The Russia vs Ukraine show

[5hout]

Question: My understanding is that the USA has been consistently signaling that so long as Russia states a pretext and engages in a limited incursion (i.e. protecting "recognized" separatist regions) we'll do sanctions, but nothing else*. I'm very confused at people in the media and elsewhere (blogosphere) cheering on Pres. Biden's strong leadership here. https://twitter.com/joelockhart/status/ ... 2517075973, among others. What am I missing? Do they think under a Pres. Trump Putin would somehow be doing less/more/different? Do we give a shit if he takes just a few regions or more?

*I personally don't give a flying fuck what happens in the Ukraine. The choice seems to be between an authoritarian state run by an ethnic Russian or a different authoritarian state run by a different ethnic Russian.

[quikky]

The choice seems to be between an authoritarian state run by an ethnic Russian or a different authoritarian state run by a different ethnic Russian.

Most ex-Soviet countries are authoritarian. Ukraine is not. High levels of corruption, yes, but not authoritarian.

[aurelius]

among others. What am I missing? Do they think under a Pres. Trump Putin would somehow be doing less/more/different?

This is happening because of Trump. This is what is so confounding with the US politics. It exists in this imaginary vacuum of Presidential election cycles. Trump spent 4 years weakening NATO and alliances in Western Europe. In response several European countries strengthened ties with Russia. The big one being Germany. Putin saw that as an opportunity to be able to annex Ukraine.

NATO, the US, and Western Europe largely rallied in response to Russian aggression. In particular, the US State department got Germany on board and willing to cancel the Nordic Stream 2 project. This was not a certain outcome. This was Putin's miscalculation. I will leave it to the pundits to assign credit.

Also, credit to NATO intelligence. I do believe that Russia had planned several false flag operations which NATO disrupted by announcing before Russia could enact them. Kept 'beating them to the punch'.

I do not believe a Trump administration would have rallied NATO and Western Europe. I don't even know if Trump would have tried? US sanctions would not be effective. It requires Western Europe to cooperate. Again, 60% of the Russian government's income is from gas it sells to Western Europe.

Let's be clear: 75% of the Russian military is mobilized and surrounding Ukraine. Putin's goal was to invade and annex the entirety of Ukraine. He is now just 'peace keeping' and recognizing small regions as independent states. Which was the situation since 2014. And now Russia will 'enjoy' crippling economic sanctions. All while the Ukraine becomes better armed and prepared for a military invasion. So if Putin pushes forward with a full invasion he will have a Western backed insurgency. Putin has 'lost' this round of international geopolitical brinkmanship.

[aurelius]

Someone asked what does Russia achieve from invading and annexing the Ukraine? The answer is nothing. Russia would achieve nothing but a decade long war of insurgency. But it is the wrong question to ask. The right question: What does Putin achieve?

Putin does not care about Russia or the Russian people. He conflates his personal agenda with the interests of Russia. So what does Putin want? To diminish the West and assert himself as the dominant global political power. He believes if he can recreate the USSR he can do just that.

This situation mirrors the US Gulf War 2. W. Bush and his inner circle had an agenda to create regime change and assert US friendly authorities in the Middle East. They picked a 'soft' target, Iraq, to start this remake. Created a false reason for war (WMD). They thought it would be easy. Instead the US got bogged down in a decade long war of insurgency. And the US got NOTHING. Replace W. Bush with Putin and Iraq for Ukraine and you 100% understand Putin's ambitions in Ukraine and the likely outcome.

[mbasic]

I can't imagine Russia really going ahead with it. I think all this is like Kim in NK detonating A-bombs under mountains, and shooting off ICBMs like bottle rockets for attention.

Likely scenarios that Putin MUST be aware of:

1-long protracted insurgency like aurelius describes.
(man, that^ going to be a weird one in a modern 1st world country in Europe)
(were not talking Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, etc)

2-what if ..... just say what if .... the initial push into Ukraine fails?
Not only is that a bad look; your people, generals, underlings, are just about going to be done with you....

