Russian Far East

There are many places where there were no renowned, like, confirmed expeditions carried out by anyone, like Russian kayakers.

like foreign kayakers they were just no one were in those places like you know the northern coast of russia northern like the russian arctic that northern coast is it's extremely hard to how to access and to you know do it's extremely hard to organize something there but it's doable and it's it's waiting for some kayakers to come and do some stuff For instance, that eastern coast of Russia, like that Russian Far East, the one that I paddled along.

Yes.

I was paddling, and in most of the places, I realized that the last kayakers who were there were John Turk and Misha Petrov in the year 2000, 26 years ago.

On the mainland, the Qing, through territorial conquests and large-scale genocide, managed to expand China's territory like never before and reach the height of their territorial and demographic power before facing internal rebellions and eventually Western imperial encroachment.

Chinese nationals to this day cherish territorial ambitions that would replicate Qing's extent, whether in Mongolia, Far East Russia, Central Asia, or in the Pacific, and that includes Taiwan.

However, Taiwan was initially governed as a frontier outpost, not as a part of China, and it was only in 1887 that it was upgraded to the status of a full Chinese province, only to be ceded to Japan barely eight years later.

Yes, in a culture that prides itself with 2,000 or 4,000, sometimes 5,000 years of history or whatever the number is, Taiwan functioned as a part of mainland for about eight years.

Now, These are all great experiences which helped me to understand Russia in those days.

Other overland rail journeys I made included going from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East down to Vladivostok on the last and most scenic bit of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

I did the trip in the other direction from Khabarovsk to Blagoveshchensk which is on the Amur River on the Chinese border opposite a city called Heihei.

And when we did that, we went through the Jewish Autonomous Republic and visited Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Republic, where all the signs were still in Hebrew, although nowadays nearly the entire Jewish population has emigrated to Israel.

And if you think that anyone other than us is going to negotiate the future of the European alliance, you're sorely mistaken.

And I think the fact that these countries, probably, almost certainly the EU, probably asked NATO, Norway and Finland to be the ones to deliver this message to Putin, because as you may know, again, you have the Baltics, but you have Finland and Norway, two countries with pretty significant borders in the Russian East, right? Certainly not the Baltics, which I think is interesting, but and not Poland, who has also kind of alluded to this discussion.

So I think there's some messaging there that says, listen, we're not the Baltics.

You're not going to bully us.

Now, Russia, you brought into Russia, Russia's primary security vulnerability, particularly from the point of view of Vladimir Putin, it is the Far East, it's Siberia.

Russia always try to use either Japan, South Korea, or even China to beef up its buildup, economic buildup, and infrastructure buildup in Russian Far East.

China is pretty hard to get.

Japan was willing, but rather Putin basically shoot himself in the foot by invading Ukraine, and also particularly after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, forcing Japan to take harsher stance against Russia.

There's a few.

I mean, Kim Jong-un and Putin met at the Vostokny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East.

They were pretty explicit that they were going to collaborate on space technologies.

You know, Kim has, he's picked up Russian drones.