Brain drain is Russia's largest existential problem. I've worked with a number of intelligent folks who attended the state funded technical universities in Russia - most of them are sharp, however anecdotally most of the most pervasive cheaters were also Russian international students while I was in college.
The issue is that now due to currency devaluing and most modern companies / orgs refusing to cooperate with Russian companies, not factoring in banking / capital flows, there are very few reasons for people with skills to remain in Russia or grow their skills in Russia. Without smart young people helping to push Russia forward, not just tech wise but in most technically hard industries, the outlook for Russians are not good. Why work somewhere where your compensation for time could be worth nothing or denied by the rest of the western world?
That said, I think the west fails to understand how similar young Russians still are to their parents from the Soviet era. For instance, unlike the US most Russians even in the current generation attend a state university, party and drink like crazy until they attend college and shortly after college get married and immediately have children. This is also consistent across a huge swath of fields. For instance, I have friends who are artists / florists who have two kids at 24. This kind of culture is not necessarily aligned with fleeing the country to the west. One of the most fascinating traits of my young Russian friends (most of whom are artists) is their denial or confusion of being "proudly russian", even prior to Ukraine many seemed embarrassed to be proud of their country.
I genuinely struggle to understand what people mean by being "proud" of one's country. Could you elaborate?
Maybe I'm focusing on a different aspect than most people. I understand the emotion of pride. But people seem to often be encouraging pride in some group or development.
I can see why such encouragement makes sense when the audience meaningfully contributed to that praiseworthy state of affairs. But I don't see the justification for that for e.g. happening to have been born in a particular country.
I have a dual citizen Polish-American, I was born in Poland and I think I can answer this. I wasn't proud of being born in Poland until I went back in my 20's and went to the concentration camps and learned a bit more about the history. Poles are extremely resilient people and have a vast history. Seeing other poles do well in tech space, sports and now helping people from Ukraine just makes me feel good and happy.
> Often people from poor countries feel greater pride in their countries than people from advanced economies.
I wonder if that's more specifically "[elite(ish)] people from advanced economies." There's this sort of transnational/globalist outlook thing going in some circles that looks down its nose at patriotism, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's mainly a Western cultural thing.
I think there is something to that. Educated elites feel as if they have transcended the nation state and may feel this is the superior take and ironically this can veer on a kind of bigotry.
I have seen this before especially in immigrant communities to the US. It has baffled me. Has there been any introspection as to why natural born people are not as blindly patriotic to their country?
My theory is that they understand that a country like the US only earned all of its amazing rights and freedom due to generations of people pushing against the status quo and that invokes the same non-pride as people are feeling today.
Immigrants have not gone through the same upbringing as natural born citizens. As a result, they have a more rosy view of reality.
It takes some group of people not to accept what is reality today to forge a better future.
For example: BLM is heavily villainized by some groups in the US. Time will tell what the long term consequences of BLM will be(if any). But maybe we will look back decades from now when there is a turning point in the country and there ends up being equal justice and treatment for Black and Brown communities and maybe we will remember BLM as a contributor of change(but not the anti-US sentiment that went along with it).
> most of them are sharp, however anecdotally most of the most pervasive cheaters were also Russian international students while I was in college.
We should remember that this is the result of the incentive systems they have had and the examples of material success (i.e. oligarchs) in the overtly kleptocratic system they inhabit, and not some kind of inherent cultural tendency of Russians. This is especially the case at this moment, when there is a tendency in the West to conflate Russians with the government of Russia.
> For instance, unlike the US most Russians even in the current generation attend a state university, party and drink like crazy until they attend college and shortly after college get married and immediately have children. ... This kind of culture is not necessarily aligned with fleeing the country to the west.
What do you mean by "not necessarily aligned"? The US has plenty of people who marry young and have kids. They disproportionately tend to be less formally educated, though.
Are you saying that young university-educated and married+kids Russians migrants don't fit in with their similarly educated contemporaries in developed countries? That also seems unlikely because that profile fits most educated migrants (i.e from India and China) to western countries.
It makes sense but unfortunately it will be difficult for any NATO company to hire a Russian born citizen for fear of hiring a spy. Same issue exists for anyone born in a dictatorship.
All tech companies I’ve worked at happily hire anyone regardless of their national origin, as long as there aren’t specific sanctions banning them from being hired.
I worked at $FAANG and a coworker was hired, then fired on their first day: they had chosen to omit that they had worked for a Chinese tech company from their resume, but the background check came back and said he did.
That's not sanctions, that's because my $FAANG had hard evidence that Chinese tech company employees were switching to my company, stealing data, then leaving.
I've also heard people from my current parent company's headquarters (in Switzerland) will only hire Swiss citizens for important servers (SAP, etc). Not italians, germans, or french (and if you look at where they are headquartered, the city is literally on the border of germany and france, with many people commuting in daily).
Which doesn't reveal much. Underfunded military undermined by graft performing incompetently after period of peace is textbook Russia military adventurism. This has been happening for 100s of years. Important thing is RU military tends to get it's shit together under pressure and typically win, even if at stupendous costs. Most of RU equipment loss so far has been due to breakdowns, which is not surprising because shocking amount RU kit fall apart even during their military exercises. They have so many USSR era chassis in storage that doctrine is just to abandon. USSR / RU hardware in general are not engineered for longevity due to tech gap / low costs with assumption that they won't have long lifespan on the battlefield.
As urgent as the Ukraine invasion is, we should find attention for Taiwan.
Mainland China's claims on Taiwan are if anything more belligerent than Russia's claims on Ukraine have been. China has been building up the ability to cross the Taiwan Strait for decades. And its indifference for human rights and international law is clear.
The world must give thought, now, to how it deters China from invading Taiwan.
The reality is problematic for Taiwan, they are so dependant on the Chinese economy that any major pivot that results in an economic war could halve or quarter their economic output in very little time.
They do not have enough leverage to take the stance you are putting forth.
At this point I think he thought getting into Ukraine would be a walk in the park, and the sanctions would be minimal. And now... he's just too proud to back down so he just keeps pushing further.
I think he'd prefer to own it, but I think he'd prefer to destroy the country rather than see it become part of NATO.
Mariupol and Melitopol in particular are exceptionally strategic locations. This video does a good job of explaining why the land bridge to Crimea is so important to Russia:
The worse this war gets the stronger Ukraine has to be afterwards and the more and faster help it will get from the west. So the fear of Ukraine maybe looking more successful than Russia in 10 years or maybe joining NATO in 10 years now has become Ukraine having a better economic outlook than Russia after two weeks, and both EU and NATO memberships (or at least some form of defense guarantees equivalent to NATO) look quite likely even in the short term.
The pain isn’t just economic. Everything he touches seems to have the completely opposite effect to what he says he wants, such as Ukraine/Finland/Sweden outside NATO. There is no logic.
>The worse this war gets the stronger Ukraine has to be afterwards and the more and faster help it will get from the west
I really dont think thats true. When Europe is spending billions to host millions of refugees already while inflation keeps climbing the appetite to spend yet more money to rebuild Ukraine is really going to pall. This will be a gift to Europe's far right and EU exit campaigns will spring up in response to the EU's attempts to distribute the pain and costs of this.
Moreover, I think the west has an overly optimistic view of how well it is going to handle 10-20 million Ukrainian refugees long term given how much political strife was caused by 1 million Syrians.
I really think it could break up the EU. I think this may even have been Putin's intention.
NATO is also unlikely to fast track Ukraine's membership in a destroyed state. It'll probably wait.
I'm optimistic about Europe. I think the division we have seen in the last decade with Brexit and Fidesz and Le Pen and Farage will shrink back, when people see Russia as a dangerous example of what it leads to, and hopefully see how fragile democracy is and how hard (and important) it can be to protect it, in Ukraine. The EU and Europe as a whole has really come together. I also think that the refugee situation will be a non-issue. I wouldn't have thought so even a month ago, but now I'm optimistic about that too.
The "help from the west" I hope will come from e.g. that assets now frozen in London, Switzerland and elsewhere can be transfered to Ukraine as war reparations from Russia.
I'm more pessimistic about the future when it comes to China/Taiwan, Russia (How do we even handle having a pariah state on par with Iran but the size of Russia on our doorstep?).
I don't think it's just pride. I think that he thinks he can't afford to take the loss - it will weaken his position too much. (His position within Russia, not his position externally. Putin is terrified of a color revolution in Russia.)
ITT: people with no experience of combat who think wars are solved in two weeks. The Iraqi desert spoiled us, but surely we still remember Afghanistan...?
