You can use third party cards which are sold for a fraction of a price too. There are a bit of hassle to setup (you need to link an original card and then clone it to a cheap card), but when done they work flawlessly
Citation needed.
Stalin did at one point signal interest in joining NATO, fully aware that the proposal would be rejected; the gesture was largely ironic and intended to expose the alliance’s anti-Soviet character rather than to pursue genuine integration.
Post-Soviet Russia likewise raised the possibility of NATO membership on two occasions—first under Yeltsin and again early in Putin’s presidency. In both cases, the idea was dismissed, even as NATO proceeded to incorporate nearly all former Warsaw Pact members. This asymmetry contributed to the deterioration of Russia–NATO relations. Declassified materials from the U.S. National Archives documenting NATO–Russia talks over the years shed light on the alliance’s consistent reluctance to treat Russia as a potential partner rather than an object of containment.
That said, NATO and Russia were structurally ill-suited for integration from the outset. Russia’s geographic scale, strategic culture, and legacy military doctrine and equipment posed serious obstacles to meaningful interoperability within a U.S.-led alliance. A more stable European security order might have emerged from the creation of a new, inclusive framework after the dissolution of the USSR. Instead, Western states chose to expand and entrench NATO, a decision that effectively marginalized Russia and helped lay the groundwork for today’s confrontation.
> This asymmetry contributed to the deterioration of Russia–NATO relations.
What asymmetry are we talking about here? The Warsaw Pact disintegrated because it was held together by force by the Soviet Union and as that had ceased to exist, the Warsaw Pact had no reason to exist either (ask yourself if you think for example Poland would be in a military alliance with Russia if it could choose freely; the same for Czechoslovakia (invaded 1968-1991) and Hungary (1956)). Maybe if Russia sincerely tried to become part of the Western World, many things would look different now, buth we both know it did not.
> Western states chose to expand and entrench NATO
Well if the russians could once think about other peoples as having free agency it would help them immensely to get out of their eternal (and of course false) victim status. Why exactly do you think the Central European states jumped onto the chance to get into NATO as fast as possible? By whom are they feeling threatened? Of course since at least 2008 (Georgia) everyone knows the feeling was right and Russia will continue mass killings of their neigbours unless they meet a stronger enemy.
>and as that had ceased to exist, the Warsaw Pact had no reason to exist either
It should be mentioned that Russia's attempt at "We don't need NATO, we have our own NATO at home" (CSTO) is hilariously awful and failed to keep the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan just recently.
The Warsaw Pact ceased to exist because it always was a joke and Russia/SU has never had any true desire or ability to protect these other countries... they merely want to discourage them in any way possible from "joining the other team".
Until Russia stops being Russia, they will always be the problem.
If you look at Yeltsin’s presidency and Putin’s first term, both pursued the goal of integrating Russia into the Western world, and to some extent they succeeded. At the same time, both leaders strongly opposed NATO’s expansion eastward. This opposition was rooted in explicit assurances given by Western governments that NATO would not expand, assurances made in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany. Putin’s stance hardened once it became clear that Russia would never be accepted into either the EU or NATO, unlike many other former Soviet states.
You speak of Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors, but overlook Western aggression toward Russia. Russia—and earlier the USSR—was invaded twice in the last century by coalitions of Western powers. Two of the most devastating wars of the twentieth century were fought largely on Russian territory, resulting in the loss of tens of millions of lives. These experiences are often downplayed or ignored in Western historiography, but they remain central to Russian historical memory.
Take Finland as an example. The USSR attacked Finland once, but Finland invaded Soviet territory twice: first by annexing land, and later by participating in mass violence alongside Nazi Germany. Yet popular memory outside Russia tends to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet attack. Given this historical context, it is hardly surprising that Russia remains deeply suspicious of NATO and Western countries—especially considering that, over the past 30 years, NATO members have been involved in numerous wars of aggression.
> If you look at Yeltsin’s presidency and Putin’s first term, both pursued the goal of integrating Russia into the Western world, and to some extent they succeeded.
They succeeded to some extent to integrate Russia into the Western world, but failed or didn't try to actually change Russia. Already in first Putin's term it becomes clear how will the country proceed.
