this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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There's this documentary that follows a guy who intends to take steroids for his amateur biking competition. He wants to show how easy it would be to test negative while taking PEDs. He needs to find someone who will test his urine and he gets in contact of Russia's anti-doping program director right before their whole program exposes its dope-injected ass in front of the world.
It paints Russia as this very negative, lying, corrupt place with this profoundly illegal and deeply ingrained PED abuse scandal.
Why would some sports scandal have any impact on your perspective in regards to an international armed conflict?
I guess in my mind it was something like "If they're all lying through their teeth about doping in sports, I wonder how much of what Putin was saying about the context for the protection of the Donbas region was hot air and bullshit."
But again, my source is a documentary about sports? I didn't even make it through Putin's speech. I don't know.
The context for the Donbas existed long before Putin ever mentioned it. If anything, Putin did more deflection after they got Crimea and said that the Donbas regions didn't want to defect despite the fact that the Donbas regions were very very interested in going the way of Crimea.
The lie is more that Putin wanted to go to war and is very interested in a conflict with the West. This is clearly not the case, if Putin had wanted war with Ukraine he would have pushed for it immediately after Crimea and taken the Donbas regions while the Ukrianian government was in the middle of a coup and disorganized. The fact is that Ukrianian Nazis and Nazism had been developing under Putin's nose the entire time and he did nothing, it was only when the Russian military convinced him that not only was an attack on the Donbas imminent, that it could continue to roll into Russian territory if it succeeded, and that they could counter it with minimal force and expense that Putin ok'd the war, which is how this whole mess is now bogged down.
But idk what you would expect from a nation who literally threw away their reason for existing, sold themselves to the highest bidder, and when that didn't get them universal acceptance into the international capitalist cult, which is something that any amateur Marxist scholar could have told them would happen, try to make up another reason for having rejected the ideology that made their nation relevant on the international stage. At this point my only prognosis is that Russia is a cursed land and Russians a cursed people, to emulate Western lies and practices but not understand that you have to actually be stupid enough to believe the lie you are telling for it to work effectively.
I feel my perspective broadening as I read this. Treadonme thank you for your incredibly insightful comments on how Russia thinks and benefits from the violence it undertakes. It's of course more complicated than America makes it seem.
i have vague recollection of pre-intervention polling and it was like half
Yeah, as Russia didn't intervene, there were a lot of people who thought they should try to stay as independent oblasts, and not connect themselves up with Russia. Pre-intervention the civil war was still occuring though.