/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>484107
Giving Iran nukes seems like the surest way to start a nuclear war with Israel.

>>484114
>Giving Iran nukes seems like the surest way to start a nuclear war with Israel.
Why ?

>>484115
Iran attaining nuclear weapons has been a major Israeli "red line" for decades. It basically makes the formation of Greater Israel impossible by putting it in to nuclear check by Tehran. Russia giving Iran nuclear weapons would very likely cause a nuclear first strike from Israel, consequences be damned.

>>484116
>Iran attaining nuclear weapons has been a major Israeli "red line" for decades.
Israel constantly crosses all the red lines, like bombing hospitals for example, so why would that be a consideration ?

>It basically makes the formation of Greater Israel impossible by putting it in to nuclear check by Tehran.
But "Greater Israel" is already impossible now, and they're already "checked" by Iran. As long as Iran supplies Lebanon with weapons an Israeli invasion is doomed to fail. The only real question is what the US will do in case Iran gets nukes.

>Russia giving Iran nuclear weapons would very likely cause a nuclear first strike from Israel, consequences be damned.
But so far nuclear MAD has worked, and nobody tried that. Israel has a ruling class too and they don't want to be incinerated anymore than any of the others.

Shower thoughts: The rationale for Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine is similar to Indonesia's confrontation with Malaysia in the 1960s, inbthat Malaysia and Ukraine are both feared to be used by Western countries as launchpad countries for further incursions and eventual destabilization.

>>484121
>But so far nuclear MAD has worked,
Lmao do you expect this to last forever?

>>484184
No that comparison doesn't work. The primary conflict is a geo-political power-struggle between Russia and the US/Nato. Ukraine is mainly the grass that got trampled when two giants had a tussle.

Ukraine's mistake was not upholding geo-political neutrality, and dividing their country by making the population that lived in the eastern half second class citizens.

>>484186
>Lmao do you expect this to last forever?
No eventually we find a technology that negates nuclear weapons.

You are implying that Israel wants to use nukes unless they get territorial concession from Lebanon and then probably more after that. So nuclear first-strike aggression. I understand that the British empire intended for Israel to become some kind of beach-head that would eventually expand until it has subjugated most of the middle east, bringing it under total colonial controle of the B-empire. They baked the imperative for territorial expansion into Isreal's system.

But Israel can't act on that, it's not the 19 century anymore. The middle east is industrialized, they have greater capacity to produce weapons than what existed during WW2, and they already have stockpiled multiples of the fire-power that was used during WW2. Project "Greater Israel" would turn Israel into a post-apocalyptic grave-yard.

It's not an option regardless how the nuclear politics play out. Iran getting a nuke doesn't change anything with regards to the impossibility of "Greater Israel".

>>484196
>No eventually we find a technology that negates nuclear weapons.
This is hopelessly naive. Nuclear weapons unleash the power of stars on Earth. The prospect of the obliteration of civilization is by far the more likely outcome. Whatever weapon may someday supercede nukes is likely to be even more threatening to the future of humanity. Our counter to one of the most significant forces in the universe can only be the establishment of peace on Earth.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/09/ukraine-sitrep-end-of-the-kursk-incursion-long-range-missiles-ending-the-war.html

>The Ukrainian incursion into the Russian Kursk oblast is coming to an end.

>The Ukrainian command had sent its best troops and equipment into the area. It had even pushed its last motorized reserves into the operation. Last week it reinforced the contingent. But four weeks of steady Russian bombing and artillery attacks have taken their toll.

>Whatever the aim of the incursion was has not been achieved. It created a short sugar-high in Ukrainian morale but that has already dissipated.

>The price was high. Half of the troops and material invested in the incursion are now gone.

>Russia seems to believe that there is not much more for it to gain from this trap and started to shut it down. Yesterday a fast attack by Russian Marines and paratroopers cleared ten towns and hamlets of Ukrainian forces. Today at least three additional towns were liberated.

>Most of the tanks and armored fighting vehicles the Ukrainians had brought to the fight are gone. They will have to retreat in whatever vehicle they may find. This while being under steady bombardment. In two or three weeks the Ukrainians who survive will likely be back inside of their borders.

>U.S. Secretary of State Blinken is in Kiev today. He will likely inform the Ukrainians that they will now be allowed to use U.S. weapons, especially longer range missiles, against targets in Russia.

