To anyone following... it was clear from the start that he wanted to expand territory and power. It was never about just Ukraine either.
More competent would be fine. Well, not for Russians. It will be terrible for them. But a competent Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine.
The risk and historical pattern is the people surrounding a paranoid autocrat tend to be more zealous, not less. They've internalized the propaganda. And they never had to drop the act to make the good decisions that got o.g. autocrat onto the throne. Putin was and likely remains a competent spook. His cronies are good at embezzling.
However, as I understand it, Putin has undermined any obvious successors and stoked divisions in the Kremlin to secure his grip. If so, infighting may let a united opposition under Navalny succeed.
Another alternative would be the breakup of the Federation. Some of the republics in the federation like Komi, Tartarstan, Ossetia, Sakha and Karelia have strong national identities and may unilaterally declare independence during the choas. Many of those will end up like the 'stans, but many would at least try to follow the example of the Baltics.
To be clear I'm being more hopeful than realistic here, but one can always hope. But the clear prerequisite for the hopeful scenarios is a resounding defeat in the Ukraine war. We in the west need to strongly support Ukraine not just to save Ukraine but also on the off chance that it might save the Russian people too.
That's highly unlikely. In a dictatorship, competent people don't survive long in positions of power.
https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1531956066451394577 (https://nitter.it/MarkGaleotti/status/1531956066451394577)
I'm a fluent Russian speaker and sometimes I watch a few Russian nightly "talk-shows", start to finish, to get a feel for how Putin's propaganda machine is changing over time. Well, since February, it's been in such overdrive, pumping Russians full of vicious hatred of all things "Western" and delusions of grandeur, that I honestly think it's possible for the regime to lose control. They are convincing the riff-raff that they're about to take on NATO and win. Maybe they don't have intentions of starting WW3, but what if Putin is offed or dies suddenly and the populace, driven to such jingoist frenzy that it lost all sense of reality and actually believes they can take on NATO and win, puts an even more evil and reckless "rebuilder of empire" on the throne? Even authoritarian dictatorships are affected by the mood of the mob.
In the first couple months of the war, there were lots of explosions/fires at major Russia industrial or infrastructure sites that got reported; I’ve seen fewer reports recently, but I don't know if it is happening less or Russia has clamped down on the news more effectively.
At any given moment there are a million foreign people freely traveling around the US- some on vacation, some visiting family, some for school, some for work, some for medical treatment, etc. It's relatively trivial for a nefarious organization to find a person who speaks English and can legally enter the US.
For Russia (among other places) none of this is true. Visas to enter the country are harder to acquire, movement within the country on such a visa is still constrained, a smaller number of foreigners means easier for intelligence to monitor, and far fewer people have the language skills or physical characteristics to blend into the local populace.
>refineries venting poison gas into populated areas
Hard to think of a better way to become the villain in the story. This has not occurred, but not necessarily because the means of making it happen aren't there.
That seems like a job for the Russian propaganda machine. Just as they manipulated malleable minds towards one idea, they can do it towards another: "We were never at war with NATO".
> Attempts to meet this expansion with appeasement will end in WW3.
Or, perhaps, this war already is WW3, the question is how it ends, not whether it starts. (Yeah, most of the big powers aren't openly directly engaged, just supporting one of the belligerents with military and economic aid and intelligence and sanctions on the opposing belligerent. But that's a choice of how to fight the war, and that's been made very clear—the US explicitly invoking lend-lease in naming it's aid bill for Ukraine couldn't be a more pointed declaration of how it sees the situation.)
There's plenty of arguments, some reasonable, that there have been one or more World Wars since WW2.
Feel free to read WW3 in GP as “WWn+1”; I’m not interested in arguing against any particular construction of the number of prior world wars.
Things are always building up to one major event. Those events are as much responsible, as much as the last event before the big war?
Can't agree more on this part, its a bully that understands only force of the stronger, any concept of law, fairness, democracy etc. are simply not present there. Soft approach is publicly maybe welcomed, but privately laughed at as clear show of weakness.
I am vastly disappointed by Macron's attempts to still please him, to have some sort of 'graceful loss' like something similar is possible right now or acceptable by either side. I guess you can afford some pompous PR bullshit like that if there are multiple big countries between you and the invader.
