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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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 Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 6:35 pm Post subject: |
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| The guy was writing an expose about government corruption, so yes it is possible that he did actually know something. Looking at how thin skinned Putin seems to be/ how many journalists are killed in Russia, etc. etc. it isn't exactly as implausible as Titus is making it out to be. It is, at the very least, equally as plausible as saying that Ukrainian far right killed him (seriously you go straight to Ukrainian Nazis, but tell other people to train themselves to recognize propaganda?) |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 7:10 pm Post subject: |
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| Leon wrote: |
| The guy was writing an expose about government corruption, so yes it is possible that he did actually know something. Looking at how thin skinned Putin seems to be/ how many journalists are killed in Russia, etc. etc. it isn't exactly as implausible as Titus is making it out to be. It is, at the very least, equally as plausible as saying that Ukrainian far right killed him (seriously you go straight to Ukrainian Nazis, but tell other people to train themselves to recognize propaganda?) |
He had been writing and publishing exposes about corruption since he and his friends were ejected from power. Year after year he writes exposes. He and CNN's traveling chef Anthony Bourdain had a long talk about it. Russians know their government is corrupt. They're the ones paying the bribes. They care, but their memory of the 90's is firm. Putin is the anti-90's. He's gold. There is nothing at this moment that can rattle the government. It is as stable as is possible. Putin is now polling a hair from 90%. That is basically every single ethnic Russian, and quite a few non-Russians. A defeat in Ukraine would change that, but even then no sufficiently to threaten things. A dried up American patsy writing an essay won't.
So, then we have to look at who benefits. Or better yet, which bunch of excitable, thoughtless and desperate men would think that this would inspire a Maidan. I could not possibly have less respect for State, but I don't think they're sufficiently bold. They don't know how to inspire a protest in Russia. They have been trying. They do know how to organize snipers to make a protest go crazy, so it is nice to see that people went home before the guns came out. As I said, international Jewish interests probably wouldn't take out one of their own, and anyway they seem to think propagandizing Americans et al is sufficient. The liberals in Russia (see previous point) wouldn't do it. The nationalists doubtful, unless personality was involved. He was with a young Ukranian model (read: hooker) so there is some underworld exposure. The car had plates from the Caucasus, but I can't see anything there. You're left with the Ukrainians. They've gotten their ass horrifically kicked. They've lost, they're demoralized.. I'm sticking with that. Excitable Ukrainian Svboda or similar who really didn't understand what they were doing. The other possibility, which I didn't get into, is that he was specifically investigating relationships between builders and cement suppliers in Sochi. Real estate can get pretty heated. However, that's big money and they'd be a great deal more careful and quiet in the act.
Final answer: Ukrainians. |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 7:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Titus wrote: |
| Leon wrote: |
| The guy was writing an expose about government corruption, so yes it is possible that he did actually know something. Looking at how thin skinned Putin seems to be/ how many journalists are killed in Russia, etc. etc. it isn't exactly as implausible as Titus is making it out to be. It is, at the very least, equally as plausible as saying that Ukrainian far right killed him (seriously you go straight to Ukrainian Nazis, but tell other people to train themselves to recognize propaganda?) |
He had been writing and publishing exposes about corruption since he and his friends were ejected from power. Year after year he writes exposes. He and CNN's traveling chef Anthony Bourdain had a long talk about it. Russians know their government is corrupt. They're the ones paying the bribes. They care, but their memory of the 90's is firm. Putin is the anti-90's. He's gold. There is nothing at this moment that can rattle the government. It is as stable as is possible. Putin is now polling a hair from 90%. That is basically every single ethnic Russian, and quite a few non-Russians. A defeat in Ukraine would change that, but even then no sufficiently to threaten things. A dried up American patsy writing an essay won't.
So, then we have to look at who benefits. Or better yet, which bunch of excitable, thoughtless and desperate men would think that this would inspire a Maidan. I could not possibly have less respect for State, but I don't think they're sufficiently bold. They don't know how to inspire a protest in Russia. They have been trying. They do know how to organize snipers to make a protest go crazy, so it is nice to see that people went home before the guns came out. As I said, international Jewish interests probably wouldn't take out one of their own, and anyway they seem to think propagandizing Americans et al is sufficient. The liberals in Russia (see previous point) wouldn't do it. The nationalists doubtful, unless personality was involved. He was with a young Ukranian model (read: hooker) so there is some underworld exposure. The car had plates from the Caucasus, but I can't see anything there. You're left with the Ukrainians. They've gotten their ass horrifically kicked. They've lost, they're demoralized.. I'm sticking with that. Excitable Ukrainian Svboda or similar who really didn't understand what they were doing. The other possibility, which I didn't get into, is that he was specifically investigating relationships between builders and cement suppliers in Sochi. Real estate can get pretty heated. However, that's big money and they'd be a great deal more careful and quiet in the act.