>There are two questions:
- How many U.S. missiles with longer reach does Ukraine still have?
- How many military targets are there left in Russia that have not yet been evacuated or have not received additional protection?

>I believe that both of those numbers are low.

>There was a fight within the Biden administration about the issues. The Pentagon was reportedly against allowing Ukraine to do such. The generals know what Russia can do and fear that it will retaliate. The warmongers in the State Department though seem to have won the discussion.

>But it is the Pentagon that will, or will not, carry out any resupply. The Ukrainians wont get any additional missiles if the generals are determined to block those.

>The Wall Street Journal reports about pressure on Ukraine to think of an endgame:

< Some European diplomats say Ukraine needs to be more realistic in its wartime aims. That could help Western officials advocate to their respective voters the need to funnel arms and aid to the country.
…
< Senior European officials say Kyiv has been told that a full Ukrainian victory would require the West to provide hundreds of billions of dollars worth of support, something neither Washington nor Europe can realistically do.

>Zelenski will have to present a Plan B, something that is more realistic than his current uncompromising stand on negotiations. For any ceasefire or peace Ukraine will have to give up on land, on quite a lot of it, and will have to fulfill additional conditions.

>Should Zelenski be unable to come to such a solution someone else will be found to take up his role.

>>484214
>This is hopelessly naive.
Well there already is a theoretical physics proposal on how this could be done
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0305062.pdf
>Whatever weapon may someday supercede nukes is likely to be even more threatening to the future of humanity.
The proposed mechanism i linked to above, is relatively harmless.

In the not so distant future, nukes as a strategic deterrent could be replaced by kinetic impact weapons that store all their energy by moving wicked fast. Those have no radioactive fallout, do not level entire cities while still doing more damage to a relatively limited target area. They achieve their deterrence effect because
- the political penalty for using it is low, because it won't kill hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
- it does have the power to vaporize anything relevant to military.

>Our counter
>the establishment of peace on Earth.
Sure, but going after anti-weapon technology might still be worth it.

>>484217
Like Putin said years ago, AGi is gonna make all this moot. The fact that the SMO blindsided so many informed people always suggested to me that there were hidden reasons for it. Preventing an insurmountable US lead over BRICS in AI could be one reason. Yes, I'm obsessed with this shit right now because all the big brains are also obsessed.

>>484249
>Like Putin said years ago, AGi is gonna make all this moot.
Seems odd, can you link to that statement ?

>The fact that the SMO blindsided so many informed people always suggested to me that there were hidden reasons for it.
Most people didn't see it coming because they didn't get any relevant information. The only people who predicted it were the intelligence guys and nobody trusts them anymore after they lied about the weapons of mass destruction to create a false pretext for the war in Iraq.

>Preventing an insurmountable US lead over BRICS in AI could be one reason.
But the US's AI sector was not affected by the war in Ukraine. And it's not like BRICS doesn't have countries that can build computers. The Chinese are almost on par with the US, and the Russians do have some domestic chip and software production, even if it's not very advanced at present.

>Yes, I'm obsessed with this shit right now because all the big brains are also obsessed.
The AI stuff sure is fancy, but the level of hype that ensued was somewhat exaggerating what this stuff can do. People got carried away, just a little bit.

Well lads after over a week in suspense, the Big Z just release his plan for the Big V. Are you ready for it? It's let Ukraine into NATO pls.

>>484360
yeah seems like all the "off-brand fascism"" regimes do tend to come up with the same solution for their unwinnable wars.

Getting the US to set off WW3.

>>484249
You dumb Germanic faggots know nothing about intelligence or artifices of any kind. You really are an inferior race. I pray some day the world sees yuur filthy race as a disease to be wiped out. My sides, the stupidity and chronic backstabbing, for a shitty little country that should have been taken down after 1914 for letting that shit continue.

Anyway this fantasy scenario is peak retarded ideology. Complete opposite of reality. BRICS is literally the imperial blueprint. These countries all hate each other, with Brazil and South Africa being rubber stamps for the empire and having no say whatsoever that isn't commanded from London without even a pretense that they have a "national interest" in this imaginary alliance… which is fine for them because if you told them BRICS was this super-alliance, they'd wonder what you were smoking. This is the vehicle for the continued demolition of nations once the US is no longer available to be the muscle for the project. You are immense fags for cheering it on.

