Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Russia lost some wind in its sails

I knew they'd get them Military confirms death of Russian troops who killed Ukrainian POWs (kyivindependent.com)

I'm on holiday in Europe for 4 days and I've already seen 2 Russian families turn tail and leave an establishment after being refused service for being absolute c*nts.

Let's face it, every nation needs to deport them and refuse entry because maybe then, they'll get the message that their own country is viewed by any normal functioning country, as a piece of ****.

I know Russians and a few Belarussians and it's genuinely time to force them to look in the mirror.

Subtlety does not work on them. It's time to **** up their hollibops

Then why did you say it was nearly 3 years? 2014 is more than 3years ago, right ?

Would this information be better not shared as it represents a competitive advantage or is the PR part the bigger outcome?

in passing, the argument i saw articulated was that the AFD being mainly a working class party are not happy with inks with Russia being degraded, as access to cheap energy from Russia will be gone which means the decimation of German manufacturing, this would hit working class people more.

Please enlighten me why you are sure his views are realistic in the context of why it was necessary to invade a neighboring sovereign country .. I'm goin with the madman /small penis syndrome narrative

It's more or less exactly what he said he wanted to do ,he wants to redraw maps to include former Soviet occupied states under the guise of protecting those independent countries from Western occupation

Well, Putin's logic is "Give me Poland or I'll nuke Warsaw. Give me Germany or I'll nuke Berlin"...and so on. He must be stopped now.

comforting narratives are comforting but for example see below, now its not to say that Putin was blameless , but I believe this was was avoidable if the US didnt treat the globe like their sandbox

Nobody wanted Ukraine in NATO or Europe despite both being raised at least once since the mid1990s ,even now Ukraine are a long way off EU membership and likely NATO too and there is zero guarantees of either happening in the next few years despite calls for both to happen without the full due process every other countries have went through to become a member of either.

But this war is now 10 years old and there was no discussion on Ukraine and NATO in 2014

Why are you posting a link to this absolute horses**t. Ukraine has not got destroyed in spite of putin's best efforts. He has sent his troops to commit mass murder and other war crimes in a country that had an existing treaty agreeing international borders at the pre 2014 lines. He is using some fighting the west narrative to keep hold of power in moskow at the cost not only to innocent Ukrainians but thousands of his own people. Blaming the US for putin's mass murder and socioeconomic destruction of the russian federation is comical.

There are multiple threads at play here.

For starters, at least as Germany is concerned, a lot of the initial support for the AfD came from East Germany, the states that formerly made up the GDR, and there in particular in the parts of Thuringia, Saxony & Saxony-Anhalt that, due to their geographical make-up would have been shielded from western radio & TV broadcasts. As such, post-1945 Soviet indoctrination worked much better there than it would in the areas around Berlin or up in the North, which is generally flat as a board. East German propaganda & education was also a lot more nationalist than you'd expect from a country subscribed to a supposedly internationalist ideology which, coupled with a lack of any proper attempts to process the events & crimes of the nazi years, created a witches brew of anti-western sentiment and nationalist ideology in the southern parts of the GDR, primarily in the post-war generations.

As such, there was a real feeling of betrayal when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and this feeling of betrayal and alienation only increased when, in the years following reunification, Eastern German industrial plants, which had often been built in poorly-developed regions (Just look at places such as Eisenhüttenstadt or Leuna to see what I mean) and were often decades behind in terms of technology, were shut down or laid off vast numbers of their pre-unification work force. At the same time, the successor to the SED (East German Communist Party), the PDS, later Linkspartei or Linke, moved away from its previous martial & nationalist positions, moving more into a traditional far-left political party, alienating a lot of its former members in East Germany. This allowed more extreme parties, first the unabashedly neo-nazi NPD and later the AfD (NPD in suits) to take advantage of a readily-prepared support base, one that had generally good memories of the time when the big brother in Moscow was still on their side.

Then, there are the social aspects. For all the propaganda about freeing the working people, GDR society was surprisingly conservative/reactionary and sealed off. While women were far more common in the workplace in the GDR compared to West Germany, particularly in the first twenty years of the GDR regime, their place in society wasn't all that different than it was in Germany pre-war, with a very clear emphasis on men being the pillars of society. The LGBT scene was actively suppressed, and to a far more extreme degree than in the west, with once again the first twenty years being the worst. And finally, there was basically no immigration. While there was an exchange with fellow socialist countries such as Vietnam, this was highly regimented, almost always tied to major infrastructure projects and for the most part, these foreign nationals were restricted to their own compounds, with only limited cultural exchange events under strict supervision of the party and the Stasi. This stood in stark contrast to the far more liberal situation in West Germany, and the resulting clash of ideologies post-reunification only reinforced the feelings of alienation & betrayal I mentioned earlier.

So when Russia seemingly sorted its troubles out in the early 2000s, coupled with embarking on a decidedly conservative social policy under Putin, this became a welcome point of focus for a significant number of East Germans. Russia was seen as a welcome oasis of calm, a country where the proper order of things was being reestablished. It was also a welcome logistics base for some of the more radical elements of the far-right, with weapons readily available, loads of isolated areas for "training" and local authorities that could easily be bought off with hard currency.

Of course, Russia also expertly played on the collective societal guilt of German society for the crimes committed during WW2, reinforcing the need for reconciliation and positioning a deepening friendship with Russia as the best way to do so, with an accompanying cooling of relations with the US & NATO being positioned as the best way to break out of the circle of post-war guilt. And for a while, this actually worked. Russia was seen as a "natural ally", public service broadcasters ran massive documentary series about Russia, from Kaliningrad to the Urals, highlighting the people and the culture. Hell, they even let a camera team onto a Typhoon class submarine during a routine deterrence patrol. Even my dad, who was an old-school left-wing liberal, was taken in to a certain degree, believing that the "Atlantic Bridge" as it was called in Germany, the close partnership between Western European states and the US, needed to go.

So yeah, it's a complicated situation with no quick & easy answers, as you can see from this rambling reply.

EDIT: There's one more thing that needs to be pointed out, despite the length of my post already: Yes, there was already an active far-right scene in West Germany at the time of reunification. The NPD, which I mentioned before, was a west German party. However, the far-right & neo-nazi scene in the West were generally disorganised, chaotic and impulsive, preferring direct action and violence over working their way through the system. They were also generally cash-strapped, so when the AfD started its rise in the late 2000s, with a well-established party structure and ample financial resources, it was able to not only absorb far-right movements in West Germany, but also weed-out the "undesirable" elements of these movements, while adopting their political positions & outlook. An AfD-internal strategy paper actually stated this in 2016: "We differentiate ourselves from the NPD through our conservative supporters, not through our policies"