If anybody in the Russian army is worth half a ruble, they planned this to take months at least. They came straight out of engagements in Syria and Chechnya, which took years to turn. Whether they told their troops (who, in Russia, are synonim with "cannon fodder" since forever) is another matter, of course.
Last I checked, Ukraine is not Afghanistan, for a few reasons:
1. It's not a constantly feuding cornucopia of tribes, regional warlords, and militias that have spent 20 years fighting eachother in a never-ending civil war.
2. Prior to the star of the war, it had fully functional, developed-world logistics networks.
3. Russia borders it, it's not trying to project power across an ocean.
4. Russia is far culturally closer to Ukraine that the United States ever will be to Afghanistan.
5. People accustomed to developed world lifestyles get war-weary much, much faster.
In light of those four factors, Putin was banking on an easy victory, with Ukraine choosing a bad peace over a protracted, bloody war.
Ukraine is not really considered a developed country. By GDP per capita it is even poorer than Moldova (which I had always thought was “the poorest country in Europe”).
> In light of captured documents outlining how they expected this to be over in three weeks, no one in the Russian military is worth a ruble
To be fair, the US policy leadership made similar misunderestimates of the difficulties it would face in Iraq, it just didn't have global sanctions crushing it's economy at the same time.
(On the other hand, a key figure in that determination and policy planning regarding Iraq was reportedly described by the General that commanded the invasion and early occupation as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet”, so, there's that.)
Militarily, the US performed very well in the initial invasion of Iraq. It was more a political failure after the defeat of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard that led to the insurgency.
The pictures that are coming out of this are shocking, if Russians were allowed to view them they’d turn on Putin instantly. If the pictures of Ukrainian suffering didn’t do that then the ones of fallen russians would. Beyond senseless and horrific all because Putin bought his own lies.
Many Russians have seen them and still support the invasion. There are TV interviews showing this regularly now. It’s not a lot different from Republicans in the US ignoring other realities.
I think, in fairness, most people only watch easily accessible TV, which tells them a very different story. Also TV interviews, in state-controlled media, are kind of meaningless.
I can well imagine it's true, just not that you can tell by looking at TV interviews.
These are US TV interviews of Russian citizens, but fair point that we don't really know. This was before the restrictions on what you're allowed to say, though.
For as long as there's been a Russian Empire Crimea has been either an aspiration or a strategic territory. It's the key to controlling the Black Sea and projecting power in SE Europe and the Caucauses. To some extent, it's the crown jewel of the Russian Empire. If you're an emperor (which Putin essentially is) it's very hard to explain away losing your crown jewel. It shatters the myth of a resurgent/strong Russia and would be an existential threat to Putin's regime.
That's the why. Why now is a little bit trickier. But I think it's because of a fundamental weakness. Russia's military is essentially still the Soviet military. It's a decaying force using last generation military technology that is rapidly being left behind. MANPADs (infantry mobile air defense) & Javelins (anti-tank missiles) have all but rendered their planes, helicopters, and tanks obsolete. And, as a country, they are too corrupt and poor to modernize their military.
They're going to win this war but it's obvious that they're mustering about the best invasion force they can and even then it's been a slow moving brutal war. Five more years of Russian decay and Ukrainian modernization would bring the outcome into doubt. Ten years and maybe it's impossible.
Russia isn't going to win this war, short of using weapons of mass destruction. They don't have the manpower. They walk troops into Kyiv and they will be slaughtered by the Ukrainian military. The only way Russia wins this war is to obliterate Ukraine, and raise the deaths by multiple orders of magnitude from what we've seen so far. Hundreds of thousands per day or more.
And I rather expect Putin will try to do exactly that, and we see carnage the world hasn't seen since the last world war to try and goad NATO into reacting. What we need is for the U.N. general assembly to catch up with what's going on. It's not enough to just condemn the invasion. The purpose of the U.N. is to prevent world wars and right now they're not doing enough.
Extending long term military, political, even economic security in face of declining/terminal demographics. It's an existential gamble for a bigger RU light cone. The alternative framing is there was much more to lose. RU is better off losing 20 years of progress than 200 years of future security. A few generations doomed to middle income is one of the milder calamity in terms of costly historical RU mistakes.
I think people overlook how rational the geopolitical calculus is, it's only shocking because eating so much short/medium term loss is counter to the interest of a "compromised" leader, i.e. one who has to answer to the public. My feeling is Putin has simply secured so much power that he can do what most leaders can not, pursue long term geopolitically maximizing gamble and survive it. I doubt he'll be deposed - no one wants to inherit this shitshow.
Also history rarely looks down on leaders who regain lost land, especially one of such cultural importance as UKR is to RU. If Putin can hold on to UKR, he'll have statues built of him for centuries and impartial historians 100 years from now will likely evaluate his conquest favorably.
In the meantime, the real question is ask what the west will lose not accommodating RU interests and maintaining sanctions comparable to a blockade. RU hasn't even began retaliating yet, they can (IMO will) extract disportionate cost from 40Trillion western block economy versus what the west block can punish a 1.5T RU economy.
Russia is facing existential risks now that it wasn't as late as one month ago. If the Soviets couldn't "hold" to AFG, there's no way he can hold UKR. The "long term geo-politically maximizing" strategy here is quite clear, just look at what China has managed to achieve in the past 30 or 40 years. Russia may have made big mistakes before, but that does not exactly help if they keep making big mistakes.
Existential risk now pale in comparison to long term existential risk of irrevocably west/NATO aligned UKR, hence emphasis on eating "short/medium term loss". Soviets didn't want to hold AFG, it was peripheral counter insurgency work, on tier of Vietnam war was to PRC. UKR is reforging historic empire, it's core interest like TW is to PRC. As for holding UKR, it remains to be seen. There's very real possibly they'll Grozny the entire country and displace 20M+ which will destabilize Europe and make holding UKR feasible.
>if they keep making big mistakes.
Taking UKR isn't a big mistake, hasty special operations gamble was, but complete occupation isn't, especially now when RU is still capable. UKR with another 5 years US training and support would make such conquest out of reach, especially coupled with continued RU demographic/military decline. TBH for RU best time was 2014 considering how poor sanction proofing their economy went.
>look at what China has managed to achieve
RU isn't PRC in terms of demographics, and even PRC will eventually have to take TW / push back US aligned containment security architecture in East Asia. Common argument for PRC doing so in next 10-20 years is that's when PRC power will be maximal. RU has no peak to look forward to, is already on decline. It can't afford to wait.
West/NATO aligned Eastern Europe and UKR was Russia's own doing, they should've been working on fixing that for the past 20 years. They didn't do it, arguably they didn't even try which is surprising. Even China has not made that mistake. And Russia would've found it a lot easier to appeal to Ukraine than China to Taiwan or to their neighbors more generally. Now you're saying that they might be planning to displace 20M+ people, somehow I doubt that would improve things.
>should've been working on fixing that for the past 20 years
Post USSR broken RU didn't have as many carrots as West/NATO. Their leverage was coalescing their big sticks after period of disorder. West/NATO equally culpable indulging UKR and failing to manage her as buffer led to RU resorting to sticks, because they couldn't compete on carrots.
>Even China has not made that mistake
Look at 1st, 2nd, 3rd TW strait crisis, PRC wasn't even capable of succeeding but they still tried. 92 consensus provided ~30 years of detente but that's gone, and PRC is building up to try again. Improving geo strategic conditions for long term security is rarely a mistake, especially considering RU headwinds. The mistake for RU is waiting this long in the first place.
>appeal to Ukraine than China to Taiwan
See how HK opinion on PRC shifted in a generation, and how TW's as well. That's what happens when new gen grows up in antagonistic political systems (again influenced/funded by west) - value fracture, identities diverge. Past certain point, appealing with carrots stop working. Again 1.5T RU economy can't out compete on 40T western block. Was even more lopsided 20 years ago. It's not they didn't try, they just didn't stand a chance.
>might be planning to displace 20M+ people, somehow I doubt that would improve things.
Destabilized europe with 20M refugees while RU has defendable UKR geography and resources is a massive long term "improvement". More than half of world's population are neutral/still need RU exports. I don't think warcriming to victory is the plan considering how kid gloves RU ROE has been so far, but it's likely the inevitable outcome if RU demands aren't met. RU peer-level military strategy is artillery slowly glassing everything. They don't have capability to prosecute a high tech war with relatively less disruption.
There's a difference between what Putin hoped to gain, and what he will actually gain. I suspect that Putin thought this would be a cakewalk and he hoped to gain territory in Ukraine. Instead, this is increasingly looking like a huge blunder for the Russian state.
