Actually it did change. The life expectancy plummeted dramatically during the 90s after the collapse of the USSR and is still recovering, and the whole ideology of the government has shifted. It is a completely different country to what it was when the KGB was a thing.
Do you live there? If not, then you only know what information is fed to the public. The thing is, the information we have, is curated to appear better than it actually is.
Lemmy is showing another year old post, but I actually met the person who drafted the letter at a bar. In a year or so we’re gonna hear about the results of their lawsuit. They were very fun to talk to and they mentioned being harassed by musk fans obsessively to the point of having to move multiple times.
Russia has filled huge swaths of Ukraine with mines and I doubt Russia will be sending Ukraine their records (lol) of where the fields are after the war. The minefields created by Russia’s war of conquest will be an ongoing issue in the country for decades.
Assuming Ukraine wins the war, we will likely see a large rebuilding effort, which will necessarily include getting the majority of these cleared out.
I think that it's going to be a tough sell to the Kiwis. Until 12 years ago, New Zealand didn't even allow US nuclear-powered warships in her waters, because there was that much concern from the Kiwi public about them.
New Zealand was suspended from ANZUS in 1986 as it initiated a nuclear-free zone in its territorial waters; in late 2012, New Zealand lifted a ban on visits by United States warships leading to a thawing in tensions. New Zealand maintains a nuclear-free zone as part of its foreign policy and is partially suspended from ANZUS, as the United States maintains an ambiguous policy whether or not the warships carry nuclear weapons and operates numerous nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines; however New Zealand resumed key areas of the ANZUS treaty in 2007.[3][4]
ANZUS was overshadowed in late 2021 by AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It involves cooperation in nuclear submarines that New Zealand will not support. Australia and New Zealand, "are poles apart in terms of the way they see the world....I think this alliance underlines that they’re going in very different directions,” said Geoffrey Miller, an international analyst at the Democracy Project in New Zealand.[5]
AUKUS is specifically about submarine tech, not just tolerating someone else's subs passage. The Aussie government may have wanted nuclear vessels and decided that the public was finally sufficiently on-board, but New Zealand has had more opposition than Australia has.
reuters.com
Top