Lester Golden
2 min readJul 30, 2023

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"I'm review"?

With Russia imperialist should not be within quotation marks. Here's why:

Putin in July 2021: "Ukraine’s leaders “began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united [Russia and Ukraine], and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation."

Medvedev: “Kyiv is a large Little Russian city within the Russian Empire."

Russia's extractive resource cursed empire was made in Muscovy, not Wall St. Russia isn't a nation as you and I understand it. It is Muscovy's 500 year old ponzi-like empire-building tool.

Since Russia can't run its oil and gas industry without western tech and know-how, it's not just Wall St that is essential for Russia to rejoin the world economy. It will need Equinor, BP, Total, ENI, Halliburton, Chevron, Exxon, Schlumberger, etc. But burned once, they won't soon return without solid guarantees that their fixed assets won't be at risk of seizure. Wall St has nothing to do with this process since the companies that can help Russia develop its oil and gas industry are capital rich enough not to need Wall St.

To rejoin the world and see sanctions lifted Russia will have to pay reparations, send its political, military and media war criminals to the ICC, explicitly recognize EU and NATO member Ukraine's independence, cleanse its propaganda and media machine of genocidal denial of Ukraine's existence and end Moscow's hypercentralized extraction and control of Tatar, Urali and Siberian resources. This isn't just me talking, but Kasparov and Khodorkovsky, who advocate a decentralized parliamentary republic and confederation for Russia. Wall St would have to negotiate deals directly with Yakutia, Sakhalin, Tatarstan, etc. I don't see that as turning them into "domesticated animals". Why do you?

If you don't want another war like this one after a few years of frozen conflict, make this one end in complete and earlier Ukrainian victory by supplying F-16s, ATACMS, cluster munitions (which Russia has already been using).

Defeat on the scale of 1856 in Crimea or 1918 would be sufficient to get Russia incapable of and uninterested in empire.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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