I wouldn't be surprised if the Russian soldiers aren't up to this .... the occupation part.
Sure, Russia could use air power and/or smart cruise missiles to no end .... but that's a whole different deal altogether, and will yield a different response from the rest of the world IOW: It's going to be SO MUCH harder to go in there, all "boots on the ground", and occupy and "take back" the country without making a total absolute fucking mess of everything. Which I assume that's what Putin wants (bolded part), that is going to be a real tough ask of his troops.

That said, me thinks this all meta-sabre-rattling.

=====================

He believes if he can recreate the USSR he can do just that.

I mean, like that whole Kazakhstan thing makes perfect sense. Or say Uzbekistan.
I think those places have some oil and/or mineral resources, etc.

[aurelius]

I mean, like that whole Kazakhstan thing makes perfect sense. Or say Uzbekistan.
I think those places have some oil and/or mineral resources, etc.

Yes. And as we have discussed, Russia already gets what it wants out of those countries. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

Think in terms like this: Russia has a population of 145 million. Ukraine has a population of 45 million. Focusing on natural resources is missing the forest for the trees. A nation's number one resource is its people. Not only is the Ukraine's geographic proximity to Europe important (location, location, location) but the population of Ukraine in terms of size and education would be a big boon for Russia. There is a reason Putin laments the loss of Ukraine after the fall of the USSR.

Even removing NATO and Western Europe from the equation Putin faces serious Problems with this gambit. Ukrainians are more European in mind set. It is unlikely they are going to accept the yoke Putin seeks to place on them. Putin really has not had to be a Saddam Hussein style ruler. Sure, he runs an oppressive regime with selective wet work type shenanigans. But occupying and subjugating a 45 million populace? That is a horse of a different color. Saddam Hussein was BRUTAL. Will the Russian people have the will to do that to people they largely view as their own? He is already being questioned by prominent members of the military.

[JonA]

This is happening because of Trump. This is what is so confounding with the US politics. It exists in this imaginary vacuum of Presidential election cycles. Trump spent 4 years weakening NATO and alliances in Western Europe. In response several European countries strengthened ties with Russia. The big one being Germany. Putin saw that as an opportunity to be able to annex Ukraine.

I would have thought that maybe Ukraine's own political makeup, it's constant yin/yang of Western and Russian courtship, and the fact that it has been in a slow brewing civil war for a decade might have been a contributing factor to why it's happening.

[aurelius]

This is happening because of Trump. This is what is so confounding with the US politics. It exists in this imaginary vacuum of Presidential election cycles. Trump spent 4 years weakening NATO and alliances in Western Europe. In response several European countries strengthened ties with Russia. The big one being Germany. Putin saw that as an opportunity to be able to annex Ukraine.

I would have thought that maybe Ukraine's own political makeup, it's constant yin/yang of Western and Russian courtship, and the fact that it has been in a slow brewing civil war for a decade might have been a contributing factor to why it's happening.

That is Russian propaganda. Did you read his deranged speech? Yikes. Putin is and has been worried of Ukraine's growing alliance with Europe. Of them de facto joining NATO. Europe has been slow playing Ukraine to not offend Russia. Putin tried to install a dummy government like Belarus. That didn't work. He now is trying to take it by force.

Why Russia's probable invasion of Ukraine matters (from The Morning):

1. Regional dominance
A Russian invasion of Ukraine seems likely to involve one of the world’s largest militaries launching an unprovoked ground invasion of a neighboring country. The apparent goal would be an expansion of regional dominance, either through annexation or the establishment of a puppet government.

Few other conflicts since World War II fit this description. Some of the closest analogies are the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and Hungary in the 1950s — as well as Vladimir Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. The U.S., for its part, invaded Panama in the 1980s and used the C.I.A. to overthrow an elected government in Guatemala in the 1950s. Of course, it also launched several faraway wars, in Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere.

