War in Ukraine

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Open your history book to the chapters 1960's 1970's and 1980's. Take a look at Jamaica, Cuba and Grenada and any random central American country.

But it's not the 60's or 70's any more. Russia has an economy similar in size to Spain, with a population about 3.5 times as big, but the russians are primarily working on getting the second part of that down, rather than the first.

As for the Ukraine, russia's actions there can entirely be summed up as putin trying to prove to a variety of audiences that russia's national Penis was still big and strong and definitely still worked. And all it ultimately achieved was make the european Union and the United States take the Russian economy, fold it carefully until it was a fraction of its previous size and wipe their arse with it.

[Tactical Genius]

But it's not the 60's or 70's any more. Russia has an economy similar in size to Spain, with a population about 3.5 times as big, but the Russians are primarily working on getting the second part of that down, rather than the first.

I guess Russia's economy would be a fair bit larger if a large percentage of the nations asset stripped wealth wasn't tied up in the UK banking system and property market?

As for the Ukraine, russia's actions can be summed up as putin trying to prove to a variety of audiences that russia's national Penis was still big and strong and definitely still worked. And all it ultimately achieved was make the european Union and the United States to take the Russian economy, fold it carefully until it was a fraction of its previous size and wipe their arse with it.

Not really, Russia behaviour in the Ukrain is not dick waving or posturing, it makes logical political and military sense.
Yeltzin left Russia in a mess and militarily exposed. Ukraine has been cosying up to NATO and has been making claim to larger and larger shares of the Ex-Soviet Baltic fleet.
They have also been making more threats to unilaterally tear up the agreement for Russia to lease the Naval bases for the next few decades.

I guessed they pushed Putin too far and he said fuck it and took the whole Peninsular, if he didn't it would have been check mate and the Russian black sea fleet would be severely compromised and there would be 10 NATO aircraft carriers moored there in a blink of an eye.

Dick waving by weak leaders is going into Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Constantly threatening Iran, bombing tiny little Balkan countries even Geography majors would struggle to find on a map and the destabilising of the Venezuelan economy and the attempted coup in the country and Haiti.

[Lang Spoon]

But Putin did go into Syria, in a big fucking way, and is gleefully ramping up ethnic hatred/attempting coups/bankrolling evil bastards in "tiny little Balkan countries".

[ooh aah]

It's possible they're both dick waving

[Muukalainen]

Finland, a country that has had a recent history of animus with Russia and the Soviet Union did not feel the need to join NATO to protect itself.

I'm not certain what the word "recent" is doing in there, TG. Whether we should apply for NATO membership was debated around the time we joined the EU, and although the majority of the public are opposed, polling suggests that it's not by much. Brexit type of majority according to figures that I can find. It's far from clear to me what the benefit of our joining NATO would be. Military presence of a foreign power on Finnish soil would be viewed in Moscow as provocative, and for what kind of marginal increase in defensive capability would this bring?

[E10 Rifle]

I think it's very obvious why former Warsaw Pact countries fear Russia. They have an actual memory of why they should.

Yeah. I mean kind of similar to understanding why much of Latin America fears US interference.

[E10 Rifle]

Not doing whatabouttery btw, just giving a broader outline to why "big countries should be able to treat small countries near them as in some ways their property" encounters wide opposition.

[Gangster Octopus]

Yeah, but Ireland should do what we tell them to do. Surely that's different...

[elguapo4]

We had our own problems with ports, with Winston wanting to use our western ports as allied bases in WW2, and setting up plans to invade at one stage. Only his need to keep the Yanks onside, and the fact that the Irish already serving in the British army would have mutinied, stopped him.

The Black sea ports are Sovereign Ukrainian territory, and what the Russian fleet do isn't their problem.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ussia-analysis

Talking about stalin's purges makes you a foreign agent it would seem, even if you started during the soviet union. This is not worrying, not worrying at all.

I guess Russia's economy would be a fair bit larger if a large percentage of the nations asset stripped wealth wasn't tied up in the UK banking system and property market?

Surely that's on them. Certainly their govt seems to be extremely comfortable with it.

Not really, Russia behaviour in the Ukrain is not dick waving or posturing, it makes logical political and military sense.
Yeltzin left Russia in a mess and militarily exposed. Ukraine has been cosying up to NATO and has been making claim to larger and larger shares of the Ex-Soviet Baltic fleet.
They have also been making more threats to unilaterally tear up the agreement for Russia to lease the Naval bases for the next few decades.

