Most likely the latter.

Surprising absolutely no one. Based on the behavior of the Kiev regime this was the only logical consequence.

Harden your heart, Putin. Bismillah, give us another 1814.

As far as i see it this is a win-win. Either this gambit fails and the US comes out of this looking weaker than ever with its grip on its vassals diminished, or it succeeds and shows to the world that the US does not have allies but rather only subjects that it keeps in line through bullying. Either way a further nail the coffin of the myth of the liberal "rules based order" upon which US hegemony relies.

At this point the geopolitical situation for the US is like quicksand. If it does nothing it continues to slowly sink, but if it struggles aggressively it only sinks faster.

This article does not endorse Georgia's current ruling party, and neither do we. It is simply pointing out that relations between Georgia and Russia are stabilizing, and that this is a good thing for both countries while at the same time being a blow to the plans of the US empire to drive a wedge between them and turn Georgia into another Ukraine.

Georgia has been a US puppet for decades but it appears that enough people in Georgia have understood that that was not to their advantage and are now seeking to regain their autonomy and adopt a more neutral alignment.

As for the breakaway regions, so long as there is no pressing need for Russia to annex Abkhazia or South Ossetia the status quo is best left as is.

Congratulations to Georgia for narrowly escaping the fate of becoming another Ukraine...for now.

Of course, it's no Hong Kong national security law, but it's a start. At least now the perfidious western agent NGOs will be exposed for what they are. The next step is to actually start to crack down on them.

I think we're still safe on that for now. Not to downplay what i'm sure is an impressive scientific achievement, and admittedly i'm no expert on this subject, but usually these kinds of articles tend to get a little ahead of themselves with the scifi predictions, at least they do in my field. But i appreciate how optimistic the author is.

Apparently it was Germany that told Putin that if he wanted Ukraine to be able to sign the agreement that they had just negotiated he should first pull his troops from Kiev. Like a complete idiot he believed them, and this after they had just spent seven years dicking him around with the Minsk accords that they never had any intention of making Ukraine abide by.

Say what you will about the West but they would never fall for this kind of shit. They wouldn't get fucked over due to being so naive as to believe that their interlocutor was negotiating in good faith, because they themselves never act in good faith, are always lying and looking to screw the other side over and so assume everyone else does too.

Russians are like naive children sometimes. They really want to believe that they are dealing with rational, normal people in the West and they get fucked over for it every time. I hope that the Ukraine saga has finally taught them that the West is incapable of doing anything but lying and cheating and will never ever cease trying to destroy you if you don't bow down to them and let them rob and enslave you.

And i hope China has been paying attention and learning this lesson as well.

This is the wrong way to think about things. The task of communists is not to save capitalism from itself (as the social democrats wish to do) out of fear of fascists taking over. It is to build a disciplined, militant and class conscious revolutionary movement such that when the time comes it is us and not the fascists who will lead the masses. It is a complete waste of your energies to worry about whether capitalism is declining too quickly. If it is declining quickly that just means we have a better opportunity to educate, agitate and organize, taking advantage of the discontent that the decline is causing. The more the collapse accelerates the more we must redouble our efforts.

For comparison, here are the results of the previous election:

My initial thoughts: this is an impressive result if not exactly what we communists would prefer, but it was to be expected that Putin would win, and do so convincingly with even more votes than he got in any previous elections due to the "rally around the flag" effect during a war and things generally going very well for Russia at the moment, both domestically in terms of the economy and geopolitically.

For us as communists we can at least be glad that the Communist Party came in second again, though we would much prefer to see a result like that of 2018 (or better) where the lead over the third place is more convincing. Still it is more than what communist parties get in almost any western country, and at an unusually high voter turnout of around 75% this still means that between 3 and 4 million people voted for communists.

Putin was never going to be defeated but this shows that communists in Russia need to step up their game if they want to continue to have political leverage to use in advancing working class interests. Putin will most likely leave the political scene come the end of this next six year term he just won, and it is necessary that by then the communists will have built up their strength, organizing and winning the trust of the people by fighting for their interests.

Participating in bourgeois electoralism is of course not the most productive avenue for communists to advance our goals but as Lenin explained it should also not be entirely excluded as a method of struggle in the right circumstances. The situation in Russia is currently one in which i believe those circumstances exist, unlike in the West where this is generally a rather pointless endeavor at the moment and our efforts are better spent elsewhere.

Don't mistake this for any kind of humanitarian concession, this is merely yet another step toward the full ethnic cleansing they want to achieve. By making the south of Gaza slightly less unliveable than the north they intend to push all civilians into the south, and when that is done they will simply do the same to the south as they did to the north. If they get away with ethnic cleansing in one half of Gaza they believe they will get away with it in the other half too because they will have set a precedent.

This arrogant and dismissive attitude toward Russia is exactly why this war is happening. Russia did not lie when it warned since 2007 to stop expanding NATO else the entire security situation in Europe would be destabilized. Russia did not lie when it warned that the horrific treatment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine since 2014 needed to stop else there would be serious consequences. People just like you were convinced that they did not need to take Russia's red lines seriously and that the Russians were just bluffing. And yet you continue to dismiss Russia even when they say with all seriousness that their official doctrine allows for use of nuclear weapons in case of an existential threat to the Russian state and nation. The fact that Russia so far has shown incredible restraint in responding to escalations by Ukraine and its western handlers does not mean that their patience is infinite. What exactly do you gain from gambling on nuclear apocalypse?