And yet, Putin has a lot of popular support for the war from the Russian people, as far as one can tell in an authoritarian state.
I think there will be a middle ground between conventional weapons (which aren’t winning the war for Russia) and nuclear weapons. I think we’ll see Russian use of chemical weapons.
Yes, but the ongoing Ukraine policy sounds like the logic of a 26-year old who doesn’t want to go to college because “I’ll be 30 by the time I get my degree.” One will be 30 with or without it.
Had the United States and western Europe gotten the Abrams, F-16, ball rolling eight months ago, the Ukrainians could have been having it all together and in operation by now. Instead, this “It takes time to do it” dithering by Ukrainian allies only means that by the time it’s approved, the weapons will be good to go by December 2023 instead of December 2022.
The long time has always been a given. But there was no point in starting the process now rather than eight months ago.
Yes, but what happened to people that opposed the war?
Even holding a blank piece of paper can get you jailed.
People will say/do what they have to to survive.
There has never been any indication that a majority of Russians want liberal democracy. Their political history is one of wanting authoritarian leadership. Post-Putin will be new-Putin.
Finland and Estonia used to be part of the Swedish Empire, but Sweden has never been part of the Russian Empire. Also Sweden and Finland are both EU members; if Russia attracted them the rest of the EU could be obliged to respond.
Again, agreed ultimately Russia can’t absorb the costs (for varying degrees and timelines of can’t), but they certainly have the factories. Still. Russia has always made their own ‘dumb’ munitions and as heavily as they’ve always leaned on artillery, quite a bit of it. The only thing they’ve out-sourced is chip production for the guided stuff. They still can’t maintain a modern-war-munition-burning pace. No one can. But they do have active munitions factories.
Sweden owned a lot of the Baltic coast at the time (not to mention chunks of northern Germany) and Peter wanted that access. It’s a rather different geographic situation today than the days when Sweden was a borderline Great Power.
I’ll just note in passing that I disagree. But it’s really an argument that boils down to semantics, probably not worth pursuing. It may well be the case that retroactively this will be viewed as when it all started, but we’re not there yet. IMHO 
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Ooooh, kinky! I like it. I doubt it will happen, but I like it.
What’s Belarus doing in all this? If the Belarusian president is a Russian puppet, he’s doing remarkably little to aid Russia, like opening up a northern front. Is his position too insecure to openly go to war?
“We’ll deliver in two weeks!”
Lukashenko is trying to thread a very small needle. He is effectively a Russian puppet (there was a recent leak of a Russian planning document whereby Belarus is officially absorbed as a Russian satellite), but he has also been resistant to simply acknowledging this status outright. In public he maintains a position of independence, and it’s debatable whether Putin actually has the political and administrative juice to cleanly remove Lukashenko and replace him with another puppet. But at the same time, Lukashenko has closely aligned his country with Russian interests, allowing the Ukrainian invasion to be staged from Belarusian territory. And yet, every couple of weeks Putin demands Belarus commit actual boots-on-the-ground forces to help in the Ukraine war, and Lukashenko always responds, it takes time to plan, give me another couple weeks. His internal position is much less stable, less guaranteed, than Putin’s; there are forces within Belarus who could threaten Lukashenko’s leadership.
Source: long conversations with my Belarusian neighbor, who has been very patient with my curiosity in this very difficult and upsetting time.
Wasn’t there railway sabotage against forces moving through Belarus? Suggests Lukashenko wouldn’t be very popular if he tried to call up mobs.
Yes .
Yes:
But of course the various political camps have different claims about the saboteurs’ effectiveness. Ukrainian partisans celebrate their work as having put meaningful drag on Russian mobilization, while the other side dismisses them as isolated crackpot terrorists whose efforts produced little or no actual effect.
Nevertheless, the speed and aggressiveness of the prosecutions indicate Lukashenko wants to send a clear warning against further such rebelliousness, which implies an awareness that if he doesn’t keep the lid on, things could potentially get out of control.
