So far.
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Are they still running ads on youtube? Or will the sanctions put an end to that?
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The EU and U.S. are still considering sanctions on Belarus. I doubt YouTube will do anything until that happens (if ever).
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I am TBH preoccupied, but your whole answer is thorough and nuanced. Thanks!
Those empathic cries from the billionaires seem like they’re begging not to be sanctioned themselves.
@gracchus @lumpmoose @Elmer in addition to DCS and World of Tanks, War Thunder creator Gaijin is referred to on Wikipedia as “a Hungarian (ex-Russian) video game developer and publisher established in 2002 headquartered in Budapest, Hungary and with offices in Cyprus, Germany, Russia and Latvia.” They have, for the time being, disabled text chat in the game. I am not sure if they’ve disabled any maps.
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Not really relevant to this current conflict, but anybody interested in tanks might like the novel “Uncle Target” by Gavin Ewart. It’s a bit dated now, but still a damn good read.
The one weapon I’ve heard about that chills me is the Russian’s “Vacuum Bomb”.
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He’s just a bully, not some tactical genius. He really is just projecting power to show superiority. There isn’t so much there there as some like to pretend of “leaders” like Putin…
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Timothy Snyder argues that Putin is a poor strategist because he is ignoring the real long term threat to Russian sovereignty, which comes not from the West but from China. By pursuing confrontation with Western countries, Putin is making Russia dependent on China, which really does covet Russia’s land and natural resources.
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That reminds me of The Bear and the Dragon (2000), one of the last books that Tom Clancy actually wrote, rather than just attaching his name to. In the book, China invades Russia after massive oil and gold reserves are discovered near the border. However, Clancy depicts the US and Russia as former rivals that are now on good terms. The book even has President Jack Ryan maneuver to get Russia admitted into NATO so that he can help defend Russia.
Those were such innocent times…
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I thought that at first, that his main goal was forcing recognition of the two bogus “republics” in Donbas that he could then absorb into Russia next year. By day 2 of the invasion it became clear that the total annexation of Ukraine was in fact Putin’s goal all along. For whatever reason he thought it would be a cakewalk but he miscalculated because…
Besieging cities with conscripted young men and throwing projectiles at the civilian populations inside isn’t exactly the height of innovation in warfare.
And he’s stuck with that because it turns out he’s not a strategic or operational genius either. It’s nothing but brute force for the Shirtless Wonder.
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Just in general, human beings have been waging war for centuries… there is so much to pull from that you don’t NEED to have any sort of smarts to conduct it. War is literally the dumbest and worst thing humans managed to invent.
Between Putin and Snyder, I’m gonna assume Snyder is smarter…
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Or tens of thousands of regular Russians in the streets.
In a country where protesting or even saying the wrong thing gets you killed.
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His career up until the USSR collapsed was pretty mediocre, even with some of the retconning that he’s done. Assigned to Dresden, East Germany at 39 isn’t a Bond-level mid-career fast track. The cold calculating killer, judo master assassin is the myth. He was a thug, in charge of thugs, perfect for when the USSR turned into Thugworld.
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Yet, even some people here seem willing to believe it for some strange reason. And the larger lie that fascism rests on some great intellectual basis, when at its heart, it’s just a expression of naked aggression, brutality, and bullying of people deemed “lesser than”… it does not take great genius to embrace or act out that shit, just a willingness to be a violent asshole.
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I forget. was Clancy’s Russia controlled by “ultranationalists”, the villains of the video game “Ghost Recon”?
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Authoritarians tend to surround themselves with yes-men forming a perfect echo-chamber. He obviously believed that the Ukrainians (at least the Russian speaking ones) would be just as happy to be under the thumb of a Greater Russia. The idea that people might actually WANT democracy is anathema to him, and the idea that a state can be based on anything other than power and ethnic ties is not credible to him.
He obviously didn’t think that he would have to go full Grozny on Kiev (Kyiv). But I have no doubt that he is willing to do so.
Edited to add: Authoritarians don’t think that freedom and democracy are worth anything, so they can’t imagine people are willing to fight for them.
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Yes, bullies always surround themselves with toadies. In some ways I find the latter more repulsive.
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