The Western camp has never invented any framework that would let Russia be in it.
What it could offer was: you sit here and sell us cheap oil and gas, while we court all your neighbours to stop associating with you and associate with us instead. But it did not have any meaningful participation format for Russia, only that it should be increasingly lonely. Not to mention stuff like visa waiver or student exchange programmes. In the end even at the best of relations the integration was actually tiny.
When confronted with this, the West will usually deflect and blame it all on Putin, which is also not constructive: This does not offer any plan to a regular Russian, especially seeing how close EU politicians were to Putin at that time and how they did not care if he stays for as many terms as he wanted to.
And yet all of Russias neighbours are now courting China, Kazakhstan especially. And also Russia is content with becoming a vassal gas station for China as long as it gets to play as a faux empire and slaughter both its citizens and its brother nation's citizens in an industrial meat grinder. 5D chess as the youngsters say these days
China is not so dangerous in this regard because it is not appealing.
It has great amount of economic power, but culturally it is very insular, plus the story of Chinese Uighurs, making people (in Central Asia especially) wary of fully embracing the Chinese Way.
Not so with Europe, which is culturally dominant, and many countries around Russia would love to fully embrace the EU, if EU is willing to take effort. But this is shitty deal for Russia since it was never invited to any such schemes and will lose cultural and economic influence. It's also not all rosy for target countries' population, but it's acceptable and Europe can make it look great.
For Russians it will always look that they cut family bonds for sugar daddy, though. That has sufficient stigma that would explain why Russian population still does not mind the war.
Russia has the Snow White's Evil Queen role assigned here, who is uninvited to the party but crashes it. And boy does Russia embraces this role, unfortunately. "5D checkers" is the term.
Tell me. Had russia treated its neighbors well, not genocided them for centuries on end, enslaved and taken liberties from them. Would they then maybe feel different about russia?
Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Baltics, all the Stans. Everyone has been been attacked by russia over the centuries. Centuries before putin was born.
The biggest problem of course is that russia is STILL doing that. Attacked Georgia, attacked Ukraine, is threatening to attack Baltics again.
There is no sign that russia can be trusted to treat it's neighbors well or be a responsible member of a world where human rights are being valued.
This is completely on russia itself, trying to play the victim is not going to work as everyone has tried to accomodate russia. Germans thought that wandel-durch-handel tried to make russia to understand that trade is more profitable than war, but this was proven to be hopelessly naive.
The West should not pretend they wanted Russia in their camp then. Not talking about faults. "Your fault is that I want to eat", as Krylov's wolf said to a lamb.
Russia just wasted at least 15 years on that bullshit that it could productively spend, as you have framed it, genociding and enslaving people. Now have stuff to catch up.
From Russian perspective, everybody is trespassing on our lands. We tried voluntary giving independence to these regions, which belonged to Russia by right, on assumption they respond with gratitude and uphold the rights of Russians and living there and Russian culture. Here they are now, telling tales about how they were genocided and enslaved. Now the prevailing idea is that we should take that independence back whether possible.
One teeny tiny examples, Russian Empire has secured the lands which are now contested Southern Ukraine, from Donetsk to Odessa. These were nomad-raided steppes with barely any population. Russian Empire secured them and let Ukrainians settle these new lands alongside other ethnicities (Greeks, Jews and of course Russians), and just two centuries later, Ukrainians refuse to acknowledge that and seek to forcibly assimilate all other ethnicities there. Now it is obvious that Ukrainian autonomy during the USSR was a costly mistake. They were gifted these lands for settlement and now they tell fairy tales about centuries of genocide. They were permitted to settle there among others and now they have driven everybody else away.
But the situation with Baltic states is in fact even worse. What happened to Baltic Jews? Baltic Germans? Baltic Russians? :))
Russians exterminated them. When Russians invaded in 1939-1940, they abolished Jewish cultural autonomy, closed all Jewish institutions (schools, associations, etc), rounded up Jews into cattle cars and sent them in entire families to die in Siberian wilderness, because they saw wealthy Jews as kulaks and oppressors of the working man. Russians targeted the entire professional class that was capable of running a country (public administrators, lawyers, engineers, doctors, merchants, etc), but because Jews were overrepresented in middle-upper classes, they got hit the hardest. They were about ten times more likely to get victimized by Russians than anyone else.
> Baltic Germans?
Resettled to newly-occupied Poland between late 1939 and early 1940 under agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union. They were allies at the time and had divided Europe in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Russians gave Germans free hands to do what they want with Poland and in return, Germany picked up Baltic Germans from the region (in an action called Umsiedlung) and left the rest for Russians to maul.
