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I think it does inform it in the sense of forming part of the Russian national psyche. I would be amazed if any of the leadership seriously thought that they were facing a land invasion and occupation. If nothing else, they must know that the population of western countries would take an incredibly dim view of their politicians flinging hundreds of thousands of their citizens into that meatgrinder.
I think it's pretty clear that the main mindset driving their actions is the desire to re-establish Russia as an empire along its historical lines, which means control or occupation of neighbouring countries. The irony being that if they just chilled the fuck out and acted like a modern trading nation secure within their own borders they'd be much stronger and not subject to the various forms of economic and diplomatic damage that they're currently suffering.
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Russia has almost 4 times Canada’s population and it’s official (probably falsified) GDP is only 80% of Canada’s. This war must be doing a lot of damage to their economy. It’s also taking productive labour out of the workforce and saddling the economy with thousands of disabled veterans, widows and orphans.
Best case scenario in my opinion is total economic collapse of Russia and dissolution. -
(Trigger warning, references to v crude violence.)
Which no one sane should really want. The collapse of a huge centrist state with a large and spread out population would almost certainly result in major famine and disease. Remember that after WW2, the Russian state had to create posters telling people not to eat their own children, and there’s widespread evidence of it happening.
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Also, the Kremlin is the biggest baddest gorilla keeping a lot of other armed, ambitious loonies in check. Given free rein, there’s several factions and regions where tribal infighting is foreseeable.
And let’s not forget the world’s largest nuclear stockpile. Iran, Saudi, North Korea, China, possibly Turkey, Pakistan would love a slice of that pie.
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Yeah, no real disagreements with you there - I'm not suggesting that the Risk-informed, Great Game bullshit is the correct view, but rather that it renders the behaviour of the Russian government a lot more comprehensible. When they 'just seem crazy', that's a disempowering understanding of their actions - since it can't inform a considered response.
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Isn't that what Putin says the West wants? And doesn't anyone who remembers the collapse of the Soviet Union have a fairly good reason to fear that scenario?
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Best case scenario in my opinion is total economic collapse of Russia and dissolution.
How did that play out last time?
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A viewpoint many in this thread have said they disagree with:
Asked what the west could do to help, he said he thought it could “send a clear signal to the Russian people that it does not consider them an enemy”.
Russians needed an alternative to Putin’s imperialism, which brought death and poverty, isolation, corruption, arbitrariness, he added. “It would be a big mistake if the rhetoric and sanctions policy of the west degenerate into Russophobia.”
Remarks like these have put Yashin at odds with some of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters abroad. They have said millions of Russians are to blame just as much as Putin for the war. Yashin has always argued the opposite, that “our society has also become a victim of Putin”.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t idealise my people,” he wrote. “Yes, unfortunately we have allowed this criminal power into the Kremlin. People believed the propaganda, allowed themselves to be manipulated, did not control officials and security forces. All this is our responsibility. But this does not mean that the Russian people deserve to be defamed.”
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Supposedly the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, visited Bakhmut on Friday and Prigozhin just posted a city of himself in the city, which you'd assume wasn't taken today, crazy to think they were in such close proximity of each other
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I am not convinced the economic collapse of the russian state (different from political change which is clearly needed) is a slam dunk for improving things and securing long term stability in those regions either
Look what happened as soon as it was clear the russian military was pre-occupied, you had conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh starting again
Collapse of the Soviet Union led to millions of excess deaths in the decade that followed, life expectancy slumped, the vulnerable suffered disproportionately and the oligarchs emerged facilitating huge power and wealth transfers, not sure how anyone can be sure that wouldn't play out the same again?
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I would assume most likely yes but I think it all depends on the what comes next. Not sure there are many examples of economic collapse leading to OK outcomes in the short to medium term? Coups, democratic uprisings etc. at least have some examples of semi-orderly transitions for the ordinary person
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Collapse of the Soviet Union led to millions of excess deaths in the decade that followed
You make it sounds like the collapse was a bad thing.
Yeah we had factories go bankrupt, same with kolkhoz, then hyperinflation, food coupons, temporary currency, then new currency, privatisation and then some wild capitalism but people adapted.
