Thanks for the thread. The Townhall thread is right on the money in many ways.
One thing I would say against it is, by totally ignoring Putin’s PHILOSOPHY and pathological gansterism, it misses the answer to the thread question.
Putin APPEARS to be fixated on one thing - Russia being a superpower. Has been right since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He BELIEVED in the Soviet Union. He’s an ethnonationalist, thuggish, Deep State totalitarianist to the core. The Cold War may have left him, but he never left it, and he’s been wanting to bring it back since the day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the trilateral agreement that created the Commonwealth of INDEPENDENT states.
But, the other half of his personality is, he’s a klepto. The biggest klepto on the planet. Everything he thinks should be his, is his, he thinks.
INDEPENDENT is the thing that boils Putin’s piss. In his Weltangschauung, even asking for independence (from Mother Russia) was the height of impudence. Being given it was the most ridiculous thing Russia’s ever done.
There are only three kinds of countries in Putin’s mind - the superpower, the vassal state, and a state that’s militarily and strategically unimportant.
Putin believes there is no such thing as independence if a superpower desires to rule over a state. We went on course toward a world war with Russia the very minute Putin rigged the system to put himself up as Leader For Life.
Putin is a fanatical idealist who got angrier and angrier by the pace of change around Russia. If Russia had put the trillion dollars the kleptos put into their own pockets, into infrastructure and modernisation and education instead, the Baltic states would’ve been begging to join the CIS instead of the EU, and now NATO.
For contrast, Mikhael Khordakovsky was a former hardball ideological commie turned oligarch klepto. Over time, he realised that kleptocracy wasn’t the answer and he urged Putin repeatedly to modernise not just the country, but his thinking too.
Putin took one bit of what MK said to heart - if Russia didn’t get on board with the Information Age, it would end up more backward than a third world basket case. As for the rest, Putin’s answer was to imprison MK, break up the guy’s business empire, sell it for pennies to cronies who then ruined it.
Basically, “screw you, I actually like gangsterism and I want to party like it’s 1988.”
In 2008, PUTIN goaded himself into Russian intervention and the rout of the Georgian arm, not because of what the neocons did but because it was the perfect opportunity to salami-slice its way back into “owning” Georgia like the good old Soviet days.
BEFORE 2014, PUTIN poisoned Yanukovych’s rivals and bought Yanukovych’s loyalty, and HE goaded Ukrainians into overthrowing the elected pro-Russian regime in Kyiv BY HAVING YANUKOVYCH HAND OVER UKRAINE’S ECONOMIC FUTURE TO DIRECT CONTROL FROM THE KREMLIN. When they succeeded, Putin seized Crimea and Sevastopol, for centuries the home base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, DESPITE HAVING SIGNED UP TO THREE BINDING TREATIES COMMITTING RUSSIA NEVER TO DO THAT.
PUTIN doesn’t believe his country has been pushed against a wall by the West. He blames Gorbachev and Yeltsin for it. He also knows that Ukraine’s cities - and those in the Baltic states, and in East Germany - have had thirty years of modernisation and improved living conditions AND THAT IS WHY THEY LEAN WEST, while Russia, frankly, hasn’t had a paint job in forty years because the money to do it has been stolen by him and his mates.
And despite that, he wants to make Russia great again. Best way? Bomb the shit out of anywhere close by that might end up as a walking advert for how USELESS the Kremlin and Putin has been for Russia, and win some wars of conquest, and open a picture book showing Peter The Great’s Russia like a New Jerusalem.
What Putin fears the most with EU and NATO expansion is, ordinary Russians saying “why the hell can’t we have what they’ve got?” so he has walled off the internet, censors the news, and pushes out a whole series of utterly bonkers excuses for the war in Ukraine in order to brainwash his own people into thinking that Russia NEEDED to be bigger than it currently is.
Russia doesn’t need to be bigger to avoid “humiliation”, it needs to throw Putin and his kleptomaniac cronies in a gulag, sieze their assets, put those assets into a national development fund, and actually do what Russia should’ve done in the 90s.
Spend the Russian money on improving Russia instead of on palaces and yachts and totalitarian control instruments.
“Americans appear dismissive of dark Russian warnings that rather than accept defeat in Ukraine, the humiliation of their nation, and their encirclement and isolation, they will resort to tactical nuclear weapons.”
I truly believe Russia will do that, with or without America. You see, Putin is the ultimate narcissist and he’s built a death cult around it. That death cult runs Russia. In fact didn’t someone say, “What is the point of a world if Putin is not in it?”
The only “out” I can see is, a coup in Russia that doesn’t just end Putin personally but takes every last one of his enablers and True Believers in the Kremlin out at the same time. Only through another revolution can a SANE regime in Moscow find a way off the suicidal road Putin is determined to go down.
I think October 2022 has some symbolism. If we can string things out till then, maybe something interesting will happen.
Thank you. I appreciate your insightful comments.
That’s huge, coming from a gy from a country which has Hunter Biden.
I gotta chuckle whenever I see posts like that one, especially since you far left Dems are quite silent on the very high number of Bill/Hilary Clinton enemies who have mysteriously ended up getting murdered, without their killers ever being brought to justice.