I think the reason he has been doing a shuffle every few years to keep a position of total authority is because he doesn’t feel he can simply remove term limits and make his current office all powerful forever. His power is obviously somehow limited.
My take on it is that it’s useful to him to maintain the pretense of being the democratically elected leader of Russia, rather than the permanently installed “dear leader”.
Why? Is he afraid of being ostracized by the west? China’s doing fine without the pretense.
Eta: I suppose ego could make him want to be selected by the people.
Plausible deniability. He wants to be accepted by the West as a legitimate world leader, not as an occasional +1, even as he acts to undermine them.
The whole edifice has always been about appearance and plausible deniability.
Murder a Russian dissident in the UK using a Russian made military-grade nerve agent? “It wasn’t us honest. Those military-age Russian guys with backgrounds in the army were just taking a 5,000 mile day trip to see the spire on Salisbury cathedral.” It’s ridiculous but it’s their MO. And it plays into a Russian ‘we didn’t do it but we did really’ sense of humour.
Well, that kind of extends “plausible deniability” into the realm of assuming other world leaders being complete rubes but I suppose it’s a possibility.
I mean, specific oligarchs were targeted by the west when they went after Russia for the last annexation. Surely the jig is up?
What changed when those sanctions were applied? Did Putin give up an inch of Crimea or the Donbas region of Ukraine? Nope. He doubled down in Syria.
The point of both was to secure important ports. What does western Ukraine have to offer?
The same thing it had to offer when it was a republic of the USSR. But I don’t think he’ll go west of the Dnepre. It’s the major source of fresh water that supplies Crimea and he doesn’t want Ukraine fucking with that natural resource.
That’s kind of a cop out. What exactly did it do 30 years ago that it would do again now? It was something of the "bread basket " of the USSR. Would it simply become that again under a hostile occupation?
And that’s part of the reason Syria and Crimea aren’t comparable to most of Ukraine. You don’t need an occupying force. The people there want your help.
It’s about territory. Strategically, Ukraine is a buffer to NATO. Putin resents very much the idea of having American missiles parked on his borders and he doesn’t want to wait for Ukraine to become part of NATO. I realize that extending borders to include Ukraine leaves him with the same problem, but he won’t start a war with a NATO member country. He can however, invade Ukraine without threat of starting such a war.
But Russia has already got NATO parked on its border for decades now - Turkey and Estonia.
And taking the Ukraine only puts NATO on their border, it doesn’t make buffer.
Is the argument then that he ought to resign himself to more of the same by waiting for Ukraine and Belarus to join NATO? I mean, yeah, he should stop being an asshole altogether. But that seems pretty unlikely.
There is really not even a remote chance that Belarus is joining NATO in the foreseeable future. They are quite interconnected with Russia.
Indeed.
The Ukraine would be an idiotic choice for NATO. I know there’s a few people pushing for it but their system of government is still fucked up. Regardless, Russia effectively blocks their membership by continuing to support the eastern separatists. Allowing Ukraine into NATO while that’s going on effectively puts NATO immediately into a direct war with Russia.
Russia is weaker in comparison to the USSR of the 1960s - 1980s. But not anywhere close to the difference between the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and current day Austria or the Ottoman Empire and current day Turkey. It might not be the cakewalk Saddam had with Kuwait, but the result wouldn’t be in doubt.
This ties into the concept of “deterrence malpractice,” which Trump was accused of in his dealings with North Korea.
Effective deterrence is like this: You rarely issue warnings, but when you do, you back them up all the way to the hilt, full-bore. You seldom say, “Cross that red line and you’ll get whacked,” but when they do cross the line, you blast them hard.
What the West often does instead is the opposite: Issue helter-skelter “warnings” and “red lines” all over the place, then seldom back them up - instead mumbling and shuffling one’s feet. This then teaches all sorts of regimes not to take NATO and America seriously.
I know nothing about sports, but …
I feel like Putin is leading off from first base in an effort to let the other team, and – moreso – his fans (Russian citizens) know that he’s prepared to steal second base.
And Ukraine probably looks like the best risk/reward equation.
But my concern is that it’s mostly a political/nationalism play – something the Soviet Union survived on for decades.
Very little else alloyed Nazi Germany like the renewed sense of nationalism of a dog badly beaten in WWI. Giving everybody a common enemy can solidify fractured segments of Russian society, create the famous Bush 43 “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” sense of ultranationalism, squash the dissent that so rankles Putin (if not actually threatening his rule), and allow the Russian equivalent of Emergency Powers (a/ka: if you thought I was robbing you blind before, …).
The question is how far toward that next base he has to go before he sees turning back as no longer being an option. How can we make the risk intolerable for the perceived reward ?
I’d be for doing nearly whatever I could to bolster the Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and ensure that the risk/reward looks worse and worse for Putin.
I do remember that Russia has been more and more food INdependent over the last decade. Finding other places to tighten the screws may be difficult, but – in conjunction with other nations – may be critical.