But they’ve also have had a near-infinite number of coups, peaceful or otherwise, and in most cases the public just shrugged and went on with their life. The Russian people will not overthrow Putin, but it’s also doubtful they’ll be willing to give their lives to keep him in power.
It’s a reasonable observation that Russia’s ever-reducing population of young people is problematic (albeit in more of a long term economic sense) but Russia doesn’t seem to be running out of young men to conscript (or entice through ‘fat’ three year contracts although as the word gets around that they aren’t actually paying out on those contracts it is going to be more difficult) so far, and they can obviously extend conscription to older men. Their recruitment of Chechnyan and Syrian fighters has more to do with getting experienced fighters to the front as quickly as possible when their original plan for a fast invasion and takeover went sideways. If it comes to it, Russia will have the military going around and impressing men and possibly women of fighting age into joining the war effort, and as inefficient as that is it will give them enough influx to keep the war going.
I think people might be surprised about just how many Russians actually support this war and Putin, too. Even the younger people who have access to Western news sources are still inculcated to doubt the truth and motivation of those sources. The people who really distrust Russian government authority have already fled or are attempting to leave; those that remain will support and fight, even if reluctantly.
What @Mallard said was:
Things that might haven some effect are the sanctions and if the pope would publicly condemn Poutine and Kirill.
Kirill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, has no reason to have any concern about what Francis, the Bishop of Rome (a.k.a. “The Pope”), the head of the Roman Catholic Church, would say about anything Putin or Kirill said or did. Kirill might theoretically have more concern about what Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople of the Eastern Orthodox Church might have to say since he is primus inter pares of the Orthodox liturgical communion, but as the article cited above demonstrates he has withdrawn communion over ‘Bart’ granting autocephalous status to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in essence recognizing it as being distinct from the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox churches are a liturgically distinct from Roman Catholicism as much as is the Southern Baptist Convention, and I guarantee if you ask a Baptist what he thinks about the Pope’s opinion on anything you’ll be lucked to be met with mere indifference.
Stranger
Barring a Ukrainian collapse, Russia isn’t going to get anywhere near Moldova in the current situation; one may as well discuss the potential ability of Russia to reclaim Alaska. They haven’t managed to push out past Kherson, and if they do Mykolaiv is in the way, which means heavy urban combat followed by a major river crossing where the bridges would most certainly have been blown. This is what Mykolaiv looks like from the air, they’d have to clear the ‘peninsula’ the city is on and then force a crossing of the Bug River.
Even if they were to somehow manage that, then the city of Odessa is in their way to Moldova. Odessa held out for 73 days when the Germans and Romanians tried taking it the wake of Barbarossa. The Russians appear to have given up on trying to invest Kharkov, only 20 miles away from the Russian border at the same time that they abandoned their gains in the Kiev area, and have been pushed back in counterattacks. I can’t see trying to push through two of the largest cities in the Ukraine on the way to Moldova faring any better than their attempts at taking Kiev and Kharkov.
I don’t disagree with that, and even if they could manage to take Odessa I think it is clear they could not sustain a thrust in to Moldova. That would also essentially put them on the Romanian border which is going to put them both into direct conflict with NATO and MCU actor Sebastian ‘Winter Soldier’ Stan, who still has some payback coming.
In all seriousness, even trying to hold southern Ukraine would be such an economically losing proposition that even if it could be sustained militarily it would just further serve to weaken Russia to no positive gain other than having unilateral access to the Crimea and Sevastopol, which given the apparent state of the Black Sea Fleet probably isn’t as much of as advantage as it might otherwise be. Pretty much any way you slice the pie Russia is in a world of hurt, and this “military operation” has accelerated their decline. But Putin is in charge of a declining nation with the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal which is the one aspect of the military that has been actively modernized, and while maybe that is as much of a Potemkin village as the rest of their military forces I don’t like to bet against nuclear holocaust.
Stranger
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Maybe this is a different type of war? A war fought with never-ending economic sanctions, cyber, and a series of very minor border disputes by their many neighbors seeing an over-extended Russian military incapable of defending all 16 of its borders at once?
