The people in donbass have not been ethnically cleansed, that is a big benefit.
REEEEvolution
Russian proxy forces began an insurgency there in 2014.
Words can not describe how much I hate the BBC.
Tbf the russian army was not ready for such a thing in 2014. Likewise the russian economy was not resilient against sanctions by then.
Right after he ate all that ukranian grain, he yearned for some entertainment.
In short: To be considered not poor in China you have to have full access to healthcare, edcuation a relatively decent income, solid housing and so on.
They did not "pat thremselves on the back" for givcing them the "possibility" of making above 1,90 bucks a day.
What you described is ABSOLUTE poverty(not the possibility of making that money, but actually doing so is the definition. Just the possibility would be considered a failure by chinese standards), the form of poverty(also called relative poverty) which China has fully eradicated not too long ago. China defines relative poverty much more broadly.
Then They'd have done no pushups in the last 6 years and thus had atrophied muscles.
Tanks are easy to get! First you have to befriend a tank manufacturer...
Considering he was a anti-communist snitch. Makes sense.
Tankie is a perjorative word, but it refers to those who support authoritarian communism. For instance by denying documented historical events, or support or defend repression from authoritarian regimes.
Multiple problems with this paragraph alone.
- There is no non-authoritarian communism.
- Then most liberals would be "tankies" because they still think the 1928 famine in the ussr was a genocide and the june 4th incident in China was a massacre. Historians widely disagree with both notions.
- Communists do not deny anything, we just care a lot more about the reasons for events to learn from them. This leads us to learn that the liberal, anti-communist naratives of such events is always bs and leads us to much more reasonable discussions about them.
- "Authoritarian" is a meaningless word. All states are authoritarian, because they use their authority and state violence to uphold their laws and defend their existence. Thus there are no "non-authoritarian" states, ergo "authoritarian state" being a trueism. The term is part of the liberal propaganda toolkit, scary terms for states that are not based on liberalism.
- "tankie" refers to britsh communist who supported the intervention of the Warsaw pact to put down the Hungarian counter-revolution. By now it is a mix of a liberal version of "woke/SJW" and red scare "commie", with the intention of both.
sThe countries who joined were to do so anyway should anything happen.
Sweden was always a de facto NATO country, during the cold war the US air force assets in germany should relocate to sweden in case of nuclear exchange and continue fighting from there. Not exactly something a neutral country would agree with, which Sweden pretended to be at that time.
And Finland moved towards NATO after the end of the USSR, the socdems there paved the way and the right wingers afterwards nailed it in, not remotely unexpected.
Likewise switzerland throwing out its neutrality, they were US lapdogs for a while already. With US state visits to switzerland getting away with outright disrespecting the local government. Once a country sinks that deep, it will come when its master calls.
Any other NATO expansion? Nah.
How great NATO is doing is obvious by not one, but two batshit increases of defense spending, first 2% and now 5%! While all NATOcountries have decrepid infrastructure, underfunded education and recessive economies.