The name of the game now is probably self-preservation and saving-face for the Putin government. What "self-preservation" means to Putin is hard to guess but an embarrassing retreat from Ukraine doesn't seem like it's on the table yet.
Survival of his regime, as best I can tell. When a reasonably functional democracy (Ukraine) abuts an autocracy (Russia), the democracy starts to make the autocracy look bad in the eyes of those living in it, threatening the autocrat's power. Putin seems to have over-estimated the risk (paranoia perhaps), but this seems to be a typical dynamic which is also playing out between China and Taiwan.
NATO equipment is proliferating on his doorstep because he keeps invading his neighbors. What do you think is going to happen now that he's not just nibbled at the corner, but done a full-scale bloody invasion? Everyone who possibly can will join NATO and be armed to he hilt.
Seriously, this is completely psycho ex-boyfriend territory. "You provoked me by getting new friends and trying to get a restraining order against me. So really this is your fault."
i'm not a leader of any sort of country, but i fail to see how shelling and invading ukraine fixes that.
even if it were a quick and easy three day excursion to kyiv, congratulations! your newly annexed ukraine is now... right on the edge of nato poland. and other countries that were on the fence might be more likely to join, lest they be next in russia's sights.
granted, a lot of this analysis is from the standpoint that nato had no plans to be militarily aggressive with russia. if you assume nato was gearing up to use ukraine as a means to get invasion forces into russia, then that shifts things. but there's no evidence that was ever on the table.
> your newly annexed ukraine is now... right on the edge of nato poland.
Why assume he planned to annex Ukraine? It seems more likely (at least to me) that he was planning on deposing the regime and installing a puppet president like the one in Belarus, or even leaving the regime in place but getting them to agree to permanent neutrality.
>He wants Ukraine because they're the breadbasket of the Eastern Bloc. He wants to expand Russia's territory. Just look at Crimea.
I would argue he wants Ukraine so he can protect and control the energy (gas/oil) supply and maintain his personal position, power, and control and his (Russia's) position over Europe (because they are dependent on "him" and Russian energy (gas/oil).
The original question was about motivations, if you read my comment you'll see I never said the response was justified.
>He also said he was going there to de-Nazify Ukraine
Sounds like US bringing "democracy" to Syria by arming rebels who behead children. [1]
>He wants Ukraine because they're the breadbasket of the Eastern Bloc
The hit from sanctions is larger than the potential gain in food security so I find this argument very hard to believe, and I haven't seen anyone reputable make this claim either.
>He wants to expand Russia's territory
This seems like a claim that is not supported by Russia's actions nor words. What evidence is there of this? It's like claiming the US invaded Afghanistan to expand territory.
>Just look at Crimea.
Crimean people wanted to join Russia according to independent non-Russian pollsters like Pew, so I find it hard to care. The people overwhelmingly supported it, unless you think democracy doesn't matter.
>Any "fear" or "self-defense" Putin convinces you he is acting on is nothing but falling for his anti-west propaganda.
This would be easier to believe if Kamala Harris wasn't sabre rattling in Munich last month.
> Sounds like US bringing "democracy" to Syria by arming rebels who behead children.
While the US's foreign policy is abhorrent, they're really not comparable. Putin created a strawman and has been telling Russians that they're there as a means to defend Russia from Ukrainian Nazis.
It's more similar to the US invading Iraq because of WMDs.
> The hit from sanctions is larger than the potential gain in food security so I find this argument very hard to believe, and I haven't seen anyone reputable make this claim either.
Clearly Putin miscalculated. He thought Ukraine would roll over.
Ukraine's role as the breadbasket isn't a secret. Adding that amount of fertile land to Russia's territory is a fairly obvious reason for wanting to acquire it [1]. From a strategic point of view, it's been discussed since before the invasion as a reason why he'd want to take over Ukraine (and why Crimea was a stepping stone to doing so).
> This seems like a claim that is not supported by Russia's actions nor words. What evidence is there of this? It's like claiming the US invaded Afghanistan to expand territory.
How is Russia invading Ukraine in attempt to take it over not supported by this?
> This would be easier to believe if Kamala Harris wasn't sabre rattling in Munich last month.
It's pretty obvious that Putin would use this as a means to justify escalation. He'd been moving armaments and soldiers to the border for much longer than a month. This has been a plan in action for quite a while. It's wild to claim that VP Harris's presence a couple of weeks before Russia's invasion had any actual involvement with Putin's justifications for invasion.
>How is Russia invading Ukraine in attempt to take it over
This is opinion. Russia doesn't claim this, nor do their actions suggest this is their goal. Invasion is hardly ever about territory expansion. Afghanisatan, Iraq, Libya. Take your pick.
If China invaded Taiwan it'd be easy to say it was an attempt to take it over, because China has literally stated this is their goal. Russia has never said anything remotely like that.
>It's wild to claim that VP Harris's presence a couple of weeks before Russia's invasion had any actual involvement with Putin's justifications for invasion.
She was in Europe advocating Ukraine join NATO after Russia stated it is unacceptable. How is this not provocation? Kamala Harris is a liability and has a long line of incompetent decision making in her career, whether it's throwing innocent black men in jail as a prosecutor or being highly involved in the Afghanistan catastrophe. This is simply her latest failure in leadership.
> This is opinion. Russia doesn't claim this, nor do their actions suggest this is their goal. Invasion is hardly ever about territory expansion. Afghanisatan, Iraq, Libya. Take your pick.
They want to overthrow Zelenskyy and the other govt officials and install his own puppet government. He invaded and took over Crimea. There's no other way to read this situation than conquest.
> She was in Europe advocating Ukraine join NATO after Russia stated it is unacceptable. How is this not provocation? Kamala Harris is a liability and has a long line of incompetent decision making in her career, whether it's throwing innocent black men in jail as a prosecutor or being highly involved in the Afghanistan catastrophe. This is simply her latest failure in leadership.
It's obvious you have a political bias here and are casting undo blame on the administration. Blaming VP Harris for Russia invading Ukraine is straight out of Fox News talking points, which have become an extension of RT and other parroted Russian propaganda.
This invasion has been in the works for over a year. Putin has been moving forces to the border for months. It was going to happen regardless of any of the west's posturing. The only thing we could've done is been more proactive about sanctions in attempt to dissuade, but that would've been seen as escalation as well. It's clear that Putin is willing to draw the iron curtain again, and he put himself in a position where he has no good out.
Just to add to your last point invading a country in not planned in 4 weeks time. There have been reports they were planning it for over a year. Plus, Ukraine knew Putin would invade at some point and that it was a matter of time.
Look, we get it. Your hatred for the woman is absolute. But, hey, a hint: when you continually use loaded, abusive language in every post you make, you neuter yourself. You present as one who is incapable of reasoned arguments, who flies off the handle, who is immune to constructive dialog.
In short, you set yourself up to be downvoted, flagged, ignored, and perhaps even shadow-banned.
In short, your use of button-pushing language shows you to be woefully incompetent at effective argumentation.
Those are in contradiction. If someone is being irrationally controlling, then standing up to them and trying to protect their victims isn't "pushing buttons".
There is no contradiction there. The US being incompetent and pushing buttons can be the motivation for actions that are unjustified in scope. I think the disconnect here is that you believe me being able to describe Putin's motivations means I somehow agree with them.
Claims like Putin is invading to expand territory is conspiracy theory, and likely Ukrainian propaganda (like the debunked Ghost of Kyiv and Snake Island propaganda that covered HN).
During war, both sides spill propaganda and lies. Just because one country is clearly in the wrong doesn't mean you should dutifully swallow the other side's propaganda.
>Instead he’s bombing Ukraine into the ground including hospitals.
Was that the main objective? As a 30+ y-o, I'm familiar with collateral damages but they usually result from the US or their allies. Why would this bombing be considered differently, especially if Russia use less precise weapons (for lack of other options).
>I’m not quite sure if you are saying this is natos fault, but the level of escalation here from Putin is ridiculous.
What did NATO do with regard to every Russian requests regarding neutral states between NATO and Russia? Do you remember how the US reacted when the USSR put missiles in Cuba?
China's support while Russia negotiate Ukraine permanent neutrality with NATO/EU (with troops on the field).
What's the price of Ukraine as a non-Western state? I'm surprised we can spend hours valuing the cost of the sanctions but few can put a price on what Putin has been asking for.
The price is similar to giving your pocket money to the school bully. It's not just a one time price.
Perhaps if the message is "I'm not a bully, I'm a school monitor with a badge to prove it" maybe it's different.
The best question to pose oneself is, if NATO was such a bully instead, where is the moral, good, international aid, charity, role model and respect that Putin has performed in times of peace? Where is his school monitor badge that he should have got?
