No, they will not decide such a thing. If there is anything that Ballistic Nuclear Armament earns a country, it’s protection from regime-changing invasion. Why even have the damn things if you’re not going to use them when a rival nation invades your country with the intention of toppling the government?
The Patriarch Kirill of Moscow could care less what the (Catholic) Pope of Rome says. He’s technically under the aegis of the Eastern Orthodox Church and responsive to guidance from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople but unlike Roman Catholic doctrine the Patriarch is a “first among equals” rather than the “Supreme Pontiff”, and practically speaking the Patriarch rarely gives opinions on nationalist secular matters, although Kirill actually broke communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate due to Bartholomew I granting autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine., so he probably gives fuck all about what the Patriarch of Constantinople has to say about it anyway.
Stranger
To be fair, there are currently some very Nazi-like folks in Ukraine, and Russia seems to be working very hard to ensure that those folks are defeated.
And while the Pope has no authority over the Russian Orthodox Church, he just might have some influence. As, for that matter, might the other orthodox Patriarchs.
We’ve got some “very Nazi-like folks” here in the US of A, but I imagine we’d take exception if Russia tried to justify an invasion—excuse me, a “special military operation”—to remove them. But the bulk of Ukrainians are not neo-Nazis, or fanatical white nationalists, or otherwise committed to any ideology that would be threatening to Russia. And oh, by the way, Russian leaders have never had any problem cozying up to Nazis and other fascist regimes when it served their purposes, such as when annexing/carving up Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Stalin made a meal over the ‘patriotic’ need to fight Nazis that Putin is now nostalgically invoking only after famously shaking hands after signing the “Treaty of Non-Aggression between German and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” in 1939 in the Kremlin.
Referrring to the “denazification” of Ukraine as any kind of justification for a unilateral aggression, invasion, and the brutality we are now witnessing is nothing more than feeding propaganda. It’s bad enough that Fox Newsheads like Tucker “Never Met A White Nationalist I Didn’t Like” Carlton try to imply it at every opportunity even though he’s otherwise onboard with fascism as a general principle; we don’t need to promulgate it here even incidentally.
Stranger
I’m guessing it was a joke–the Russians are the ones acting like Nazis, and at the same time engineering their own defeat…
That is how they got out of Afghanistan. “We won, time to go home.”
Officially this method is called, “Declare victory and leave”.
I think that this is one reason why the US and the world needs to do a much better job of making it clear that Russia has already lost the war.
They have only shrunk their position in the world, become weaker and poorer. Their soldiers will be coming home to a country that is worse than the one they left - and those soldiers might find that they’re getting paid with a currency that’s worth the equivalent of Kleenex for all that it matters.
Russia lost within one week of invading. The Russian people need to understand that - and it doesn’t happen if the West is just as complicit in making it seem like the battle is purely one of military success at destroying a bunch of shit in Ukraine.
I don’t believe Russia has lost. Putin will just throw enough untrained draftees at Ukraine until there are just some old ladies left throwing rocks. He will probably begin bombing any material coming into Ukraine, so that even the Ukrainian army will only have rocks to throw.
Has Russia gained more than it lost, because of attacking Ukraine? At the most, they will have a questionable hold on the Donbas and they will hold Crimea. If we ignore the destruction that is occurring in those regions, that’s still a no-win since it’s the same position that they were in before the war. Once you add in the destruction of those regions, it’s a loss.
That’s the closest to an argument that you can make for Russia winning and it’s still a no-win before adding in every other thing that matters in the world for the nation of Russia and its people. They did lose. Even if they should somehow turn this around and take Ukraine and install a Russian puppet - what did that really buy them? They control more of the land over Nord Stream 2 - a pipeline that no one will ever use and that they spent billions constructing for no purpose? They control a bunch of people who hate them and practice nigh-constant terrorist attacks against them?
You’re free to make the argument for the Russian win. The war seems to have been about Putin getting frustrated that Ukraine simply wouldn’t obey his wishes. So let’s imagine that Rudolph keeps telling Gerald to do things - “give me all your money”, “let me wipe my shoes on your shirt”, “stop being friends with those guys”, etc. Gerald refuses and so Rudolph bends down, cuts off his own legs, beats Gerald to death with them, and throws the legs in a cesspit.
I’m on the side that not only was there no winner but that Rudolph lost the second he chopped his own legs off. It was just f’in dumb and any other interpretation is wildly missing the obvious. He didn’t get Gerald to obey, he used a dumb means to try and force the matter, and he harmed his own future abilities. There is no win.
Of course I was joking, and I’m not sure which is more obtuse, my sarcasm or Stranger’s reading of tone here.
OK, point taken. How about “making fun of it” as a colossally stupid and self-defeating argument? Is that allowed?
