The Ukraine war thread
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Long article - some highlights (paywall)
He had reached that moment in life when a man abandons himself to his demons or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Stuck in a war he can neither win nor walk away from, Vladimir Putin is in a bad place. It can only get worse. His options are narrowing quickly: no longer low- and high-risk but between very dangerous and more perilous still. The proverbial desperate times may call for desperate measures. The West should anticipate them, no matter how unlikely or even absurd they may seem.Mired in the longest economic stagnation in modern Russian history for most of the decade before the war, the economy is projected to shrink this year and next. In the long run, it is headed for at best an anemic performance. As very little of quality is made in Russia, the sanctions on high-technology items are slowly but inexorably degrading entire industries. Machine-building, car-making, and aviation are atrophying the fastest. Labor shortages have deepened as some of Russia’s best educated, most skilled, and entrepreneurial citizens were among the hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million, men and women who fled the country immediately after the invasion of Ukraine.
Just as the cost of war grows fast and is projected to consume about a quarter of next year’s state budget, income from energy exports, which account for at least half of the government revenues, is bound to shrink: Russian natural gas and oil are no longer expensive enough to make up for the volumes decreased by the EU and G-7 sanctions. (At an equivalent of $417 billion, Russia’s budget last year was about one-sixth of Apple’s market capitalization.)Yet the war’s greatest damage is in tarnished symbols and discredited official mythology. When early in his third presidential term, 2012–18, Putin began to shift the foundation of his support — and thus his regime’s legitimacy — from economic progress and the growth of incomes to militarized patriotism, he reinvented himself as a wartime president, the unyielding and victorious defender of Russia against the perennially plotting West. He became Vladimir the Vanquisher, like Russia’s patron saint, George the Victorious on the country’s coat of arms, spearing the NATO dragon writhing under the hoofs of his steed.
Like Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait to make up for the eight-year stalemated war with Iran and for the lost lives of an estimated quarter-million Iraqi soldiers, Putin could hope to rekindle the patriotic euphoria that followed Crimea’s “return to the motherland” and to obscure the bloody slog of the Ukraine campaign with a swift military triumph.
Putin would not lack targets among Russia’s neighbors.
He could teach a lesson in deference to Moldova and Georgia, both of which are flirting with the EU. Then there are the Kazakhs, who, Putin averred, never had their own state until the fall of the Soviet Union. He almost certainly had in mind Kazakhstan’s six northern provinces, where most of the country’s 3.5 million ethnic Russians live, when he blamed former Soviet republics for exiting the Soviet Union and “dragging” with them vast areas of historically Russian lands, “presents from the Russian people.”A few years back, RAND war-gamers assessed that Russian troops could be in Riga or Tallinn in 36 to 60 hours after the beginning of hostilities. Deepened by the devastation visited on Russia’s armies in Ukraine, the enormous qualitative and quantitative gap between Russia’s and NATO’s militaries would render such an operation moot. A conventional war of any significant length would suicidal for Moscow. But Putin will not be looking for such a war. Instead, he is likely to opt for a smash-and-grab occupation of narrow slivers of land with large ethnic Russia populations, the better to claim their “liberation” and then “reunification with the motherland.”
In Estonia, the target would likely be Idu-Viru county, where three-quarters of the inhabitants are ethically Russian and its largest city, Narva, on the Estonian–Russian border, is 80 percent Russian. Alternatively, in Latvia, Moscow’s target would be the Latgale province, which is one-third Russian and whose capital, Daugavpils, is almost half Russian.
Of course, even a very limited aggression against a NATO country is irrationally risky in conventional military-strategic terms. But we know that Putin is no longer “rational” in the common sense of the word. If he were, he would not have invaded Ukraine.
A different kind of “rationality” takes over. A triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson famously said of ill-fated endeavors. Or, to recall the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Nazism, “a triumph of will” — of determination over reality. “Possunt quia posse videntur,” Vergil wrote. They can because they think they can. -
Good essay however it is contingent on whether Putin’s regime can survive the cost of it’s current war.
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Let’s find out.
Edit: I guess I ought to have included the link:
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From what I have been reading and hearing out there as of late is the Russians are moving large numbers of strike aircraft and ground support helicopters closer to the Ukrainian border. I think we can expect to see the Russians attempting much more integrated offensive in the coming days or weeks.
Regardless, I have my doubts whether the Russian command structure can accommodate an integrated and combined forces strike without turning into a train wreck.
One thing for certain, it will get right nasty again.
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Another one bites the dust. Dropping like flies.
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Another one bites the dust. Dropping like flies.
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Putin’s version of residential schools for Ukrainian children:
https://www.rferl.org/amp/ukraine-russia-children-reeducation/32272143.html
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Apparently SecState Blinken's comments about the possibility of China supplying lethal aid to Russia in the Ukraine war led to some displeasure on the part of the Chinese.
"It would be a 'red line' he said."
Devil's advocate here, how is China supplying lethal aid to Russia fundamentally different from what the US and other NATO nations are doing?
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Apparently SecState Blinken's comments about the possibility of China supplying lethal aid to Russia in the Ukraine war led to some displeasure on the part of the Chinese.
"It would be a 'red line' he said."
Devil's advocate here, how is China supplying lethal aid to Russia fundamentally different from what the US and other NATO nations are doing?
Good question. For us in the decadent West, Russia is the aggressor and must be stopped in Ukraine.
China, on the other hand, while fully supporting Ukrainian sovereignty, its right to self determination and the inviolability of its borders, cannot help but see that its own Marxist-Leninist ideology demands that it support Russia, the true victim of US imperialist ambitions and birthplace of the first proletarian state.
That and the fact that it’s a great opportunity to sell arms and munitions and further mortgage Russia under its benign, peace loving proletarian and progressive embrace.
Hope that helps.
Elbows up!
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Good question. For us in the decadent West, Russia is the aggressor and must be stopped in Ukraine.
China, on the other hand, while fully supporting Ukrainian sovereignty, its right to self determination and the inviolability of its borders, cannot help but see that its own Marxist-Leninist ideology demands that it support Russia, the true victim of US imperialist ambitions and birthplace of the first proletarian state.
That and the fact that it’s a great opportunity to sell arms and munitions and further mortgage Russia under its benign, peace loving proletarian and progressive embrace.
Hope that helps.
@Renauda said in The Ukraine war thread:
great opportunity to sell arms and munitions and further mortgage Russia
I think someone (was it you, Renauda?) who commented that the Chinese look at this as a way of asserting dominance over Russia - not only politically, but also financially.