Of course it's dick waving and posturing. Literally everything putin does is such. He sells himself as the great man who brought order to the chaos of the post soviet era, You've got to work really hard to maintain the pretence that Russia is still a major power, capable of projecting its power and influence over its neighbours. And the only appropriate response to that is, "what the fuck are you talking about." Also it's worth remembering that most of the ex-soviet baltic fleet is tied up and rotting, and regularly bits of it go on fire and sink. Even if they had the money to repair it, they couldn't because their floating dry dock caught fire and sank. If you have a base in another country, the appropriate course of action is to maintain good relations with that govt, not invade.

What we did see in the Ukraine war is that Russia has all sorts of fancy military kit, which did terrible things to the ukrainians in the opening phase of the war, and then after about 4 weeks, they ran out of fancy ammunition, and it turned into a much more even battle that turned into a stalemate. they've clearly spent the last seven years building up another stockpile and are ready to give it another go. It's kind of tragic in a way, and actually tragic in another way. The big justification for the russians was that Khruschev gave the crimea to the Ukraine at some point, and then the soviet Union broke up. But this just means thatRussia has no claim on this region. Sure there are ethnic russians in the Ukfraine, for a wide variety of reasons, but that's just one of those things, and you don't get to have a "Greater insert-name-of-country" any more. That didn't work out well for anyone.

[Levin]

The UK is currently shipping anti armour weaponry to Ukraine (on planes that are noticeably avoiding German airspace).

I saw reports that Russian troops have been moved to the Belarus-Ukraine border in the last day or so.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Turkey supplying drones to Ukraine as well.

[ursus arctos]

Given the Erdogan-Putin relationship, I would think twice about using those were I Ukrainian.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Turkey is selling drones all around the world. Much cheaper than other countries produce and with their success in the recent Azerbaijan Armenia conflict proven to work. Ethiopia is an enthusiastic buyer now.

[Snake Plissken]

ArsTechnica reporting that Ukraine government sites getting hit by malware attacks.

[Logan Mountstuart]

I presume this is the thread, but I find it really strange the Ukraine situation isn't being discussed more on here. I know I'm a soft, protected, western wimp, but war in the former Yugoslavia really freaked me out, particularly as I'd been where the major initial conflicts took place just a year before.

The thought of war in the Ukraine absolutely terrifies me. And if it spread to the Baltic states? One massive blessing is that at least Trump and his Republican White House are out of the picture. But is this really so insignificant? Am I just a paranoid, old bastard who remembers the fear in the 80s?

[Amor de Cosmos]

This is an interesting backgrounder on Putin, which will do nothing to stifle anyone's concerns I'm afraid

[ad hoc]

paywalled

[Amor de Cosmos]

Darn:

Amy Knight is the author of six books on Russian history and politics, including, most recently, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. She is currently working on a book about Vladimir Putin and Boris Berezovsky.

As the Biden administration and its Western allies decide how to respond next to Russia’s threatening military presence on the borders of Ukraine, it’s worth probing Vladimir Putin’s psyche. Is he a rational leader who grasps the realities of his country’s current standoff with the West? Does he fully understand what is happening within Russia and the world outside? Or is he operating under serious delusions?

This is not the first time the question of his rationality has come up. After a frustrating telephone call with Mr. Putin over Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told U.S. president Barack Obama that the Russian leader seemed out of touch with reality and was living “in another world.”

Jake Sullivan, now U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, recalled in a 2017 interview that, when he was an adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton tried “to dispel Putin’s paranoia” about NATO. But Mr. Putin misinterpreted just about everything they tried to convey to him. “The very effort of reassuring Putin that the United States was not up to something nefarious vis-à-vis Russia merely reinforced his view, because he saw it as a form of subterfuge to cover actions he viewed as antithetical to Russian interests.”

Mr. Putin’s paranoid distrust of the U.S. and NATO was on full display at his annual news conference in December, when he accused the West of trying to break the Russian Federation apart. It all began, he said, when the Soviet Union was dismantled: “In 1991, we divided into 12 states – and we did this ourselves. Still, it seems that this was not enough for our [Western] partners. They believe Russia is still too big today.”