> This opposition was rooted in explicit assurances
No such explicit assurances have ever existed and if someone claims russian politicians have believed some spoken sentences as ratified pacts, they are either dumb or lying. Anyway, Russia also promised in writing to guarantee the territorial integrity and safety of Ukraine (1994), so there is no reason to believe anything they say or write for the foreseeable future.
> You speak of Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors,
For which they never apologised.
> Yet popular memory outside Russia tends to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet attack.
For which they never apologised and annexed Karelia.
And this is exactly why many people say the only good Russian is a dead one. If the country and nation wants to be universally hated, it should proceed exactly like that.
> No such explicit assurances have ever existed and if someone claims russian politicians have believed some spoken sentences as ratified pacts, they are either dumb or lying. Anyway, Russia also promised in writing to guarantee the territorial integrity and safety of Ukraine (1994), so there is no reason to believe anything they say or write for the foreseeable future.
You can look at this issue from both sides. The Budapest Memorandum was exactly that—a memorandum—and it was never ratified by Russia. As such, it carries no more legal weight than the security assurances provided by NATO. Moreover, it was largely the Clinton administration, together with the EU, that pressured Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, since no one wanted the emergence of a new nuclear state in Europe.
> For which they never apologised.
You are also incorrect on the historical point. Russia officially apologised for the Winter War during Yeltsin’s presidency, along with issuing several other apologies for Soviet-era crimes. Finland, by contrast, has never apologised for its own actions, nor does it adequately teach about its own atrocities. Ask the average Finn how Finland acquired Petsamo or about Finland’s role in the siege of Leningrad, and you are unlikely to encounter much regret or acknowledgment of responsibility.
> And this is exactly why many people say the only good Russian is a dead one. If the country and nation wants to be universally hated, it should proceed exactly like that.
> As such, it carries no more legal weight than the security assurances provided by NATO.
There were no 'security assurances provided by NATO', but I also agree any political agreement signed or even ratified by Russia carries zero significance as they do not feel to be bound by it. They only understand force, not dialogue, and as such can't be a part of the civilised world.
> You are also incorrect on the historical point.
I am correct on that, there is no formal apology for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example.
> And that is just sheer racism and speech hate.
That may be, but it's also completely understandable in the face of russian behavior of the past over 100 years, of the russian public indifference to the heinous crimes perpetrated by their army in Ukraine and it is still way better and less racist and hateful that daily murdering Ukrainian children in their sleep.
Correction: it was created to advance own geopolitical goals and harrass unfriendly regimes using human rights abuse as an excuse. So in that sense nothing has fundamentally changed.
Which geopolitical goals was it created for? Certainly not the ones it's being used for right now.
This sort of fallacy, of widening a category such that the initial meaning is lost, and then advancing an argument on that false category, is something I'm seeing a lot more these days in political topics. But I'm not sure I have a name for the fallacy.
It's like people that argue that the US civil wars was "actually" about states' rights and economic differences rather than slavery. It wasn't a war about the concepts of states rights in general, it was about the right of states to do one thing: legalize slavery. It wasn't about the idea of economic differences in general, it was about one specific economic difference: chattel slavery and whether those slaves get paid and have economic freedom.
Not really. The poster you're agreeing with specifically stated that "nothing has fundamentally changed" and that the US has been "using human rights as an excuse". I don't know if you're completely unaware but Trump is definitely not using human rights as an excuse when sanctioning the ICC judges or whoever fits his fancy. In fact, he's not even using international law as an excuse as the term "human rights" actually means something under the UN. That is the change. And it's just as likely he'd do it if it was in his interest but not American interest. That also would be a rather fundamental change.
Sanctions are an economic tool to punish opposition to and advance geopolitical aims of the sanctioning country.
The original poster is absolutely correct in this. Whether the excuse is human rights or something else, the key point being made is that its intention is to advance a geopolitical cause behind an excuse. It doesn’t matter what the excuse is.
I think you and the original poster are being a tad careless in your reading. This article is specifically about sanctioned individuals not countries-- a sanctioned ICC judge who concurred with a very specific ruling. If you want to discuss sanctioning countries you should state explicitly that you're taking a slight tangent because though these topics are very related they are definitly not the same, and vastly different with respect to the magnitude of the practical consequences.
