I wonder how many of those promises will actually be fulfilled before Putin gets frustrated.
Does Putin strike you as an overly emotional guy who gets frustrated easily?
My take is that he is cold and calculating. Not one I’d take lightly.
Like, I've seen arguments that the whole "Ukraine joining NATO" justification is just a pretext. But if that's just a pretext, what's the actual reason? I haven't seen a good answer yet.
I honestly don't think we'll know the true story for decades.
The power gained in this case is attempting to rebuild the Russian empire by "liberating" areas that have since become independent countries and want nothing to do with the Russian rule.
It was auto published on 26 on ria and bunch of other sites and than purged. It explains everything
see the idea ?
kinda brings up a phrase that was thrown by some russian official or tv person a few years ago: "what's the need in the world that doesn't have russia in it"
It does not represent real thoughts of those in power.
one extra point: this book is written by somebody who is considered to be putin's guru. wiki article contains summary of the book. go through it and for every bullet point that you find something corresponding in today's reality, get yourself a candy :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
i also found today's interview with author of this book. interview pretty much exactly echoes sentiments of the article (google translate is your friend). https://bloknot-voronezh.ru/news/nikakogo-yanukovicha-2-0-po...
it's not propoganda. it's just batshit crazy people who are obsessed with rebuilding russian empire. is it so hard to believe when we have qanon on display for past few years ?
Maybe was tricked into war by .. I don't know .. and the war is just collateral demage.
Maybe his information had been so wrong because he and all people around him lives in a bubble.
What putin is doing now is something along the Kosovo playbook... someone has interest in some area somewhere (us in kosovo, putin in donbas/lugansk), they help the separatists, the main country fights back, and then they start war (bombing in case of yugoslavia, this now in case of ukraine), to get what they want. Putin also mentioned weapons of mass destruction in ukraine ("the iraq playbook" USA used), but the theory didn't get a lot of traction.
Also, it's just the beginning of the war, so you can expect the propaganda machines to work 24/7 on both sides, so what the truth is, will probably never be know and will be rewritten by the winners and CNN.
Yeah it is, the Baltics are already in NATO. Ukraine joining would not significantly change the balance of power in the region.
Cuba on the other hand was far more significant because the Soviet Union did not otherwise have assets so close to the US.
Also the US never invaded Cuba in the way Russia invaded Ukraine. Their actions were more comparable to Russian support of DPR and LPR.
USA definitely had the plan for a war with cuba, but it luckily didn't happen. They did start many other wars in the meantime, mostly on the other side of the world.
> USA definitely had the plan for a war with cuba, but it luckily didn't happen
This is a really weird way to write “USA decided not to fight a war with Cuba”, everybody makes all kinds of plans.
And there's a difference between a "lets prepare, just in case if cuba attacks" and "let's make a false flag attack, and kill our own people, so we can attack cuba".
NATO has has only engaged in non-combat missions in Iraq, in support of the local government. NATO has never fought in Iraq.
The US is not NATO, it would do you well to do some basic research before throwing around misguided criticism.
Well, for a defensive alliance it sure has been on the offensive for the best part of 50 years
E: Unfortunately can’t reply below because of HN throttling, but yes, a month ago I moved several of my employees out of Ukraine because of Russian troop buildup on the border.
Wars don’t start overnight, everyone who hadn’t buried their head in sand knew this was a likely outcome.
Yes, at their own borders. Their jurisdiction ends there.
All other nations have the right of self-determination and don't have to care about Russia's thoughts.
If they won't like it, they could sanction Ukraine or something, don't you think?
I live in a small balkan country, and we also have our soldiers in kosovo, syria, libanon etc... what right do we have to point the finger at russia? USA is currently bombing somalia. China is looking greedily at taiwan... etc.
If "everyone else" can do it, why not putin? If not putin, why do we let usa do it? Ukraine is just another equivalent of iraq, afghanistan, etc.
This would be a great time to say "stop" in nato, start acting as just a defensive organization, stop all the nato members meddling abroad, and say "NO" to both putin and USA, and everyone else who wants anything outside their own borders.
This is bordering on dishonest. US is supporting the legitimate Somalian government against a terror group famous for it’s attacks on schools.
You could sort of compare this to Russia supporting the Syrian government, despite their legitimacy being questionable. This is something they have hardly faced international criticism over, beyond downright war crimes.
Just look at a map. There's a reason "Turn the map around" is a mantra in professional military officer schools in the West: it's essential to understanding your adversary.
Russia's land border with Estonia and Latvia is ~325km long, straddling Lakes Peipus and Pihkva. This is a small frontage, and fairly easy for Russia's massive army to defend.
There is only 1 MSR/highway (M-9) that leads to Russia from these Baltic States, and the distance is just about 570km. The operational combat range of an M1 Abrams or Leopard 2 MBT is ~450km. So they can't reach Moscow from NATO territory without stopping to refuel a good distance short of the capital.