In a few weeks, there will be no more non-NATO countries on Russia's western border, and you will have nothing to be concerned about.
Anyone who thinks Russia can invade NATO is as mistaken as the Russians that currently believe NATO can, and wants to, invade Russia. There are, unfortunately, hundreds of millions of people who believe one or the other.
Let's see. I bet neither NATO nor the EU will consider accepting Ukraine or Georgia as new members, after Russia proved they're ready to invade these countries to defend their interests.
Do you believe the West would go to war with Russia, only to add a few members to a giant military alliance that was designed for a post-WWII world?
The US will retreat and focus on China and the EU will try to become more independent from NATO and Russia (and they'll negotiate with Putin if need be, unless he already jumped on China's side for good).
> Do you believe the West would go to war with Russia, only to add a few members to a giant military alliance that was designed for a post-WWII world?
No, I believe that alliance will defend its members, and given that Russia can't even successfully bully the poorest country in Europe, it is in no position to start a war over Finland or Sweden.
Of course Ukraine won't be a part of NATO.
The US can't withdraw from Europe, unless it wants to see the American hegemony collapse overnight. And if we know anything about empires, it's that they will keep hold on what they've spent decades building long past the point of positive ROI or reason.
The invasion was not at all defensive as defined in U.N. charter article 51. This war is a direct violation of article 2. Russia is a party to the charter, this war is expressly prohibited under it. Russia is also a party to the Budapest Memorandum in which they recognized Ukraine's sovereignty and 1994 borders, with the only condition being Ukraine become a non-nuclear nation under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty.
Had Ukraine been a member of NATO or the EU would Russia have invaded? Almost certainly not, and that's because of the credible use of overwhelming military power to repel such an attempt. Why is the U.N. system inadequate in this case? Article 39 and 41 give the Security Council the power to repel breaches to the peace using armed force. But Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council and thus effectively has a veto vote (lack of consent to use armed forces against itself is a certain outcome).
This exposes a real problem when the belligerent is a member of the Security Council. And as Russia cannot be trusted to honor their agreements, and the U.N. Security Council in matters involving Russian aggression can't be depended on, it is completely reasonable for the EU to bring in Ukraine and Georgia as members rather than have Russia initiate yet another war right on Europe's doorstep. This is the third time Putin has waged an aggressive war without provocation or any compelling case for defense.
And hopefully it still is a post-WW2 world. Putin is seemingly making a case of a pre-WW2 view of "might makes right" without any international system of peacefully resolving disputes. He's certainly not bound by any agreements. It's a recipe for a very expensive second Cold War.
Could somebody describe what upward mobility looks like in Russia? I have a really hard time understanding it when I hear terminology like “kleptocrats” or “oligarchs”. At best I can generalize that upward mobility sucks in Russia, but I’d really like to hear a few narratives of what this looks like from people who actually grew up in Russia.
Interestingly upward mobility in Russia (I moved out in 2008 but visited almost every year since, I guess not anymore) may be easier in a certain way, because education is free if you can pass exams, or otherwise cheap. Now on one hand, that means that most people don't value it, so most of my CS-major fellow students had no notion of CS, coding, or really much of anything IT-related by the end of their education... and many people I know have degrees in some random X that they got "because everyone does it" but they don't do X and never intend to (X can be marketing, or it can be biology, or whatever). On the other hand almost anyone who actually wants it can get decent education for ~free.
Then you get a job (in IT, often while still in college) and here's upward mobility :) There are obviously less jobs on every level of "upwards" compared to the USA, but there are still plenty. Many people also (used to?) freelance for Western customers. Until recently, if you don't engage in politics life was pretty good. One aspect of being upper middle class in Russia is that you are surrounded by cheap labor, so everything - healthcare, home improvement, nannies, etc. - is dirt cheap. E.g. you could have a reliable full-time live-in caretaker for an elderly person for like $500-600/month (before the recent ruble collapse) in Moscow; even cheaper in other cities I suspect.
Another peculiar aspect with Russia is that it's very centralized, so it really helps to move (imagine Silicon Valley -> Seattle/Austin/... -> the rest - type centralization, but with an even steeper salary gradient and for nearly ALL jobs, not just IT). Ideally you want to be in Moscow; some other major cities (Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk) are also not so bad but people still move to Moscow if they can.
Just as sanctions hit with historic speed and scope it is possible that damages could be reversed as quickly. This could become an opportunity to make long needed capital improvements. Either way it needs to be acknowledged that the past is a poor guide to this current situation.
Maybe this time around people will build a bit more slack in their logistics. Maximizing profit and efficiency is what got us into this mess.
Younger me was appalled when I learned most everyone seems to operate in a just-in-time fashion. Remember when you could go to the supermarket and ask if they have any extra in the back room? Stores don't even have that any more, everything shipped to the store goes straight to the shelf. Then COVID comes along and fucks that up.
All of life is logistics. There’s no getting around the need to try to maximize efficiency. You can choose to improve resilience as well, of course.
Supermarkets don’t usually have much extra stuff because they carry a lot of perishable stuff. This is no different than outdoor markets for millennia. If anything, we’re a bit better off due to refrigeration and better preservation techniques, but if you have too much slop, that just means greater food wastage.
There is still a backroom for places I go. You can see it behind the milk cartons.
I hope not. Russia has been doing this kind of stuff for the past 300 years, in Eastern Europe. It's just now that the West started to care.
They were always imperialistic, and never cared for human lives.
Yeah, thats the imperialist mentality. The west didnt care as much until recently due to being imperialists themselves, but this is no longer the guiding policy (though still a sentiment present in politics and societies).
After 20 years of failed Western imperial warfare over several countries, this statement is really, really incorrect.
The problem is, in fact, that imperialism got back on the menu in 2001, and in 2003 it became the main dish. At that point, anyone who had a doubt on what to choose, followed the chef's advice. It would have been silly not to.
That is just not true. Just because the US invaded it does not equate imperialism. The intended purpose matters, and the US never wanted them as colonies or to install puppet regimes, or to exploit the resources.
> The intended purpose matters, and the US never wanted them as colonies or to install puppet regimes, or to exploit the resources.
The US absolutely wanted Iraq as a puppet regime, not just on its own but as a toehold for a project to transform the region into a set of US economic satellites. Numerous people who went on to senior defense and foreign policy roles in the Bush Administration wrote about that intent before Bush was elected, and agitated to use 9/11 as the pretext for that war immediately after it happened, but were initially drowned out by people that thought we ought to address the people that actually launched the attack first.
The US also very much wanted to exploit Iraq’s resources to fund that project and insulate the US against the economic power of other oil producing states to influence domestic economic conditions.
Then how come most of the oil in Iraq was leased to other countries, not the US? And how come they didn't install a puppet regime, winning the war and all?
> Then how come most of the oil in Iraq was leased to other countries, not the US?
Because state production policy, not nationality of the firms involved, was the mechanism of influence sought.
> And how come they didn't install a puppet regime, winning the war and all?
They did; for quite some time after it was established, the post-Saddam Iraqi government took direction from the US.
It didn't turn out to be durable nor did the US manage to use it as the planned lever against the rest of the Middle East, in part because a substantial part of the war and post-war planning was coordinated by “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet” [0] (to quote Gen. Franks) and as a result the occupation/counter-insurgency phase was both botched from the beginning and, arguably, not really a realistic way of achieving some of its broader objectives even if it had been planned competently and executed ideally, and in part because the US changed policy priorities and executive administrations during the occupation away from the original objectives (in part because different policy makers has different ideology, and in part because of recognition of the how badly the situation was botched.) Hence the upthread description of failed imperial warfare, which would not be used of if the imperialist objectives motivated the war had been achieved.
[0] it's looking like the planning for the Ukraine operation by Russia may have had similar levels prioritizing what the ruling clique finds to be ideologically-appealing fantasy over hard-nosed practicality in its planning.
Because the definition of "puppet regime" in US terms is "a somewhat democratic government that can be conditioned to work only in the ideological confines we set". Only where that fails, like in Egypt or Pakistan, they support overt strongmen.
The first 5-10 years or so of post-Saddam Iraq were an attempt at achieving the former. Then Iran brought some stability and it was accepted as the lesser evil, because resources and political support for the occupation were over.
> a somewhat democratic government that can be conditioned to work only in the ideological confines we set
That is not what a puppet regime is...especially when you consider that "ideological confines" for the US means free trade, civil liberties, justice system, free elections. Calling that a puppet regime is whitewashing the truly horrible puppet regimes that Russia is installing.