The article specifically states that there are some 15,000 sanctioned individuals, many of which are IS and Al Quaeda members. These actors are often considered non-state terrorists. If you wish to dispute the article's claim that these actors represent the majority of sanctioned individuals feel free to do so, otherwise please explain how much practical pressure sanctioning the rest of the lot-- those compromised mainly from the top brass of authoritarian regimes -- could have effects remotely comparable to sanctioning an entire country composed of millions of people. Those sanctioned individual are also the people least affected by sanctions, since they have direct access to their countrie's financial and natural resources and could care less whether their daughter's visa or mastercard works at that fancy ski resort in the Austrian Alps.
Trump is sanctioning ICC judges because their rulings are complicating his blatant direct personal enchrichment and his family
business's real estate dealings for the "Gazan Riveria", which he wants implemented unopposed. It is just silly to say that this amount of in-your-face direct personal enrichment angle having an oversized impact on American foreign policy is just your regular American geopolitical machinations, as you would have to argue that the USA has always been a banana republic no different than any other.
I think you should probably read a bit more on the history of sanctions, their effect and incentives before calling someone “tad careless”. Your argument basically devolves to semantics about the labelling of who is being sanctioned, vs the impacts.
Look up who the US has sanctioned historically, and what the geopolitical objective was. Someone is always being enriched, question is who.
It’s striking that while many states push citizens toward digital-only public services, almost none provide a state-run email service. Instead, official communication is effectively outsourced to foreign, commercial platforms with uneven privacy records (e.g. Gmail).
If governments are serious about digital sovereignty and data protection, they should operate their own email infrastructure and issue each citizen an official address, much like a social security number. Whether people actually use it or prefer a private alternative should remain a personal choice—but the state shouldn’t depend on third-party platforms as its default communication layer.
It is actually much worse than that. Much like banking, the push for digital government services in many countries has ended up more or less requiring every citizen to own an up-to-date, non-jailbroken iOS or Android device. If you blocked your phone from accessing Apple or Google servers (or if it's 6 years old, a dumb phone or runs GrapheneOS), the support staff will just tell you to walk to your closest Best Buy equivalent and grab the cheapest Android device you can find; in the name of "security" there often is no fallback option, and when there is one it's SMS 2FA which is (understandably) rate limited to three uses per year.
If your phone gets stolen, meanwhile, you may find yourself unable to log into the police's portal for reporting it.
This is something that worries me. I know that the laws/constitution that guarantees the rights of somebody may vary from country to country (and may not even be enforced by the letter), but lets say: All commercial companies will have a ToS, data sharing agreements, etc. You, as a user, i assume is not obligated to agree to that ToS at the expense of not using the service. If a government body requires you to use their service to access basic services (and offers no 'offline' alternative) required by law, are they, by proxy, coercing you to accept a commercial ToS? I would very much like to hear a lawyer opinion on this.
I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.
The Dutch government has one approach to the email service issue, by having a website and app, Berichtenbox, where you can receive official communications. They're regularly extending it to include municipalities as well.
However it's one-way only at the moment, there's no way to use it for two-way communication.
It also requires either a phone or computer that’s increasingly owned by private corporations. The only OS that doesn’t restrict what I can do with it is Linux.
The post was only state run because it was necessary. The Romans and the Sassanians for instance did not provide mail service to their subjects. I think you're big picture is still too small. The world existed fine on private mail carriers, it will in the future to.
I think that companies providing certain basic services like email or messaging should eventually become branches of the government. This is the only way to provide these services with subsidies without enshittification.
How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me.
Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so on. Take any media openly hostile to the state's foreign policy and it will prosecuted no matter the country. Wikileaks, The Intercept, Junge Welt to name a few.
I don't live in the US, but do you think the government determines direction in the media the same way as it does in Russia?
I do get the free speech argument and that the line is thin, but Russian media by large is different from the West: you'll get prosecuted when you start saying the wrong thing.
Yes, this is really my opinion. And unlike yourself, I am well familiar with Russian media first hand and not the distilled version presented by Western propaganda.
It is shocking how openly US planning a war of aggression against Venezuela and the whole civilized world is just fine with it. EU could grow a pair and show the US that this type of behaviour is not accepted. Sanction the fuck out of the US regime, boot off Swift, kick American companies out of the EU market, barren American citizens from travelling to EU. EU can prevent this war, while it is not too late.
