The taxi driver just now had no doubts. The war is entirely America's fault and peaceful countries like Romania are dragged into it. Romania has no interests at stake but President Ioannis has pushed Romania into it. Zelensky or rather the shadowy rich men behind him are much to blame.
It all makes money for the American armaments companies.
The (Romanian) lady I dined with thinks the same.
I better say more in order not to be misunderstood.
I don't agree with the drivers who blame America and not Putin for Russia’s invasion, although I agreed with this one completely about Zelensky and the oligarch whose creature he is.
Putin is wholly to blame, but in another way America is also much to blame, if that makes sense.
Causation is complex.
As my friend from last night told me a year ago, America had placed Putin in a lose-lose position.
American mistakes provoked a very dangerous man and America should have known better.
President Obama did know better but President Biden, the foreign policy expert who has been wrong about every foreign policy issue, got it badly wrong.
Is he as bad a president as George W Bush?
He might turn out to be, which is a terrible thought.
You forgot that Trump was the worst ever President.
ReplyDeleteThe worst was Lincoln, responsible for an unnecessary and in my opinion illegal war in which 700,000 died. No-one else is.comparably bad. I thought Trump on the whole very good.
DeleteYou have to see it from Putin’s point of view. What exactly was the US doing meddling in the Ukraine from 2008 onwards — that’s Bush, Obama, and Trump? Why did the US bring down Yanukovich and encourage the Ukraine to join NATO and to persecute its Russians? And why is the US now so desperate to get the Crimea out of the hands of the Russians?
ReplyDeleteWe have only to listen to the mad talk of Victoria Nuland and her followers to see that the US is playing a deep game. It hopes to use the Ukraine not only to keep NATO in business but also to break up Russia, with a view to turning it into a group of good little liberal democracies. It also hopes to prevent any land-based trade routes from China to Europe and to get hold of Sevastopol as a NATO base.
At first sight, the Ukrainians seem mighty foolish to be willing to be made use of in this way, at the cost of maybe half a million lives, or more, and terrifying structural damage. The key to it is that the provinces with a Russian majority have almost all of the country’s industrial and mineral resources. Without them, the rump state will be like the American mid-west, but without the oil — it has the bulk of the population and most of the good farmland, but the jobs are fast disappearing.
Poroshenko and Zelensky tried to drive the Russians out of the country. Putin, on the other hand, wants to drive the Ukrainian nationalists out, never to return. And now that he is clearly winning the war, he is well on the way to succeeding. If the Ukrainian men are allowed to join their women and children in Germany, Britain, the US, as they surely will be, why would they want to stay in a destroyed country? My humble opinion, they will clear off. They are good people and good workers, a hundred times more welcome in Europe than the Afghans and the Somalis.
For anyone with a spirit of adventure, there will be a lot of cheap property in what is left of the Ukraine.
Taxi drivers are the scourge of Romanian society. I've never seen a single occupational group which has as many aggressive, prideful, borderline retarded, spiritually corrupt members as the taxi driving contingent. (I say this independently from their political opinions, which are generally meant to shock and to make them the center of attention). Perhaps soccer hooligans are a similar demographic. Speaking of taxi drivers, they tried to cheat me numerous times in Romania. When I traveled through Ukraine, despite not speaking the language, and in spite of the incredible poverty, I did not get ripped off a single time.
ReplyDeleteNothing could be further from the truth if you use reliable taxi companies.
DeleteI hailed street taxis in both countries.
DeleteThe only time I remember a valuable political opinion from a taxi driver was when one said he will radio all of his taxi buddies and they'll all vote as a bloc for Kelemen Hunor for president, then claim discrimination and get the right to emigrate to the Bahamas. Otherwise it was all BS.
ReplyDelete