A bit sad considering France didn't have it rosy with germans in WWII but I guess that memory is too old now, and its more important to get french car factories in Russia again running (or honestly I can't get another good reason for such stance, EU is facing by far biggest military threat since its existence and such stance is completely irrational when looking on it from long term perspective).
Ukraine cannot win in the traditional sense (capturing Moscow (although even that was insufficient for Napoleon) and forcing a surrender). It has to force Russia's surrender through other means - making the war unpopular, too costly in men and money, etc. This could literally take years since Russia is a dictatorship with lots of humans to sacrifice. Giving Putin an "honourable out" is probably the fastest way to bring the war to a stop. It's highly unlikely it will work, on multiple levels - Russia wouldn't agree, Ukraine sure as hell won't, and even if they did, it wouldn't last. Still, you can see where Macron is coming from - be it for humanitarian or practical reasons ( like the fact that the EU needs Russian gas for the foreseeable future and keeps paying to Russia, or that pushing an unhinged man with nuclear weapons to desperation might not end well).
In any case, yes, Russia must lose decisively, Germany WWII style, not Germany WWI style where the population didn't get it.
I almost agree, except on democracy. This type is not something strange unseen at home, it is a common mindset among ambitious powerful persons in Europe and the West as well. And here at home just as in Russia, these types often enjoy democratic support. Hitler was a democratically elected and supported leader. Orban is too. Brexit leaders were too. Trump just as well.
We can't just magically get rid of this type of leader and its threat to us, calling for more democracy and law. Our politics, business and culture are full of such gangster types, and in some cases they do have democratic support.
I write this to point out that we should be realist on these things, not indulge in indignation and moral superiority. Russia has a strongman leadership that we fear, but they probably look at us the same way, with valid reasons. After all, the West did reveal its nasty face in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and so on. That did not evade Putin's attention.
> I am vastly disappointed by Macron's attempts to still please him... A bit sad considering France didn't have it rosy with germans in WWII...honestly I can't get another good reason for such stance, EU is facing by far biggest military threat since its existence and such stance is completely irrational when looking on it from long term perspective).
France benefited by folding to Hitler - they limited destruction and loss of lives. And Hitler did not even have nuclear weapons. Some people do not realize it, but the game has changed, it now involves planetary scale destruction. Americans/NATO understand this and measure their response carefully. Macron's activities seem a valid strategy, considering it is just good manners, keeping that channel opened. It is infuriating for the Ukraine leadership, yes, it helps Putin, yes, it is not ideal, yes, but it is in the interest of big business to get back to business.
A gangster knows when to go to war, and when to make a deal with another gangster. That's the realpolitik.
> EU is facing by far biggest military threat since its existence and such stance is completely irrational when looking on it from long term perspective
Soviet Union was much bigger threat. Nobody expects present-day Russia to take on any NATO country.
I've been really struck by how one of the most popular shows features presenters and guests standing on a stage discussing or arguing about the day's news in front of an audience; literally news theater. Of course, one could argue that western TV formats are also theatrical in their way; sitting around or behind desks to give an air of collegiality or authority, respectively; or just explaining visual events with a disembodied voice, inviting its adoption as internal monologue.
Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media was written early the cold war and though it's dated in many respects, it was sufficiently forward thinking that it's still a useful and thought-provoking read today: his basic idea is that there are different paths toward the construction of meaning in the mind of audience members, and that the way in which information is presented is often far more important than the content of the information.
So, they've copied CNN Crossfire (first aired in 1982), but added “standing up”?
the recordings of those shows will be a class material for the classes on modern nazism for the decades to come. A "master-nation" constantly talking on TV about getting rid of "ukraininess" while the Putin's SS force "Russian Guard" abducts and disappears on the occupied territories Ukrainian business an political leadership, activists and armed forces veterans (the same approach what USSR did in 1939 in Poland) - after days of torture some of them appear back very lifelessly claiming change of views and becoming pro-Russian and collaborating with the occupant regime while others just disappear probably into the mobile crematoriums and mass graves like in Bucha.