>>484368
>BRICS is literally the imperial blueprint

the imperial pattern has 3 main features, financial dominance, military dominance, and imperial division of industry

Their financial project is not replicating the imperial-currency dominance pattern. They have this intermediary currency for trade between nations that is locked to a basket of goods (think of this like currency locked to gold, except that it is now lots of different commodities), it will not re-create the typical imperial finance structures. I would classify this as a blocking mechanism that prevents any of the Brics countries from establishing their national currency as the one everybody has to use for trade.

Potential candidates for military dominance in Brics could be either Russia or China. At the moment we're not seeing either expanding as in creating a global network of military bases. (Which has been the pattern for every empire in history so far)

Now for the imperial division of industry, one can definitely see some of that happening in Brics. There is resource extraction going on in some countries while the higher value-add processes in the industrial chain are happening mainly in other countries. However there are no indications of restricted development, as in one country imposing on another what kind of industry it can have.
Sofar we see Africa and South America functioning as low-value add supplies for China, but we're not seeing China doing anything to prevent these countries from climbing up the value add latter to industries higher in the industrial chain.

The Russians have been helping other countries in Brics to level up domestic military technology and Chinese have been helping with industrial infrastructure. That's also something that i haven't seen any previous empire do.

At the very least there are people trying to build something else that is not shaped like an empire. Whether these people succeed, i can't really say. But it would be wrong to dismiss their efforts. At least at the moment that tendency seems to be in the ascendance.

Where do you boyos think Z-Lensky is gonna setup his government-in-exile? Brussels? Miami?

>>484666
Maybe they'll turn that into a TV series called egZiled and the Lensky can go back to his roots

Yeltsin would have handled it differently and that's the tea 💅💅☕ ☕

>>484765
Yeltsin was kind of a traitor, but I doubt any Russian leadership would be able to yield Ukraine to Nato. Strategical realities of that type transcend political differences.

World Famous Actor Zelensky's latest stunt is to assert that North Korea has been sending soldiers to support the Russian military. I'm trying to think of the demographic this utterly idiotic assertion is appealing to. There are some exceptionally uninformed neocons around Western power lately, so drunk on their own stupid ideology that they proudly refuse actual information about their geopolitical adversaries, but this is exceptionally dumb even for them.

>>485012
The DPRK might have send guest-workers to Russia. And since the neocons suffer from reality-impairment they might have confuse that with troop deployments.

I'm not surprised. Russia had been announcing a mutual defense treaty with North Korea for a long time.

Apparently Zelensky just gave a stupifying speech to the Ukrainian parliament arguing that if NATO doesn't come in and fight for Ukraine they're going to pursue nuclear weapons. NATO-aligned media of course doesn't wanna cover it.

Remember Zelensky's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2022 implying the same thing was the final straw that prompted the Russian invasion.

>>485078
It really puts the attack in Kursk (where some tactical nuclear warheads are stored) in a new light.

>>485078
he could possibly get nukes from Israel, he's turning Ukraine into the 2nd Khazar reich anyways

usa could also just give him nukes and say they didn't

>>485078
>Zelensky just gave a stupifying speech
>if NATO doesn't come in and fight for Ukraine they're going to pursue nuclear weapons.
I wonder if this wasn't just an empty bluff, in order to get Nato troops. They could probably do it if they had years to a decade. But in time to turn around the current conflict. Not a chance.

>NATO-aligned media of course doesn't wanna cover it.
yeah they're not covering him when he goes too far off script, unhinged nuclear rants definitely qualify as that.

>Remember Zelensky's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2022 implying the same thing was the final straw
Yeah i remember, but why did he talk nukes at Russia's doorstep at that point in time ?


>>485080
>he could possibly get nukes from Israel
>usa could also just give him nukes
No the Russians would almost certainly detect it and interdict the transport, all the military hardware for doing that in or around Ukraine is already in full battle-mode. It would make a massive radioactive fallout contamination zone where ever the transport was when the Russians knock it out. Think a lot worse than Chernobyl.