A Russian tank takes part in military drills at Molkino training ground in the southern Krasnodar region on Dec. 14.The Associated Press



The Kremlin’s unreasonable and unobtainable demands for guarantees that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO and that NATO troops and weapons will be removed from Eastern European member countries reflect Mr. Putin’s misguided conviction that states once belonging to the Soviet empire should still be under Russia’s sphere of influence.

Putin critic Gennady Gudkov, who served in the Russian parliament for 11 years, observed recently that Mr. Putin is “captivated by his own illusions. … He perceives the world, Russia, relations with countries in a completely different way from what they actually are. And it’s scary. It’s not funny when the leader of a great nuclear power is completely out of touch with reality.”

The problem is compounded, Mr. Gudkov said, by the fact that Mr. Putin is surrounded by yes men. He is told only what he wants to hear because, when his advisers have told him the truth, he has exploded in anger. And his main foreign policy consultants are allies from his KGB days, such as Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev, who is so bellicose toward the West that he has openly advocated for Russia’s military doctrine to include a pre-emptive nuclear strike option.

Mr. Putin and his Kremlin team are not motivated by the ideological convictions that propelled the KGB when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power. When Mr. Putin served in Dresden as a low-level KGB officer in the late 1980s, all he and his comrades cared about was getting their hands on Western goods. (One of Mr. Putin’s prize acquisitions was a Blaupunkt stereo for his car, pilfered for him by a German contact.)

An insatiable thirst for material gain has been the driving force behind Mr. Putin’s kleptocratic regime, which views democracies in bordering states as Western-inspired threats to its power and vast wealth.







A customer at a Moscow souvenir shop holds a Russian doll of Vladimir Putin this past December.Pavel Golovkin/The Associated Press



Mr. Putin’s “geopolitical anxieties” also stem from his personal background.

Small in stature – about five-foot-six without his shoe lifts – he grew up in a rough Leningrad neighbourhood, where he had to defend himself against larger, tougher courtyard thugs. According to his biographers, he reacted by becoming a bully himself, lashing out against anyone who tried to humiliate him. Later, in an apparent effort to cultivate a macho image, he took up martial arts.

Ms. Merkel had an experience with him in 2007 that gave her a valuable insight. The Chancellor, whose fear of dogs is well known, was visiting Mr. Putin at his presidential residence in Sochi when he called for his large black Labrador retriever to be sent into the room and watched, grinning, as the dog went over to sniff the very frightened Ms. Merkel. Afterward, she explained the motive for the deliberately hostile act: “I understand why he has to do this – to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness.”


Mr. Putin strokes a Kyrgyz greyhound in Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek, in 2019.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters



Mr. Putin’s sense of danger doesn’t stop with NATO or with democracies, such as Ukraine, that border Russia. He is so terrified of COVID-19 that journalists who attended his December news conference had to pass through specially constructed disinfection booths, where they were sprayed with silver particles, then forced to don protective masks that had been treated with an “antibacterial solution of nanosilver.” In October, 2021, Russian Olympic medalists had to spend a week in quarantine before meeting the President at a reception.

Russian democracy activist Alexey Navalny, confined to the gulag a year ago, apparently still causes Mr. Putin such anxiety that he will not even utter his name in public. Instead of facing up to the fact that Mr. Navalny had a genuine following, Mr. Putin chose to believe the crackpot theory that he was a secret CIA agent. But sanctioning a plot to have Mr. Navalny poisoned in August, 2020, by a bunch of bungling Federal Security Service (FSB) officers was an extreme reaction, given the consequences.

The stiff sanctions imposed by Western governments on Russian officials made the venture a costly one. Even Mr. Putin’s decision to imprison Mr. Navalny could backfire, as it has elevated him to the status of a hero who could at some point re-emerge on the national scene.





Protesters march in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny in downtown Moscow in January of last year. The placard with an image of the Kremlin critic reads, 'Freedom to Navalny!'KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images



Mr. Putin has in the past been successful in directing Russians’ discontent with their dismal economic plight toward the West, prompting fear and hostility. Thanks to incessant propaganda on state-sponsored television, many Russians have accepted the idea that Russia’s woes can be blamed on foreign powers bent on undermining or even destroying their country and approve of Mr. Putin’s macho nationalism.

