Russia threw my family out in the 1890’s, they’re not getting us back. Ever.
Then they might have to start with their own president, a man whose first language was Russian (he’s fluent in several), with strong family ties to Russia, who had lived some years in Russia in his childhood (check his bio on wikipedia). But Zelenskyy is clearly not Russian, he’s Ukrainian.
I think the Ukrainians will be able to figure out the difference between “Russian by descent but a loyal Ukrainian” and “Russian citizen loyal to Russia.”
Also:
I’m sure the Ukrainians will work this out while avoiding throwing Russian-speaking Ukrainians under the bus.
That’s so Ukrainian flowers would feed on their corpses, preventing them from escaping their fate even in death.
A flat plain that, right now, is soft mud. That’s why everything is on the road - if those heavy vehicles try to go off-road they’ll sink into the ground up to their axles. At the least.
Each of these people have family and friends. - I don’t think this is going to win hearts and minds of the Russian people, nor make them more amenable to killing more Ukraine civilians with missile strikes on their apartments.
Martial law would mean a harder clampdown on protests, total control of media, and closure of the borders forbidding anyone from leaving.
It looks like they’re afraid of mass departures of knowledge from Russia. So they’ll hold their own people in the country at gunpoint.
This is not going to end well for Putin. At some point, the people who have been used to a relatively good life are not going to be happy eating potato soup for the 5th time, just because Putin wants a war.
Yeah, they also said this about Stalin. The chances of this happening are… not zero, not impossible, but quite slim.
Apart from the Bolshevik Revolution and Krushchev’s ouster, Russia isn’t having much historical track record of popular uprising or palace coups.
People keep looking at this through the filter of what they expect well-off Westerners would do in this situation. It simply doesn’t apply. This is Russia, and not the Yeltsin iterations of it. Set your expectations accordingly.
We’re probably looking at a new Iron Curtain for some indeterminate period of time. We’ll spend at least the next 10 years marveling at how such a thing could happen, because history ended in 1991 and we were supposed to be past all such things.
We’re not past all this. There were some moments when we might have peacefully changed the course of history, but such moments are now long gone.
Yeah, agreed. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a news bulletin that Putin has died of extreme lead poisoning, but the chances of that are slim. The chances of some sort of Russia uprising are equally slim. That said, I do expect the situation in Russia to deteriorate, especially from a morale perspective, and especially as the sanctions and other actions really sink in.
But people are letting their enthusiasm really get the better of them on a lot of this stuff. Russia, despite the setbacks, is still pushing forward on all fronts, and still massively outguns the Ukrainians. For whatever reasons, Russia has shot itself in the foot…or, perhaps, stomped on its collective dick with its big golf shoes…but in the end it has what it needs to push through the current offensives and take at least eastern Ukraine. It’s taking them longer, and it’s costing much more than they thought it would…but, assuming Russia is willing to pay the price, they can do it and there isn’t much Ukraine can do except make it cost as much as possible. Which they are already doing.
Absolutely, at least in the west. I have to admit, I’ve been more than a bit dismayed by some of my Indian friend’s reactions to this whole thing, and the Chinese reaction has been…disturbing. But this has been a solid PR win for Ukraine in the west, especially in western Europe.
I agree, and it really is just wishful thinking on my part (and others) that Putin should just have an accident soon.
A new Iron Curtain is certainly possible, but it would be smaller inside, have fewer resources and a larger world arrayed against it with more crushing economic sanctions At the moment, Russia seems to have North Korea, Syriam Belarus and Iritrea solidly on side. With China and India sitting back and hedging their bets.
The situation looks a little different from the 1950’s or 1960’s. In those decades, I don’t recall banking shutdowns (including Switzerland!!), worldwide sanctions, Sweden sending military equipment, or a complete ban on international sports activities.
Wondering if it could be an effective strategy to airdrop thousands of cases of vodka on the demoralized Russian forces. Or just leave them laying around everywhere.
I don’t disagree, though I certainly wish it were otherwise. It might well be worth mentioning, however, that Russian oligarchs are certainly well off – but not nearly as well off as they used to be, and getting more and more pissed about it. Will that have any effect on Putin’s longevity? Who knows. The only thing that’s clear is that Putin is in a bad place and desperate to turn things around. Currently all he’s been able to do is broadcast the kinds of lies that we used to associate with Baghdad Bob.
I’m starting to think that, no matter what happens on the battlefield of Ukraine, this is going to end up as a fatal over-reach by Putin. I saw this just now:
His biggest international propaganda arm has fallen apart in a week. It took years to build this up, and he destroyed it in a week.
He’s never going to recover from this. I’m not sure how it’s all going to go in detail, but the end result seems like it’s going to be Russia utterly destroyed as an economic power and as a conventional military power.
They’ll be a destitute nuclear power with no other effective military forces. No one will want to invade them because of the nuclear threat, but they won’t be able to project power across the street, let alone across a border. He’s gone all in on a busted straight.