But the world’s most powerful counties have rarely used force to expand their boundaries or set up client states in their region. Instead, they have generally abided by the treaties and international rules established in the 1940s. The phrase “Pax Americana” describes this stability.

The relative peace has had enormous benefits. Living standards have surged, with people living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives on average than their ancestors. In recent decades, the largest gains have come in lower-income countries. The decline in warfare has played a central role: By the start of this century, the rate at which people were dying in armed conflicts had fallen to the lowest level in recorded history, as Joshua Goldstein, Steven Pinker and other scholars have noted.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like the kind of war that has been largely absent in the past 80 years and that was once common. It would involve a powerful nation setting out to expand its regional dominance by taking over a neighbor. A war like this — a voluntary war of aggression — would be a sign that Putin believed that Pax Americana was over and that the U.S., the European Union and their allies had become too weak to exact painful consequences.

As Anne Applebaum has written in The Atlantic, Putin and his inner circle are part of a new breed of autocrats, along with the rulers of China, Iran and Venezuela: “people who aren’t interested in treaties and documents, people who only respect hard power.”

This is why many people in Taiwan find the situation in Ukraine to be chilling, as my colleagues Steven Lee Myers and Amy Qin have explained. “If the Western powers fail to respond to Russia, they do embolden the Chinese thinking regarding action on Taiwan,” said Lai I-chung, a Taiwanese official with ties to its leaders. If the world is entering an era in which countries again make decisions based, above all, on what their military power allows them to do, it would be a big change.

2. Democratic recession
Political scientists have been warning for several years that democracy is in decline around the world. Larry Diamond of Stanford University has described the trend as a “democratic recession.”

Freedom House, which tracks every country in the world, reports that global political freedom has declined every year since 2006. Last year, Freedom House concluded, “the countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began.”

A Russian takeover of Ukraine would contribute to this democratic recession in a new way: An autocracy would be taking over a democracy by force.

Ukraine is a largely democratic nation of more than 40 million people, with a pro-Western president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who in 2019 won 73 percent of the vote in the election’s final round. That victory and recent polls both indicate that most Ukrainians want to live in a country that resembles the European nations to its west — and the U.S. — more than it resembles Russia.

But Putin and his inner circle believe that liberal democracies are in decline, a view that Xi Jinping and other top Chinese officials share.

They know that the U.S. and Europe are now struggling to lift living standards for much of their populations. Putin and Xi also know that many Western countries are polarized, rived by cultural conflicts between metropolitan areas and more rural ones. Major political parties are weak (as in the case of the old center-left parties in Britain, France and elsewhere) or themselves behaving in anti-democratic ways (as with the Republican Party in the U.S.).

These problems have given Putin and his top aides confidence to act aggressively, believing that “the American-led order is in deep crisis,” Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote in The Economist this weekend.

In the view of Putin’s regime, Gabuev explained: “A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values. A feisty, resurgent Russia is a pioneering force behind the arrival of this new order, along with a rising China.”

As I’ve tried to emphasize before, the situation in Ukraine remains highly uncertain. Putin may still choose not to invade, given the potential for a protracted war, a large number of Russian casualties and economic turmoil. An invasion would be a spectacular gamble with almost no modern equivalent — which is also why it would be a sign that the world might be changing.

[dw]

"But Putin and his inner circle believe that liberal democracies are in decline, a view that Xi Jinping and other top Chinese officials share."

I think this is true. I think the problem is the material benefits of liberal democracy - high standards of living, relatively low corruption and persecution of individuals and groups (contra BLM) - are not enough to withstand the spiritual dissatisfaction they seem to engender. (Not that this is an original opinion.)

People want... something. And patriotism works well enough for the autocrats as we're calling them to exploit.

ETA another thing to ponder is that the current liberal democratic Western order is the result of one event that was by no means predestined - namely the US-led alliance winning WW2. If the Axis had won, with or without the US being involved, then the prediction expressed above would have become manifest reality 80 years ago.

