If you want to convert rubles to crypto, you just do P2P on the Binance or on any other exchange. Basically, exchange provides a list of verified merchants to whom you can deposit rubles directly via any kind of means (card-to-card, FPS, cash, you name it), and these merchants top up your crypto wallet. It takes like two minutes to buy USDT. And it also works in other direction.
As for deposits, there was no reasonable way to deposit rubles on Binance anyway since VISA and Mastercard blocked international payments. Now it's just cleaning up the leftovers so Binance can legally say "we don't work with Russia anymore".
Sure - if they have some bank that isn't sanctioned (AFAIK there are 0 domestic banks not sanctioned) - or money already outside of Russia (only the rich, and most of the mega rich are sanctioned individually).
Unfortunately no. Gazprombank, Raiffeisenbank and Rosselkhozbank are partially sanctioned but operational - they allow to do swift transfers, their own native transfers to select post-soviet countries and their unionpay cards work relatively well outside of russia.
Classy. FYI the population is not invading, the government and military is. You can go there and take a look, its not too hard to go and see that the people are normal people like anyone else. You can even talk to them.
Did you talk to them? Based on your location, I can guess your sample is not representative. There's overwhelming support for the invasion. People are brainwashed by propaganda. I had to unsubscribe from Russian social networks - I can't stomach the posts by my old friends.
By that logic, every American who supported the Iraq invasion should be debanked. Whether or not the people support the government in their actions, they are not responsible for their government's actions. I'm ethnically Russian, my entire family lives in Russia, and facing racism due to the actions of some other people is really strange. I thought we were better than this, or at least pretended to be.
Edit, yes, it's racism. I don't care about whatever power structure you imagine to be necessary, it's in the dictionary.
As long as they pay taxes and contribute to the economy, they are supporting whatever the government does in a very concrete way. Their actual opinions matter little.
Western strategy is based on containing Russia to limit their government's ability to cause harm. Most would prefer that Russians chose overthrow the government and replace it with something more palatable, but so far they have been unable or unwilling to do so. The next best alternative weakening their economy with sanctions. That necessarily hurts ordinary Russians, because they are part of the same economy as the government.
It's not racism, because your family is being punished for their actions. It may feel unfair, but the world is unfair.
Let me rephrase what you said, replacing a few key terms:
As long as Rwandans pay their taxes, they are contributing to recruiting child soldiers. This is a good reason to be shitty to Rwandans in general, no matter where they are in the world.
My family is in Russia, they're fine. I'm the one experiencing the racism. Justify that.
I misinterpreted you, because the context of the discussion seemed to be the effect of sanctions on ordinary Russians. Treating you badly because of your ethnicity is obviously not ok.
You also mentioned the US invasion of Iraq. Sanctions against the US would have been justified at that time, but they were impossible, because the US was too big to sanction. Around that time, there were serious discussions in Europe whether Putin or Bush was the bigger villain. Putin had not gone particularly bad yet, while Bush was obviously a villain. Memories of those years helped Putin maintain a favorable image in Europe far longer than could be justified based on his actions.
Putin is taking care of Russia and the people he considers to be under Russia's care. As far as I know from my immediate family, living under Putin is pretty nice. The economy has actually gotten stronger since the invasion. They're doing better than we are in the US on prices and imports. The sanctions are a joke, and BRICS is really strong.
That's all immaterial compared to the actual discussion here, and I appreciate you clarifying your position.
I'm very sorry to hear that. It's almost an evolutionary bug to make shortcuts and consider all members of a misbehaving group evil. There's very little anybody can do about it.
"Russian people overwhelmingly support the invasion" is a statement of fact - which is based on overwhelming evidence (this includes personal communications).
I'm not talking about the government.
At the same time, I'm not familiar with any evidence any Russian living abroad is facing "racism". (Most of my family live in US/Canada/Australia).
Yeah, I support the invasion too. I don't tell people that in my real life, because I'm not stupid. Donbass basin had a shit time of it and Russia was morally correct to step in. Also Ukraine is corrupt. I'm sorry for the Ukrop people, because they also should not pay for the actions of their government.
I'm in the US, and I just pretend I'm Polish if people ask what kind of Slav I am. Russian gets the shitty comments and nasty remarks.
Or, maybe, I know people from Donbass and know more about this than you do. Ukraine treats them like garbage. Rape by Ukrainian soldiers is a common occurrence. I'm fully aware of the propaganda, Russia is doing a shit job at actually winning this, and I understand the strategic aspect. The stated purpose of the occupation is moral. Obviously geopolitics will play a role, but this is international conflict. My own country has done far worse things, and pretending to be angry at this when the Gulf War was worse is just intellectually dishonest.
And again, supporting the invasion does not make you responsible for it. Even if your relative is rooting for it, that opinion is the only thing they could be held accountable for.
Don't worry, I'm not claiming the status of an internment camp detainee. The things people have said and done towards me simply fall under the category of racism. I'm not a victim, they're idiots.
That's partially because almost everyone who's against the war and haven't cut ties with Russia are silenced. No freedom of speech there, and most folks don't fancy themselves as martyrs.
But, yeah, I was appalled to see how many folks had so much shit in their heads. There's a very significant fraction of the population that aren't just pro-war but openly hold neo-fascist views (while in a strong denial that those views are such - mental gymnastics with syncretism of incompatible values is a long-held tradition).
They aren't normal anymore. From my observations, 43 out of 51 people I questioned do support the war in various forms, many even making donations. It wasn't like that in the beginning but now they say that they have to.
