defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.
It genuinely baffles me how the conservative parties of more than a few western countries went from the hawkish party during the Cold War to Russian apologists today. The mental gymnastics are truly astounding.
Russia funds them, and in at least some cases has kompromat. See: NRA, 2016 us national party hacks.
Oh, I’m aware. I’m mostly talking about how insane it is that the party base is enthusiastically eating this up.
Well, the base is definitely suffering from a tragic lack of gravitas. It helps to be aware that you desire to mistake not your own worldview, for a universal one. “Common sense” is never truly common, but derived from the knowledge and beliefs of the individual.
I’m not though. If you’d have taken a poll of Republicans at literally any point before Trump launched his campaign, asking whether Russia was an ally or adversary, it would have yielded strong consensus on the latter.
So I think it’s less relevant to consider Russia qua Russia here, and think of it more as a negative applause light that has had its valence flipped through the exercise of the massive media machine that the right has built to prevent another Nixon from ever having to resign in disgrace again.