Don't you know that the US has jurisdiction on every square centimeter of this planet? That's just how the international rules based order works. The US makes the law and everyone except the US has to obey it. Anyone who disagrees is an authoritarian terrorist dictator and a threat to democracy and the free world.

This isn't about geopolitics

This is about geopolitics, that's exactly the point of the article. You seem very fixated on this one individual but there are larger forces at play and there is a bigger geopolitical context that this fits into.

If bourgeois interests that once supported Georgia's submission to US diktat and aggressive anti-Russian policies are now turning in a different direction and in doing so are daring to draw the ire of the US empire that is a sign of which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

It means that something has fundamentally changed in the global balance of power and various actors around the world are reorienting according to what they perceive as being in their best interest.

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.

Pathetic. But what can you expect? Vassal states are gonna vassal.

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.

Europeans spend most of their time negotiating and talking among themselves and with their "allies" like the US. They behave as though the world outside of the West doesn't matter or even doesn't exist. They pat each other on the back, tell each other how smart they are, they come to agreements among themselves about how the world should be, announce it to the world and are surprised and shocked when the rest of the world is not impressed or interested and does not want to go along with their "genius ideas". In effect what they do is not diplomacy but a big circlejerk.

And they don't understand why this behavior is alienating the world and because they don't understand it they are getting more and more angry. They live in the ultimate self-absorbed bubble. At least the US due to the fact that it is an empire is forced to interact with and at least try and understand the rest of the world, if only to devise plans to better dominate it.

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?

The US-Saudi alliance is the keystone of the petrodollar, if Russia and China manage (with a little help from the US self-sabotaging by alienating most of the world with sanctions overreach and bad diplomacy that is perceived as disrespectful and bullying) to rip Saudi Arabia away from Washington, even just partly, that could snowball into the entire structure of US global financial dominance collapsing. All it takes is for the Saudis to start selling their oil in regional currencies instead of the dollar. Of course being in BRICS is not exclusive with having good ties to the US, at least on the surface, that's why it's so appealing to a lot of countries. After all, India was able to be recruited to the so-called "Quad" and be in BRICS at the same time. But it makes it much harder for the imperialists to drive wedges between its members and isolate individual countries that it decides to target.