While I think the Five Eyes could tell if Putin is bluffing, I don’t think they could accurately determine whether he’s not. Putin is wily enough to know that if the West needs to believe it’s not a bluff to cry uncle on NATO concessions, then he’s going to do everything to make it look like an imminent invasion, including making his own generals possibly believe it.
Having said that, one group of Russia analysts did a semantic analysis of state media now vs before the invasion of Crimea. Prior to invasion of Crimea, state media was swamped with hostile coverage of Crimea, but that is not happening with Ukraine now. Instead the vitriol has recently shifted to NATO. They seem to think it means he’s bluffing, but I would think it supports the pretext that this isn’t a war against the Ukrainian people, but a war against western incursion.
Another analyst has noted that Putin was unusually isolated during Covid and has recently made a number of uncharacteristic moves. They conclude his mental state is deteriorating. I’m reminded of the time he stole Robert Kraft’s super bowl ring and a glass Kalishnikov from a US museum. I’m wondering if this is his kelptomania writ large.
We need to let it slip that our source on Russian plans is a person in the Kremlin. Much excitement would result.
Of course if we do have a spy in the Kremlin, we ought to let it slip we are reading their internal transmissions because of a Chinese bug in the software. Either way would be fun.
Well, heck, they evacuated 49,000 out of one city back in 1986, it’s not like they have no practice at this sort of thing. I wonder if the current refugees, like the people of Pripyat, have been promised they can return home one day?
Biden convenes NSC in rare Sunday meeting, believes Putin has already given the “go” order. Russian motor pools empty of armor, many Russian vessels in the Black Sea off of Odessa.
It really appears like Putin’s just going to repeat his obvious historical pattern of invading immediately after the Olympics.
It’s a tragic, sad, alarming situation all around. I’m still hoping for a last minute miracle, but as I’ve been saying all along, that’s very unlikely. Putin’s mobilization here was too costly & conspicuous for him to do anything else than invade. This action was all but predetermined from the beginning.
That’s what I’ve been thinking all along, that given the state of the Russian economy right now, the uncertainty about the Nordstream, the reliance of Europe on Russian natural gas for heat, etc that just mobilizing all this men and materiel would be astonishingly expensive for a brinksmanship charade with NATO.
The narrative that Putin, a former USSR intel man himself, is trying to reshape his immediate surroundings into some sort of loosely united, buffer puppet states resembling the former USSR is fairly compelling.
Whatever the case, yet another war in Europe is a disastrous outcome for the world in so many ways, not to mention the Chinese watching our response(s) with great interest as they eye a similar plan for Taiwan. We could literally be close to fighting a war on two fronts, and that’s super scary for the USA and it’s allies.
So Putin is going to announce something “of international relevance” very soon, apparently he’s going to recognize the independence of the breakaway "people’s republics’ from Ukraine.
Prediction: This is what he wanted, no invasion of Ukraine, the USA and European nations protest, throw some middling sanctions in and everybody calls it a day.
Before his address I’ll make a prediction. Putin will recognize the DNR\LNR. In the next week they will request military aid because of the false flag shit Russia has been pushing. Russia will invade Ukraine militarily simultaneously supporting a political coup. Both may or may not succeed, but we’ll have tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