The US is a country with the strongest Imperial streak in the west, that is true, but youre still comparing apples to oranges. The Russian brand of imperialism is something from colonialist times, and involves eradicating entire populations, nationalities, to replace with their own. They forcibly resettled over 20 million people last century (or maybe that was just Stalin), countries with rich history which simply do not exist anymore. And the Russian society allows this, because the imperialist mentality is so prevalent that the state gets away with it, because they cannot do wrong, and because the mental slavery of a large part of the population is unshakeable.
And just because these conflicts existed doesnt mean imperialism guides everything. If it did, and the US practiced full imperialism they would own half of middle east by now, and millions of arabs would be dead.
American Imperialism: keep the oil flowing (we don't have to sell it ourselves, you guys drill, sell and profit, just keep it flowing), keep the trade as free as possible, have at least some sort of justice system that is not medieval, don't start genocides, don't start senseless wars (by senseless we mean against a country that respects all the points above), don't humiliate us(Cuba, Iran). If you do these, you're gonna be in pretty good terms with the US, in general.
IMO this about sums it up, the fierce American Imperialism. You just cannot put American imperialism and Russian Imperialism in the same paragraph without being a Russian troll or apologist.
Russian Imperialism: conquer nations through medieval, brutal wars, for no reason other than "they border us, so we must attack them first", displace 30% of the population to Siberia (10% in gulags), move in your Russian colonists to take their place, install your own people at the top of the country, you can only do good trades with Russia and its allies, maybe you'll have your entire resources stolen anyway.
well, I for one hope that the world changed forever, and the wars are now economic and cybernetic. Russia with late middle age tactics and 20th century fascism can just be walled off for all I care. When they evolve to present day they should be allowed out.
"I assure you, we will overcome adversity, and we will do everything to no longer depend on the West in any strategic sectors of our life that are of decisive importance for our people".
In other news Lavrov's stepdaughter has a £4 million flat in the most upmarket area of London - well she has it at the moment, for how much longer who knows.
Putin has deep pockets and can provide Lavrov's family (or any other sanctioned person) with far more expensive stuff wherever China has more influence that the West. That sphere of influence will expand over time. I wouldn't doubt that Kong Kong, or some other rich Asian cities, will welcome oligarch. This war is a huge transfer of power to the East.
This is an interesting take on Putin's miscalculation in Ukraine.
He's a spy, not a soldier. He relies on subterfuge and fabrication. And he's being undone as his fabricated and delusional view of Ukraine, Russia and the world bangs up against reality.
It's horrible, and I bet all well informed Russians will agree that it is. Who are "they"? I think it is mostly up to a small group of people. I feel it is important to not forget that, and not get lost in hatred and revenge. Which is easy to say from far away from the front, I know.
“Well informed” is doing a lot of work there. The Russian equivalent of the American Republican is cheering this on, regardless of what information they have access to.
Because Americans are either Republicans or Democrats? Because you can't both think that the government should perhaps not have a monopoly on weapons AND be pro-choice? And you can't both condemn the war and then argue that Gorbachov was promised that the NATO would not expand and it is a factor in this war? What are you saying here?
We are humans and our opinions and ideas fall on continuums in many dimensions. Lets keep talking, to anyone, with respect.
I have no words for this. It sounds to me like you have just lost it. Either that or your entire country lost it.
For god's sake, call anyone that voted republican (why do you even call them "a republican"? Maybe they just didn't like Hillary back when?!) and talk to them with an open mind and be kind. I think that would be the best thing to do for your country right now.
While I appreciate how crazy our country looks from outside, it's not that different from other English-speaking countries right now. There's a set of people whose perception of the world has become completely detached from reality. The vast majority of those people identify with the Republican party.
I fully agree with cautioning people not to get consumed with hate/revenge or to project Putin/supporters' faults on all Russians, but it's quite a bit more complicated even among the folks who "agree that the war is horrible" will, over the course of a few exchanges, begin arguing that western aggression/expansionism forced Putin's hand and he's really just defending Russian sovereignty. Or else they "agree that the war is horrible" but then fixate on how bad the sanctions are and how the west is so awful for imposing those sanctions. So it definitely feels like a lot of the Russians who "agree that the war is horrible" don't really mean it, or at least implicitly think the Ukrainians have it good compared to the sanctioned Russians. Of course, there are Russians who sincerely think the war is horrible--they're out protesting bravely (criticizing the war is punishable by 15 years in prison per a new "misinformation" law); however, few of the Russians I've talked to who "oppose the war" have anything good to say about these protesters.
> It's horrible, and I bet all well informed Russians will agree that it is.
One of the heavy pregnant woman photographed there has her instagram full of hundreds of Russians calling her a crisis actor, wishing her and her (yet unborn) child death and being raped. [0]
It is of course true that the "average Russian" is not shelling Mariupol, is not an oligarch, and may not even have voted for Putin. Voting and support numbers showing broad support for Putin, if accurate and genuine, should be seen in the context of Russian propaganda.
And yet... this is the first time that Russians experience the anguish they have caused to Central and Eastern Europe over the past 80 years. USSR caused untold misery, to Russians too, but to its non-Russian subjects mostly. Economies were exploited, lives and bones were broken, culture subdued. Attempts to leave USSR be peaceful means were violently quashed, such as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, and lots of smaller events along the way. Pro-USSR sentiment in Russia remains strong, as was support for annexation of Crimea.
At some point, "ordinary Russians" need to understand that the "Russian empire" machine they support, by sentiment if not democratic votes, brings misery and destruction to all who stand in its way.
In my experience, this sentiment is also not limited to "domestic-only" Russians, who perhaps lack access to "different bias" sources of information. I knew a number of highly educated and intelligent Russians living in the West, who still drank the kool aid.
I'm not saying, it's their turn to suffer, but for this reason I'm struggling to muster depths of sympathy.
My colleague with family in the region has said that the hospitals are evacuated and being used for logistics. Which might explain why they would be targeted.
This video being described as “difficult to watch” seems a lot like propaganda.
I don’t know what the truth is, but I know it’s not black and white.
yes. That's the nature of war. Just like general disinformation and the campaign to support the poor Ukrainians roasting devious Russian in their tanks (while taking 0 losses of course!) and painting the heroic image of a people waging urban warfare defending (read: destroying beyond recognition) their country to the last drop of blood.
Putin is evil (and a child of the end of history). And yet, fighting fire with fire in heated, nationalistic conflicts has never been a recipe for improvement.
Honestly, everyone in Ukraine has a right to be anywhere in Ukraine. If they do logistics in a hospital it doesn’t give Russia the right to bomb it - because Russia’s invasion isn’t in any way justifiable or legal.
Why is it hard to believe that Russians would intentionally target Ukrainian hospitals? Have you seen what the Russian media and social media say about Ukrainians?
Russia literally bombed and killed 47 civilians waiting for food last week.
>but I know it’s not black and white
Russia started an irredentist invasion of an independent democratic country.
The truth is Putin's troops invaded Ukraine and are killing innocent people every hour. And it's obvious that each day of this aggression will make this number higher and higher.
Maybe to some degree. A lot of it is that in most conflicts both sides have some credible arguments, I disagree with the degree of responses and general treatment of WB and Gaza, but Israel usually claims with some degree of truth to be responding to attacks during their incursions and bombings, while noone believes Russia had a valid reason to invade Ukraine.
I'm talking about outside of Russia/Israel. And I personally do not see Israel positively wrt Palestine, but find their pretexts a lot more credible than Putin's so I understand why there's a lot more unanimity in Western press about Ukraine
> After watching this bombarded hospital I wish them to burn in hell. They deserve much stronger sanctions than North Korea.
It should be noted that sanctions have done nothing to change the behavior of North Korea's leadership to be more palatable to the West. I bet it'll be the same with Russia.
NK is not Russia. Russia knows what western brands and luxuries are. There have been lines in Russia to McDonalds, Victoria's Secret and other stores.
The sanctions are working. Russians are going back in time and soon will be standing in line for bread.
Chelsea a large premier league team owned by an oligarch has been frozen and he can't sell like he wanted to.
Nikkita Mazepin has been removed from F1 and sanctioned along with his oligarch father and no longer can travel in EU.
Aeroflot(russian airline) grounded its planes because they will get seized and cannot enter EU/US air space.
Other oligarchs are moving their expensive yachts because those are getting seized. Their other assets such as properties and bank accounts are being frozen all over the world and they a lot real estate in the UK. This definitely hurts.
> NK is not Russia. Russia knows what western brands and luxuries are. There have been lines in Russia to McDonalds, Victoria's Secret and other stores.
