“Russia cannot afford to lose, so we need a kind of a victory”: Sergey Karaganov | Hacker News Reader

“Russia cannot afford to lose, so we need a kind of a victory”: Sergey Karaganov

newstatesman.com

11 pointsmwattsun17 comments

Based on this interview, Karaganov appears to be a typical geopolitical policy wonk. These so-called experts care nothing about the immense human suffering caused by the leaders who take their advice. I have nothing but contempt for them, including similar experts in positions of power here in the USA.

I'd love to know what, in his view, creates the inevitability that Democracies die (or become autocratic) during times of war. Is it because the state becomes more aggressive/potentially overreaching in order to combat an enemy, never releases that power, and citizens either absolutely hate it or go along with it?

While I don't support the war on Ukraine, it's fascinating to hear this guy's perspective. Especially if Russians are largely choosing to support the war as recent articles are saying, it can only help us to understand why people would embrace it.

A victory for Russians would be to get a democracy. The autocratic thing isn’t working out so well for them.

Losing the war sucks. It really sucks but that's how the character is tested. We all have failed at least once in our lives. Maybe it was the job one didn't get or maybe you had a bitter divorce court case for visitation rights of your children. Sometimes you lose, and it may even be that you didn't deserve this. You did everything alright but the other side cheated, or the judge was biased or you got a bad lawyer.

Nevertheless, Russia should accept the loss and humiliation and move on even if it is very hard. Complaining that it cannot afford to lose and start killing innocent civilians out of revenge only makes it a monster. Then we are not going to deeper understand its special way of seeing things to grant Russia some token victory.

Putin gets buried in the kremlin wall, if he loses without being able to save face. He cannot afford the appearance of a loss.

What an idiot

Yes, a false cogency. He makes statements which need to be torn down to look at the atoms. 'Must' is used a lot.

I posted it because I thought the Russian perspective was worth knowing, not because I agree with it (retweet is not endorsement.) His attitude is pretty frightening actually because he thinks this thing is going to get much bigger. I feel like he is saying they will do whatever it takes to win. If that means attacking a NATO country, so be it. He says NATO is worthless because it doesn't obligate any country to actually go to war for another country in NATO. Not sure that's true, but that's what he says.

That's not true, article 5 of NATO - https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_110496.htm

For the Russian perspective, you could visit 1420 on Youtube ( It's in Moscow, so the opinions are more liberal than in rural area's)

"Man on the street" interviews are not very interesting. I was referring to the Russian leadership perspective.

You thought to find a leadership perspective from that?

There's plenty of US resources on that, that became available the last months.

Right, but he's actually advocating Putin's thinking. He's the next best thing to hearing from Putin himself to my ears.

But you're right, there's a lot available. My favorite:

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani

This is the best one i know of - https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA444-3.html

It's 180 pages fyi

Stop and marvel for a moment at the Doublethink he’s displaying.

On the one hand he’s claiming that NATO expansion is a threat to Russia that is the reason for the war. On the other hand he’s claiming that article 5 is toothless, ergo NATO is harmless to Russia.

I can’t tell if he is genuinely so irrational (like most other Russian thinking on Ukraine as evidenced by events of the war) or if he’s exceedingly cynical.

Totally. He's watching his house burn down, and is trying to act like it's just another play on the chessboard. I particularly loath how Russian spin keeps trying to make this about being a proxy war with the west. They invaded a country incredibly similar ethnically, linguistically, and culturally to themselves. It's like beating your own kids to spite the step father.

It doesn't matter, Russia has a demographic problem even worse than the US and is going to have a collapse. Something like Japan would be a best case scenario for them but I don't think they have the economy to support it.

https://archive.ph/DKNLg

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