Now let's add a NATO-member Ukraine to the mix. Not even including Crimea, the Russian-Ukrainian land border is over 1200km long. That is a LOT of frontage to protect. It features 2 MSRs/highways with direct access to Moscow, 3 if you took a detour to secure Voronezh (not an easy task). If you use subsidiary roads from the closest part of Ukraine's border, before merging onto the M-3 highway, you can get to Moscow in about ~475km, JUST about the maximum range for tanks.
So Russia would be risking shorting the invasion distance to their capital by 20%, putting it in range of a mechanized lightning thrust. It would also massively complicate their ability to mass combat power on their border because their NATO front would quintuple in length. It would give the US the option of putting anti-ballistic missiles in eastern Ukraine, closer to potential Russian launch locations and probably making it easier to achieve boost-phase intercepts of ICBMs. That undermines the strategic deterrence balance of power/MAD. US ABMs in Eastern Europe is something Russian leadership has been bitching about for 15 years. For some reason we keep pretending to not consider their concerns legitimate.
That's a WHOLE lotta downsides. What is the UPSIDE, for Russia, of a NATO-member Ukraine, though? Pretty much nothing. So Russia's leadership did some risk mitigation calculus and they figured that immediate economic damage was more acceptable than the highly-negative long term Expected Value of a NATO Ukraine. Even if the probability of NATO attacking is low, the damage potential is astronomical. Keep in mind this is a country who's arguably most important holiday commemorates the war where they lost 25+ million lives fighting off an invasion from a hostile alliance on their western border. That's still in living memory for them.
Where they miscalculated was a) Putin's perceptions of the Ukrainian popular sentiment and b) their military's actual ability to pull off a nearly-bloodless blitz of Kiev to facilitate a regime change. The Russian military is looking hella-incompetent right now. I think if Kiev had fallen in <72hrs, there wouldn't even be sanctions against Russia today.
Because in Putin's mind, "Soviet" and "Russian" are synonyms. In other words, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to him the breakup of Russia, and as a Russian nationalist he sees that as a great tragedy. He blames it on the Communists for adopting a constitutional structure which contained within it the seeds of separatism; the Communists only ever meant it as lip-service, and as long as they remained in control that was all it was, but as they lost control those seeds began to sprout and 1991 was the result. To him, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, etc, are not neighbouring foreign nationalities, they are Russians, they are traditional ethnic minorities of the Russian nationality, just as he views Chechens, Tatars, Tuvans, etc, as being.
He wants to "Make Russia Great Again" by reversing the breakup of 1991, or getting as close to that goal as he possibly can. And annexing large parts of Ukraine and installing one or more puppet governments in the rest is, in his mind, an important step towards that ultimate goal.
You can hear threads if this in the speeches he gives to Russian audiences where he argues that Ukraine isn't a real country.
He's actually going further back than that, to the various Rus empires that predated the modern countries of Russia, Ukraine, etc.
To some extent I think the extensive propaganda about numerous political/celebrity figures being great and powerful and capable has been a sham from the beginning. I would call the war on Ukraine 'put up or shut up' time, where reality tests the value of the claims that have been made for many, many years.
I think we've all been told a lot of lies for a long time.
History's monsters so often seem to be dumb, deeply fallible, weak humans in the wrong place at the wrong time, doubling down on wrong decisions. I've seen people being unsettled and afraid and going 'but what if it's a feint and then the REAL Russian Army comes to obliterate everything', in the face of the shitshow we're seeing.
Not an accident: the effort that went into putting forth that narrative has been extensive. But once tested, we see where reality lies.
Hitler was an example of this. He cleverly came to power, astutely conserved himself in power for years, but then badly fucked up almost from the beginning once he embarked on major military adventures. However, many people kept believing him even militarily clever because of previous political cleverness. I believe something similar is the case with Putin (This is not a comparison of Putin with Hitler in moral terms, just an example)
Today Lavrov again repeated the RF's demands for removal of US's nuclear weapons from Europe.
(And yes, I too believe we are not privy to what has transpired in the past few months, if not past year between the various powers. And there is no way short of collective madness in Russian leadership that this "operation" will be limited to Ukraine.)
One does not avoid a war by starting a war
He's a hardliner, I would not say that he could be frustrated easily but this absolutely is not an easy situation. His currency has collapsed and his country is on the brink of defaulting on foreign debt. He has no support anywhere but from his puppet dictator Lukashenko.
I think Putin did not expect such coordination and global effort in sanctioning Russia over Ukraine invasion. I believe that he wanted to take over Ukraine in just a few days and was surprised by Ukraine's defence and multiple desertions in his own army. He has decisions to make and choices are poor.
Everything I have read that isn't heavily biased anti-Russia propaganda says Russia has exercised enormous restraint so far in this invasion. There's no reason I see to believe Putin's been surprised by Ukraine's defenses, it's not as if all of Russia's forces at the border have been deployed and overwhelmed. Last I read not even half had mobilized. It's more like Putin pushed forward what he hoped was enough to compel a low-casualty outcome in his favor.