Do you really think the Russian government will withdraw from Ukraine because people can't buy McDonald's in Moscow anymore?
China isn't sanctioning Russia. I bet the oligarchs and other elietes will continue to get whatever Western status goods they want through smuggling (just like North Korea!), and the Russia people will have sufficient Chinese-manufactured consumer goods (like everyone everywhere else), just equivalents with different logos.
"The world was theirs", they could show off their wealth in Paris, in London, in Florence, in New York, in Athens and Mallorca, in Tel Aviv and Sydney. Do you think they would be happy of having their world "shrink" to just Russia and China? Would that feel claustrophobic for these wealthy Russians? Could they do something about it, throwing their weight to shift some power balance and replace their dictator with another one more in line with the actual interests of the Russian riling class?
> "The world was theirs", they could show off their wealth in Paris, in London, in Florence, in New York, in Athens and Mallorca, in Tel Aviv and Sydney. Do you think they would be happy of having their world "shrink" to just Russia and China?
We'll see, but "being unhappy" is a far cry from deciding to take on some KGB goon who appears to have no compunction against murdering rivals.
I highly doubt there will be regime change in Russia because some politically-connected oligarchs' wives can't flout their Hermes handbags in Paris. That seems far more like a fantasy than a realistic expectation.
I agree. Just saying that it's not that oligarchs will just get their goods from china and nothing will change for them. Whether that's going to have any impact whatsoever is another story.
No. Sure, they won't have access to Western technological miracle products like Netflix, Facebook, and PornHub, but they have plenty of grain production, processing, transportation, and baking capacity for as much bread as they want, particularly since they'll be exporting less of their own wheat.
Your examples are very telling. Wow, Russians are being excluded from sportsball, motor racing, sex tourism, and extravagant yachting excursions! Nothing of value was lost.
Their actual concerns will be the German, Italian, and Japanese precision machine tools, optics, and PLC/robotics/automation components that their own industry relies on. These are the real worries, not a goddamned soccer club.
> Their actual concerns will be the German, Italian, and Japanese precision machine tools, optics, and PLC/robotics/automation components that their own industry relies on. These are the real worries, not a goddamned soccer club.
And for stuff like that, there's always front companies and smuggling (if they can't find what they need on the market in China). IIRC, that's what they used to do during Soviet times.
Putin meets with oligarchs, the richest people in the country have access and communicate with governments and have the ability to affect policy making.
Placing sanctions on people close to Putin and freezing their soccer team worth billions of dollars definitely has an impact.
Many car manufacturers are pulling out and not selling parts. We live in a globalized society and Russia was a part of it. Putin was betting on oil/natural gas money but that soon will be gone.
Our countries should send an ultimatum: if no agreement have been found by next week, frozen assets will be nationalized. Having Chelsea belong to BoJo would be fun :)
Everyone agrees sanctions will make Russia poorer. What is less clear, and none of your examples show, is if it will change Russia's geopolitical actions.
I don't think anyone in public has enough information to state this. We don't know what NK we'd have to deal with had those sanctions not been in place.
> I don't think anyone in public has enough information to state this. We don't know what NK we'd have to deal with had those sanctions not been in place.
But we do know that it is currently an extremely totalitarian country that developed nuclear weapons and ICBMs while under sanctions, and it continues to have a gun pointed at the head of South Korea (e.g. enough dug in artillery to level Seoul a couple times over).
It's not like a lack of sanctions would change their behavior either though, maybe nothing we do will change their behavior. In that case they can do less damage to the rest of the world if they are poor and cut off than if they are rich and able to trade freely.
And there is still a chance sanctions will change their behavior even if in some cases like with NK it hasn't worked.
> It should be noted that sanctions have done nothing to change the behavior of North Korea's leadership to be more palatable to the West.
Sanctions aren't chosen because they are effective at changing behavior, but because they limit capacity if they fail to change behavior. The sanctions on Russia are not “we believe Putin will behave in response to the sanctions” but “we intend to destroy Russia’s economy and thereby limit it's ability to engage in aggression until and unless we are convinced that Putin has made a durable course correction.”
How do you know the sanctions on North Korea haven’t changed anything? It’s impossible to know what their behavior would have been in an alternate reality without sanctions.
> How do you know the sanctions on North Korea haven’t changed anything? It’s impossible to know what their behavior would have been in an alternate reality without sanctions.
But it is possible to know that their behavior continues to be extremely unacceptable to the West. So if your goal with sanctions is to stop the invasion of Ukraine and to get Russia to stop threatening its neighbors with similar, it's very likely that sanctions won't work.
IMHO, sanctions are something the West does when it doesn't want to solve a problem but still wants to feel like it's doing something.
I also think sanctions will end up being counterproductive. They'll fail to address the military situation AND geopolitically they'll push Russia into a deeper alliance with China, strengthening the latter.
You've already seen an example of that with Belarus. A few years ago it got sanctioned and its leader was forced to turn to Russia for help. Now it's militarily supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Of course Israel said Palestinians they were fighting were nearby, but that is what the Russians are saying too.
I don't remember the maudlin, mawkish melodrama of hospitals and clinics being bombed by a US armed country being such a big deal in the US last year.
Actually Biden's team is in Saudi Arabia right now discussing a deal for Saudi Arabia to export more oil if the US drops its minimal sanctions last year relating to its bloody war in Yemen and disembowlment of a Washington Post reporter in a Turkish embassy.
When people say stuff like this, I'm inclined to make the distinction between the Russian state and the Russian people. Russia isn't a democracy, so its actions don't necessarily represent the will of the Russian people. And indeed, tens of thousands risk imprisonment by protesting the war, and this gives me hope. However, I've been really bummed lurking on r/AskARussian where many Russians perspectives read like, "I don't like Putin and I don't support this war but the sanctions are worse and the evil West forced Putin's hand and actually Putin is a hero and I love him and support the war". Even still, I don't want Russia to be cut off from the rest of the world, but I also want Putin's murderous conquest to be stopped.
I sort of agree with you, but I don't think the judgment by westerners is justified considering how few westerners have contributed in any significant way toward the freedoms we enjoy and how many actively seek to undermine them (campaigns against free speech, due process, egalitarianism/"colorblindness", unfavorable election results, etc). While it's true that Russians are in the best position to fix their government, those who protest or otherwise resist demonstrate a braveness well in excess of anything most living westerners can claim, and I think that should be the posture with which we discuss Russians resisting their government.
EDIT: as a sibling commenter points out, many western countries are still directly financing the war via payments to Russian state fossil fuel companies. How many westerners would be willing to endure a year or more of high prices and economic downturn to resist the Russian invasion (yes, Americans favor boycotting Russian oil now, but (1) will they still after a year of high gas prices and (2) many other western countries are far more dependent on Russian oil than America)?
This is not entirely accurate. European countries pay billions of dollars for gas directly to the state. If they stopped immediately, the damage would be far greater than anything coming from the ordinary citizens.
As another commenter points out, the West could stop financing the war by payments to the Russian state in exchange for fossil fuels. But that would be pretty inconvenient for westerners.
Yeah, that's entirely true. I wish I could get our country to stop buying oil. I live near an (electric, hydro powered) subway station so I don't have to own a car!
Remember that the first victim of war is the truth. Putin deserves scorn for starting an unnecessary fight that will inflict unnecessary suffering on millions, but focusing on individual acts is basically meaningless, because they'll be spun to death on both sides.
I’m not sure that it matters how much a country defending itself spins things. If the invaders don’t want spin, they can go back to their (unbombed) homes.
I'm just saying that focusing on this or that "atrocity" is just a way to lose sight of the big picture, which inevitably favours somebody's agenda. We don't want to hype ourselves into WW3, no matter how hard some Ukrainians might want us to; we want to find a way to save lives and ramp this down somehow.
It's really hard to imagine any benefit to anyone from this disaster.
It is / was folly. Russia, other than hard firepower, does not have influence or economic heft to drive anything.
All this has done has been to antagonize others and consolidate rivals --I mean, even Maduro, maybe Cuba, are going against him, traditional "allies". His only "allies" now are other pariah nations/tyrants.
One day I'd like to find out what the calculus was.
At least with the Gulf War I, II and Afghanistan we kind of had parallel objectives, one economic and one for hegemony but lots of countries benefited and not just the US --and even then arguably the US lost (credibility among other things).
Russia's economy, and the nation's well being as a whole, is dependent on selling gas to Europe. Europe doesn't want to support the regime and would prefer to buy elsewhere. Ukraine found lots of oil and gas reserves in the past decade or two but it takes a long time to turn reserves into deliverable product and they haven't yet. So for Russia, seizing those reserves, which are in the East and South, where they are attacking the hardest, would be a big win. But if they can't hold those areas, destroying infrastructure and government so they can't produce and market that oil and gas to Europe for another couple of decades is also a big win.