> Baltic Russians?
Exterminated during WWII by Russians. For example, one third of the pre-war population of Narva was Russian. Russians systematically destroyed Narva in WWII using the same methods we now see in Ukraine. Not a single habitable building was left. After the war, they banned the few surviving former inhabitants of Narva from returning. Instead, they resettled the area with ethnic Russians. This has caused incredible cultural discontinuity. I just finished reading memoirs of a Russian who grew up there in the 1960s. From his youth, he remembers no old men telling stories to kids "how things used to be". In fact, he knows no-one who had lived there before the war. The entire human (people, traditions, culture) and physical (buildings) history of the place got wiped away and replaced with depressing commie blocks and chauvinistic Russian settlers who are bitter that no-one treats them as liberators.
This is particularly striking considering that as a Hanseatic trading city, Narva had vibrant multiethnic population and immaculately preserved baroque architecture. It was a remarkably beautiful place that Swedes had once considered moving their capital to from Stockholm. Now it's a run-down shithole full of angry and miserable rootless Russians who don't understand where they are and why everyone dislikes them so much.
It's also notable how Baltic Russians came into existence. They were historic minority compromised of refugees who had fled religious persecution in the 17th century Russia. Some things never change.
Some of this is true - but by Soviets, not Russians. I'm not sure why you would conflate the two. Was Stalin Russian? Perhaps Beria? Trotsky? Dzerzhinsky? Lenin? :)
The stupidity of "Russians has occupied Baltics and killed all Russians" will vanish once you call the former the Soviet.
But mostly, it is baltic people themselves who got rid of Jews and helped get rid of Germans, and then after 1990 tried to get rid of Russians too.
> This has caused incredible cultural discontinuity. I just finished reading memoirs of a Russian who grew up there in the 1960s. From his youth, he remembers no old men telling stories to kids "how things used to be". In fact, he knows no-one who had lived there before the war
That's the story of many places past WWII. There was an unprecedented cultural discontinuity. For starters, St. Petersburg is resettled practically anew because almost all of its population either perished in the blockade or was evacuated and was not encouraged to return. Don't get me started on Polish and German resettlements. Why blame Russians for anything here? Russians are the same victims of the war as Baltic people and Jews and Poles and Germans themselves.
> run-down shithole full of angry and miserable rootless Russians who don't understand where they are and why everyone dislikes them so much
Can you perhaps stop disliking your compatriots for who they are, and maybe they will stop treating you as a Nazi who you currently objectively are.
> Some of this is true - but by Soviets, not Russians. I'm not sure why you would conflate the two. Was Stalin Russian? Perhaps Beria? Trotsky? Dzerzhinsky? Lenin?
Whatever possible claims there were along the lines of "Hitler was ackchyually an Austrian", present-day Russians have willingly adopted that legacy instead of denouncing it like Germans, justify it and continue to pursue it further.
> present-day Russians have willingly adopted that legacy
Present-day Woke LGBT socialists from California has adopted that legacy. Russians have no predisposition towards socialism, utopian cults or dictature of minorities. Soviet regime is a branchild of European Social Democracy and it's pathetic how they are trying to frame the victims of this crime for it.
Just ask all these young people from Italy, Spain or Seattle why so many hammer-and-sickles.
I didn't know that "LGBT socialist from California" were the people giving ~70% approval ratings to mass murderers like Stalin in Russian domestic polls and erecting monuments to Lenin in occupied parts of Ukraine.
As Stalin himself has said, "never ask who is doing the voting, ask who is doing the counting".
Most Russian people do not care that much about Stalin since it's all too old and they care much more about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who are much more recent butchers of Russia.
Some people do, but then again, some Italians, French and US campuses also give a lot of shits about people like Trotsky. An absolute majority of humanity are politically clueless, and the worst of them are also opinionated.
Spaniards and Italians, not to mention teenagers in Seattle, have no personal connection with Russian crimes and their ignorance is understandable. They have never lived under Russian control and have no real concept of what it means in practical terms. Russians have not extinguished entire branches of their family trees.
But why should any Russian approve Stalin, spew the same toxic imperialistic view of the world in many different forms like supporting the genocidal war against Ukraine remains a mystery. Germans are not holding military parades under swastikas, erecting monuments to their Führer, telling Jews that Germans suffered the most, harassing and shutting down Holocaust researchers and threatening rest of Europe that if they don't do as told, "we'll repeat it".
