Quote:
Originally Posted by Kolya
USA is far away from Poland. And perhaps a time will come when USA will have its hands full with China and will loose it's interest in Europe. And if Poland doesn't maintain good relations with its immediate neighbors such as Germany and Russia, then it may fall on hard times as it did more than once in its historical past.
Being allied with far away countries is no guarantee of peace and security. Before World War II, Poland was allied with France and Great Britain. And guess what, those far away allies abandoned Poland when it became in their interest to maintain good relations with USSR.
It's the immediate neighbors who matter the most in the long run. And keeping good relations with the them is the best guarantee of peace and security.
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What you are doing is, behind China's back, pointing your finger at China and hope the U.S. will focus its crosshair on China and not Russia. LOL It's just too funny.
Seriously, your threat against Poland is hollow. Just like Germany, Poland is a memeber of NATO and EU. Poland has nothing to fear from Russia because Poles know
Russia speaks loudly but Russia carries a pretty small stick. LOL
Russian Red Army: Russia's Achilles' heel — poor and abused young conscripts drafted, often forcibly, for compulsory military service, to a deeply corrupt officer corps.
Just last month Russian Air Force commander Col.-Gen. Vladimir Mikhailov stunned the Kremlin establishment with a blunt speech. Of the 11,000 young men drafted into the Air Force in 2006, it concluded,
more than 30 percent were "mentally unstable." An additional 10 percent suffered from drug or alcohol problems, while a further 15 percent were deemed ill or malnourished. A quarter of Mikhailov's soldiers never knew their fathers, 3 percent never knew their mothers and 3 percent were orphans. "Many draftees cannot read or write properly," says Ivashov, acknowledging the problems cited by Mikhailov. Many recruits barely know how to drive a car, let alone a sophisticated tank, he adds. "It is ridiculous that we let ignorant soldiers use a T-90 that costs $1 million after only six months of training."
Consider another statistic: that some 89 percent of Russian youths escape the draft, often by paying bribes to recruiting officers or the doctors who certify them for service. Thus only the poorest and the worst-educated end up actually enlisting. "By drafting the dregs of society, we create an illusion that all is well in the military," argues former deputy commander of Russian ground forces Col.-Gen. Eduard Vorobyov.
There's a reason the Army is so wedded to its conscripts. They're a lucrative source of slave labor and bribes. "The Army is a stinking swamp. It has been absolutely degraded, top to bottom," wrote Capt. Viktor Bobrov, commander of a motorized-infantry company near Nizhny Novgorod, in his suicide note in January. "Nobody is responsible for anything. All officers do is collect money from soldiers and their parents; all they think about is how to steal more." Immediately afterward, Bobrov shot himself in the head to avoid embezzlement charges he claimed were concocted by his superiors to cover up their wrongdoing.
Last month the Soldiers' Mothers Committee of St. Petersburg, an NGO defending conscripts' rights, publicized the story of Pvt. Dmitry X, drafted in 2005 to serve in an elite communications unit attached to the Russian Army's northwestern headquarters in St. Petersburg. He thought it would be an easy posting. But within two months of finishing basic training, the 18-year-old learned his real job would be something else: older conscripts, known as dedy, or grandfathers, forced him into working as a male prostitute. "I had to make 1,000 rubles [about $35] every night," says Dmitry in video testimony provided to NEWSWEEK. "If I failed to bring the money, I was beaten." Eventually, Dmitry deserted from his unit and now faces criminal charges. "The Russian Army has nuclear missiles that can destroy human life on earth," says Valentina Melnikova of the Soldiers' Mothers, who has been monitoring Army life since 1989. "But it's an institution in the final stages of decomposition."
1st March 2007, 19:28
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