We're still amongst the fastest growing economies in Europe and I think the collapse was the greatest thing that could happen to my country.
The only better thing I can imagine is if we didn't have soviet foot in our country for 45 year prior.
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Yeh the photos and footage are horrific
https://twitter.com/y_akopov/status/1632070912081281024?t=LGxY7fMXTS5JZyHTHDlzTw&s=19Completely senseless
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Interesting piece on how Ukraine's journalists scaled back reporting to not hamper the war effort but now starting investigative journalism and having to tread a tightrope of providing scrutiny while not being anti-state
Example being military food contracts being rigged at high prices to skim high profits, which were dismissed and not addressed when highlighted to the military in the first instance
Sources in the presidential administration said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was furious, according to Ukrainska Pravda journalists. It prompted the dismissal of 15 senior government and regional officials, including two senior defence officials.
Anti-corruption measures are one of the requirements for Ukraine’s EU membership status and Zelenskiy was responding to disquiet in wider Ukrainian society over corruption at a time when most are regularly donating money to aid the war effort.
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Did not see Gerasimov getting pitched as potential kingmaker coming
From the Guardian live text which I can never think out how to link to:
Former Chief of the General Staff Gen Lord Richard Dannatt has been speaking to Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday about Ukraine this morning.
I’d like to think that if the counter-offensive by the Ukrainians is sufficiently well planned, supported and executed, that Putin won’t be in a position to do too much decision making himself that if his army crumbles and runs, that I think there’s quite likely that he’ll be swept out of the Kremlin as well.”
He added:
And you’ll also have to ask the question, which everybody does, is, well if it’s not going to be Putin and the Kremlin, who is it going to be? Well, to be honest, I don’t really know the answer to that question. But what I would say is, I think the group of people, the group of leaders, who are most disaffected in Russia at the present moment, are the senior generals.
They’ve seen Putin totally interfere with a war they probably don’t largely agree with. They realise that their weaponry is distinctly inferior to that of the West. And that’s largely throught corruption in the Russian defence procurement process. So I could see said General Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff, who’s now been put in charge and overall command in in Ukraine itself to be the one, if he could make a sufficiently sensible plan and have the moral courage to see it through, it could be the generals that topple Putin and push him out of the Kremlin.
There’s going to be a lot of change in Russia over the next 12 months. I’ve got no doubt.”
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Again from the Guardian live text, heinous crimes being committed
Ukraine MP Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said tens of thousands of Ukrainian children could have disappeared, potentially deported to Russia in what she described as “genocide”.
She told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday:
We have about 13,000 cases that are confirmed that Ukrainian children have been deported to different parts of the Russian Federation.
However, we also have information about many more of those that are counted in tens of thousands. But we just do not have that the official kind of recording of those ... and this is part of the genocide that the Russian Federation is conducting against Ukrainian nation.
Because turning children, abducting them, and turning children into different nationality by spreading them around the Russian Federation and actually giving them to to Russian families, that is just another trace of genocide that is ongoing right now in the centre of Europe.
Klympush-Tsintsadze, the chair of the parliamentary committee on EU integration, said they have been able to return about 100 Ukrainian children to their families with the help of human rights groups and other organisations.
Speaking about how the children had been separated from their families, including instances where some children were even adopted, she explained:
Some of them [the children] have been going through the filtration camps with their parents where they were separated from the parents. Some of them have been taken to so called summer camps or vacation camps for a week from their parents and then never, never returned. And they were even some of them were even given already for adoption to Russian families, as if they didn’t have their own families back in Ukraine.
Klympush-Tsintsadze added that the full picture would not be known until all Ukrainian territories were “liberated”.
I think the the scope of these absolutely tragic activities that are being carried out by the Russian authorities will learn only after we will be able to liberate all the territories of Ukraine.
And that is something that those people who are suggesting peaceful territories do not understand: the suffering, the tragedies, the tortures, the abductions, deportations, you know, all the territories that are right now occupied by the Russian Federation…and we have to ensure that those people are liberated by the Ukrainian armed forces.
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Video from Vuhledar. An illustrated definition of madness.
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