See, I have my doubts about the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
Russia is supposed to actually have more nuclear warheads than the US, and the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Now — The US, with the bulk of their ICBMs being relatively “easy” to maintain solid fuel Minuteman III rockets, spends roughly 60 billion dollars per year in the maintenance of its nuclear arsenal.
The whole yearly military spending of Russia has been 70 billion dollars.
The Russian nuclear arsenal depends mostly on liquid fuel rockets which are more delicate and require more maintenance. First of all, has Russia really allocated (on paper) the funds needed for real maintenance of that arsenal? I personally have my doubts.
Second: has Russia really spent the allocated funds properly? Russia is a kleptocracy, and I am afraid that most of the money for their vaunted 10-year program to improve their whole military has been spent in yachts, escorts and luxury items instead. The army that invaded Ukraine does not look like an army that has spent 10 years modernizing itself. The logistical troubles it has experienced are mind-boggling, and the communication problems it has been having in the front are simply amazing. They were supposed to have the “Azart” radios for encrypted tactical communications in the front. They have been using cell phones, walkie-talkies and VHF radio, all in clear. Where the fuck are those awesome radios?! Although perhaps the question should rather be, where the fuck is the money that should have paid for the manufacture and distribution of those radios?!
Of course, the nuclear arsenal might (mind you, might ) have been paid more attention to. But the fact remains that, given the military budget of Russia, they directly do not have the money to do proper maintenance of delivery vehicles that are more delicate and complex than the ones the US has. On top of that, it is very likely that there has been money skimmed off the budget that might have been allocated for that maintenance.
I am willing to bet that a big % of the Russian nuclear arsenal is directly unusable. Of course, the point is then what % that is. My personal estimation is about 65% (the silo-based rockets, which are the majority of their arsenal, needed extremely urgent maintenance in 2020; that maintenance did not take place).
Of course, 35% is still quite a lot, and potentially dangerous enough. However, the fact remains that, for years, Russia has not been able to spend the money for proper maintenance that their nuclear arsenal really requires. I am not actually sure that even that 35% is really in a good state of preparedness.
Does it mean that we can discount Russia’s nuclear arsenal? No. But also, we must keep in mind that it may well be a much, much diminished beast than it looks on paper.
Yes, but. To be honest, I think the same thing: If their nukes are being maintained as well as the rest of their military, then they’re extremely unreliable. But the thing is, even if 90% of their weapons fail, 10% of Russia’s nuclear arsenal is still enough to really ruin anyone’s day.
Of their land-based ICBMs in the Russian arsenal, only the UR-100N (NATO SS-19 ‘Stiletto’) and R-36M2 (NATO SS-18 ‘Satan’ Mod 5) use storable liquid propellants as does the highly capable RS-28 (NATO SS-X-29 ‘Satan 2’) scheduled to be deployed this year. Other ICBMs, including the road mobile RT-2PM Topol (NATO SS-25 ‘Sickle’) and RT-2PM2 Topol-M (NATO SS-27 ‘Sickle B’), are solid propellant. Although the storable liquid propellant boosters are potentially more dangerous (as the US discovered with the LGM-25C ‘Titan II’ in a couple of ‘incidents’) they also have much more capability in terms of throw weight, and modern ones can be launched basically as quickly as solid propellant ICBMs. Russia has been going through extensive modernization and new missile and reentry system developments and testing for their ICBM and SLBM forces for well over a decade, and while it isn’t clear how reliable their newer systems are they are at least quite capable on paper, certainly enough to represent an effective deterrent against any plausible hope of a disarming first strike.
The USAF LGM-30G ‘Minuteman III’ is actually a more than 50 year old system, with the design of the first stage (M55A1) dating back to 1959 in the LGM-30A/B ‘Minuteman I’. The Minuteman III has gone through two remanufacture cycles as well as multiple guidance improvements and modernization programs but is still very old technology that is being pushed well past its design life and even past the end of service life for the most recent Propulsion Replacement Program that ended in 2009 and was only intended to extend service life through 2020, while the replacement effort (Ground Based Strategic Deterrent) isn’t expected to be deployed until 2029. When it does, it will use W87 Mod 0 warheads in the Mk 21 reentry vehicle (RV) originally built for the now-retired LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ in the 1980s and Mod 1 warheads constructed for the cancelled LGM-134A ‘Midgetman’ road mobile missile.
