Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

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> "why now"

Armenia just lost a war [1]. Minsk is swallowed by protests [2]. Kazakhstan is now facing protests [3]. That's half the CSTO members [4]. Meanwhile, Georgia and Ukraine are reminders to disheveled Russians that democracy for former Soviet members can work. (Also Nord Stream [5].)

The cause for action begins and ends with domestic politics vis-a-vis Putin, who has created a system where losing power means loss of property, freedom and potentially life.

[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46651

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020–2021_Belarusian_protests

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/world/asia/kazakhstan-pro...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...

[5] https://news.yahoo.com/u-senate-vote-cruzs-nord-011608935.ht...

Eh, Armenia losing its war wasn't particularly detrimental to the Russian interests in the Transcaucasia - if anything it helped bring Pashinyan back into the fold, as evidenced by him embracing CSTO during the Kazakh unrest.

Minsk is also hardly "swallowed by protests" right now, they've succeeded in driving all resistance back underground.

I agree that the post-Soviet world is in a bit of a crisis but it's not particularly more crisisy than normal. Putin's just getting older.

Fair enough. I do think taken together, and the observation that absent Moscow's military support Minsk and new Almaty could have gone quite differently, they would be worrying to someone in Putin's shoes.

Deploying the Russian army to Kazakhstan is much less risky than deploying it in Moscow. A small shift in the balance of power and the guns are aimed at you.

That said, we in the West have a long history of overcomplicating the Kremlin's thinking. Perhaps he is just going senile.

> The cause for action begins and ends with domestic politics vis-a-vis Putin

Realizing this has been very important in my attempts at understanding Russian behavior. However, even after years of attempting to internalize this knowledge I still have a reactionary response at first... then I remember this.

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