My wife’s father likely had narcissistic personality disorder [1]. Putin does a lot of things she recognizes, and she is genuinely terrified that he feels something like: if he’s dying then why should the world live?
[1] Never diagnosed, but it rarely is actually diagnosed. The people who have it almost never accept the idea they need help and talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist.
Russia as a whole does. The Perimeter system exists, and is scarily relevant right now.
But does he trust the technicians?
war is the application of violence in order to force one’s opponent to accept one’s own policy preferences. putin decided on those policy choices before he invaded ukraine. the questions now are 1). how much violence would it require for putin to abandon his original policy preferences? and 2). at what point might he alter those policy choices without abandoning them?
it would likely be advisable to recall that the soviet union fought a losing game in afghanistan for just over nine years while the russian empire fought ten wars with the ottoman turks over a period of 210 years for control of central asia and the balkans.
Of course this is a large part of why the US never adopted a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons- the (genuine) belief that the Red Army’s overwhelming conventional superiority meant they could be in Paris in a week unless the US used tactical* nukes to stop them.
*Tactical adj (of a nuclear weapon) one which explodes in Germany
If it is then it’s a strategic blunder that exceeds the taking of Crimea and creation of the breakaways.
Before Putin’s 1st war Ukraine was oscillating between the EU and Russia, if he played his cards right he probably could have turned Ukraine into Belarus. Instead he took the two most friendly regions by force and completely alienated the rest of the country so he had no choice but invasion to regain influence.
If he takes Crimea and Donbass without the neutrality + demilitarization then Ukraine is no longer part of an active conflict or territorial dispute and they can join the EU + NATO.
Hate myself a little for generalizing, but:
The general Russian mindset seems to be that any amount of suffering they endure is ennobling, and inevitable, so why not pass it around and make everyone else miserable, too?
When the US tried (and failed) to eliminate Gaddafi with an air strike, one general said (allegedly) “you can’t spend a 10 million dollar missile to blow a camel’s ass”
For what I hear, the Russians have some nice bits of kit, enough to show on a military parade and segment on state TV but not near enough to be used effectively in conflict.
Putin took Crimea and most of the Donbass in 2014 but Ukraine still claims them. If Ukraine renounces sovereignty over the lost territories it is no longer part of an active conflict or territorial dispute.
That’s what I understood too: ammo arriving according to a previously set plan leaves units with a lot(!) of it every here and there. So they’re gonna use it rather than hauling it somewhere lese.
I don’t want to do armchair analysis based on the K-Mart sources available to me, but one thing I don’t need a CIA to know: if an isolated tyrant says he wants something, and his underlings can’t deliver it, he is going to be the last person in the world to hear that.
So it’s totally believable that Russia is prosecuting a plan that never had any hope of success. But that’s unlikely to be good news, because anyone who overpromised to their superiors will now have every reason to either double down, or find new external excuses for why the plan isn’t working (i.e., enemies).
I doubt there is any mechanism whereby Russia’s executive (outside of Putin himself) could ever say “well, we fucked up guys, nobody’s perfect, let’s rethink this whole thing”. They’d need some kind of off-ramp that doesn’t rhyme with “defeat”.
Regardless of what it’s becoming now, the invasion was not initially about pain and fear. Putin wants Ukraine as either a vassal or part of greater Russia, and he wants NATO weakened or destroyed. I think he thought Ukraine was going to roll over fairly quickly, and he’d even hoped they’d be able to do it without actually invading. Had Ukraine been conquered quickly and/or without an invasion, it might have driven a wedge between NATO members.
At this point, though, Ukraine is not rolling over, NATO has been revitalized and Putin has backed himself into a corner. Causing pain and fear is what he has left. Yes, Ukraine will likely fall in the near future, but good luck governing it. It’s gonna be little more than a drain on what’s left of the Russian economy.
Causing pain and fear in Ukraine doesn’t actually help him at home, either. Sure, odds are fair he can keep everything clamped down, but lots of Russians have ties with people in Ukraine. This doesn’t make things easier for him.
He lost his best chance to destroy NATO when Trump lost the 2020 election, and at this point I think he’s gone all in and his playing all his cards. The problem is that his hand just isn’t that good.
I don’t think Ukraine will fall. Look at the territory they’re occupying/attacking. It’s all round the edges, close to his supply lines, and they’re already reduced to trying to shell it flat. Ukraine is huge, you can’t extend that strategy to the rest of it. At best he can try to hold onto Donetsk, Luhansk and a corridor to Crimea.
I think a lot of people just want to excuse various forms of authoritarianism, honestly. But, as you note, authoritarianism pretty much just runs off brutality, not supreme intelligence.
IIRC, The people on this podcast were skeptical of Ukraine’s ability to hold out for that long.
I’m not seeing Putin’s ability to get supplies into Ukraine, which means his army can’t get there either. How’s he going to take the rest of the country if he can’t actually get there?
Aside from the fact the somewhat obvious fact that Russia is very big and doesn’t necessarily have a lot of roads in a lot of places, trains have played a very significant part in Russian military history of the last 100 years . Armoured trains were the decisive factor in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War and apparently were still in use until 1953 in Western Ukraine defending the railways against Ukrainian partisans. If you are unfamiliar with the history Ukraine, during the Civil War, was home to an Anarchist army of over 100,000 personnel who fought a mobile guerilla warfare using horse and buggies. There was also the Czech legion who got stranded in Russia fleeing WWI and at one point ended up spread out along, and in control of, almost the entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
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