Re: BoJo picks a fight with Russia.

I don't call annexing another country or poisoning people propaganda.
Neither should any sensible person IMHO.

Re: BoJo picks a fight with Russia.

Both of which have been done by Americans even in the very recent past.

In industrial quantities.

In any case Crimea has not been annexed. Crimea is Russian.

Re: BoJo picks a fight with Russia.

Thanks for that Zaphod, East European political history was never my strongest subject.

O M G, I dread to think what would happen beyond the running battles in the streets and home-made bombs exploding all over.

Re: BoJo picks a fight with Russia.

You'll have to point out what country the USA has annexed recently and show us where the USA have been accused of covertly poisoning dissenters?

And how come Biden is POTUS when apparently the USA is so bad that Trump could have done a "Putin" and remained in power instead?

I'm not a great fan of either regime, but at least the Yanks make a good pretense of playing fair.
Putin doesn't even bother doing that.

Re: BoJo picks a fight with Russia.

But that's what has happened over the past century in not only the Crimea, but in many former Soviet bloc countries.
In 1900 over a third of Crimeans were descended from Tatars, the largest proportion of the area.
By the last census two thirds were instead descended from Russians; the original peoples have been displaced.

They tried the same tactic in Kazakhstan apparently where a few of my friends are from but failed; after seeing the number of Russians rise from 11% to well over 40% after WWII it has fallen to below 20% now and is still shrinking.
I've been told that the plan was to breed the ethnic minorities out in order to promote Russian influence and although it's only heresay, the evidence by numbers would suggest that to be true.

The result is pretty much what you suggest; the extreme dissatisfaction of the original inhabitants is leading to anti-Russian reactions in places like Ukraine and Georgia, even now.


ETA that of course under Soviet rule any dissent was immediately and forcefully squashed.
What bombs might have come from disaffected citizens wouldn't have been high in number before the force of a dictatorial regime rendered continuation impossible.
Look at Navalny for example and things seem not to have changed very much.

Re: BoJo picks a fight with Russia.

Annexed by business takeover. Poisoning? Probably the worst by airborne atom tests and with the use of defoliants in the case of Vietnam where birth defects resulting from Agent Orange continues to be a huge problem.
Then use of African countries to test pharmaceutical products and on shore such awful abuses of which the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of the better known.

I will take Putin all day long.

Crimea has not been annexed. Crimea IS russian.