While the USAF has maintained a Service Life Extension program for both the Minuteman III missile and the warheads, as well as ‘Glory Trip’ test flights to evaluate booster reliability (albeit with a couple of notable failures in the last decade) these are old weapons well beyond the design service life, operated by a program that no longer as much prestige in Air Force hierarchy, and was due for replacement thirty years ago when it was supposed to be replaced by Peacekeeper and Midgetman but was retained because it met then-START compliance requirements. That is not to say that these motors don’t work; we’ve been flying Minuteman- and Peacekeeper-based small space launch and target systems since the early ‘Nineties with surprisingly good reliability, and in fact the Northrop Grumman (nee Orbital Sciences) Minotaur program has never had a failure or major anomaly using these systems. But age and handling have their way of introducing flaws and problems in even the best designed systems.
I would not bet any amount of money or millions of innocent lives on the hypothetical unreliability of the Russian nuclear arsenal (at least, not its land-based component), nor their extensive arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
Stranger
As I said at the end of my comment, the Russian nuclear arsenal is not to be discounted (although now I think I should have used the word “dismissed”. The problems of ESL…!)
But I definitely think that their nuclear arsenal is not at all in good shape. Russia has not spent the money it should have to maintain it. To begin with, it seems not to have it: the military budget, “on paper”, is not enough to do so. And the amount of money that has been systematically embezzled from that budget only adds to their problems.
‘discounted’ was fine. However, when someone says something is not to be discounted or dismissed it usually is a preface to a reason to discount it or dismiss it.
All the nuclear capability they need is to be set off some nukes in Europe. They definitely want to hit us with some, but as long as they can mess up Europe Putin will pump his fist in the air and shout maniacally “Now they’re sorry they didn’t listen to me” as the clouds of fallout blow eastward back over Russia, sickening and killing his own people too. I bet the Europeans will love us for starting WWIII.
FWIW I am European and I live in a potential ground zero. In such a scenario, the fault for starting WWIII, in my opinion, would fall 100% squarely on the shoulders of Putin. In the unlikely case that I were to survive something like that, I personally would not be blaming the US.
However I am afraid that this is a hijack that has already lasted a while.
Thank you for being reasonable. But Putin will be dead and it will leave many with an empty feeling. And the tragedy is then only beginning.
Well, no. Not a hijack but a directly relevant extension of a discussion of regime change in Russia, namely what Putin’s moves will likely be if he is threatened personally by western aggression.
The problem is that, other letting him defeat Ukraine and win the war gloriously, any other result will be perceived by him as western aggression. I’m a bit surprised he hasn’t gone chemical yet, and when he does can nuclear be that far behind? Oh, well, it’s still early in this war…
This begs the question:
Can he?
Not just from the point of view of the Russian military actually having chemical weapons in a usable state, but from the point of view of the military brass and the officers down the chain of command actually going along with an order to employ those weapons and authorizing their use.
Even then, I’m struggling to see what the end-game of a small nuke in Ukraine would be. There’s no use that would be useful on the battlefield, and as a terror weapon I think it would backfire.
I don’t think NATO would respond in kind; escalating like that is just flat-out dumb. Nor would they respond with conventional troops- that would just be slow-motion escalation.
But I do think that they’d pull out any remaining economic/communication links to the rest of the world and more importantly, threaten dire sanctions on anyone else trading with them.
More importantly, I suspect that this would absolutely terrify the oligarchs and others in that second sub-Putin tier of Russian leadership, and they’d take some kind of action of their own to manage the situation.
Not as fast as would make a difference. They’re still a country of ~145 million with about 14 million men in the 20-34 year old age group.