[hsilman]

I don't know if this is accurate, but it feels like the rise of China and Russia is part of the failure of "neo" policy for the past 50ish years, since Nixon in China. I'm basically talking about capitalism, or the idea that captalism will solve problems, which both major political parties agree on.

The problem is that they all offered the carrot without the stick. How do we get China to "fall in line" without military force? Well, get them 'dependent' on foreign trade, of course. Because then, if you want to exert pressure, you simply cut them off/reduce their exports pipeline and they'll be so desperate that they'll change their tune.

Oh, you have an economic and political system that has no long term memory and if prices rise everyone will blame you and you'll be voted out of office. Woops. Oh, 'unfair' competition will completely destroy your manufacturing base? woops. Oh, you ended up relying on Chinese/Russian(for gasahol) production to keep prices low and now don't want to piss off your benefactors. Woops.

You see it now, when Biden quite literally said "sanctions on Russia will cost Americans in the form of higher prices" and 30% of the voting base lost their fucking minds. I say 30% because there was a significant amount of reasonable responses even in the conservative ecosystem. Of course, drowned out by the more extreme voices but I feel like it would be inaccurate to dismiss them. And Liberals may not publicly disagree with statement/Biden, but voter enthusiasm will decline due to higher costs.

Give totalitarian regimes the carrot(see also, SA etc), but be too afraid to use the stick. This is why I felt like the Iran deal was actually a major step forward. Very specific goals, and guidelines with consequences that were clearly spelled out. It wasn't just "here's some money, play nice", which is of course how some people framed it.

I dunno, maybe this is all wrong and I'm just biased to think in economic terms. I kinda feel like this whole spiel is right out of the mouth of Immortant Joe. I certainly don't claim to be an expert or even well informed.

[5hout]

https://twitter.com/Lawrence/status/1495844462630772738

Amazing take.

EDIT bonus tweet: https://twitter.com/USEmbassyKyiv/statu ... 81/photo/1

I can't decide if this is fiddling while Rome burns or what, but maybe don't have the US Embassy in the Ukraine meme'ing on Russia this week? Like probably can't do any harm or any good, but strong vibes of "the person that tweeted this so wrapped up in the tweetsphere/simulacra level 4 [i.e. have lost all connection with physical reality]"

[aurelius]

https://twitter.com/Lawrence/status/1495844462630772738

Amazing take.

Exactly. And that is in the context of Trump's recent statement. I get not voting for Democrats. I don't understand anyone that supports or would vote for Trump. He is not playing for Team America.

[5hout]

https://twitter.com/Lawrence/status/1495844462630772738

Amazing take.

Exactly. And that is in the context of Trump's recent statement. I get not voting for Democrats. I don't understand anyone that supports or would vote for Trump. He is not playing for Team America.

Just to be clear (b/c text makes this hard): We agree Lawrence, the Dems and Trump are all idiots?

[dw]

Wow what a dumb comment by Lawrence.

[aurelius]

Just to be clear (b/c text makes this hard): We agree Lawrence, the Dems and Trump are all idiots?

I don't know Lawrence. But add Republicans to that list and I will agree. Although, I am personally impressed with the work the State Department has done during this crisis.

I think the tweet was in response to this: Trump on the recent Ukraine invasions: "I went in yesterday, and there was a television screen, and I said, 'This is genius,'" he said. "Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine - of Ukraine - Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful."

"I said, 'How smart is that?' He's going to go in and be a peacekeeper," added Trump, who regularly praised and sought close ties with Putin during his time in office. "That's the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border. That's the strongest peace force I've ever seen. There were more army tanks than I've ever seen. They're going to keep peace, all right."


Looking at Putin's actions, what have they achieved long-term? The Russian economy is terrible and essentially run by government supported gangs. It shouldn't be. Russia has land, natural resources, and a large, technically educated population. It has been 30 years since the fall of the USSR. And Russia is not in the top 10 of economies. For context, Italy with less than half the population of Russia has a larger economy.
Instead Russia is just Europe's gas station.