Consider the worldwide ramifications, the Russians would retaliate by also doing nuclear proliferation. Arming Israel's or the US' enemies with nukes. Considering how many enemies Israel or the US has, how vast the area is that would require guarding, it might not be so easy to block that. It's much easier for the Russians to block nukes from going into Ukraine.

>say they didn't
nope forensic stuff like isotope analysis will tell you exactly who done it.

>>485081
What terrible thing do they think is going to happen if the war ends with Putin controlling all of Ukraine? Apart from Zelensky losing his $millions / year job, that would obviously be a tragedy to the whole human race.

>>485012
Apparently it's RAND disinfo

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/10/ukraine-hyped-threat-of-north-korean-soldiers-expands.html

>At the time of writing the above I did not know that the idea for this campaign came from RAND, the Pentagon's think tank which often proposes strategic ideas. In a commentary about Russian/North Korean and Chinese cooperation published on October 11, three days before the start of Zelenski's campaign, a RAND analyst wrote:

< What Should the United States Do?

< Given the differences in the objectives of Russia, China, and North Korea, the United States should be mounting major information operations against these three countries to highlight their differences and fuel distrust among them. Doing so would increase the likelihood of decoupling at least some of their partnerships. Some examples of potential information operations seem obvious.
…
< Information operations are also possible against Russia and North Korea.
…
< [T]he United States should recognize that North Korean military advisors are supporting Russian use of North Korean military supplies in occupied areas of Ukraine.
…
< The South Korean Defense Minister has said that North Korea will likely send more of its troops to support Russia, probably on the battlefield. Given Russian attitudes, those troops may well serve as cannon fodder. The North Korean elites need to hear what Kim may do to their sons.
…
< This new cooperation between Russia and North Korea is hardly a signal of a budding long-term alliance and U.S. information campaigns could help speed its demise.

>>485078
Sauce?

>>485080
>say they didn't
The best route for the US would be to give him nukes and say they did.
Or not give him nukes, but make it look like they did.
The optic of Zelenskyy having nukes would be great for ending the war on terms which don't result in Ukraine entirely under permanent military occupation… which is exactly why the US would never do any of this. Ending the war in Ukraine is bad for business.

>>485084
Where's this?

>>485085
US loses access to a bunch of natural resources/can't sell as many toys.
From a Ukrainian POV, it would still be bad though. It would end the war as we know it, but it would also result in decades of permanent low-intensity conflict. The US didn't just make Ukrainian nationalism out of thin air; when the US stops arming & exploiting it, it won't mean it automatically goes away, especially not after years of a brutal war.

>>485084
Can't say for sure but that doesn't look nuclear, just like a really big chemical detonation.

The mushroom shape happens because of rising gases, and large chemical detonations can reach high enough energy levels where they produce this effect too. Maybe this was some ammunition/fuel depot.

There isn't any recent controle footage of nuclear detonations to compare it too, obviously, but this just doesn't look bright enough, nuclear creates a lot of light. And you'd expect to see some artifacts from gamma and x rays hitting the camera sensor, like little dots or something. And there seems to be vegetation, that would be on fire because nuclear kicks out a lot off radiant heat too.

>>485085
>What terrible thing do they think is going to happen if the war ends with Putin controlling all of Ukraine?
For the proles in the west it might be beneficial, because it would mean the fighting ends and there's one less battle to burn public funding on.
For the small and medium capitalists it might also have an upside because they realize their profits in the consumer commodity market. Which always shrinks when military spending goes up.
For the big imperial capitalists it's obviously going to be a loss because they could not expand into Ukraine to loot resources and super-exploit the population.

>>485096
>From a Ukrainian POV, it would still be bad though. It would end the war as we know it, but it would also result in decades of permanent low-intensity conflict.
This has always happened during the various US occupations, but i'm not sure if that logic applies here.

The US primarily bombs from the air, and that means all the fighters can hide in holes, and wait out the air-campaign, and then make an insurgency afterwards.

The Russians fought an attrition ground war, that is a different beast. I don't think there would be many "ukro-rebel-fighters" left over to make an insurgency, when this is done. The Russians will probably go after the Bandera types, because they consider that as unfinished business from WW2.

In case you meant it as a power-vacuum causing a struggle for power and a civil war. That can happen, but Ukraine likely isn't going to go that way. It's located in a strategic position between big power blocks, so it's very likely that as soon as one government falls another one gets installed right away. Ukraine might get carved up and then there could be multiple new governments.