What happens next seems likely to be substantially more painful for the Ukrainians, but I hope I'm wrong.
Implying Putin held back for the sake of the ukranian people is misleading.
I hope you'll never have to deal with Russia's restraint.
By Russian standards? Yes. Absolutely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny_ballistic_missile_attac...
1) He has sent in his shit soldiers and equipment first, to sacrifice it and wear down Ukrainian forces.
2) All of his equipment and soldiers are of equal shitness.
If it is 1, then he could not have expected a quick win in Ukraine if he was sending in sacrificial troops first. If he did expect a quick win then 2 is the most likely option.
However this raises the question about his air force, they have not been involved and would surely have made a huge difference to their objectives. So again there are a few main reasons:
1) They are not as good as they should be (some reports of pilots having around 100 hours annual flight time, vs RAF and US Air Force where they pilots complain that less than 200 flight hours per year is not enough to remain combat ready).
2) He needs the for stage 2 of the plan which would mean fighting NATO when he tries to invade Poland or other neigbouring Baltic state (There is no way he can get his forces from Ukraine to Finland without Finland having lots of notice and preparing... posssibly by joining NATO anyway)
3) It might be “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” If his air force flew and we saw they were in as much dissaray as his land troops there goes any concern over Russian air superiority.
Given his age, it's certainly within the realm of possibility that he is suffering from cognitive decline.
>Western intelligence agencies have good visibility into Putin right now and are closely watching his moves for any significant behavioral changes, several current and former officials said. Four U.S. officials said there is no intelligence saying he is mentally unstable, but they said he has displayed a different pattern of behavior from in the past.
>The U.S. has solid intelligence that Putin is frustrated and directing unusual bursts of anger at people in his inner circle over the state of the military campaign and the worldwide condemnation of his actions, one former and two current U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence said.
>That is unusual, they say, because Putin, a former intelligence officer, usually keeps his emotions in check.
Dangerous ofcourse, but a mastermind he isn't.
I mean... yes, clearly! Obviously, there's the Ukraine thing, but even before that, look at photos and footage of him when slighted at conferences and so on. He's not as emotionally open as a Trump or a Burlusconi, but he's no stoic as politicians go.
It should have taken hours to break through. The operation was a shamble, even if it might succeed over time.
In 20 years of NATO operations over 5 different war theatres there have been 74 captured soldiers (src: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/prisoners-in-the-war-o... ). Here there have been 10's in a matter of days.
Either he's gone full potato, or he's still very calculating but everyone around him is feeding false information upwards to "look nice" and because they can't say no. Neither scenario bodes extremely well for his chances of success.
The picture he had portrayed of him doesn't match reality.
Just look at how scared he is of catching COVID. Since 2 years, almost no one is allowed near to him.
The amount of COVID tests his bodyguards and others need to do daily is pretty insane too. Everyone he sees/greets needs to be in isolation for 2 weeks upfront to get near.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/10/02/thanks-to-covid-...
And many other sources for many years. Here's a video from him in a hazmat suite, one of his last public appearances - https://abcnews.go.com/International/putin-dons-hazmat-suit-...
Fyi, sitting at a 20 meter table is not a public appearance and Putin has met his big/important friend Xi only virtually as far as I'm aware the last years.
I don't think he's calculated at all. Many things have wrong that he didn't suspect:
- Their 'advanced' malware was finished off by Microsoft within 3 hours
- Their 'advanced hacking culture' has been reversed within days, state tv programs and websites have gone offline within hours.
- Their decade long effort of a propaganda machine has been severely reduced within days ( RT, ...)
- Their portrait of having an 'advanced military' has been decimated. The world now knows that his army is mostly old, rusty, unmotivated and his troops are clueless.
- He miscalculated Ukraine, who he practically trained for 8 years. He also raised serious awareness under Ukrainians what happens with inaction.
- He's giving up his independence, isolating himself from the world and it seems that he's fully aware of that.
- He is constantly ( for years) angering his biggest and most profitable clients ( Europe).
He overstepped his carefully crafted image and failed every step on the way. Not even taken into consideration that he literally had 8 years ( or more) to plan this.
His image of being a world power ( while Russia has the same GDP as 30 years ago and America has grown 14 fold) is just an illusion, but real for him. We have given him too much attention on the world stage.
He has nukes, not brains... Should have been known years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679110 ).
Europe is prioritizing energy independence now, Russia still had multiple decades to profit from that to improve their situation.
Now, they became 100% China dependent.
But in reality, he's just a short, puffy old man, living in ridiculous kitschy palaces, sitting on ridiculous long tables because he's afraid of even his most loyal underlings.
With attacking Ukraine, he made a huge mistake. He simply counted on the west doing nothing, as usual, but this time he went too far. But because he's just a powerful man, not a great man, he's unable to admit that.
Looks like he was right.
I don't think a man who has run Russia for decades will suddenly have a brain fart and attack another sovereign state on a whim. Think carefully.
Think very carefully.