Originally published at: Russia is in financial freefall | Boing Boing
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The oligarchs will have to tighten their belts and cut back on the Faberge egg omelettes.
For the average Russian, it’s enough to make them wonder just what the fuck their leaders are doing.
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This is scary. If he’s this deeply invested, then he has graduated from Aggressive Dictator to Frothing Mad Man. That means it will require people in his circle to pull him back from the abyss, and everyone’s safety is down to how isolated he is from his confidantes and how much pressure it will take to get said confidantes to act.
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Flights to Kaliningrad are getting expensive
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It won’t stop Putin and his immediate toadies. However, it will seriously and quickly erode public support for his war. Most adults there still remember living through the economic disaster of the 1990s – it’s a national trauma that’s still talked about today. That time around it really was in large part the fault of Western meddling, especially due to American “free”-market neoliberal ideologues who insisted on rapid privatisation which only led to the rise of Russia’s oligarchs (who in turn helped Putin into power).
This time, although Putin will try to blame the economic catastrophe entirely on “unwarranted” Western sanctions, 70%+ of Russians will know that it was his war of choice that screwed them over.
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Huh, is there even neutral airspace between Estonia and Finland (or all the Baltic states and Sweden, for that matter)? I’d always thought they butter up against each other in such situations.
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As if Putin cares… he’s sitting on a pile of Melania Crypto, zero worries.
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Personally I think his extreme paranoia (the long desks, etc) are because he is terrified his confidants and the oligarchs are going to take him out. He’s afraid of his own insiders.
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Interesting. Somehow I’d never heard of the province of Kaliningrad, separated by at least two countries from the rest of contiguous Russia. I hope that Lithuania and Poland aren’t next for invasion.
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As somebody said: It’s the economy, stupid. Let’s hope for a new Russia without Putin and the oligarchs.
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That patch of the Earth has a really interesting history. Prior to WWII it was the furthest East part of Germany (previously Prussia) and I think was part of the justification for Prussia gobbling up Poland.
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He’s been the Covid Bubble Boy for two years. He wouldn’t let Macron near him without a test performed by a Russian. (“Non.”)
I’m guessing that in the room with the looong table, the filtered airflow is strictly from Putin’s end towards the others.
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Is there any greater curse that a patch of land can have than “an interesting history”?
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Well, maybe one.
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Some of it is interesting in the good way.
The question is are they of scared of him as an individual. The sort of people he surrounds himself with tend to be moral weaklings and cowards (like the intelligence chief who acted like a chastened schoolboy when Putin publicly berated him) who are pitted against each-other, so maybe. However, I’m not convinced he’s engendered the sort of fear amongst his subordinates that Stalin did (his toadies were scared of him after he died), so maybe not.
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A coup seems more likely.
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You might know it as Königsberg?
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It’ll have to be some combination of the oligarchs (unhappy about the economic situation) and the generals (unhappy if the war goes pear-shaped) getting together and realising that, for all his money and bodyguards and elite skills in bare-chested judo, Putin is just one dude.
We’re only four days into the war and while there have been screw-ups a-plenty I don’t think the generals are quite there yet.
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