Full consensus for disconnecting Russia from SWIFT achieved, process has begun

Well, given the sanctions they might as well burn these dollars/euros. So maybe it's not that bad to pump their currency rate here.

But I did just finish catching up to current on the Revolutions podcast which covers 10 political upheavals defined in the podcaster’s terms as Revolutions under a broad label and what’s amazing to me is that any of the Revolutions that tended to center around strongmen also tended to outstay their welcome and any of the Revolutionary Big Cheeses that lived to old age tended to lose touch with their own inner circle. The monarchs or whoever was being overthrown were also not immune to this: if they were popular, it was often because people didn’t actually know them very well and they tended to lose popularity quickly when they made the worse blunders of their lives.

So, just a perspective, and maybe some of this is applicable to Putin, but again, I’m not in good faith going to try to make that call but leave it to those who maybe can.

The big deal is the loss of high or medium tech supplies for the foreseable future. You might not realise how the whole of Russia runs entirely on import of those. China, even if they wanted to, can not replace that.

If Putin doesn't end up hanging on some random light pole in next few days, RU will collapse.

Seems familiar...

Russia has terminal demographics. Russia’s borders as they are today are impossible to defend let alone with a soon to be rapidly shrinking military. If they don’t take regions they can defend far easier with few troops then they never will. Russia has been invaded enough times across the North European Plain and Hordelands and they have a long memory, and at least the leadership has little conscience. I can’t read Putin’s mind either, but, perhaps he figured Ukraine would roll over and the US and Europe wouldn’t do anything.

I've found the first 25mins of this conference by professor John Mearshimer https://youtu.be/Nbj1AR_aAcE

They don't have Ukraine.

What's the cost of this to Putin? Think about it carefully -- for Putin himself, there is more or less only an upside.

1. China unfortunately is choosing to side with Russia. Realistically, we can't do much to interfere with trade between China and Russia. That means that sanctions that we're going to impose will have less of an effect.

(I hope this doesn't read as political flamewar, since it's my intent just to state the facts.)

2. I am rooting for Ukraine, and I think they have a chance at victory. But the reality is that the battle is far from over. And in the worst case, if Putin loses, he still has the option of employing a tactical nuke as a last resort. My point here is that even in the worst case for Putin, he still believes he can win, no matter what.

I'm hoping that Putin will lose, and does try to use a nuke, because that seems the most likely path to Putin finally being assassinated. But until that moment comes, we're witnessing the outcome of an unhinged person who is also acting rationally. (Both can be true simultaneously.)

He is looking at the west build a fortress around Russia through NATO. Look at US reaction to Cuba and now imagine Cuba having a 100x more tactical and strategic geography in relationship to the US.

Months ago Russia asked that Ukraine and Georgia be excluded from NATO. We ignored him. A better approach would have been to negotiate and demand that they become permanently neutral countrys. Now we're here. Yes Putin owns all this bloodshed but it is naive to say that we the west did everything to avert this situation.

The gas pipelines. Gazprom is a key element of his kleptocratic rule. I don't think it's a coincidence that he waited so many years to "solve" the Donbass, but a few months after it became clear that NordStream2 will likely never become operational, suddenly he went balls-out. From a security standpoint he could have simply deployed in the key regions and dared anyone to fight back, like Erdogan has done over the Syrian regions he wanted to annex. Instead Putin is trying to take the whole thing, because he wants to control the pipelines all the way.

everybody is trying to get putin "back" to the table, they dont realize he already memorized what is on it and is not interested in anything that is being offered there...

there is a russian playbook from 1997 that putin might be playing by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Con... it's outlining a possible version of russians geopolitical long game

I think Russia agreed with China to pull this wild experiment off with invading Ukraine in order to see how far US and its allies are willing to go to sanction Russia and to see if two of them(Russia and China) can survive and prevail together. This mentality "me against the world" is extremely irrational from diplomatic and economic point of view but it can work out because Russian and Chinese economy can complement, synergize and eventually survive and live together. Russia has 6,400 nuclear warheads—the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world so no way anybody can compete with them militarily. Also they have $600bn+ in national reserves in USD, gold and other assets so this vast amount of sanctions won't hurt them at least not in the short term. Btw Taiwan could be next.

You underestimate how much threat a hostile neighbor poses.

Putin knows this. His enemies are weak and fighting runaway inflation. They do not have the appetite for war.

Putin will not tolerate having another enemy on his border. I presume he also expected for Ukrainians to capitulate faster. He has been demanding for Ukraine to remain Kremlin friendly or at least neutral since 2014.

As far as geopolitical YOLOs go, it was a decent bet. He took Crimea with little pushback, I presume he expected he could oust Zelenskyy swiftly or at least return Ukraine to a state of neutrality with little meaningful fallout from a weak West.