Even so-called opposition (pro-Navalny people) say things like "if Navalny was a president, we won't be humiliated because he would win the war quickly".
Thats still not everyone, you see? Theres a massive difference between "everyone who is X is also Y" and "most people who are X are also Y", because the latter means that assuming everyone who is X is Y is discrimination no different from other kinds of discrimination from history.
Super weird then since putin has taken greater than 50% of the votes since 2000 (nearly 80% in the last election) Maybe some Russians don't want to sleep in the bed they made.
You forgot to put the quotes around the term "election". Elections in authoritarian states are just a mockery of the term. It was repeatedly mathematically proven that every recent election in Russia was rigged.
There were numerous protests, and they all were suppressed.
> With the russian military bogged down in Ukraine seems like the right time to throw one.
An uprising is not a likely event in a highly atomized society where no one trusts anyone. And Russians were trained to distrust anyone but themselves and their immediate family for at least a century.
Plus, there are plenty of siloviki working on internal affairs, protecting the regime. Witch hunts are all-high since '30s there.
Yes, they were. Ukrainians managed to recover from the Soviet legacy and do the right thing, and Russians failed miserably. Russian society is atomized and Ukrainian is apparently not.
And there's probably no single reason why the history is the way it is. It's absolutely not like "Soviets were there and that's why it is the way it is". There's probably not even two or three or four reasons why - but some complex set of causes and effects that led the world to where it is today.
Don't get me wrong, please. I'm not absolving the responsibility by blaming Soviets for Russian problems. I'm just mentioning one of the potential factors, saying that Soviets had contributed to this.
Soviet legacy is probably way less important than Putin's years. Since USSR fell, Ukrainian people had elected 6 presidents, and Russia had something like two and a half, all hereditary preemniks to each other (and - again - that's not a particular reason why things are the way they are, just another indicator of how different two post-Soviet countries are).
I guess, I should've been more concise and just said that in an atomized society, uprising is considered to be an unlikely event - without trying to delve into reasons why Russian society is atomized.
Don't get me wrong, please. I'm not absolving the responsibility by blaming Soviets for Russian problems. I'm just mentioning one of the potential factors, saying that Soviets had contributed to this.
Not a worry, I appreciate the nuance and I actually agree for the most part with your argument. Historical conditioning is 100% a burden and I agree that system has broken trust across the board in russian society but at some point a combination of living in a low trust/no trust society combined with a horrifying mutation of that system mixed with unrestricted capitalism has to have taken a toll even before being pariah'd and sanctioned to hell and back.
I also know there are Russians that are against this and have put their lives on the line (and lost them) trying to expose putin for what he is and does, I just wish more would follow in their spirit and maybe we can, at least in one section of the world, have a little peace and quiet.
even 98% isnt everyone, and that still gives you no right to discriminate against those 1% (in my example, in reality way more) based on what the other 99% do.
> At the same time, support for the Russian military action has neither increased nor decreased. Three in four Russians (76%) continue to say they support the military operation, with 43 percent expressing strong support and 33 percent somewhat supporting it.
Apologies if I accidentally condemn the 24% of Russians who aren't neofascists (and yet, can't be bothered to protest, lest the state get upset).
Yes, that is my point. Russian liberals are only anemically willing to be anti-war when that stance cannot personally hurt them, and certainly not opposed enough that they are willing to leave Russia.
It may shock you to know that in some countries[1], dissidents have been willing to take personal risk of jail time to make their voice heard.
It may shock you to know that in some countries[1][2], dissidents have been willing to take personal risk of jail time to make their voice heard. Or being killed. [3]
I don't think the poster above paints anyone in any light, but of course everybody hears what they want to hear.
>- Are they, as a majority people, engaging in inexcusable wars of conquest, with close to 0 professed empathy for what they are doing? Yes.
That's nationalistic hogwash. You're forcefully drawing the group identity line by the nationality/citizenship. That's a perceived line which doesn't exist in reality.
Maybe that's not the line you want to matter, but if you talk to the actual human beings, they are going to self-identify as "Russian" not "Citizens of the Earth".
Alright? With the start of the war, I and my twin brother, actual human beings, ended up on the different sides of the border, with different passports. We both been to Bolotnaya, Maidan, and many other places together. Both of us risked our lives, torture, and jail. But somehow one of us is not like the other to you, just because one has a fork and another a two-headed chicken on a piece of plastic.
They're because whoever's asking likely comes from a country on Earth. If the being asking actual human beings was clearly not of this Earth, I think a great many people would choose to identify as being of Earth, as opposed to a specific place on it, or somewhere else.
Yes, accidentally discriminating a group of people based on something they have nothing to do with is a huge issue, and can lead to a lot of shit we should have learned from in history
I don't know the poster you're replying to, but the protests against the Iraq invasion were massive, both in the US and worldwide. [1] It happened regardless. (although admittedly the protesters weren't in any physical danger, and there was much less will to punish those who started the invasion afterwards, moreover the person directly responsible for it is currently a president).
Invading Iraq was a mistake but I'm not going to let you try to morally equate the invasion of Ukraine and Iraq.
One was an illconceived and halfassed attempt to remove an explicitly genocidal dictator, with the goal of replacing him with some fantasy liberal democracy.
The other is an attempt to eliminate a democratically elected government, permanently annex territory, and culturally and linguistically subsume Ukraine into Russia by any means necessary.
with every exchange in the world refusing to work with rubles, the russian people are becoming completely cut off from crypto markets