He’s already trying that. It’s not working now, and there’s no reason to believe it’s ever going to start working any better.
He won’t gain anything, he will just kill everyone in Ukraine. You can’t remain a bully by letting one of your victims get the better of you.
Putin is going to rule until his death from natural causes, or the dismantlement of Russia itself via nuclear bombardment.
It’s hard to predict what happens after Putin goes. There’s a chance that the security apparatus fractures and turns on itself, but it’s equally likely that they select the next Putin and continue business as usual.
The people of Russia aren’t going to rise up and topple the government as long as the government has a functioning police force and propaganda apparatus. In Russia’s history AFAIK there has been exactly one successful popular revolution, and it’s unlikely to be repeated unless the entire state simply collapses and disintegrates.
Actually, it’s working well enough to maintain control over eastern Ukraine and establishing a land route from Russia through Melitopol to the Crimean Peninsula and thus onto Moldova (although whether they can maintain adequate logistics to even support a campaign into Moldova is another question). The push to take Kyiv (predictably) failed, which is problematic in the sense that Ukraine will be able to maintain an in-country government presence and thus solicit assistance from Western nations, but it doesn’t mean that the Russian army is going to belly flop and retreat any time soon. Indeed, being able to hold southeastern Ukraine would be ‘victory’ enough even if they can’t keep the the entire Donbas region (and actually more crucial now that the Black Sea Russian Fleet is so crippled).
One of the many problems with much of the conclusions of Western-oriented analysts is that they assume the high causality and loss figures that the Russians appear to be suffering (and largely verified through visual evidence and OSINT) will cause them to ‘realize’ that losses are too great to bear. These people apparently aren’t very knowledgeable about Russian history and culture in which bearing such extraordinary losses is actually a source of cultural and nationalistic pride. Putin is entirely willing to throw conscripts into the grinder for as long as it takes. The greater restriction is the amount of arms and armament that they can get to the fighting front, and while you’ve been probably hearing for a while about how Russia is practically out of tanks, they have plenty of reserves (although how many can be made operational is in question) and virtually their only major manufacturing industry is weapons. Their ultimate limitation is fuel; Russia has never maintained large reserves of refined transportation fuels which limits the ability to sustain a forward-moving campaign, but once they are dug in like a tick into Meriupol, Berdyansk, Melitopol, and Kherson, dislodging them is going to turn the tables on Ukraine from being the defender to the attacker where the insurgency tactics they have used to stall the Russian Army advance will no longer be as effective.
And if Putin truly find that he’s out of ways to wage conventional war, he may well decide to start utilizing other aspects of Russia’s military power, in particular chemical and nuclear weapons. There is no reason to believe that he will not do this regardless of the consequences and is an argument for why NATO members need to starting thinking about what their ‘bright line’ for more active involvement is because the further Russia gets before they stop the more Putin is going to be invested in holding what was taken. In retrospect, the realpolitik of letting Putin take the Crimea was as ill-conceived as allowing Hitler to annex the Sudetenland and for precisely the same reason.
And even that revolution was ‘successful’ in deposing the Tsars but rapidly fell into internal conflict and was co-opted by an autocracy that ended up killing more people than the Nazis did in WWII. ‘Popular revolutions’ rarely result in stable governments, to the extent that it would be difficult to fill the fingers of one hand with the successes.
Stranger
There is zero chance of direct regime change from outside, but there is real potential for a coup from within.
That said, Russians today are different than Russians in the 1940s. Pontificating that Russians will behave the way that their great grandparents did is - to some extent - reasonable but it’s very far from conclusive. You’re right that they’re proud of their losses during WWII and all that, and certainly they’ve never developed an anti-authoritarian instinct. But, that isn’t proof positive that some 18 year old, whose parents are software developers for Yandex and who met his 16 year old girlfriend on Instagram, cause she was posing all cute-like, is going to be thinking first and foremost about falling back into winter and burning Moscow, if that’s what it takes to ward off Napoleon.
I’m reasonably sure that, yes, Putin is willing to throw them into the grinder. Whether they’ll keep going or not is up to the real world to decide, not history.
I’m not talking about Russia giving up. Sadly, you’re probably right that Putin is too stubborn for that. I’m talking about Ukraine forcibly pushing them back out of the regions they’ve taken. They’re already starting to regain territory, and I see no reason to expect them to stop short of the border.
This is true, but the willingness to throw more conscripts into the grinder is not the same thing as the capacity to throw more conscripts into the grinder. Russia is an aging country that’s already thrown a huge proportion of its youths into this conflict. The supply of bodies to throw is not inexhaustible, and it is dwindling.
That’s a different issue. I was responding to you nitpicking ** Mallard** for not knowing that the Pope isn’t the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, when Mallard was saying that Kirill was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Your mistake, not Mallard’s.