Russian invasion of Ukraine

I would also buy some

^^ incredible!

What does the actual defence minister say though?

Is anybody worried about a Russia after Putin? Even if they manage to remove Putin with protests or some internal coup I don't think there will be a formation of a free democratic government. With the level of organized crime and corruption I can't see the rich and powerful just standing by letting ordinary people organize the state. In the worst case it could become a failed state with civil war and thousands of nukes.

Is anybody worried about a Russia after Putin?

Yes. There are dark forces in significant numbers further to the right of Putin.
A bit like how the Arab spring looked all young, urban and promising and then the Egyptians voted in the Islamic Brotherhood.

The west urgently need a plan for how to contribute to building a liberal post-Putin Russia.

You're not wrong about needing to plan for post Putin Russia but I think we shouldn't expect Russia to fully settle into liberal democracy for 25+ years. They've effectively never had a functioning democracy before.

I'm fact, thinking about it, I think there's a foreign office adage about it taking two generations to build a democracy but two years to build a dictatorship.

Can't imagine Ramzan Kadyrov is feeling so great either if a sizeable portion of the force he sent has been repelled, leaves him more vulnerable at home

I imagine that they will be leaning eastwards rather than west. The US has been tarnished with Trump. Britain with Johnson. Neither are great examples of competent leadership.

leaning eastwards

Opting for Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai style autocracy with a heavy army presence you mean? Doesn't sound unlikely to me. The thing I am afraid of is all out genocide towards gays, jews and non-white people. To my knowledge we don't have very clear numbers on the far right in Russia but there seems to be loads of them.

Russia apparently making up stuff about US funded chemical weapons facility I'm Ukraine... presumably another attempt by Russians to muddy the waters

Saw on twitter: Ukraine invented covid and was working on more deadly version but Russians captured the lab and saved the world.

Straight out of the Iraq playbook

Making up Ukraine was working on nuclear weapons

Dodgy dossier works once...

All the footage online has taught me how popular John Deere is in Ukraine

It is possible to slide away from defeat by claiming victory against more realistic goals. After all Saddam Hussein led Iraq into two disastrous wars – when he invaded Iran in 1980 and seized Kuwait a decade later. At the end of both, with nothing to show for all the consequential death and destruction, he nonetheless claimed victory because somehow, he had personally managed to survive in power. As Putin is forced to move away from his maximum aims will that minimum one also come to be his priority?

https://samf.substack.com/p/space-and-time?s=r

At the UN vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on March 2, 141 countries voted in favor, 4 against and 35 abstained. Those numbers are deceptive, however, because of which countries were in each camp. Though the motion to condemn Russia had an overwhelming majority, weighted by population the vote looked different. Of the 7.7 billion people represented by governments taking part in the vote, only 42 percent were from countries approving the motion condemning Russia. Governments representing 51 percent of the world’s population abstained.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-92-so-like-us-africa-and?s=r

At the beginning of March, around 660,000 people had fled according to the
@UNHCR. EU humanitarian commissioner said eighteen million people will be affected.
@CGDev has estimated that the costs associated with hosting refugees could amount to $30 billion a year. These costs can be counted as aid under @OECDdev rules which, as it did in 2016 during the so-called European ‘migration crisis’, could cut into European aid to Africa, which amounted to $8.9 billion from the EU, $4.6 billion from Germany and $4 billion from France in 2020.

https://twitter.com/David_McNair/status/1499644389357936643

Let's forecast one year ahead. Russia will have its land corridor to Crimea. They'll have invaded Moldova and added Transnistria to the corridor. There'll be a de facto border between Russian-occupied Ukraine and the rest of it. Same situation in Moldova. There'll be low intensity fighting along the borders. Russian troops will be garrisoned in Belarus. Lukashenko will have 100% pro Russian policies and will ramp up his use of Syrian refugees to destabilise his Western neighbours. Putin will use all his hybrid warfare tactics against the Baltic states and Romania. He'll weaken them without actually invading. He'll demand that he's given the Suwalki gap, plus recognition of his new territories in Ukraine and Moldova, in exchange for a settlement in which he doesn't invade the rest of Ukraine or Moldova. The Russian economy will be in recession. Same in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Belarus. Some Western economies will be close to it, or in it, possibly also damaged by new Covid variants. Other former Soviet republics will be subservient to Putin and will accept a stronger economic union with Russia. Turkey and China will both try for good relations with both Putin and the West. All in all, Putin will have made huge progress towards rebuilding the Soviet Union.

A possible scenario, for sure. Not the only possible outcome but it certainly bears thinking about.

I think your crystal ball may need a polish. Certainly hope so.

It got me so depressed I wish I hadn't written it. Dictators do so well. So do crooks. Total corruption in the world was estimated at $3.6 trillion in 2017. Roughly the same as the car industry.

Pretty sure that reactors belonging to Syria, Iraq, and Iran have been attacked by foreign powers, although Iran's was attacked via cyber, and neither the Iraqi nor Syrian facilities were running when they were bombed.

Yes, it's incredibly depressing. I am half way through Patrick Radden Keefe's book about the Sacklers. Overall messages:

Crime pays
Money matters more than justice
Just keep lying and you'll get through
Say the same lie often enough and it becomes true

We need to put out the fire, as Neil Oliver puts it. I'm really disturbed by this stuff but I have no idea how to respond.

The West needed this plan in like 1991, instead of that Shock Therapy bullshit that knocked 20 years off life expectancy in the former USSR.

But to be fair to the West, they need some kind of plan for shoring up liberal democracy and strengthening institutions in the West too, to avoid dark forces from the Right taking grip here.

“Dictators do so well”
as i said in the dictators thread, they often get assassinated by somebody close to them, tried in the Hague or shot/hung in the street by the oppressed.

Nick H has certainly put forward a plausible analysis here, but it does assume Putin remains at the helm. As with so many other aspects of this crisis, we are short of reliable information, we don't appear to have much idea about whether another leader would pursue the same aggressive policy.

Autocrats generally like to start wars because they deflect attention from bad things going on in the homeland. It seems quite possible that this war has been caused by Putin's feelings of insecurity - anyone in his position ( over twenty years of near absolute power) is likely to fear assassination. A palace coup would probably result in a change of policy since the new bloke, whoever he is, could win popularity by bringing peace. The Bolsheviks' slogan which brought them to power in 1917 was 'Bread, Land and Peace': it was another three word sound bite which worked!

I hope this is cheerful. For more light relief you may like to look at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Nemorensis

At first sight this ancient story may seem irrelevant to today's problems, but the ritual described can be seem as a metaphor for change of leadership in any state which does not have a recognised constitution.