Sanctions on Russia due to the war in Ukraine (and other bad actors) and whatever the hell orange mussolini is doing are not even remotely close to being a similar situation.
I’ve seen his interviews on YouTube and I’m not sure if he is a Russian asset or just says things contrary to the western narrative. There is a propaganda war.
So what hard evidence that he is working for the Russians?
> Since when is it OK for governments to sanction people when they are lawfully expressing disagreement with Govt policies or views?
When it stops being a disagreement over policy and becomes a paid job for a foreign government to spread as much malicious FUD as possible.
The former commander of Russian ground forces recently gave a long interview in which he said that the Russian army was on the verge of total collapse in the fall of 2022, when Ukrainian forces were pushing them back during the highly successful Kharkiv counteroffensive. Mearsheimer, Sachs, et al played a vital role in spreading FUD and unfounded fears that led to less military support for Ukraine than was needed. As a result, hundreds of thousands more people are dead than might have been had Ukraine been supported properly.
Mearsheimer alone has done more to deny modern weapons to Ukraine than the entire Russian air force could. In terms of ROI, he has been a spectacularly cost-effective propaganda asset. He has the blood of countless people on his hands and deserves to be hanged. But instead, he will kick the bucket due to natural causes in old age, a luxury not afforded to the children who died in their bedrooms under Russian missile attacks that Mearsheimer twisted himself into a pretzel to enable and justify.
This just sounds like scapegoating to disguise lack of political will in the west. Did Mearsheimer have that kind of influence among Western governments?
I guess we're going to see more of such scapegoating as western politicians fail to deliver on their promises on Ukraine. Where's the multinational force that was going to defend Ukraine?
If I recall correctly, Vladimir Chirkin (commander-in-chief of Russian ground forces 2012-2013) said that in the 27 November 2025 interview with Yuri Tamantsev on RBC. I went back to verify it, but the entire interview is now missing from both RBC's website and Tamantsev's YouTube channel as well. Only a reupload of the first segment can be found on another YouTube channel.
> When it stops being a disagreement over policy and becomes a paid job for a foreign government to spread as much malicious FUD as possible.
Where is the evidence for your claim that Mearsheimer and Sachs are being paid to spread malicious FUD?
Are you implying that the officials in charge of providing support for the Ukrainian war effort believed that Mearsheimer and Sachs had access to superior intelligence on Russian's war disposition?
Blaming a YouTube analyst for the slow pace of weapons transfers and not the EU and NATO officials who were actually responsible for said transfers is a spectacular cope. If NATO is getting marching orders from random 3rd parties on YouTube and TV networks then there are a million problems more urgent to address than Mearscheimer's analysis here.
No, the reason for the slow trickle of weapons was because the West got high on their own supply after the successful 2022 offensives and actually thought they could break the Russian line without advanced weaponry. In that way Mearscheimer's message of caution was bang on - Ukraine should have negotiated peace when they had the upper hand, hundreds of thousands of good Ukranian and Russian men would be alive today.
What kind of "peace" would that be? Russia is not interested in peace, or do you have evidence that suggests otherwise?
The peace of Ukraine being neutral? Ukraine was officially neutral in 2014 (law from 2010, pushed by Russia), and see how that went.
So again, what kind of peace are you talking about?
Edit: Let me make the problem very clear:
- Ukraine wants a peace deal where Russia can't invaded again. After their experience with the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the want hard security guarantees, not just Russian words on a piece of paper.
- Russia wants a peace deal where Ukraine's army is limited, and that doesn't allow foreign troops in Ukraine. Something else is unacceptable for them. In other words, a peace deal that is the perfect setup to invade again.
So again, what kind of peace deal are you talking about?
If the people who attacked Ukraine without provocation - just as they attacked other neighbours in other regions - are attempting to bring down a democratically elected regimes across the region, so they can replace them with weak compliant puppets, the "thought crime" becomes straightforward self defence.
It was though. If Russia wanted to annex Ukrainian separatist states, it could have done so before they invaded.
Since it didn't, Ukraine never attacked Russian territory.
Then Ukraine the elected a Jewish person whose mother tongue is Russian and speaks Ukrainian with a slight russian accent. Which threw their 'Nazis who want to kill Russian-speaking Ukrainians' narrative in the trash, and maybe it was lived as a provocation since it made Russian propagandists looks like fools.
