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Originally Posted by Slartibartfas
BTW there was a few years ago this argue about Kaliningrad and the EU borders between it and Russia. Hasn't this problem been solved through establishing a corridor or so?
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I think no, maybe they reduce the period of time to get visa to go to another part of Russia through it's countries at the most.
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Originally Posted by Slartibartfas
I am not sure I understood you, can you elaborate?
Are you meaning that our criticism towards your democracy are used by your own state to increase its own influence?
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I'm sorry about my awful English. I mean the criticism from the west is very general and is not concrete. Many people perceive it not as healthy criticism, but as humiliation. In many respects it is so because the west don't understand what to tell and to do, I think.
Our government say: 'look, the West criticize us because we don't want to give them our oil and gas'.
I don't agree with it. But I want to note, that if we have no oil and gas, we would have been not interesting to the West. In 90th years there were as many human right violations in Russia, but the West was deaf to it because our oilfields were open to the West.
We (in Russia) can recognize moods in the west by reading its newspapers. We have two internet sites with translated fresh articles about relationships with Russia from all basic EU, American and some others newspapers (about 15-20 articles per day). Frequently I read there, that the Russia isn't a worth country and it would be better to isolate it from the west. They divide all to black and white instead of analyse and draw logical conclusions. Moreover this leaves an impression, that these journalists has not been in Russia at all. They make theirs materials using articles from another newspapers. Thus authors try to write the most general and abstract.
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Originally Posted by Slartibartfas
No thats not the case I think, but it might not be the first issue we think about when hearing some calling us about failures of the west. You know the list is long, apart from Iraq that is another story, we would think of Afghanistan is pretty fucked up operation.
In Kosovo, Europe did a long time only wait and see. In fact it is still critized for having been too passive for too long. On the other side, the opposition within Europe towards the NATO campaign was not to be underestimated either. Especially the UCK was not viewed as really trustworthy in the public, and that proved right in the end, so the NATO was a fool to support them.
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This operation had very significant influence in consciousness the most people in Russia. Almost all my relatives and friends were disapointed in the West and NATO especially and changed their opinion about. I know in England didn't display on TV destroyed maternity hospital in Belgrad and womens lieing on the flow. Althow I know about more terrible events in our country, I was horrified that time. (At that time our TV was free yet...)
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Originally Posted by Slartibartfas
But I am glad at least that the weapons are silent now at the Balkan. I would not go as far as to claim there is really peace established but I hope the parties down there could reach a compromise. The new consitution of Serbia did not really help this goal.
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Me too. I hope no war in Balkans, but the situation is very difficult and we can expect anything.