I think because of this you'll continue to see outsized investment in not buying oil from Russia.
I think they may have had the opposite effect in almost every realm they wanted to play in.
They have shown they are not a military power other than nukes, they have pushed nations into fast tracking NATO and EU memberships, They have weakened the interest in turning the blind eye and buying their oil. There will certainly be countries that will buy out of necessity but I expect that to become increasingly unpopular as this goes on.
Even if they take Ukraine for oil, I do not expect them to make back even close to what it cost them, both politically and financially.
Russia maybe was making a grab for the natural gas fields in Ukraine. Maybe they already saw Europe's gas business as a lost cause, and with the new pipeline to China, saw aggression towards Europe as worth the risk of losing the business.
I think the calculus is to capture Ukrainian territory whatever the cost now, if millions are starved/bombed, all the better, areas would be repopulated with some Russians and would forever join the "Russian world". Same thing was done by Stalin so the blueprint is there.
Then the West, which is weak in Putin's worldview, would drop some of the more disastrous sanctions cause Western politicians need to get re-elected and recessions are bad for their prospects. Putin would continue buying up Western elites, fostering divisions, and in 1-2 election cycles everyone would forget about Russia or Ukraine, stretch goal is the disintegration of NATO by American withdrawal.
So in a decade there would be no sanctions and Ukrainian territory would belong to Putin. Speed of Western abandonment of Ukraine would decide how soon Putin attacks other countries.
Obviously Russian people would suffer in between but 1) Putin doesn't care about them 2) They would be cheering anyway.
I struggle to understand Putin's reasoning as well.
My best guess is that he wants to leave a legacy of expanding Russia's geographic influence. I.e., it was a gamble based on a successful invasion of Ukraine.
My Hollywood-style conspiracy theory (which I very much doubt) is that Russia and China are secretly collaborating. The plan would be for Russia to draw NATO / U.S. forces into eastern Europe, leaving Taiwan under-defended. And then China would invade Taiwan.
Joe Biden said, in 1997, that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states. That was several years before Putin became president. https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500782351831662592
We knew how Russia would react, with or without Putin. But it is now folly?
Russia knows the hyperpower is China now and is acting accordingly. China encourages Russia to oppose NATO in Europe, preventing the US from focusing fully on Asia, forcing the EU to become more independent and weakening the US' influence on the world stage. And Europe pretends to want to become independent from Russia but that requires an full transition to non-carbon energy – and this won't happen anytime soon (since Europe is still following a neoliberal playbook that make such transition a "folly" in the leaders' eye). Russia knows the West's weak points and understand that now is the right time to exploit them. The West continues to believe it's Putin's folly but they're the one losing a critical ally to China. I'm sorry to war victims, but this is far more important than negotiating Ukraine's neutrality. Too bad we had to let Putin go to war as NATO and the EU could have a agreed to this and avoid a war (that weakens both Europe and Russia in the short term, and the West in the long term).
The NATO expansion angle seems like a distraction. The rambling speech Putin gave at the outset of the invasion outlined his pet theory that Ukraine is part of broader Russia and that he doesn't see them as a separate people. He's long said that the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest catastrophe in Russian history. It's pretty clear that his aim is a revanchist restoration of historical Russian territory.
It is also worth noting that NATO does not expand by invasion or recruitment. Member nations all have to apply to join and be democracies, meaning that at least notionally their people have to want to be in NATO. And why would former Soviet Republic want to be in NATO? Most of them say it's because they're afraid of Russian invasion. It's worth noting that Russia has recently invaded Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Those fears don't spring from a place of pure paranoia.
It also seems unrealistic that there will be long term alignment between Russia and China, they're natural rivals. Russia still holds contested territory that used to be part of China. Even under the Soviet system they tolerated each other at best, and entered into armed conflict in 1969. China officially calls that conflict an act of Russian aggression, even after hammering out a deal with Lavrov in 2008.
>And why would former Soviet Republic want to be in NATO? Most of them say it's because they're afraid of Russian invasion.
So you have a big countries that, for various reasons (WWII and Cold War, for one) fear about its security. They said repeatedly that they'll act if the US continues to expand NATO further onto Russia's borders. Russia intervenes so countries close to Russia fear they might be invade.
I fully understand the legitimate fear of these countries but why NATO wants to continue to expand when the US/EU knows perfectly that this only makes Russia more aggressive. We (the West) knew that Russia would act (military if need be https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592 but because we refuses to tell Ukraine that NATO is full, we have Russia invading Ukraine and we refuse to defend them military. How is this positive for Ukrainians? They won't join NATO (because the West doesn't want to go to war with Russia directly) but they'll be ruined by a tragic war. Only China is winning here.
> but why NATO wants to continue to expand when the US/EU knows perfectly that this only makes Russia more aggressive
This seems ridiculous to me. Russia has been aggressive to its neighbors for a hundred years.
> They won't join NATO (because the West doesn't want to go to war with Russia directly) but they'll be ruined by a tragic war.
They couldn't join because the second Viktor Yanukovych was gone, Russia invaded the east and took Crimea. You can't join NATO while in an active conflict. People seem to be forgetting that the very second his henchman got tossed out he invaded. The precipitating event was a trade deal with the EU, not a bid to enter NATO.
I'm sure Putin was angry about the missile shield project in 2007, but that's an insane reason to invade a country that isn't part of Nato in 2022. I've read all of those arguments from the think tanks, but again NATO doesn't pick new members like some sort of playground kick ball team. New member ask to join because they feel threatened by Russia specifically. NATO could turn them down, but that's not really in the spirit of the treaty, and gives a hecklers veto to Russia.
Putin's earlier speeches essentially boil down to a threat that he'll invade any neighbors who try to join a defense pact designed to protect them from Russian invasion. You could call that realpolitik, but it looks an awful lot like revanchism.
I would also point out that NATO has never attacked Russia, but Russia has attacked a bunch of places that aren't part of NATO. Defending Eastern Europe from Russian invasion isn't aggression against Russia.
I actually don't even like NATO or think the US should be part of it, but all Putin is doing here is using it as a pretext to capture territory. He made that perfectly clear on the eve of the invasion.
Yes, I understand that we the west have reneged on a tacit agreement to not expand NATO in certain sensitive border areas.
And Joe Biden is guilty of bravado… but Russia going in like that makes no sense whatsoever. They are antagonizing everyone but a handful of countries and it’s resulting in galvanized opposition to him —even internally.
To use an overwrought phrase the invasion was a huge foot-gun.
Can we stop comparing Putin to Hitler (and calling this war a genocide while we're at it). Words have meaning, you can be a piece of shit blood thirsty autocrat without being Hitler or nazi, you can kill civilians without it being a genocide
Yeah he called it a special operation because "war" sounds bad and he's taunting the west. And using the word "solution" isn't always a reference to Hitler (it virtually never is)... The mental gymnastic is insane...
The US had plenty of "military operations"/"special operations" and "solutions" for Iraq and Afghanistan, they killed plenty of civilians yet they're no Nazi and the president isn't Hitler.
Alternatively, this is (arguably) the most paradigmatic example of genocide on European soil since the post-Yugoslav wars: the official line of the Russian government is that there is no such thing as a "Ukrainian people," only a "little Russia" (Malorossiya) that has no distinct identity, and the war is intended to destroy the Ukrainian nation itself and absorb it through violence into Russia, through some combination of direct absorption and tightly-controlled puppet states.
This is hardly unprecedented in Russian-Ukrainian relations, even in the last century; in a 1953 speech, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and foundationally established international law against it, called the Holodomor and post-Holodomor Soviet control of Ukraine "the classic example of Soviet genocide ... the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. [I]f the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it ... which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people."
No, that's far from anything related to genocide and Putin is actually right: Russians and Ukrainians(and Belarussians) have the same common root in the Kievan Rus. The idea of Ukraine didn't even exit until about 1700s and the country itself was founded in 1917.
Yeah I'm not an expert on this conflict, but have been following it closely enough. I'm pretty confused as to why people are invoking genocide, because I haven't seen any evidence to indicate that's what is happening.
There was the bombing of the children's hospital, which may turn out to be a war crime, but I don't see how anyone can know whether it was intentional. And if collateral civilian deaths are equated with genocide, then what should we call the US wars in the middle east?