In the end, by not taking responsibility for your past and present actions like Germans have done, you will simply live shorter and poorer lives than other peoples of Europe, making endless excuses for your own suffering and the suffering inflicted upon others, while leaders are robbing you blind and partying on megayachts. My hope is that this degenerate russki mir will never reach me.
> Spaniards and Italians, not to mention teenagers in Seattle, have no personal connection with Soviet crimes and their ignorance is understandable. They have never lived under Soviet control and have no real concept of what it means in practical terms. Soviets have not extinguished entire branches of their family trees.
There, I've fixed it for you. But even then, it's not the only game in town. "Democrats" (Yeltsin's band of US loving nomenclature and friends) practically killed or dispersed just as many people as Stalin & company did.
There's a very significant number of monuments devoted to tragedies of Soviet period, in Russia. I'm not even sure Germany would match that. I believe their general approach was to pretend that nothing happened between 1933 and 1945. In short, stop trying to confront other people on their history and first confront yourself on your own history. Which would be?..
> "Democrats" (Yeltsin's band of US loving nomenclature and friends) practically killed or dispersed just as many people as Stalin & company did.
It was your own mismanagement that reached such level by 1990 that the economy was unable to provide even food to the population, forcing people from all social classes to subsistence farming for survival.
The constant passive-aggressive snark towards the Americans is distasteful and ungrateful given how much they helped you then with food aid.
> There's a very significant number of monuments devoted to tragedies of Soviet period, in Russia.
Mostly from 1990s and early 2000s, before Putin began rehabilitation of Stalin and incorporation of Soviet legacy into modern Russia. The monuments are now vanishing at an accelerating pace and incidents like these have become common: https://sakhaday.ru/news/v-yakutske-snesli-pamyatnik-polskim...
> In short, stop trying to confront other people on their history and first confront yourself on your own history.
That's what Europe has done - confronted own history and learned from it, Germans in particular. They do not pretend that nothing happened between 1933 and 1945, far from it. Disagreements are now solved calmly in EU cooperation formats, which have brought unprecedented peace to Europe.
The peace is being violated by Russians, who keep trying to bring back history by sending tanks with hammer-and-sickle flags into foreign countries, to shoot at peaceful people living there.
When will you confront your history and present actions, learn from them, and become a normal country where people are not living in filth and despair?
I'm glad that you have implicitly agreed that Soviet regime wasn't "our own".
> Americans... helped you then with food aid
As you've noted, I grew my potatoes myself and subsisted on them. Why would I be grateful to Americans then? shrug
> living in filth and despair
I wonder when you've last set foot in any Russian city or town, since they're actually quite nice these days. Of course, as they say, a swine will always find filth.
> I'm glad that you have implicitly agreed that Soviet regime wasn't "our own".
Of course it was. You've made it your own by flying its flags, by marching under its banners, by celebrating its dictators, and by continuing its traditions in how you treat domestic population and neighbours alike. Germany, in comparison, has made a clear break with its past and you see nothing like that there.
> As you've noted, I grew my potatoes myself and subsisted on them. Why would I be grateful to Americans then? shrug
The billions from American food aid program stabilized prices and prevented the situation from deteriorating into widespread hunger. Of particular importance was the grain required to feed livestock. I vividly remember newspaper photos of grain ships when they first arrived. The aid program lasted until 2000, and it wasn't the first time for Americans to give food aid to prevent starvation in Russia.
> I wonder when you've last set foot in any Russian city or town, since they're actually quite nice these days.
2019, but since I mentioned Narva earlier, this Varlamov's video is better than any personal anecdote ands sums up very well what I meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSwO7lS5QY In 2014, the EU provided Narva and its Russian counterpart Ivangorod on the other bank of the river 5M EUR to reconstruct the riverbanks in an initiative to improve neighbourly relations. Estonian side built a modern and very popular public space with lighted walkways, open air gyms and playgrounds along the riverbank. On the Russian side, the money got stolen and fishermen continue to sit on piles of rocks between weeds.
And may I remind that Narva in 2024 is a run-down and declining provincial town, that is, nothing spectacular and no "model city" in any way.
All in all, I see no objective reasons why Russians couldn't share the same standard of living as Norwegians, if they hanged their Kremlin rat, dropped the idiotic and violent belief in Russian exceptionalism and xenophobia, and focused on improving life at home one step at a time instead of trying to drag everyone around them down the drain. This too is a Soviet legacy that Russians have adopted and willingly embrace. After losing the war, Germans gave up on their stupid world domination plans. When will Russians do the same?
That wasn't a loss. Russia was never in the western camp.
The "loss" is the loss of the hope that they would become so. I'm not sure how realistic that hope ever was.