And on paper, they’ve got large reserve forces - as many as 2 million. Now whether these forces are anything other than former draftees assigned on paper to reserve units (how it worked in the Soviet days), or if they’re something more than that, I don’t know. I am pretty sure that they’re not armed and trained to the level of US National Guard or other Western militaries’ reserve forces.
Believe it or not, Moscow is not in Asia.
But invading Moscow has not worked out well for many invaders either. I think the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the last to actually succeed and that was 400 years ago. Even they only held Moscow for a few years.
Now uprisings in Moscow have been pretty successful at regime change.
I know, but the thread asks whether NATO would attack Russia, and Russia does extend into Asia.
And it was too good a line to pass up.
I’d caution against compared dollars to rubles in terms of adequate spending. In the US there is an extraordinary amount of money spent on what is largely nonproductive maintenance and refurbishment at very high labor rates under the thesis that there is nothing more useless than a second-best weapon system. Russia has always had a different philosophy about military spending and weapons design (specifically, it is better to have more and accept some failures than a lesser quantity of gold plated perfection), and much lower labor costs. This is not to say that there is not corruption within the design bureaus and Strategic Rocket Forces that might have generals and colonels buying counterfeit parts or selling off inventory to pay for their dachas, but missile components and nuclear weapon mechanisms are less fungible than tanks, helicopters, and ammunition, and there is almost certainly more stringent inventory control (although given that it is Russia, that may not be saying much, and even the United States has had serious issues in the past couple of decades including shipping devices used in nuclear weapon initiation systems oversees and leaving nuclear weapons on a plane on a flight line unsecured for many hours).
I don’t know how much money has been “systematically embezzled” or any specifics about the details of Russian nuclear weapon surety and reliability, but the people I know or follow who study those issues are not dulcified by the purported lack of money spent on maintenance or ostensible corruption in terms of assessing the Russian nuclear arsenal as unusable or inadequate for deterrence. It seems like hopefully pleading to argue that their nuclear weapons are not a threat because of a lack of maintenance, and Russia today is not in the state of post-Soviet collapse circa 1991 when troops weren’t being paid and the economy was in utter free-fall.
Ostensibly, Putin has plenary authority to authorize and direct the use of nuclear weapons (as does the American President). Will someone in the military chain of command step up and say, “Enough! We’re not going to pull the temple down upon our heads for your fragile ego!”? It is impossible to say, but military training in general instills respect for the chain of command and following lawful orders even when they are morally questionable, and the Russian military and culture in particular emphasizes obedience to authority rather than individual action.
It is notable that Stanislaw Petrov, the Soviet officer who deliberately failed to pass on apparent detections of incoming missiles in 1983 because he suspected they were due to errors in the software (on which he had helped work in development) attributed his improvisational decision on his civilian education that encouraged him to be skeptical (the system reported only a few incremental launches rather than the fusillade of incoming missiles one would expect from in. disarming first strike) rather than just blindly follow procedure. Is there a Stanislaw Petrov somewhere in the upper echelons of Russian Strategic Rocket Forces or in military units that would deploy tactical nuclear weapons? Maybe? It is something to bet the farm on? I wouldn’t.
It would be ‘useful’ in the sense of protecting the areas already occupied from being reclaimed by Ukrainian forces, and would serve as the same kind of warning to Ukraine (and NATO) as bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to Japan in WWII, to wit: “Continue on and we will utterly annihilate you!”
Russia is already in the state of extreme sanctions (although nations are now wavering when they realize what the costs will be), and nobody is going to impose severe sanctions on China because China makes everything you need, and you need everything they make (apologies to Max Headroom). It is clear that ‘“the oligarchs” have no real control over Vladimir Putin, and “others in that second sub[Putin tier of Russian leadership” are vetted for their fealty and removed for any sign of disobedience. Even if someone did rise up to remove Putin, it may just well be that it is replacing one radical autocrat with another who either backed up to a wall and continues on out of fear, or is even more dogmatic about returning Russia to its former(?) glory of Russian Mir and starts talking about how Finland is also “a part of Russia”, and that way madness lies.
Stranger