This emphasis on ideas has led Snyder to be criticised by some in the realist school of international relations. Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a thinktank, counts herself an admirer of Snyder’s historical work, but she also says that his “understanding of world affairs is almost indelibly shaped by what he thinks are the big important ideas, whereas I would say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated as much by trying to prop up its falling security in the region”. The dispute is not academic. If you believe, as Ashford does, that Russia is motivated by strategic fears, then every additional degree of western involvement risks exacerbating the original causes of the war and prolonging the conflict. By contrast, if you believe with Snyder that the war’s roots lie in Putin’s fascist worldview, then victory on the battlefield becomes imperative. “A lot of smart people have said it before me, but fascism was never discredited. It was only defeated,” he says. “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”
Truer words, and applicable to the US as much as Ukraine.
Re: WSJ reporter
I hear Murdoch knows a guy.
The one body of ideologically committed agents supporting the
invasion was the Russian Orthodox Church. Beyond its efforts to support Russian information
operations, its priests were widely recruited and run by the Russian special services 37 and their
monasteries and churches used as safe houses for equipment and personnel. 38 The use of
religion as cover is not only a widely established method of the Russian special services but also
creates its own protection mechanism because of the political sensitivities of state targeting
IDK forcibly remove them by any means necessary? (I’ve visited that monastery. It seems so surreal now.)
Interesting how Russia cut people/villages/cities off:
Another part of the occupation administration was the information isolation of the communities being targeted. This was done in three ways. First, the Russian military would jam the frequencies by which people in the occupied area could access Ukrainian television and radio.
Second, the telecommunications infrastructure was severed from Ukrainian infrastructure and reconnected to Russian infrastructure, enabling monitoring of telecommunication and internet traffic.
Third, listening posts and metadata analysis against cellular telephones was set up to monitor the communications of local residents, prioritizing those who attempted to route calls or messages from the occupied territories to the rest of Ukraine.
Without systems like Starlink etc. it seems it would be very difficult to counter this tactic.
Starlink wouldn’t help, because terminals would have to be smuggled into the occupied territory somehow, and IIRC SpaceX geoblocks the service so that it can’t be used in occupied territory. When Ukraine first used naval drones to attack Russian targets in Crimea, it reportedly used Starlink to control the drones and receive live video from their on-board cameras. This is no longer possible.
What Snyder understands, and what Ashford misses, is that the regional strategic security concerns are expressed primarily as a way to keep Russia’s politically active Know-Nothings supporting Putin’s fascist regime. If Russia is definitively defeated in Ukraine then one of the factions will take him out at the Kremlin (probably feet first). What comes next might not be better, but that particular autocrat will be gone.
The fascist playbook is to claim everyone is out to get their glorious fatherland, then use a combination of bullying and “special military operations” to “rescue” their ethnic or ideological compatriots in neighbouring enclaves, and then go to war when their own exacerbation and boundary-pushing inevitably go too far for other members of the international community (thus “proving” that they were always out to get the glorious fatherland).
That’s from June last year (or earlier), by the way.
And now I notice that I didn’t transcribe it correctly (“rifles” instead of “weapons”). Ack.
Also citing the RUSI report:
The stories coming out of Ukraine have been depressingly similar to those of the Soviet war in Afghanistan as told by Svetlana Alexievich in “Boys in Zinc”. The dysfunctional command structures, propaganda utterly detached from factual reality, widespread looting, including to replace garbage standard-issue equipment, and traumatised veterans abandoned to become beggars, murderers or suicides - all this we knew already. The story above completes the awful bingo card.
In Afghanistan, military officers would often create fictitious job openings - say, a full-time librarian to manage a single shelf of books in an army base. These would attract young women fresh out of Communist Youth and eager to do their part in what they were told was a mission to help the friendly peoples of Afghanistan build socialism (definitely not a war). And they would arrive for a crash course in disillusionment: being sexually exploited by officers, helping them loot Soviet and Afghan stocks alike for personal profit, and witnessing a brutal war of imperial aggression.
Interesting that the SolarWinds hack wasn’t mentioned. Looks like the tool to map critical infrastructure could be based on something similar.
Maybe they were mad about the piece he just wrote for the WSJ previously posted above.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the cutthroat founder of the mercenary group, said earlier this week that more than 5,000 inmates were pardoned since the twisted scheme began last fall.
“Right now, more than 5,000 people have completed a contract with Wagner and been pardoned. The percentage of those who committed a second crime within a month is 0.31 percent. This is 10–20 times less than the standard before the [special military operation],” Prigozhin said through his press service Saturday.
“Therefore, I can say with confidence: We have reduced crime in Russia tenfold,” he said.
He’s bad at the maths.