That said, my neighbor has said more than once he’s skeptical about the probability of a full scale revolution, or of its chance of success in the unlikely event it should erupt. The demonstrations two years ago were massive, and if they neither brought down the regime nor triggered wider resistance, it’s hard to imagine what it would actually take.
also, it’s putin that has to treat lightly in Belarus …
sure he could oust Luka in a matter of hours, but he cannot run the risk of what happens after that? … Will this trigger an uprising for the people? … and if yes, which way would it go (pro-russian or contra)?
worst case scenario: he ousts Luka, things go sour, belarussians start protesting russian war assets in belarus and Putin has another front/problem the size of a cathedral on his hands … with this hair already on fire.
that - IMHO - is the only reason Luka is still around … b/c putin cannot (w/out huge risk) change the status quo in belarus
ps: and if belarus people (you probably just need 5-10% of them) should start protesting/sabotageing russians, would that be a fire that could spread into georgia/armenia/ and the -stans?
little to win - lots to lose when ousting Luka
I think you’ve got that thinking a bit backward. “we don’t have a problem with the people, just the government” was a cold-war cliché to rationalize American efforts to undermine foreign governments (including Russia). Growing up I believed it. I’m not a boomer but GenX who spent my adolescence anxious about nuclear annihilation. “We have no problem with the people” made America sound like the good guys, it offered a hope of some solution short of total war - just get the pesky governments out of the way, and the people will hold hands and sing songs.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has absolutely shattered that for me. I began following Russian state media and social media more closely, and began reading more of their history and literature, and some things became clear to me:
- Russia has always hated Ukraine for not being Russia. It goes back to Pushkin, a Russian national hero and (arguably) a founder of modern Russian literature and identity. Hatred of Ukraine is an explicit part of that. If MAGA were an entire country, it would be Russia.
- Russia is run by gangsters and always will be. If you get rid of Putin, another extremist dictator will take his place. No “reformer” is going to survive, Russians do not hold any real hope of liberation or improvement. They expect some amount of subjugation and tolerate it. They’ve never had anything else, so they can’t imagine anything else.
- Ordinary average Russians disapprove of Putin only to the extent that his actions affect them individually. If they are individually affected, they have a massive threshold of pain for losing fathers, sons, brothers, limbs, futures. They have a deeply fatalist view toward life.
- Most Russians really are desperately insecure nationalists who believe in the project of Russian expansion. They have nothing else to hold onto. As I said earlier it’s the original MAGA nation. It’s no accident Russia is so good at propagandizing and aligning with the American right, as they’re both racist nations that feel entitled to dominate others.
So Putin is a problem, a small problem. Getting rid of Putin is like destroying a major Russian city - it takes out part of the gangster network, but there are dozens of others ready to take its place. And the Russian people will support that person. Many of them may be ready to “pause” fighting right now, due to war-weariness and short term costs, but in 5-10 years they’ll be recovered and ready to do it again.
Anyone who observes me on this board knows I’m more or less liberal (in spite of some disagreements). I will never support Republicans and I loathe Ronald Reagan. But in hindsight I have to admit Reagan, Curtis LeMay, the fiercest anti-Russian hawks were right all along.
Conservative war-hawks were right for the wrong reasons, which does matter - they characterized their struggle as anti-communism. Communism was just window-dressing for the real problem, Russia’s pre-existing thirst for imperialism. But I now see they were 100% right in their judgment that Russia’s nature is to expand until it meets an immovable force. When they step on your toe, the only answer is to keep punching them in the nose until they step back. That’s how Reagan drove the USSR to the breaking point. Reagan and Nixon had it right; every other American postwar president had it wrong (as a liberal it galls me to say that, but new information, new positions, etc).
I am under the imression that Ukraine and Belarus were seen as similar subserviant roles for Russia, until 2014, when then President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the Euromaidan. That set the chess board up for Putin to claim Ukraine as a threat to Russia, and a pre-text for taking Crimea in 2014, and a few moves later the situation we have now. Putin to Yanukovych: “If you would have cracked down harder on those damn EU-favoring protesters and stayed in power, I wouldn’t have had to do all this.”
This goes against one of the foundations of my beliefs – people around the world are all fundamentally the same, the only significant differences are in systems and institutions. I can very easily believe that Russian systems and institutions are deeply corrupt and immoral in a way that’s very unlikely to change in the medium term, but that seems much more likely than that there is something deeply and uniquely wrong with the Russian people (who are, by and large, genetically nigh-identical to their various neighboring countries, including Ukraine).
Or are you just saying the same thing in a different way?
China’s position of walking the line seems untenable to me. Ukraine doesn’t believe it’s an honest media and Russia probably doesn’t think it backs them enough. China is in danger of becoming sidelined and irrelevant in this crisis, unless it takes a side.
Errr…I think the two aren’t necessarily contradictory. This is kind of like asking, “Are people born as jerks or do they become jerks?” Enough of a particular environment and it can fundamentally change you.
If you take one nation’s people and steep them in another nation’s environment for a long enough time, their entire consciousness/persona might change. 300 million Americans, put in Russia’s systems and institutions for a century, would become like today’s Russians.