What is missed is that Russia needs Europe. Europe does not need Russia. There are other 'gas stations' in the world (the US, the Middle East) that can fulfill Europe's demand. Russia would just be fucked.

Russia is not a stable government. When Putin dies Russia will collapse as his inner circle fights for who gets to be Putin 2.0.

Putin is forced to resort to playing the patriotism card and appeasing his hawkish inner circle to keep power. He has to create scenarios to distract the Russian people that he sucks at nation building. For this to work Putin has to win. What he is doing in Ukraine isn't winning. The sanctions will fuck the Russian economy more. If he goes fully into Ukraine he will get bogged down into a war of insurgency. Have fun selling the Russian people on the glory of the former USSR as the body bags pile up. The military, which has signaled the taking of Ukraine will not be as easy as the Kremlin thinks, could turn on Putin as well.

In short, Putin miscalculated. His one stated objective was to further weaken NATO. The opposite has happened. NATO has found new resolve. Biden would have spent all 4 years of his Presidency to undo the damage Trump did to NATO and our relationships with European allies. And Biden would have failed. Putin created the opportunity to remind NATO and our European allies why the US is important and restored those relationships in 6 weeks. DUMB

[omaniphil]

War. My overarching prayer is for peace obviously, but since this war is due to Putin's illicit desires, my more immediate desire is for the Ukrainian military to give them hell.

[BostonRugger]

I was wrong about the Russians invading. As @aurelius alluded to above, I misunderstood Putin.

By way of excuse, the US fed gov and its war propaganda system are the boy who cried wolf.

[mbasic]

I was wrong about the Russians invading.

is it a full scale "invasion" though ?

--------------------

so weird

MOSCOW, Feb 24 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Thursday that the length of Russia's military operation in Ukraine depended on how it progressed and on its aims, and that the assault should ideally cleanse the country of "Nazis" and "neutralise" Kyiv's military potential.

In a conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that nobody was talking about occupying Ukraine and that it was "unacceptable" to use the word to describe in the context of Russia's operation.

I guess they just want to bully them around a bit, like bully that sucker punches a kid before getting off the school bus or something?

[5hout]

Based on a review of information it seems the current action is broad scale air/missile attack on Ukraine command and control forces, medium scale physical incursion, likely to be followed by a retrenchment into the Donbass (under the pretexutal "invitation" of the separatist leaders) (moderate confidence prediction as this follows the plan of their actions in Georgia and Crimea, among others). If we wanted to predict further I'd bet in 5-8 years, after some digestion and limited (if any) insurgency Russia will gear up and do this again to connect Crimea to the Donbass for "secure transport reasons".

Media reports of "full scale war" seem to be attempts to hype this up and overblown. While the air/missile incursion is full country I have not seen reports of following physical troops outside of limited regions (i.e. no paratrooper/fast attack followup to seize important points throughout the country). Russia seems to be crippling C&C while leaving government intact and providing an out for Zelenksy to "staunchly oppose" this while basically giving up the contested regions.

[BostonRugger]

I was wrong about the Russians invading.

is it a full scale "invasion" though ?

--------------------

so weird

MOSCOW, Feb 24 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Thursday that the length of Russia's military operation in Ukraine depended on how it progressed and on its aims, and that the assault should ideally cleanse the country of "Nazis" and "neutralise" Kyiv's military potential.

In a conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that nobody was talking about occupying Ukraine and that it was "unacceptable" to use the word to describe in the context of Russia's operation.

I guess they just want to bully them around a bit, like bully that sucker punches a kid before getting off the school bus or something?

It'll be somewhere between Blitzkrieg and the "invasion" of Crimea which mostly involved them pushing out of their naval base at Sevastopol, standing on corners with rifles and telling the Ukrainian military to beat it. Doesn't look like they're stopping with the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk that are already under separatist control.