Nothing new there. That would just be the Fifth Partition of Poland by Russia, depending on how you count.
Neither of these claims are true. The so-called Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a much stronger power in Central and Eastern Europe in the 16th through 18th centuries, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the dominant power in Central and Eastern Europe through most of the 19th Century. Russia wasn’t even in the cast of being a rated as a ‘Great Power’ until their successful defense against the French Empire in 1812, and that had less to do with the military prowess of the Russians than of the headlessness of Napoleon in the now universally recognized folly of a fall/winter invasion.
Russia is no longer an industrial power (and arguably never was except for the quantity of weapons produced and exported by its arms industry), is no longer an economic power (similar), and its conventional military capability is clearly wanting, but it is still the world’s greatest nuclear power in both the number of weapons and delivery systems, and total yield of its nuclear arsenal to the extent that even if only a small fraction of its nuclear weapons are functional it could still virtually destroy all of Europe and most of the United States and China. The very reason that NATO powers like Poland and Germany haven’t sent their best weapon systems and troops into Ukraine to push back a Russian incursion that is potentially a foothold to their doorstep is because Putin has the nuclear trump card to play if backed into a corner.
Stranger
Completely eliminating nuclear weapons would make the world much safer from nuclear holocaust. It would however make the world much less safe from conventional total wars like World War Two. I’ve often envisioned what would have happened if nuclear weapons were somehow impossible, and the answer is probably a conventional World War Three in the 1960s, which would have amounted to about 3-5 World War Twos in scale, destruction and deaths.
On the other hand, a global nuclear exchange would probably kill several hundred million people directly, billions more due to famine and disease, and essentially push industrial development back to the era of the steam engine.
Stranger
I could debate this more but it’s off-topic. Another thread if you care to start one.
Bret Devereaux’s “A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry” blog observes the 1-year mark of the war, and looks back at his commentary on the war for the past year:
That war had a lot to do with Russian willingness to scorch the Earth, starve their own people and destroy their own cities, including Moscow, rather than let the invading army feed off the land and shelter in Russian buildings. Winter did the rest, and it was the cold and the winter river crossings that destroyed Napoleon’s army. The Russians are proud of their ability to suffer, and see it as a strength. In the case of the war of 1812, it was.
The Ukrainians share that fatalism and ability to put up with horrors when necessary, but Ukraine’s exposure to the west has given them a more optimistic view of the future and what’s possible for them.
No, the Bolsheviks didn’t overthrow the Imperial government. The Tsar abdicated and a democratic government replaced it in February 1917. It was this democratic government that was overthrown by Lenin and the communists in October 1917.
The “experts” really ought to do a lot of soul searching here. There weren’t good reasons to assume Russia was going to have an easy win a year ago - they just made several dumb assumptions and most “experts” went along with it. War is inherently unpredictable.
As a non “expert” (though I am a veteran and a professional military logistician) who is not humble enough to avoid tooting my own horn again and again and again, I’ll remind everyone once again that war is almost entirely about morale and logistics, and experts should have seen that Ukraine had a big advantage in both last February.
if the last year or so tought me one thing about russia, than it is NOT to believe those kinds of stories anymore.
IMHO - they have NOTHING like that, that actually WORKS (beyond possibly a couple of blocks wired up to showcase their “thingy” to top-brass)
…or why would they have to resort to prisioners to get conscripts after they issued the law - and not “knock on doors” with the relevant populace?
I call BS on this story
With prisoners they don’t have to worry that the prisoners have an ideology other than “I’m looking out for myself.” As long as the prisoners can be tricked into thinking they have a better chance on the front lines, they can safely be conscripted.
Protesters have a cause or ideology. They run a much higher risk that if they hand them an AK-47 they will turn around and shoot the guy who just handed them the weapon.
Yup, and the implications of the borders of Poland vs the borders with Poland should not be ignored.
This is a bit of hair-splitting but serves very well to illustrate my point. Russian culture didn’t change; its “democracy” lasted all of 6 months before it reverted to being a dictatorship of the elite. An elite monarchy headed by a Tsar was replaced with an elite party headed by an autocratic General Secretary. Just like after the breakup of the USSR, Yeltsin’s somewhat-progressive faction ultimately reverted to gangster politics.