Final answer: Ukrainians. |
Sure, but again it overlooks how the state has treated dissidents, the number of journalists killed, etc. The regime is kind of ham fisted with this stuff. I mean, it is like asking who benefits from sanctioning other countries food from entering Russia, it is not always a cut and dry logical answer. The guy thought his life was in danger, and I guessing he wasn't scared of Ukrainian rightists.
I think the true answer is that we will never actually know. If the west/intl community comes up with an answer than large sections of people would never accept it, and same for the ongoing Russian investigation. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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http://lifenews.ru/news/150629
Suspect is a Chechen (I missed that) who fought for Ukraine against DPR/LPR.
Article says motive was to try and destabilize Russia. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/boris-nemtsov-murder-ukranian-girlfriend-kiev-russia
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US president Barack Obama said on Monday that the killing of Nemtsov is a sign of a worsening climate in Russia where civil rights and media freedoms have been rolled back in the last several years.
“This is an indication of a climate at least inside of Russia in which civil society, independent journalists, people trying to communicate on the internet, have felt increasingly threatened, constrained. And increasingly the only information that the Russian public is able to get is through state-controlled media outlets,” Obama said.
“I have no idea at this point exactly what happened. What I do know is more broadly the fact that freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of information, basic civil rights and civil liberties inside of Russia are in much worse shape now than they were four or five, 10 years ago.” |
Obama referenced "civil rights". Good grief.
We can take from the above that the USA doesn't believe it will be able to pin the murder on Putin, so instead they're going with the "climate of hate" theme. It isn't Putin's fault, but it kinda is.
This is very similar to how the Kennedy assassination is remembered every year. The NYT rolls out how the "climate of right wing hate" in Dallas caused the communist to kill the liberal.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/11/nyt-dallass-role-in-kennedys-murder.html
If you don't want to pin something on the person who did it blame the "climate of hate". |
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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:16 pm Post subject: |
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| It is more dangerous to be a vocal critic of the Kremlin than it is the White House though. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 9:58 am Post subject: |
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I think Titus would like me to post a TheAtlantic article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/boris-nemtsov-and-the-end-of-two-eras/386555/
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| Looking back on his tenure in a 1998 interview with Hoffman, he acknowledged his failure to implement his promised reforms. "What we couldn't do is stop crony capitalism—at all," he said. "The resistance of the oligarchs was so strong; they had the strong support of the Kremlin. ... They were against our reforms." |
Okay. How about a more serious article, then.
http://pando.com/2015/03/02/boris-nemtsov-death-of-a-russian-liberal/
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Nemtsov pushed for a new law forcing bureaucrats to disclose their incomes (but not their assets or their families’ assets) — but then was caught on tape arranging a bribe in the form of an obscene book advance, $90,000, with a Yeltsin family bagman/entrepreneur named Sergei Lisovsky. (A year earlier, Lisovsky, while working for Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election campaign, was caught in central Moscow hauling a Xerox copy paper box packed with 500,000 dollars worth of Ben Franklins.) Nemtsov’s leaked discussion with Lisovsky about the $90,000 “book advance” came just as he took credit for running one of the most controversial sell-offs of a state asset — the state telecommunications company Svyazinvest, which went to a consortium that included George Soros and Oneximbank, whose then-chairman is now Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov. Initially the Svyazinvest auction was PR’d as the cleanest and bestest Yeltsin-era state auction of public assets; and then it was discovered that the winner of the auction, Oneximbank, had funneled huge book advances to the very same US-backed “young reformers” in Yeltsin’s government, including “Bonecracker” Chubais, who were in charge of awarding Svyazinvest to the Oneximbank-led consortium.
The rigged auction — Nemtsov’s showcase for what “anti-corruption” governance looked like —led to the “bankers’ war” between rival oligarch clans, the firing of many of Nemtsov’s fellow “young reformers” from government, and an open war of words between Nemtsov and the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose consortium lost the auction.
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Nemtsov was tasked with breaking up Russia’s natural monopolies and introducing fair, free-market competition. So he “took on” the state utilities monopoly, RAO-UES by placing his favorite young Nizhny Novgorod banker, Boris Brevnov, in charge of the company. Brevnov had by this time married an American woman who was one of the World Bank’s top officers in overseeing its investments into Nizhny Novogorod when Nemtsov was governor. Less than a year after Nemtsov put Brevnov in charge of the utilities monopoly, the company’s board of directors charged Brevnov with corruption and abuse of office, including the use of company jets to fly to Kentucky to pick up Brevnov’s wife, mother-in-law and dog and bring them back to Moscow. After getting fired from RAO-UES, Brevnov moved to the US and went to work for Enron.
By August 1998, Nemtsov’s government went down in one of the largest and most devastating financial collapses of modern times.
The problem with Nemtsov’s politics wasn’t so much his adherence to radical neoliberalism, but his shallowness, his grotesque elitism, and his authoritarianism. |
Basically, Nemtsov was one of the liberals responsible for making liberalism unpopular in Russia. Then there is Nemtsov's support for Putin: Russia's Best Bet
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Some critics have questioned Mr. Putin's commitment to democracy. True, he is no liberal democrat, domestically or internationally. Under his leadership Russia will not become France. The government will, however, reflect the Russian people's desire for a strong state, a functioning economy, and an end to tolerance for robber barons -- in short, a ''ruble stops here'' attitude. Russia could do considerably worse than have a leader with an unwavering commitment to the national interest.