>>485100
>For the big imperial capitalists it's obviously going to be a loss because they could not expand into Ukraine to loot resources and super-exploit the population.
Why didn't they loot and "super-exploit" Ukraine before the war started then? They are never going to take back the lost land it is obvious they want to war to continue because the war itself is where the profit is.

>>485105
>Why didn't they loot and "super-exploit" Ukraine before the war started then?
Imperial capital isn't actually that potent by it self, if they have to compete with other capitalists they're not getting imperial super-profits, only regular profits. They needed the Ukrainian state to enforce imperial monopolies and repress the population. The Ukrainian state didn't go for that, they tried to make economic deals with Russian capitalists and a bunch of others who would settle for regular profits.

That's when the regime change program started. Bandera-fascism was basically attempting to become a comprador-elite with enforcer-goons that would divide the population into a small-ish section of people who would be exempt from super-exploitation in exchange for repressing the rest of the population. That's the purpose of all the discrimination shit along religious and ethnic lines. All the shelling of residential areas and so on. That's why you get parts in Eastern Ukraine splitting off like Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. That's them saying fuck that we're not yours to sell out.

>They are never going to take back the lost land it is obvious they want to war to continue because the war itself is where the profit is.
They probably genuinely thought that the sanctions-squeeze plus the military-expenses would force Russia to yield Ukraine and eventually cause Russia to balkanize. That's why they did provoke a major escalation into the realm of big military hard-power, because they thought they were going to force another neo-liberal shock-doctrine on Russia and make bank like in the 1990s.
The war-profits they are making now is just an internal wealth transfer in the west, they're not bringing in any new wealth from the outside. They are not just harming western workers with that, they're also killing the majority of small and medium capitalists. That's not a viable system, that's the system eating it self.

>>485108
>That's when the regime change program started. Bandera-fascism was basically attempting to become a comprador-elite with enforcer-goons that would divide the population into a small-ish section of people who would be exempt from super-exploitation in exchange for repressing the rest of the population. That's the purpose of all the discrimination shit along religious and ethnic lines. All the shelling of residential areas and so on. That's why you get parts in Eastern Ukraine splitting off like Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. That's them saying fuck that we're not yours to sell out.
You're just making things up. The east broke away after the president they voted for was overthrown and replaced with a pro-NATO/pro-EU alternative in 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Donbas_status_referendums

>That's not a viable system, that's the system eating it self.
They've been doing it since WW2. Clearly the system is working for someone.

>>485109
>The east broke away after the president they voted for was overthrown and replaced with a pro-NATO/pro-EU alternative in 2014.
Yes the guy that was overthrown tried to make trade agreements with Russia and others. Which meant that Ukraine was trying to play investors from all sides against each other to get a good deal, hence negating the potential for locking in an imperial monopoly. That's why he was overthrown.

>You're just making things up.
Dude we mostly agree.

>They've been doing it since WW2. Clearly the system is working for someone.
Yeah but it seems different now.

They made bad imperial bets before, but on the hole imperialism always payed off, mind you not for the working class, but for the capitalists. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think they made an imperial deficit because of the Ukraine quagmire. All the imperial stuff they did before never had a clear and direct negative impact on the domestic economy in the west, there only were minor disturbances. This time it clearly did. You can clearly see it, they activated the sanctions against Russia and with some delay as the effects work their way through the economic networks, it impacts on the western domestic economy with significant damage. I think they planned that looting Ukraine's resources would more than offset this. Some of the strategy papers i've seen even planned for a broken up Russia being forced into selling off assets for cheap. And that clearly never happened.

>>485109
>You're just making things up.
<cites glowpedia
lmao

>>485111
>Some of the strategy papers i've seen even planned for a broken up Russia being forced into selling off assets for cheap.

Can you link these if available? I'd like to read them.

>>485108
>They probably genuinely thought that the sanctions-squeeze plus the military-expenses would force Russia to yield Ukraine and eventually cause Russia to balkanize.