This strategy worked when Mr. Putin, the little-known FSB chief, was appointed prime minister – and designated heir to the presidency – by the highly unpopular Boris Yeltsin in August, 1999. After declaring without evidence that Chechen terrorists backed by Osama bin Laden were behind apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people, Mr. Putin launched a cruel and senseless war in Chechnya that saw his popularity skyrocket.

In 2014, when his approval ratings were especially low because the economy was doing poorly, Russia’s seizure of Crimea led Russians to rally around their leader, pushing his ratings up 20 per cent.

But it hardly makes sense for the Kremlin to be following this playbook again by threatening a conflict with the West over Ukraine.

The presence of almost 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s border has already served to draw NATO countries closer together and motivated them to send much-needed military equipment to Ukraine. If Russian troops were to actually invade Ukraine, it would not be a bloodless operation, as it was in Crimea, even though the Russian military would prevail. The Kremlin would be hard put to justify the loss of Russian lives to its public.

Then, of course, there would be even more crushing economic sanctions from the West, which would further harm the Russian economy. Worried about rising prices, stagnant wages and high unemployment, Russians are getting tired of confrontations with the outside world. A poll in October by Russia’s Levada Center found that two-thirds of Russians want Russia to be first of all “a country with a high standard of living, even if not one of the most powerful countries in the world.”







Vladimir Putin attends a virtual conference with government ministers in Moscow.Sputnik/Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin via REUTERS

[Amor de Cosmos]

Continued...

None of this seems to matter to the Russian President. Holed up in the Kremlin and isolated from his people, he feels besieged. In his mind, he will always be the undersized kid in a Leningrad playground, surrounded by tough punks, or the hapless KGB operative in Dresden, shuffling papers and scouring for Western goods while KGB officers of higher ranks hunted foreign spies. As Ms. Merkel observed, Mr. Putin will always have to prove himself. And, unfortunately for the West, that means he will continue to be a bully, shielding his personal insecurities behind unrealistic demands and threats.

Even worse, as Russian political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky pointed out this week, there are no constraints on Mr. Putin, as there were in 1962 when Nikita Khrushchev had to consult with other Politburo members during the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Putin’s most trusted advisers see things the same way he does: “They pathologically hate the West with the hatred of the nouveau riche who feel like parvenu despite all their castles, palaces, harems, yachts, gas networks and nuclear warheads.” And they yearn for a chance to take revenge for the demise of the Soviet Union.

But Mr. Putin and his clan also have a strong instinct for self-preservation. If NATO governments stand firm on threatened sanctions and continue to provide Kyiv with crucial weaponry, it is always possible that the Kremlin will back down and confirm what it has been saying all along – that Russia is only conducting military exercises. After all, the narcissistic Mr. Putin has already achieved one of his main goals: placing himself back in the centre of the world stage.

[ad hoc]

Thanks Amor

[Logan Mountstuart]

Um, thanks Amor. Not particularly reassured by that. Oh fuck.

[San Bernardhinault]

I read somewhere that if it happens, it has to happen soon because otherwise the Russian tanks wouldn’t be able to get through the thawing mud (some ironic joke about how nobody else can have a military campaign in that part of the world in winter; the Russians themselves can only do it in winter). Also, the Ukrainian military isn’t small and backwards. It’s not Georgia. If something substantial happens there will be substantial Russian casualties. And Russia’s economy is already fucked so I think they really can’t take any sanctions.

So I think there is nationalist cock-waving from Putin. And he needs to do something but can’t handle and doesn’t want an actual war (well, this actual war). Which is why I thought Biden’s much criticized wording might have been telling. The west might allow minor incursions. “Training” operations that “accidentally” cross the border. Small skirmishes and shooting matches. The kind of thing that happens on occasion on the India-Pakistan border. It might be enough for Putin’s political needs without being enough to totally fuck Russia up.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Maybe. Thing is no one seems to really know what his game is. So the NATO response is difficult to plan. A tough start might be might be to go after the money:

If Americans were truly willing to go after the Russian elites who work below Putin, the United States might have leverage, but this would mean outing the locations of oligarchical wealth, freezing assets in places such as London (which is practically a Russian bank vault these days), and perhaps even uprooting children from elite Western schools and sending them home. — Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

That's a path it'd be hard to turn back from though. Which is probably why Biden is being very careful about what he says at the moment.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Short arsed narky cunt with a chip on his shoulder. Cosmic.