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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   34225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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From a Great Game perspective, I think this exchange was a clear win for Putin. Apart from the agents exchanged on either side, he got his hitman back and paid for with a few domestic dissidents nobody cares about, plus the odd Westener taken hostage.

Highly agree. This seems like a near total disaster for the US and NATO. Russia gets real assets back and NATO got some idiots and Russia's political version of the Washington Generals.

From a cursory glance, Russia imprisons western nobodies on trumped up charges just to have something to trade in these exchanges. Bad incentives to keep trading for them.

Let's be real, any competent spy who got captured looks like a nobody NGO employee who got got on trumped up charges.

If they have a few agents in the lot they should be trading and not telling you which is which.

And that goes for the Russians as well, who will also pretend all theirs are honest businessmen the West unjustly imprisoned for no reason.

Everyone is lying, but I like to believe in the funniest theory which is that everyone involved is actually innocent and these are bouts of mutual paranoia.

Let's be real, any competent spy who got captured looks like a nobody NGO employee who got got on trumped up charges.

Right. Particularly since the people who caught them are unlikely to reveal the methods by which they did so.

Do you really think the CIA is going to admit that they were spies?

Israel has set the bar for bad prisoner exchange deals so low that this feels like a glorious victory in comparison.

You don’t have to win every trade when you’re already way ahead.

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