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.”
“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.
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.
If you say so, then Trump is USSA’s Putin.
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.
It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s supposed to make actual Kremlin policy seem sane and moderate to the domestic audience.
They wouldn’t need magic. They’d just need a hamburder puppet President in office.
*hamberder. You give him too much credit.
Not to mention every other citizen is armed
That doesn’t matter at all
Not even a little bit? Okay…
If civilian gun ownership was enough to stop a military then the US would never have gotten a standing military. Like what the 2nd amendment was intended for
Well, it did in the American Revolutionary War. But there hasn’t been much by way of countries seriously looking into invading the US over the centuries.
We do have one instance, though.
In World War I, Germany tried to get Mexico to invade the US, and offered to provide support in annexing part of the US.
Mexico’s leadership had the military examine the proposal. They advised against it. One of the cited rationales for not invading was the widespread gun ownership in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assigned a military commission to assess the feasibility of the Mexican takeover of their former territories contemplated by Germany. The generals concluded that such a war was unwinnable for the following reasons:
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Mexico was in the midst of a civil war, and Carranza’s position was far from secure. (Carranza himself was later assassinated in 1920.) Picking a fight with the United States would have prompted the U.S. to support one of his rivals.
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The United States was far stronger militarily than Mexico was. Even if Mexico’s military forces had been completely united and loyal to a single government, no serious scenario existed under which it could have invaded and won a war against the United States. Indeed, much of Mexico’s military hardware of 1917 reflected only modest upgrades since the Mexican-American War 70 years before, which the U.S. had won.
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The German government’s promises of “generous financial support” were very unreliable. It had already informed Carranza in June 1916 that it could not provide the necessary gold needed to stock a completely independent Mexican national bank. Even if Mexico received financial support, it would still need to purchase arms, ammunition, and other needed war supplies from the ABC nations (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), which would strain relations with them, as explained below.
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Even if by some chance Mexico had the military means to win a conflict against the United States and to reclaim the territories in question, it would have had severe difficulty conquering and pacifying a large English-speaking population which had long enjoyed self-government and was better supplied with arms than were most other civilian populations.
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Other foreign relations were at stake. The ABC nations had organized the Niagara Falls peace conference in 1914 to avoid a full-scale war between the United States and Mexico over the United States occupation of Veracruz. Mexico entering a war against the United States would strain relations with those nations.
But, again, I think that all this misses the point. There isn’t going to be land warfare, much less militia warfare, against Russian land forces. Russia doesn’t have the means to transport forces from Russia to the US. The US has a considerably larger air force and navy, and an invasion fleet is going to run into that in the Pacific before it gets to California.
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No. First you make the inhabitants ask russia for brotherly help. Invitation > invasion.
Well…once they consolidate their claim of Canada it will be easier
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.
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.
Hexbear users are real quiet when posts like this come around.
Be careful, they might show up and start posting gifts and emojis, thus negating everything you say, or any evidence of wrongdoing you may present!
Its totally all media lies and checks notes you being a racist cishet white male, regardless if you are any of those, and therefore your entire worldview is irrelevant and wrong. Oh and if you’re from AmEriKa (the K is important to them, it makes them feel smugly superior) then anything you say is automatically wrong and you’re an imperialist pig who deserves to die. Even if you actively protest against things. Because you aren’t violently rioting.Which they TOTALLY would be doing… Not that their parents would let them out past sunset since teenagers have a curfew.
And even if you agree with them, go kill yourself because you’re probably older than they are and old people killed the world so you are also at fault despite the fact that the modern problems of the world are millenia in the making, centuries of intentional planning, and decades of underhanded subversion by people who died long ago or are old enough to remember the moon landing.
Or just mute them like I do and never have to read another response as they scream pointlessly into the void since lemmy doesn’t hide my posts from them, just theirs from me. Every so often someone will tell me what’s being said but honestly the only thing I care to do when they show up is either pretend they don’t exist or make fun of their insane bullshit.
Dear god, imagine if they called me a Chud and posted pig shit resting on balls. I would be completely devastated, might never recover.
They might even post the glasses emoji face!
Your children’s children will have to walk around knowing they, by extension, have been utterly defeated by someone superior to them!
Isn’t even just hexbear these days. The Genocide Joe crowd posts nonstop anti-Israel, anti-Biden articles, but as soon as a Republican says something like “finish the job” they’re radio silent.
Do we need to actively condemn genocide twice or are you just trying to call us all Russian Shills?
There is the russian shill.
So is MoveOn.org a Russian shill too?
Are the Russians in the room with you?
I am not denying a genocide is going on. I’m tired of the narrative I see where one political party is bad yet there is radio silence about the other side being complicit as well or rooting on the death of Palestinians.
What did you think about “finish the problem” from Trump?
I think Trump is bad. You can have a political position that isn’t team based.
But you cannot have a political position that isn’t team based nor benefits Trump, because the both sides bad argument shows a pretty clear bias in favor of the much much worse side.
