Many thanks to everyone who chose to donate last time. Some donors were *outrageously* generous, allowing soldiers to purchase new communication equipment, thermal binoculars, etc. A new round of donations on the Ukrainian military and volunteers starts now🧵
1. Fundraising for the PVS-14 night vision monoculars
3. A volunteer group is helping civilians in the frontline areas of Bakhmut and Soledar with food, medicine, etc. They are raising 2450 usd to buy and repair an additional used minibus for delivering aid
PayPal: bogomazovsergej237@gmail.com
4. Dyka Poshta foundation is raising funds for the troops in Bakhmut. You can find their photos and reports on their Twitter @DykaPoshta
7. A bulletproof vest producing workshop. An individual set of a vest + a tactical belt costs $544
Receiver: Serhii Marchenko
SWIFT: FUIBUA2X
IBAN: UA153348510000026207116880688
FIRST UKRAINIAN INTERNATIONAL BANK
Details of payment: NON-COMMERCIAL TRANSFER
The end
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You can see how blessed is America with its geography, if you compare Mississippi with Volga. The largest river in Europe. Easily navigable. No rapids. Slow -> easy travel in both directions. And flowing nowhere
Volga flowing into the endorheic Caspian Sea, it did not connect you with the World Ocean
Color = which sea do the rivers flow into
Dark grey = rivers do not flow into the ocean = relative isolation
Entire Volga/Kama basin including all of Central Russia is dark grey
Waterways being the most important means of communications till the railroad boom, the drainage patterns shaped the historical patterns of development. For example, Volga did not allow for an easy travel to the ocean but it allowed for an easy trip to the Greater Iran and back
During the Ottoman coup of 1913 Enver Bey demanded the Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) Kamil Pasha to write a letter of resignation
- At the suggestion of the military… - Kamil Pasha started
- … and the people, - corrected Enver
- … and the people, - added Kamil
“The People” = an abstraction legitimizing the will of an interest group. Enver just can’t walk around giving orders by the name of sweet himself. No, he will be giving orders by someone else’s name
“The People” will suffice
Someone else could be speaking on behalf of God...
The biggest Western delusion about the regimes like Russian may be that they can be successfully challenged by some sort of “opposition”.
Reality check:
The King is most likely to be successfully challenged by the people who grew rich and powerful on the royal service (not 🧵)
That’s easy to explain. You see, to do anything in the real world, you need resources (financial, administrative, guns), etc. Ideally, to endeavour anything big you should already command a small empire of your own. A large business for example can qualify as a small empire
People with no resources present little to no danger. People with some resources can present some danger. Now a coalition of people with private empires of their own can present a very significant danger, including to the authoritarian regime
This remark may sound as an exaggeration but I find it astute. Russia is more personalist than the (post-Stalin) USSR. It is also in many respects more centralised. For example, a separate Siloviki hierarchy unanswerable to the regional authorities is the post-Soviet innovation
In Russia all the people with guns/badges are answerable only to Moscow. Police, Investigation Committee, Prosecutors, FSB and the National Guard of course. All the law enforcement/warrior cops are 100% centralised, governors have no authority over them
Not the case in the USSR
In the (post-Stalin) USSR nomenklatura hold a tight grip over the ppl with guns and often did it on the regional level. Not only were the regular cops answerable to the regional/republican Party committee, but even the military commanders could be integrated into the latter
With all due respect to Yashin, I think that framing the situation in terms of "Putin vs Russia" dichotomy would be disingenuous. Putin is not a foreign conqueror. He is a legitimate heir, appointed by the previous monarch. Putinism is an organic continuation of Yeltsinism
Once you agree that Putin is not an external force, but rather an organic element of the Russian system, you start seeing overfocusing on Putin's personality ("it's him! he's the only one who's guilty!") as disingenuous. As an attempt to save the system intact, basically
"Ruler vs people" argument can be made for Chechnya, where Kadyrov's rule was imposed by the bloody foreign invasion. Kadyrov is largely an external force for most of his subjects, so his reign is based upon the continuous mass terror. Putin however, is *not* an external force