Very long thread:
Short version:
Putin thought that he could roll into Ukraine and resistance would collapse the way the Afghan army and government collapsed last year. Instead he’s getting 1979 Afghanistan: guerrilla warfare.
Putin’s understanding of Ukrainian society is stuck in around 1992. He thinks that they don’t have a strong sense of national identity or patriotism and don’t care who gets installed to govern them. Before 2014 he might even have been right.
I really do see him like Kim Jong-Un. He is willing to risk cutting the country off from the world, believing that Russia can be self-reliant. But I don’t see him willing to risk a situation that would see Moscow and Saint Petersburg wiped off the map.
Exactly - I do too, but with a large enough supply of nuclear weapons for MAD
I don’t think he thinks that would happen.
My concern is that he is willing to completely break with the norms around nuclear weapons. We talked about doing it during the Iraq war, I worry that he might feel he can push farther
And I don’t know how the West deals with that. I am really not trying to doom and gloom. I think there has to be either more information that is missing or people in power thinking about this and possible paths through. I definitely don’t think this is end of the world give up now, I just don’t know how we deal with an, I guess, mob-state
Ignoring that the government that is in Afghanistan today is the one that we “rolled in on” 20 years ago and overthrew and that the one that collapsed recently is the one that we put in place and propped up for 20 years! He was in power and watching for all of that. I believe the article, but it still makes no sense. I am glad that others are seeing this though!
History only makes sense in hindsight. People in September of 1939 were just as confused as we are now. We are not witnessing the end of history. But we may be witnessing the emergence of a very different era.
Russia went through a major revolution just forty years ago. It can and ultimately will happen again. Putin is not immortal, and the world can still do much to check his ambitions.
(Sorry, I don’t disagree, I just needed some comic relief while reading this thread and your post reminded me of this).
We now see Putin actually wants to do. He is not simply hollowing out the concepts of “genocide” and “denazification.” He is apparently planning to mock the judicial institutions created around those concepts. This seems to be the most apt reading of his promise to “to bring to court those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians.” If Russian forces capture Ukrainian political and civic leaders, it seems most likely that he will have them show tried before some perversion of a tribunal, and executed or sent to a special regime prison for a long term. It appears that he intends to delegitimate the whole idea of war crimes – by committing a real one in the name of punishing a fictional one.
More on the topic of logistics:
This war tears apart families. My father’s sister was also born in Ukraine, moved to Russia in the 70s, she is an incredibly intelligent woman, highly educated, working in academia in Moscow. She says war is our fault. She believes Ukrainians have been killing and torturing Russian kids in Donetsk for the last eight years and now Russia must save them. She believes Russian media and says we are making stuff up. Well, I guess I don’t have a family in Russia any more.
Abandoned BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle, according to comments.
Not even buried at the Kremlin wall. Which, considering the company there, is a win for him as far as I’m concerned.
I hope Gorbachev has left instructions in his will that he’d prefer not to be buried in the Kremlin wall (as opposed to Putin, who’s no doubt included full architectural plans for a new mausoleum in his will).
Like other sado-populist leaders, one who serves as an aspirational model for the minor bullying arseholes who make up his base.
He also comes off to me as a reckless gambler, a chancer who wagers with other human lives (often with the cowed re-assurances of toadies and sycophants). This goes hand-in-hand with the other characteristics you describe: when he gets caught out he just shrugs, gives a sh*t-eating grin or a wink, and says"so, what are you gonna do about it?" That might not work so well with a failed invasion as it does with assassinating political opponents, though.
tl:dr but one phrase on the first page of chapter one stood out
our military is determined to be unprepared for missions it does not want, as if
the lack of preparedness might prevent our going. We are like children who
refuse to get dressed for school.
Children not getting dressed in the hope of avoiding school could well describe much of the US and Europe’s political handling of Putin over the past decade or two.