Russia isn’t a country of enlightenment values nor does it have a democratic tradition to draw on. People are people, true, nobody wants to die or become impoverished, but most Russians have no frame of reference for using democratic means to gain peace and prosperity. They’ve been conditioned to believe that security and plenty are always one more conquest around the corner (which is never quite reached). That Western-style democracy is a lie and a scam, that Eastern European democracies are western puppets. They have no role model that they’re willing to emulate. And as a nuclear power, they don’t see why they should have to listen to anyone else.
One may as well look at white MAGA southerners and ask what frame of reference would convince them it could ever be in their interest to share political power with black people. We’re not coming together on that; we’re getting further apart on it, even in a so-called “liberal democracy” with a free press. In both cases there’s simply no plausible theory of change as to why things should ever be different, except that unpredictable events become increasingly likely over deep historical time.
I feel it’s a good illustration of the foundation of myth-making that underlied the Bolshevik regime along with other comparable dictatorial regimes.
The Soviets liked the story that they had overthrow the Tsar. It strengthened the legitimacy of their regime to pretend that they had done the work over defeating the centuries old power rather than simply stepping in after that battle had already been won.
It’s similar to the story they were pushing a generation later about how they defeated the Nazis single-handedly rather than acknowledging that they were part of an alliance.
In Devereaux’s case he thought that while it looked bad for Ukraine’s conventional army, he expected Russia to have to face an extremely stubborn and enduring guerilla/partisan resistance, and that actually pacifying Ukraine would be much harder than the Kremlin’s rosy predictions. Devereaux was pleasantly surprised that Ukraine did better than that.
Actually, there were excellent reasons to believe that Russia would have the upper hand, including the embedded zelyonye chelovechki (“little green men”) ‘partisans’ (i.e. mostly paid mercenaries) in contested regions of the Donbas, the occupation of Crimea to control sea access, a significantly larger and ostensibly more modern military capability including the ability to achieve and maintain air superiority, the ability to strike sites in Ukraine from protected areas within Russia via missile strikes, and the presumption that Ukraine would essentially be isolated with NATO not wanting to be seen as escalating the war by supplying modern armor and anti-aircraft systems. All of these things were legitimate assumptions based on facts in evidence, and if Russia had actually been able to conduct their ‘special operation’ with speed and tact, they probably would have cut through Ukrainian resistance. However, the Russian Army’s combination of lack of preparedness, terrible logistics (even by historical Russian standards), rampant corruption undermining operational readiness even beyond the most pessimistic estimates, and heavy reliance upon untrained conscripts, many of whom had only a few weeks of ‘training’ to head the invasion, combined with a still inexplicable inability to even attempt to gain and maintain air superiority basically resulted in the Russian military not being able to get out of its own way. Incompetence and lack of coordination in military operations is nothing new but this is at a level unseen in living memory by a supposedly modern military force.
Exactly. The Russians have never had anything like a democracy for long enough that it was actually representative, and in the case of the Russian Provisional Government in 1917, there was so much political instability that it could hardly have been said to even be in control of either the civil or military apparatus. The Soviet regime, while ostensibly Marxist-Leninist, was little more than a new Tsardom under the guise of Stalinism with a progressively more detached and paranoid leader, and show trials to convict people of made-up crimes to cover rampant corruption. So…that’s what Russian know and expect, and anyone singing the praises of democracy sounds like Harold Hill selling them on band equipment that they already know is garbage.
Stranger
Much of what you mention should have been predictable. Further, Ukraine’s size and population should have been taken into account - it’s never easy invading a large, populous country, and Ukraine’s population was particularly ill inclined towards Russia. I think you’re going too easy on the experts.
Monday-morning quarterbacking is the easiest game there is.
But I was right, in February of 2022. I linked the posts earlier. I’m a veteran and a professional military logistician and I got it right.
What do you want? A T-shirt with that written on it?