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Comment by qikInNdOutReply | Hacker News Reader

Thats what happens, when all you got to hold the band together is terror instead of soft power. Everyone just quits at the first sign of weakness.

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I was thinking about the same thing a few days ago. One of the most interesting takeaways from this war is how soft power is very underrated, and lack of any soft power whatsoever is one of the reasons behind Russia's problems.

Russia has spend billions to gain soft power by hosting the 2018 world cup, the winter Olympics etc.

However the only "soft power" that has actually worked for Russia are their hundreds of thousands of social media disinfo sockpuppet accounts. They have convinced half of India, Nigeria, Hungary and Kentucky that Ukraine created COVID-19.

Do their energy exports count as soft power? Arguably that was working quite well, until they further expanded in to Ukraine.

I would count that as a different kind of power, distinction from soft and hard. Maybe "commercial power"? "Trading power"?

To me soft power sounds more like culture - being appealing to other country's populations.

I think they count as soft power, but on the energy front, everyone (even Europe itself) completely overestimated how strong it was. Russia very much expected that energy dependency would keep Europe out of the conflict, even if it would put them on a path towards breaking that dependency in the long term. No one seemed to truly expect that the reaction would be so strong that it'd take less than a year to mostly eliminate that dependency.

In fact that went very poorly. They cut off gas to Europe in an attempt to freeze them and make them come to the bargaining table, but Europe responded very strongly and largely still supports Ukraine. The winter was even very mild. In cutting off the crutch, Russia forced Europe to go cold turkey instead of delaying it for a decade like they wanted to. Now Russia has to settle for selling the gas to other places at a steep discount, and Europe may never buy Russian gas again.

There's even a fun parallel to draw with the floating LNG terminals off the coast and WWII floating harbors for Normandy

True, but presumably because of the fear of losing energy supply, Europe chose _not_ to react to earlier provocations, including the invasion of the Crimea.

Yes, the whole salami slice expansion method seems to be designed, to use other diplomats as an abblative layer for empire expansion. Basically using your oponents wish for peace to slowly expand creeping.

And there is a whole diplomat generation standing by to be useful idiots again if not an example is placed like a statue every 3 generations.

I think it is a misunderstanding to think Russia holds no soft power in Kazakhstan.

True, but it seems that the Kazakh leadership is fed up with that power.

Kazakhstan is as authoritarian as Russia was before 2022. They'll pretend there is some conflict with Putin while still supplying sanctioned goods to Russia and serving as banking gateway to bypass financial sanctions.

You are not alone in this observation https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1633012168038785024

Russia doesn’t seem very interested in soft power either. Under Putin they seem more interested in violence, helping some local insurgents, installing strong men.

Even in Ukraine previously sympathetic Ukrainian officials in Ukraine reported getting cold calls from Russians telling them they better fall in line and threatened them. You would think it would be easier to throw them a bone / bribe… but nope.

They don’t seem to understand much outside the bullying sphere.

It is not a coincidence that 2 out of 4 of Russia's "separatist commanders" in eastern Ukraine were killed because of "infighting" between 2014 and 2022.

Yes, hopefully some of the federated republics will start civil wars to break away from the Russian empire. Continue the disintegration process that started in 1991.

Hoping that a nuclear power breaks apart is a nightmare. This is true for states like Pakistan but when you have a stockpile in the thousands and a nuclear logistical distribution like Russia it is nearly guarantee that we have several (terroristic) nuclear explosions over the next decades and probably half a dozen rogue states more.

And do not assume that this is a peaceful transition. Putin is very much concerned about the integrity of Russia.

Concern does not equal the ability to prevent or master a situation. Putin was also concerned with aquiring ukraine. Between that dictator impersonating aparatschik, the ground is liquifying as we speak.

Seems very unlikely to me. Between things like permissive action links, maintenance require to keep the bombs in working order, and expertise in how to use them, I would be dubious of rogue states getting them, wanting to use them, and actually being able to execute on them. Terrorists tend to have some sort of goal. Not just scary bad guys who want to blow stuff up. We typically see nukes are just used to establish legitimacy of authoritarian rulers via idle threats. using nukes is a losing move.

This already happened once when the USSR broke up. The world got through that.

I think in the end you can't dismiss how much it is in every state's self-interest to not start a nuclear exchange.

What is not yet visible, but might be a bringer of future conflict, is the many turk nations that could form a federation of there own. Turkey, Aserbaidschan , Turkmenistan and the Uighurs even, could form quite a mini-union themselves. If they manage for once to be at piece with all the other ethnicities they traditionally supressed similar to the russians.

You can draw a straight line from the USSR breaking up, to Ukraine giving away their nuclear weapons via the Budapest Memorandum, to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (which was a signatory). States are going to be less likely to give up their nuclear weapons, even with treaties, because treaties can be easily broken.

Putin is only concerned about integrity of his own political power and physical body. There is bunch of regions and cities in government databases that was never ever under any kind of military control. Russia is literally have imaginary state border.

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