Yeah. First of all, there wasn’t really a “Russia” at the time. Vikings invaded the European mainland and controlled some settlements like Novogrod. They eventually made it down to Kiev, and for a while there was the “Kievan Rus” state with its capital in Kiev. That was destroyed when the Mongols sacked and completely obliterated Kiev.

In December 1237, Moscow was sacked by the Mongols, and many / most (?) of the civilians were either enslaved or killed. The Ukraine area was important because the Ukrainian lands were so fertile, but Moscow wasn’t, so it retained some independence. Moscow was under the thumb of the Mongols to such an extent that they acted as tax collectors for the Horde, and when town officials resisted the tax collection on behalf of the mongols, Alexander Nevsky (Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev, etc.) had their noses cut off. The Russians only stopped paying off the Mongols in 1476.

Eventually the Mongol force faded due to infighting, and one of the forces pushing them out was based out of Moscow. But, again, this isn’t because Moscow was important and powerful. It’s because Moscow was at the very edge of their territory, and wasn’t a strategically important place the plains of Ukraine.

Putin’s whole “Ukraine has always been part of Russia” is backwards. “Russia” was originally part of the Kievan Rus, based out of Kiev. Eventually, after the chaos following the Mongols, Ukraine was fought over by various empires, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that most of the territory now considered to be Ukraine was in Russian hands.

Would have been “all” if Ogedei hadn’t caught a severe case of drinking himself to death.

If not, it can be arranged.

Democracies are a lot like the Romans, they need a casus belli real or imagined before they do war.

There was always a reason. Not always a good one, but a casus belli is still needed.

If Russia keeps it up, they might not have those either.

He had birds on fire though.

guns

It sounds like he may actually have been the first to bring them to Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe

Possible Mongol diffusion of gunpowder to Europe

Several sources mention the Mongols deploying firearms and gunpowder weapons against European forces at the Battle of Mohi in various forms, including bombs hurled via catapult.[55][56][57] Professor Kenneth Warren Chase credits the Mongols for introducing gunpowder and its associated weaponry into Europe.[58] A later legend arose in Europe about a mysterious Berthold Schwarz who is credited with the invention of gunpowder by 15th- through 19th-century European literature.[59]

In the context it’s usually seen as a male given name for English-speakers, it does descend from Scottish Gaelic that later spread across the UK, so your instincts weren’t wrong, just misplaced for this specific context

My understanding from past reading is that there’s some sort of conspiracy theory in Russia that the Alaska Purchase wasn’t properly formalized in some way, ergo it doesn’t count.

googles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_payment_conspiracy

The Alaska payment conspiracy (Russian: Аляскинский платежный заговор, romanized: Ali͡askinskiĭ platezhnyĭ zagovor), also known as the Orkney conspiracy (Russian: Оркни заговор), is a conspiracy theory that the Russian Empire never received payment for the Alaska purchase from the United States, and that instead the ship, the Orkney, that carried the payment in gold was detonated for insurance money by Alexander ‘Sandy’ Keith, a con artist and explosives expert.[1][2][3] This conspiracy theory has been debunked in several ways.[4]

Russian politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has brought up these claims, as well as the bribery related to the deal.[8]

The Fort Ross article has a similar-sounding conspiracy theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross%2C_California

Although the settlement was sold for $30,000 to Sutter, some Russian historians assert the sum was never paid; therefore legal title of the settlement was never transferred to Sutter and the area still belongs to the Russian people. A recent Sutter biography however, asserts that Sutter’s agent, Peter Burnett, paid the Russian-American Company agent William M. Steuart $19,788 in “notes and gold” on April 13, 1849, thereby settling the outstanding debt for Fort Ross and Bodega.

Would be an interesting Cold War scenario to have a little exclave of Russia just north of San Francisco, kinda a Pacific Kaliningrad.

NHS is better than $20000 band aids.

NHS is just suffering from decades of destruction at the hand of the UK’s version of US Republicans. They want it destroyed and continue to whittle away at to make perceptions such as this the norm, until they can fully destroy it.

Honestly, still beats dying of preventable disease because of fear of the bill afterward. At least this way I can die of a preventable disease due to patient backlog.

Ready the muskets folks.

Our military industrial complex would love to see you try, it would be great for stock prices. If you managed to make it ashore, you still have millions of rednecks that would love to see you down yonder and kick you out of the colonies again. We could drop one JDAM on every square mile of Great Britain(~80,823sqmi) and still have enough munitions to do it again 5 more times.

The terrifying truth is that the entire planet VS America is the only way to beat America in non-nuclear warfare.

Helldivers 3: Redcoats Bugaloo