(1) It seems unlikely that the Russians would care about Ukraine having a Jewish president. Wikipedia suggests the Nazis killed around 3 Russians for every 2 Jews who died in the Holocaust and the Nazis never got to fully implement the plan [0] where they seriously tried to wipe out Slavic populations. "Nazi" to the Russians presumably means something different than Jew-hater. They don't need ideological tropes like the Americans do to justify why the Nazis were a unique evil - they were in the direct ad explicit Nazi firing line.
> If Russia wanted to annex Ukrainian separatist states, it could have done so before they invaded.
(2) You're not being very clear about your meaning when you say this. The obvious reading to me is that Russia had alternative routes to gain control of Ukrainian separatist states, which seems too weird to be what you mean - if that is the case then that would suggest they are invading because something political provoked them.
? Néo-nazis still hate on all Jews, this didn't change with the Gaza war.
I still think it is hard to call an entire nation neo-nazi, and then have that nation vote for a Jew (especially when that nation have a huge Christian majority.).
Like I said, it made propagandists look like fools.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, they were officially neutral (law from 2010, pushed by Russia). At the time of the invasion, there was neither political nor public will to join NATO.
Another fact: Maidan was not about joining NATO, but having equal economic ties to both Russia and EU.
So can you acknowledge that Russia didn't invade Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
Does it sound weird to you that after Russia's invasion in 2014, Ukraine cancelled their neutral status and wanted to join NATO?
Jaques Baud is not a "mouthpiece". He has never appeared on Russian state TV and has taken great pains to avoid citing Russian sources in his analysis. The problem is that what he has been saying about the Ukraine war (that the war is not winnable and peace should be negotiated as soon as possible) is dangerous as to European leadership.
It's not remotely dangerous to the European leadership.
It is dangerous to EU citizens who are on the receiving end of a campaign to radicalise national governments with far-right Russian-funded puppet regimes which will - clearly, as we can see in the US - be absolutely hostile to existing freedoms.
Honestly I feel like people won't care and the sanctioning helps less and less if it doesn't do the opposite.
They feel like repeatedly the baby was thrown out with the bathwater wrt migration and the like despite popular opinion being very much against those.
Often getting no genuine choice of opposition that wasn't fringe right.
Now I know so many people who will in turn throw out the bathwater containing their national or supranational interests, rule of law (that limited their options), etc.
People who one will struggle to reach across the isle... and it was utterly predictable.
If they don't want far-right Russian puppets to win then they should actually respond to the wants and needs of their voters instead of scolding anyone who goes against their neoliberal warmonger groupthink as "pro-Russian", whatever that means. They're only digging their own graves if they think denying reality will save them.
Or maybe we should stop the propaganda arm of the US fascists distorting the reality around here and inventing needs that our population doesn't actually need so that they are pushed towards far right parties?
Or how about making sure the corrupted US society do something about them messing up the world economy because rich people want to be richer and so they bought their governments through once again their propaganda arms of all the social media and news corporations they bought?
What about the parts where the US would bomb constantly the ME thus making the people living there want to move out. But of course they won't go to the place that bombed them, especially since there's a whole ocean between them so instead they come to us in the Europe. Oh and if it's not bombs, it's global warming anyway, another thing the current US government pushes hard for.
If you insinuate the current Russian govt is related in spirit with the hitlerian regime, please read a history book that wasn't written by cold war obsessed westerners.
If you wanna operate in a market you have to follow said market's rules and regulations, full stop and period. The only ones actively trying to suppress freedom of expression are the bullies and borderline sociopaths currently in the US executive.
If you've ever read Thierry Breton's personal (and public) threats towards Elon Musk you'd understand who the real "bully and borderline sociopath" was.
Breton once threatened Musk simply for hosting an interview with the democratically-elected President of the US on X:
There was this lady who started going to the tanning salon across the street from my place. In 4-5 months her skin had turned from pale white into tanned leather. It was shocking watching this happen.
My english keyboard is broken but the two international keyboards that I have installed are borderline unusable. The keyboard situation has been atrocious for the past couple of versions of iOS but OS26 send it over the cliff.
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