A video you should watch which elucidates why Putin is hostile towards a potential EU/NATO candidate being right at his doorstep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

It's a matter of threat management. Even if you know that the guy who's pointing the gun at your head isn't going to fire it, you'd prefer him to stop, or at least throw his gun. Once NATO will have cornered Russia with ultrasonic missiles, then the NATO's ultimatums will have much more power.

I'm against war, and I don't think personally that opting for an aggressive behavior toward our neighbors will wage peace. The US has a very long history of bombing every possible threat on the globe, either economical or military, so I guess your question is quite moot if you think a bit more about it.

Given this background and a certain lack of empathy and sense of right and wrong, from Putin's perspective the past actions appear reasonable. He successfully prevented Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU and involved it into a useless war in the Donbas region. Now things weren't moving on from this point and the situation in the Donbas region was a constant source of concern. So he apparently decided to "solve" the Donbas problem once and for all, perhaps as part of his legacy, and miscalculated. From a pure military perspective the decision might seem reasonable. Ukraine's military is badly outnumbered and still has not much of a chance in the long run. He probably thought it's going to be a quick rush into the capital, installing a puppet regime, and he's done. Western military analysts thought the same.

Why he's been so extremely fixed on keeping Ukraine out of NATO can probably only be explained with his KGB background and the corresponding mindset. There are superficial justifications, it is a prima facie reasonable standpoint of Russia to be against this, but nevertheless Putin seems to be fixated on this in an abnormal way. It is clear that NATO membership of Ukraine would not pose a threat to Russia. However, you could just as well ask why Putin hasn't diversified Russia's economy, made the country a close ally and trade partner of the EU, and helped turning mother Russia into a prospering modern democratic state. This wouldn't have been hard, Russia has all the potential you could imagine - rich of resources, longstanding integration into Europe, excellent scientists and engineers (before the brain drain). The answer is probably that Putin is a paranoid poison murderer and filthy rich ex-KGB officer who came to power more or less by accident. He's simply not good presidential material. Normally this isn't a problem (most presidents aren't), but when a "president" becomes a dictator and is surrounded by Yes-sayers in an information bubble it certainly is a problem.

As far as what is and isn't what's valuable, you're ignoring the ideological dimension. Putin's favorite philosopher is is Ivan Ilyin, whose take on politics was basically Eastern Orthodox fascism. Ukraine itself, to Russian nationalists, is the single largest chunk of land that is "rightfully theirs". If Putin can pull the invasion off, he'll be a hero with that crowd.

Northern Europe is still wide-open terrain, but if can get control of the Baltics and eastern Poland, he can constrict land invasion routes to the bottleneck between Kaliningrad and Slovakia. Getting control of Kazakhstan (which, not coincidentally, is also suddenly awash with Russian troops) would similarly give him the ability to dominate other formerly Soviet countries and put mountains between Russia and invasion from the south.

But maybe underestimated the entire cost… how in lock step NATO and other nations would be.

Even if victorious, he seems to have underestimated the Ukrainians.

I think he expected a VERY quick victory, that doesn’t seem to be on track so far…

Militarily I have no idea why they haven’t established air superiority or even softened up the opposition for a while before committing to a ground war….

The reason people are saying platitudes about solidarity while watching people die from a safe distance, is because the nuclear threat is credible.

And the nuclear threat is credible, because the leader appears crazy or at least inexplicable.

As long as everyone else is not that crazy and cannot appear so, MAD is inoperative.

So in that case, why not take over the world? It just has to be in small enough steps that none of them justifies nukes individually. That's it, that's the constraint.

The war propaganda right now is incredibly dense from both sides, and each side sees only their side. But no, he's not a crazy person, he's the leader of Russia making a play.

I mean the places which matter, big cities like Moscow, St Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don.

The Boratesque villagers won’t be the ones who might overthrow the government, but the city-dwellers could.

> The Trump presidency. A man who exploited the worst of America, trashed alliances, cosied up to despots yet was a symptom of a system already poisonous.

"Made a fortune" describes the lifting of sanctions as part of the deal; Iran got a variety of its frozen assets back. That we wasted that leverage (and years of multi-national diplomacy) by blowing up the deal unilaterally for no good reason is not Iran's fault.

It's hard to have any deal when repubs have pledged to abandon it (regardless of what it is) when they have control again.

In addition to the fact that Russia’s biggest import is heavy machinery which makes it very difficult for them to actually access said raw materials, Russia must import many raw materials required for modern industry. Aluminum Oxide, plastics, and chemical feedstock are major imports for Russia that they no longer have access to. To say that Russia has raw materials essentially ignores anything that isn’t energy.