Most likely, yeah. Washington policy-makers are universally pig-ignorant as a rule, and they get their information from either lobbyists or ngos. The "common wisdom" leading up to this conflict was that Russia is just a gas station with nukes. Factor in also that whatever other information they're getting is coming from the CIA and their Ukrainian counterparts and you're going to get this distorted picture of Russian serfs yearning to breath free beneath Putin's boot heel.

It's the same sort of delusional shit that convinced the Americans they'd be greeted as liberators when they invaded Iraq.

Dniper by Christmas

Is this stupid war over yet? What do the Ukrainians even have left?

>>485541
All over but the dyin

Is there any truth to reports of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russians? I've heard mixed things wrt whether there are actually any NKers fighting or if they're just participating in training exercises. It sounds weird given the Russians already have an advantage in terms of troop numbers, but it could be legit, and it's possible that being too close to communities like this has made me less receptive to the occasional truth in western propaganda - sometimes they're right, but in this case I don't know.

>>485594
In Kursk.

>>485594
Russia and the DPRK have something like a mutual defense pact, not exactly but similar, can't remember what's it called. So like >>485595 said it's plausible that DPRK fighters could help with defense in Kursk.

This mutual defense thing is pretty recent tho, so it's perhaps more likely that they've just started out doing military cooperation training. You know overcome language barriers, find ways to harmonize military doctrines and so on.

There is another thing, the DPRK has a stupendously massive standing army, and most of those soldiers are also part of something like engineering corps, that build stuff. To make it economically viable to have such a large army.

It's also somewhat likely that the DPRK has "lend" them as labor supply to Russia. For the DPRK that means they can fill up their long term food reserves while all those mouths are eating Russian food, and they probably get industrial and military development in return. The Russians get temporary labor-power to fill the gap caused by all the workers that signed up for military deployment in Ukraine.

The DPRK lacks arable land and as a result their food security is rather tenuous, and sending people away is better than starving them. On the order of 10+ years ago they send workers to Poland where they worked industrial jobs for the parts-supply industry, they used to send workers to the Soviet Union also, so this is not unusual.

The mainstream media has picked up this story because they're looking for cope to explain away Russia's ability to withstand the "Nato proxy pressure" and to maintain the exaggeration-lie about the number of Russian battle-field losses, which in reality likely are much lower than reported in mainstream media.

Another aspect to consider is, whose initiative this would have been. The DPRK knows how hard it gets when there's no "big-power-friend" from the "dark times" in the 1990s, so if any of these rumors prove true, it's somewhat likely that the DPRK would have been eager to prove to the Russians they're good for it.

>the occasional truth in western propaganda
Yeah that degenerated alot.

It used to be that what they said was factually true (for the most part) but it got presented with heavy spin and intense bias. It was possible to figure out how to account for spin and bias (like undoing it in your head) and gain a reasonably realistic understanding of what happened, as long as you looked at enough other sources to get the facts they omitted.

Now they make shit up quite frequently or invert reality by 180°. It's gotten very mentally exhausting parsing what they say. Especially the recent tendency where accusations tend to be confessions and proclaimed victims are perpetrators. People turn away from this, not primarily because of ideological differences, but rather because it's like deciphering a really tedious riddle. That shit requires mental labor.

>>485594
Definitely the most retarded piece of neocon war propaganda we've heard in a while.

Uh oh, looks like World Famous Actor Zelensky is finally gonna be out of the job soon. Neocon rags like The Economist are talking about Ukraine elections scheduled for 2025, with America's favored puppet Valery Zaluzhny "polling well" against Zelensky.

https://archive.is/Kce28

Guess he played his cards wrong when he threatened a few weeks ago to blackmail the US by pursuing nuclear weapons if they stopped sending endless military support. Turns out the West has its own threshold for nuclear power they can't control, much like his statement at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 finally prompted the Russian invasion.

The big question for the Z-man is gonna be whether a spook agency will have any sympathy after they've finished using him and have any willingness to abscond him out of Ukraine to the safety of some Western asylum, or whether they'll leave him out to dry and presumably hanging from a lamppost in Kiev.

>>485703
>Turns out the West has its own threshold for nuclear power they can't control,
Maybe, although the Russians probably gained some leverage because they're exerting a moderating influence on Iran when it comes to nukes.

>Ukraine elections scheduled for 2025
I'm curious about how that's going to go.
You know with the US trying to install a new client regime and the Russian intending to purge the Banderites.