You’d think someone named “not_what_you_d_expect” would anticipate disappointment. 
The chaotic invasion of Finland by the Soviets was in large part due to the great purge thousands of competent officers from the Russian army. Stalin was paranoid about threats to his authority and such purges terrorised Russian society. This conspicuous military weakness did not go unnoticed.
Now, why is the modern day Russian army is performing so badly? Putin exercises control by putting his old KGB friends in generals uniforms and they are not experts in the Combined Operations techniques required for a large scale invasion. Putin’s previous incursions were small scale.
That is not to take anything alway for the courage and tenacity if the Finns in the 1940s or the Ukrainians in 2022. They are defending home territory against a larger invading army. There are few more compelling reasons to take up arms than that. Conversely the Russian army relies on military discipline to urge its troops into battle. Propaganda works best on civilian populations and Putin has a well oiled machine. However frontline troops who come in contact with civilian populations rapidly discover that they have been told a pack of lies and are not keen on fighting Ukrainians who speak Russian and are from a very similar culture. They did not sign up to shoot grandma.
Fire and forget weapons like bombs, rockets and missiles. Russia has these in abundance. Taking cities by demolition and poison gas require hardened urban warfare troops. Hence the recruitment of the Syrians, Chechens and mercenaries turning Ukrainian cities into another Grozny or Aleppo. Whether they can muster enough committed troops for this kind of warfare with the huge losses involved is debatable. Ukraine is a big country and Russia has a large army, but it is not big enough.
Putin has started to purge the FSB, which indicates he thinks he is facing internal opposition at a senior level. The Russian army have had very poor military intelligence, whereas the Ukrainians seem to be very well informed.
The international reaction and the economic sanctions is progressing, Ukraine is getting help. But Putin knows how to manipulate the Russian population by controlling the media messages with propaganda. He knows what emotional strings to pull and Russians are famously patriotic. Their deep love of their country may, however, not extend to returning to the grim war economy that prevailed during Soviet times. It is not as if they had been prepared for this. Putin thought this invasion was going to be a walk over that could be done on the cheap.
This kind of thing has happened before.
Francis Fukuyama has a reputation for poor predictions, to say the very least.
To be more specific, none of his claims here are supported by evidence.
Shit.
That’s like the only club in my bag.
There’s an unconfirmed report from the Ukrainian government that in addition to the FSB purge, Putin has fired 8 generals because of their failures in Ukraine and replaced them.
Russia announced yesterday they’re considering attacking convoys of supplies from Western nations to Ukraine. This didn’t get as much media play as you’d think, but is an alarming escalation. I’d assume they plan to restrict such attacks to when the supplies are physically in Ukraine, but you know how these things go.
It is curious that attacking supply lines from the West did not feature in the Russian invasion plan from the beginning.I guess they did not think Ukraine would be able to muster outside military aid in time.
It is much too late, huge shipments must already have been made and there are many alternative routes from the extensive western border and there will be air attack counter measures in place. Not least the Ukraine airforce and the various ‘eyes in the sky’ surveillance planes looking over the border.
Lavrov suggested supply ships would be targets. Not sure if there’s too much of that (maybe only from Turkey?) but be definition that would be outside of Ukrainian territory. If that is a threat aimed at Turkey then it might force the Turks to send military aid the long way overland via Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova. Those Turkish drones are playing havoc with the Russian forces.
What naval assets does NATO currently have in the Black Sea?
Probably just what the Turks have. But there’s a US carrier group floating about the eastern Med, currently in the Adriatic.
If the Russians decide they’re entitled to shoot at foreign-flagged ships in the Black Sea that would seem to be a major escalation to me and a good way to start a shooting war with NATO.
Actually I’m not sure if Turkey are sending military aid anyway. They did send an aid convoy but that was via road.
I’ll change this to smoking them out. Even if they have gas masks, eventually the filters will run out.
Turkey is a key supplier.
Ukraine got another shipment of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones recently to add to the 20 they already had.
Turkey also bought the Russian SA-400 air defense system from Russia.
Turkey is also part of NATO…kind of.
So there is a lot of hard bargaining going on in the background and President Erdogan’s phone will have been buzzing from all directions.
These drones get all the publicity, but a bigger factor may be the lack of an effective air defence to protect the Russian convoys.
Turkey is not going to happy about this.
Thanks for that. Looks like they were flown to Poland rather than shipped. That makes sense I guess - it would take a while for a ship to make the journey and there’s no way of knowing if the destination port will be secure by the time it got there.
This brings up a thought - what if Russia did stop once they got the areas they wanted, plus deposing the current government and installing their preferred stooges*? Trying to swallow the entirety of Ukraine and keep it under their control is going to give them severe indigestion, and the people of Ukraine are going to hate their guts no matter what happens. It would actually be easier, somewhat, for them to stop, declare ‘victory’ and pretend they are being magnanimous for not going further/claim they have successfully ‘denazified’ the country so mission accomplished.
*Somewhere upthread someone posted a link to a series of Tweets that are supposedly the thoughts of a FSB analyst. It was said in that thread that the Russians are having a hard time finding a willing puppet to head a new Ukraine government. If it’s true that’s going to complicate things for them even more.
And it certainly wasn’t Soviet doctrine by 1945. The troops spearheading the final push into Germany were the high-end, veteran, well-equipped units. The undisciplined conscripts followed behind to mop up and occupy.
So I was just reading this short analysis of Russian problems during the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, written in 2018. It is eerily familiar and points out a lot of the flaws we are seeing today (which apparently still haven’t been sufficiently addressed, like it appears the aircraft IFF). In particular I found the description of the Russian ‘seat-of-the-pants’ philosophical approach to tactical planning, which can and has led to some serous breakdowns when optimistic outlooks go sideways, very illuminating.
One would hope that. But Iran is not controlled by a rational person. It’s controlled by a belief system and backed up by people who will do God’s bidding in a quest for martyrdom.
imagine giving Jim Jones a nuclear weapon and see how his “revolutionary suicide” plays out.
This not a discussion hill I want to die on. My point was that Germany allowed Hitler and the Nazi party to rise out of the financial penalties imposed on them from WW-I, the lesson learned was at the expense of millions and millions of people. A single man created that nightmare that started by gobbling up smaller nations as the world stood by and watched.
If you consider economic hardship as the engine driving WW-II consider how badly Russia is going to get crushed financially in the future. And now think about who controls Russia.
Russia looks as if they’re making a renewed push to the west of Kyiv. The capital is still at threat of being surrounded and cut off.
great reads - both of them!