While I like the sentiment, we have to be somewhat pragmatic. The sanctions on Russia have had a deep impact on the EU economy, mainly the energy crisis and other connected systemic consequences. Germany and much of central and eastern EU became highly dependent on Russian natural gas over the last 20 years, and higher energy prices in general have been quite harmful to the already precarious industrial and agricultural sectors (high-tech farming as in NL, while quite profitable, is very energy intensive and sensitive to tightening margins).
Most of EU (and UK) is on (or near) recession right now, except for some southern EU countries which are doing surprisingly well, although relative to a long period of hardship after the 2008 crisis. It's not an acute recession, but there's no clear way out of this stagnation on the horizon, and the people are really starting to feel the squeeze.
Of course, the root cause of this is much deeper, the Russia situation was just the spark. EU industry has been complacent for decades, believing that while less competitive on costs and scale we still had the technological edge, which ironically led to severe underinvestment in R&D. And giving up on nuclear is backfiring badly too.
I do think the (shrinking) majority still believes that the (limited) actions against Russia were worthwhile, since they are not threatening sovereignty in general, they are threatening EU's territorial integrity at our doorstep. It is unacceptable, and while it is a heavy price, not retaliating would have much more catastrophic consequences.
But cutting off trade with US over Venezuela? Forget about it, EU's dependency on US is orders of magnitude higher than it was with Russia, it would be absolutely deadly to the EU economy.
The EU is fine with it, because there are no principles in geo-politics. All their hue and cry about Ukraine is also because of their own security, not any virtue. Laughably it was the EU that went along with US plans to deorbit Ukraine from Russia's influence.
The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
You make it sound like it's a bad thing, being the subject of weekly nuclear threats and invasion threats like the EU is is a valid reason on its own to support Ukraine.
Yes, Russian politicians like to voice ideas like that or just nuking EU cities. not sure if those are a weekly occurence, but its happened a couple of times this year, from officials mind you, so I wouldn't be surprised if state-run media or even just cranks that Putin likes to run for-out ideas through have weekly "Russians! We need to overrun the decadent EU" articles run...
The scope of the attacks are entirely different. Putin's imperial adventures are driven by Ruso-dominated pan-slavism, Trump's are driven by oil. Entirely different, just like a tiger shark is different from a tiger. /s
Both also do it to distract from domestic problems with their regimes.
I also wonder why the EU should invest a significant amount of political, economical and hard military power to protect a failing dictatorship?
Make no mistake, the EU is not "fine" with the war in the sense that they will express diplomatic criticism of the US when Trump finally starts his idiotic (and narcissistic, and corrupt, but I already said "Trump") war. They are "fine" with it in the sense that they won't self-implode their collective political careers and perhaps the EU itself by sanctioning the US and destroying the economy of the entire EU for fucking Maduro. Doing that would be idiocy.
And Belarus borders EU countries, but nobody throws a fit if the EU doesn't sanction Putin for making Lukaschenko suck him off. And wouldn't throw a fit if Putin decided his Lapdog needed to go.
Not with this kind of attitude for sure. EU can at least send a strong signal by doing concrete actions. Sanctions against American corporations and individuals, travel restrictions, SWIFT ban. These will make Trump think twice before waging acts of unprovoked aggression.
Trump and the US has never shown to care about this. The current US gov seems fixated on attacking the EU and trying to break it up. If they want to go to war, EU won't be able to stop them. Perhaps if they gift Trump a plane, though.
The EU has consistently been anti-Chavez and anti-Maduro, probably because the corrupt Venezuelan elites who escaped with their stolen millions after Chavez was elected, have been whispering in their ears ever since.
War is bad .. yes very, of course, but look closer at life in Venezuela, it’s really gotten bad for people there.. millions left, just saying: regime change if it works might .. be good?
No. Currently it's still better than in Syria and Libya before their regime change. If a insurrectionist force existed, you would have a point, but even then it doesn't work when too much foreign meddling happens, just look at Libya. But Syria is probably the best example: foreign power meddling made everything worse for years. Foreign power switch target because of October 7th, let free reign to insurgent group, the regime change took what, 8 weeks? And it seems way more stable than expected.
That's blatantly false. Look at the map, Russia has good relations with majority of its neighbours. It is only NATO and its vassals Russia has got sour relations and for that NATO has nobody else to blame than themselves. Had Russia been integrated into European security/economic structures from day one, we wouldn't be in the current mess.
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