That’s because you’re worried about your team.
If you’re worried about either team then you should be voting responsibly against the christofascist racist authoritarian. Nobody is going to benefit from that kind of leader, historically it has been shown to be the end of entire nations, which is exactly what some bad faith arguments here on Lemmy want to happen.
It’s widely accepted that this does not qualify as genocide. Why do people keep on insisting the false narratives?
I would not know, they are all on mutelists … lovely peace and quiet.
I should start doing that. Been mostly lurking after reddit changes. But those people are as bad as some of the reason why it felt like time to leave.
Yeah I would advise throwing the 3 tanky instances on your Blocklist (Hexbear, Lemmygrad, lemmy.ml) and find alternative communities if you subbed to any on these instances (mostly .ml communities).
Then you can block maybe the 10 users you start to recognize for their extremist or depressing views. And you’re golden.
I personally used my client to also mute the Gaza crisis with a small list because that is also just slapfests and verbal diarrhea.
It helps a lot
I would advise not. When you block someone, you cede the floor to them.
It does seem comforting knowing that the hexbear people are such a tiny fringe minority that they’re likely to have very little impact unless they are or become domestic terrorists in any significant number (I could see a few of them suicide-bombing in major cities, coordinated, but they’ll Darwin themselves out of existence eventually without leaving any real impact on this earth.)
I don’t think they can see this post with it being on lemmy.world.
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?
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
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.
In a word, no.
In more words, haha no.
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.
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.
Oh. How will the Pope instruct the court to vote?
“the mean stinky poo-poo man”
This is what you sound like.
Well… maybe if he tried being nicer and didn’t smell quite so fecal, people wouldn’t describe him like that?
He’s obviously a dick, but I feel his own name adequately expresses that at this stage.
And they thought Ukraine was hard to conquer it will be like 1776 every body and her brother killing the invaders
There is a 50/50 chance the MAGA crazies will side with Russia.
My first thought was Putin’s well on the way with Texas and Florida, but California might be a challenge.
I thought those were two of the states before clicking, maybe Idaho as the 3rd.
Bruh if he just asked nicely for Florida he could probably get it
Why dose every one think trump and Russia are friends the steel document was proven to be fake trump hates Russia he probably would decimate there military if given the chance
Maybe because he has expressed his admiration for Putin on more than one occasion, has sworn to pull all support for NATO, which was founded to defend against a Russian threat, around the time of the election the Russians hacked email accounts of prominent Democrats thus helping Trump’s campaign efforts, or because Trump chose to believe Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agency in the matter of Russian influence in the 2016 election, Trump’s national security advisor was forced to resign after he had inappropriate contact with Russia to discuss sanctions then lied about it, and because there is a boatload of circumstantial evidence, like relations his family has had with people close to Russia. Maybe for those reasons or it could be people are just really unfair to poor Mr. Trump.
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.
Like wrestling a pig in the mud
Okay, so Alaska I get. Hawaii, well okay middle of nowhere, strategic location.
But California? The fuck? Good luck with that.
But California? The fuck?
He’s listing the states where Russia has had territorial control at some point. Like, a “we controlled land once, so we can come back and take it” sort of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_North_America
Imperial Russia controlled Alaska prior to the Alaskan Purchase.
They also had three forts in Hawaii, and one fort in California.
Yes I’ve been to an old Russian fort on the coast in Northern California.
But really I’m pretty sure California could defeat Russia
Yes I’ve been to an old Russian fort on the coast in Northern California.
Yep that’s the one. They left because they basically killed all the otters off and the land wasn’t very good farming due to gophers etc.
The Mongols controlled Russia from around 1240 to 1481, a fairly long time. So Mongolia is entitled to the Russian lands.
Well, I’m sorry he has Seller’s Remorse. 🤗
“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.”
OAKLAND — President Donald Trump on Thursday blamed California for its raging wildfires and threatened to withhold federal money, reprising his attacks from previous rounds of catastrophic blazes.
“I see again the forest fires are starting,” he said at a rally in swing-state Pennsylvania. “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
He was invoking his famous comments from 2018, when he visited the remnants of Paradise, a California town that suffered the state’s deadliest and most destructive fire. Back then, he pointed to Finland, claiming its leader said the European “forest nation” had “spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And they don’t have any problem.”
Finnish President Sauli Niinistö later said he told Trump that Finland takes care of its forests but did not say anything about raking, according to CNN.
I’m getting some decidedly conflicting messages here on the relative cleanliness of California and Finland.
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.
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!
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.
You mean something like a third Reich?
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.
Removed by mod
Add Texas and you’ve got a deal.
Not cool, that’s Mexico’s to decide whether it belongs on the trash or not
Not true, it has oil. They would get regime changed within 24 hours of them not being part of the US, and a US territory inside a week.
Throw in Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi and the southern half of Louisiana to smooth out the border.
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
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.
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”
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.
Yeah good luck with that.
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.
FAFO