And it is difficult to see how to do better. |
This goes back to Titus's point that Putin is, essentially, as liberal as a Russian leader today will ever be.
Eduard Liminov:
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| The Putin regime is a liberal regime, so it’s natural that liberals like Khakamada or Nemtsov do not seriously oppose it. Just look at Putin’s economic program: Low taxes, concentration of wealth in oligarchs’ hands, strict budgets. The Kremlin’s ideology is basically the same as that of Nemtsov’s and Khakamada’s, so of course it makes no sense to confront them as my organization does. They can only argue over the details of this liberalism, over who should own what and how it should be implemented. |
Ames:
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Pity and sympathy and outrage aren’t resources we distribute fairly or evenly. Nemtsov’s murder matters more than Starovoitova’s or Listyev’s or Kholodov’s mattered because we don’t know anymore where Russia is heading, or who exactly Vladimir Putin represents. We know he’s more popular than ever, and that Russian liberalism is more marginalized than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and underneath that has been a kind of lingering anxiety that maybe we had something to do with that, that maybe we were a part of the problem. Just like Nemtsov was part of the problem.
But now Nemtsov’s dead, his bloated naked torso beamed on Livestream for all to gawk at. His murder is frightening for Russians who live there, but for us out here, it’s something more than that — a kind of karmic salvation, retroactively absolving all who played a part in Russia’s tragic post-Soviet history, a narrative arc that made no sense until Nemtsov was murdered at the foot of Putin’s Kremlin. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 5:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Titus wrote: |
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Yes, its a possibility that Putin had a nothing politician whacked across the street from the Kremlin. There is a lack of evidence available to conclude one way or the other.
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What benefit would that serve? I need evidence that you're able to think these things through. To what benefit?
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In any case, the whole thing reflects very badly on Russia.
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That's a narrative that has been inserted into your head, and you're parroting it.
As of this moment we solely have this: A guy that none of you had ever heard of, in a country you know nothing about, was killed for reasons that nobody other than the killers know.
All attempts at narrative spinning are propaganda and I'd like you to try really, really hard to train your brain to recognize propaganda.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-04/putin-condemns-brazen-murder-boris-nemtsov-politically-motivated
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Russian President Vladimir Putin told senior police officials Wednesday that they should “finally rid Russia of shame and tragedy” such as the killing of opposition activist Boris Nemtsov, his first public comments on the slaying.
Mr. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who later became a fierce Kremlin critic, was gunned down near the Kremlin late Friday, a murder that opposition allies blame on the authorities.
“The most serious attention should be paid to high-profile crimes, including those with a political motive. We need to finally rid Russia of shame and tragedy such as we experienced and saw very recently. I mean the brazen murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the center of the capital,” he said in a speech. |
So Putin agrees that the murder of Nemtsov is shameful for Russia.
Titus, try to avoid being so insufferable when discussing Russia next time. |
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maximmm
Joined: 01 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 12:17 am Post subject: |
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You know, this dude - a commander volunteer for the Ukrainian army - killing Nemtsov (who was also Ukraine's supporter) is just as nonsensical as Putin killing Nemtsov.
While I don't think Putin had anything to do with Nemtsov being taken out, I do think that he is using the situation to his benefit by putting the blame for this hit on people that were against him, thus taking them out of equation. |
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GF
Joined: 26 Sep 2012
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| Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:04 am Post subject: |
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| GF wrote: |
| Leon wrote: |
| Putin has all that he needs for his Eurasian campaign, energy resources, money, a large army and a security council veto, everything else is superfluous and Putin knows it regardless of how many op-eds he writes. |
Maybe he disagrees with you. Maybe he sees the monarchy as a linchpin of Russia's glory. I think it is possible that the Eurasian project would gain steam in the former Russian territories if the monarchy were restored. The Russian government has shown sympathy to the Romanovs lately, judging them to have been victims of political repression under the communists. The Grand Duchess Vladimirovna and her son have recently returned to Russia from decades of exile, and the Orthodox Church has reportedly recognized their claim to the Imperial dignity. I think there may be something afoot. |
Well-placed Russian politician looks towards limited restoration of Romanov Dynasty through the Grand Duchess and for Russian glory, as I suggested/predicted.
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The Romanov family's extraordinary return would not threaten the rule of the Kremlin strongman but would aim to give them a role in unifying Russia.
The move proposed by Vladimir Petrov, a law maker from Putin's party, has prompted speculation that it has the Russian leader's direct approval.
[...]
Petrov has written to Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna and Prince Dimitri Romanovich urging them to return to Russia to become symbols of national culture in order to "revive the spiritual power of Russian people". |
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/586470/Russia-royal-family-Vladimir-Putin-reinstate-Tsar-Nicholas-Second-Romanov |
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