What is "genocide" to you if not erasure of cultural identity and physical eradication of peoples? Putin literally told us himself that "there are no distinct Ukrainian people" which is erasure of cultural identity, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians is the physical eradication. It's not just about the hospital, the scale of atrocities against civilians is already way beyond the US wars in the Middle East and it's done on purpose.
They haven't setup the gas chambers, I give you that, but the future of Ukrainian identity if Russia prevails is grim.
Okay, that's a good point and I can understand where you're coming from. It seems to be true that if Russia were to succeed, there wouldn't be much difference between the situation of the Ukrainians and that of the Uyghurs.
For me the comparison is more towards how Hitler captured territories around him and the policy of appeasement of his neighboring powers (& also how those same powers could have neutered his domestic political support very early through intervention and forcing a loss of the war rather than appeasement).
From that perspective it seems apt. Also, unless OP edited their post, you're the only one to bring up genocide or the comparison to Hitler.
> you're the only one to bring up genocide or the comparison to Hitler.
I put it in parenthesis because of that, but I've seen both the Hitler comparison and genocide accusation popping up hundreds of times in the last few days, usually by the same people.
We get it, Putin is bad, and Hitler is the baddest of the bad guys, but still, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. We can call him Putinéon or Putin Khan while we're at it
It does make sense to me from a military strategy perspective. You've got a belligerent government in Europe in charge of a major military power that's attacking it's neighbors. The parallels to German's invasion of Austria in 1938 & the events leading up to that seem pretty clear to me.
> You've got a belligerent government in Europe in charge of a major military power that's attacking it's neighbors
That's the History of Europe since there are people in Europe though. I don't get why people get so fixated on Hitler to be honest. The Russians fought him in ww2 do you think they identify as him ? Why not compare Putin to Stalin ? Soviets also invaded Ukraine.
I think the comparison is much dumber than that. People think Putin is bad, they also think Hitler is the badest of the bad, and that's enough for them to start calling him "Putler". Meanwhile you have literal neo nazis fighting for Ukraine against Russians right now, ironic.
Except the genocide piece, he is pretty much Hitler though:
- no opposition parties at home
- few leaders that oppose him get killed
- all protests are quickly ended by the police (brown shirts)
- uses fascism to expand his country: outside threat, we must defend ourselves, focus is on the nation, not the individuals
- uses rich private businessmen to further his goals, when this fails he just nationalizes what he needs
- boosts military spending and might
- keep expanding territory and keeps expanding control
He is different than from the previous, communist dictators in that he is alone at the levers. The high ranking commies were able to remove insane autocrats (Khrushchev), nobody in Russia can remove Putin now.
Hitler didn't start out running concentration camps, there was a long lead up to that. The Knight of Long Knives, where 'opponents' of the Nazis were assassinated was in 1934. Kristallnacht happened in late 1938. There are a number of similarities between Hitler and Putin, and we may yet see the beginning of pogroms against Jews, but I would say that the bans on homosexuality are showing us where this ends up going.
Putin also seems to be bent on returning to a former empire (see Third Reich comparisons).
Just checking that you are aware that Putin has been murdering fleeing civilians, targeting health facilities including a maternity ward, and using dumb bombs to level entire cities? At what point does this cross into genocide for you?
Edit: People on this thread seem very confused as to what the word 'genocide' means. Here is the definition from un.org.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
> At what point does this cross into genocide for you?
The point when it enters the definition of the word....
> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
We're not talking about a few hundred or thousands civilians hit by bombs, we're talking organised and methodical wiping of entire villages/cities/regions
The jewish holocaust was a genocide, the Khmer Rouge were conducting a genocide, the Turkish committed a genocide against Armenians, &c. The scale and goals are completely different, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, it's ugly, it's revolting, it's disgusting, it's still "just" a war.
It would be genocide if the Russians were murdering a significant chunk of the population in order to eradicate the Ukrainians as a distinct ethnic group.
There is no evidence of that happening. Yes, Russia has been committing atrocities. Not all atrocities are genocide.
Your own definition says it has to be an attempt to destroy the group. Killing people from a group doesn’t necessarily mean you are attempting to destroy it. Otherwise all murders would be genocide.
Again, I'm not sure how dumb bombing entire cities that haven't been evacuated, maternity/childrens wards, and fleeing civilians _doesn't_ qualify as genocide, but I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.
I think the definition of genocide is very clear and after watching the daily footage from Ukraine, it's quite difficult to make the argument that there isn't intent to wipe out a large portion of the population systematically. Yeah, their names aren't in a spreadsheet maybe, yet, but this is just beginning.
Something can be a war crime AND not a genocide. (I recommend you wikileaks for a list of US war crimes which aren't genocides).
Putin invasion is illegal, many war crimes were committed, but it's nowhere close to a genocide. What word will you use for real genocides ?
> and after watching the daily footage from Ukraine
That's the main issue with this war, people are fed clips after clips of bombings videos, crying civilians, dead soldiers in blood pools &c. It's an information war just as much as it is a regular war
If we had the same level of publicity for the invasion or Irak or Afghanistan would you have condemned the US of genocide ? Many more civilians died. Would we have banned the US of swift ?
What about the siege of Sarajevo ? genocide committed by nato ?
It's a war, did people forget about them ? Civilians always suffer, either directly or indirectly (starvation, exposure, &c.)
Unplug, stop watching war porn, read experts reports if you want to keep up to date, don't fall for the news cycle/social media bait. There are 30 or 40 other wars going on in the world right now, all with civilians getting killed, if you want to be outraged every single second of your life feel free to look them up. There even is a real genocide going on for the last 10 years or so in Darfur, have you heard of it ? it's not making the news, 100k to 400k people were killed though
> I think the definition of genocide is very clear
It is, and no serious source calls this a genocide...
> It is, and no serious source calls this a genocide...
Again, incorrect. The Ukrainian government has called this genocide. Are they not a serious source? The UN has also had at least one hearing so far to determine if there is genocide happening in Ukraine right now, which, I'll note, the Russians did not show up for. [0]
I'm going to go ahead and stop replying to you at this point. You've made a number of assumptions about my level of engagement and education on the topic that are incorrect, and I don't feel like we are going to get anywhere.
At any rate, insisting that the systematic carpet bombing of cities and murder of fleeing civilians _isn't_ genocide, seems like a questionable hill to die on.
> Again, incorrect. The Ukrainian government has called this genocide
And Russia says there is no war... don't you think Ukraine and Russia stances might be slightly biased ? If we're arguing with that level of bad faith I agree that it won't go anywhere.
> insisting that the systematic carpet bombing of cities and murder of fleeing civilians _isn't_ genocide, seems like a questionable hill to die on.
It's a warcrime, it's not a genocide, I'll die on that hill, words have meaning. Otherwise every single conflict is a genocide, but then the word loses its meaning entirely so why not stop using it ?
Again, it's a question of scale and intent. Putting every single jew you find in trains for death camps is a genocide, killing every single Vietnamese you find is a genocide, killing a few civilians while bombing a city at war is a war crime.
Well, in the case the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are genocide! The all the Americans(still alive) and American state entities responsible for it must be held accountable
Obviously, he wants a direct engagement with NATO. So that he can spread the nuclear terror on the whole world and at the same time cement his totalitarian power in Russia.
Putin is pushing, Putin started, Putin invaded... Trump announced, Biden sanctioned...
Guys, really, it's not 1900s anymore, we do understand that they don't make decisions, right? Terrible thing is that russians think America is behind the curtains (I asked), EU and US think Putin is crazy (also asked), and only handful of people understands that this terrible conflict is played out by globalists who were year by year buying out Ukraine's soil. Kind of alike to what Turkey and Britain are doing to the North Cyprus. No one cares about population there - only territory! It's just terrible!
The issue is that now due to currency devaluing and most modern companies / orgs refusing to cooperate with Russian companies, not factoring in banking / capital flows, there are very few reasons for people with skills to remain in Russia or grow their skills in Russia. Without smart young people helping to push Russia forward, not just tech wise but in most technically hard industries, the outlook for Russians are not good. Why work somewhere where your compensation for time could be worth nothing or denied by the rest of the western world?
That said, I think the west fails to understand how similar young Russians still are to their parents from the Soviet era. For instance, unlike the US most Russians even in the current generation attend a state university, party and drink like crazy until they attend college and shortly after college get married and immediately have children. This is also consistent across a huge swath of fields. For instance, I have friends who are artists / florists who have two kids at 24. This kind of culture is not necessarily aligned with fleeing the country to the west. One of the most fascinating traits of my young Russian friends (most of whom are artists) is their denial or confusion of being "proudly russian", even prior to Ukraine many seemed embarrassed to be proud of their country.