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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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    5 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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      5 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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    5 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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      5 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.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      5 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.

    • deafboy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

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

    • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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      5 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.

  • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I could absolutely see Turnip Dump willingly “trade” those states to Russia to get something else in return, if he won a 2nd term as President.

    That is to say, he would float the idea to see the response, then say he wouldn’t do it, then turn around and do it anyway.

    People who are saying “that would never happen,” answer me this: what happened on 1/6/21? Specifically what happened with a confederate flag in the Capitol building? Something you thought would never happen?

    • kboy101222@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Can someone help me find this out -

      Is selling an entire state something that literally anyone can do? Like, can the president do it? Congress? Secretary of State? Library of Congress?

      Is this something that’s even possible?

      I assume the answer is a hard no, but the only source I could find online is quora and I have a negative amount of trust in that site

      • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        There are institutions that are designed to prevent it, but as we saw in 45’s first term, he has absolutely no qualms about dismantling meddlesome institutions.

      • bradinutah@thelemmy.club
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        5 months ago

        SCOTUS has said no. Also, the Confederacy lost the whole war over their state members trying to leave. There is no legal means of seceding from the Union aside from persuading three quarters of the other states to let you leave by amending the constitution.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        I don’t think there’s any real mechanism for it, but they could certainly do it regardless, and ultimately I’m sure it would end up in front of the Supreme Court.

    • Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      what happened on 1/6/21?

      Not what t-dump wanted to happen. If that loser-in-chief couldn’t pull off 1,000 guys storming capital hill, what makes you think that he could pull off selling states with a combined population of about 44 million to our sworn enemy?

      Even his best “allies” and his own vp left him out to dry after 1/6.

      • eyvind@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Well… maybe if he tried being nicer and didn’t smell quite so fecal, people wouldn’t describe him like that?

  • Edwardthefma99✡@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    And they thought Ukraine was hard to conquer it will be like 1776 every body and her brother killing the invaders

    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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      5 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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    5 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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      5 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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        5 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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        5 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.

  • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    Anyone taking this seriously should think again. Of course Russia isn’t going to invade the US, it would be suicide on too many levels to count. This is just posturing to tile up their own base, get people to still believe in the supposed might of mother Russia.

    It’s the same bullshit coming from the Republican party as well

    • TangledHyphae@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Why do people insist on partisan rhetoric? Your point could have been made better without the constant, cliche, stereotypical anti-Republican partisan rhetoric that you find in every comment about everything.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        probably because republicans also do very similar things. Just look at the recent CPAC and it’s mess of “we’re going to overthrow democracy and instantiate a christian nation”

      • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        Because Republicans have all but sold their souls to Putin, perhaps? At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans suggest selling Alaska to Russia because it’s in US interests, somehow.

        And of course that wouldn’t happen, it’s all base riling posturing but that is the point.

  • TherouxSonfeir@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

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

    But California? The fuck? Good luck with that.

  • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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    5 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.

  • ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world
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    5 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.

  • IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee
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    5 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.