The Russians are Coming, the Russians are...oh, they're here...

[blackchubby38]

This guy did a better job at explaining what I meant in my last post:

Putin is already at war with Europe. There is only one way to stop him

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/17/putin-is-already-at-war-with-europe-there-is-only-one-way-to-stop-him

[Stavros]

Corcoran's article on the more extreme nationalists in Russia and their criticism of Putin raises questions about Russia if Putin were to be removed from power, or die, or whatever. As is common with Autocracies, survival depends on crushing all forms of dissent, and while the one-party state that was created by Lenin and ended by Yeltsin has not been replaced Putin has in effect created, or tried to create a monopoly form of power, though it looks to some more like a personality cult than a one-party state. To that extent, the existence of other parties, mostly more Nationalist than Putin, suggests that Russia is likely to be weakened by internal disputes on top of the lamentable performance of its military in Ukraine.

So while some comment in the UK press has asked if Putin is going to be so desperate he might use tactical nuclear weapons, maybe the question is, if he is succeeded by even more extreme politicians, will they use them? But while they may cause trouble for Putin, how powerful are the Nationalists, and how much support do they have across Russia?

Russia's Hawkish Nationalists Who Want All-Out War in Ukraine (businessinsider.com)

[Stavros]

Yesterday we read that Erdogan claimed Putin wanted to end the war, today he has increased the escalation. He also says Russia is not bluffing when it says it will use all means to defend itself.

The man is either making a major strategic error, as with Saddam in Kuwait in 1990, or still gambling that over the long term, it is Ukraine and, crucially, its supporters in NATO and Europe that will weaken, and provide Russia with the agenda it can claim as 'victory' -even as the Russian annexed regions of Ukraine are less secure than they were in 2014. A lot does now rest on the willingness of NATO to continue its supplies of materiel to Ukraine, and to absorb the energy shocks Russia hopes will weaken any support Ukraine has across Europe.

I wonder if it were not for Russia's nuclear arsenal, NATO would have hammered Russia in Ukraine, though Desert Shield and Desert Storm were both backed by Security Council Resolutions. But maybe NATO should call Putin's bluff on nuclear weapons.

[Jericho]

I wonder if it were not for Russia's nuclear arsenal, NATO would have hammered Russia in Ukraine, though Desert Shield and Desert Storm were both backed by Security Council Resolutions. But maybe NATO should call Putin's bluff on nuclear weapons.

Well that's fine for some of you old bleeders, knocking on deaths door anyway.
Meanwhile, some of us would rather not become crispy critters on the turn of a card in a game of global brag!

[Stavros]

Well that's fine for some of you old bleeders, knocking on deaths door anyway.
Meanwhile, some of us would rather not become crispy critters on the turn of a card in a game of global brag!

Am I in the departure lounge? Maybe! The point I was trying to make was a matter of strategy, not what I want. When the war began earlier this year, the strategic aim was to slow the Russians down; Macron I think it was even said that NATO should not humiliate Putin. Fast forward to where we are now, and Putin is humiliated by his own strategic blunders, and by what to some is the amazing failure of Russian troops on the ground -poorly equipped, poorly managed, lacking in motivation -the parallels with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein are spooky, after all in 1990 Iraq had the fourth or fifth largest army in the world.

The Russian failures on the ground have led to Putin escalating his campaign. I assume he knows how badly it is going, but the nuclear threat, while real needs to be seen in context -the use is likely to be of tactical, or 'battlefield' nuclear weapons rather than strategic warheads -the point being that tactical nuclear weapons can 'take out' a moderate sized city like Kremenchug with minimal fall-out, and destroy much but probably not all of Kyiv. What the much-publicized Hypersonic missile can do is unknown, with the difficulty that on the one hand Russian armaments and delivery systems have been exposed as poor, but on the other hand as a new weapons system, Hypersonic might be very effective,

Also, in 1980 Saddam Hussein became an ally of the USA in its attempt to overthrow the Iranian government, ten years later, Saddam was the enemy and ten years after that, his son was plotting regime change in Iraq. NATO might not be plotting regime change in Russia, but it is no secret that people want Putin out of the way, though as I argued in an earlier post, we don't know who would replace him, and it might be someone even more reckless.

The referenda being held in regions of Ukraine is designed to integrate them into Russia so any attack on them is an attack on Russia, and other than Ukraine attacks on targets in Russia close to the border, there has been no serious attempt to take the war into Russia. Whether anyone outside Russia believes overnight these places can become Russia doesn't matter, it won't stop Ukraine from seeking to remove the Russian military presence there. Whether or not this does lead Putin to use tactical nuclear weapons is currently the great Unknown, and one can only hope it doesn't happen.

[broncofan]

Am I in the departure lounge?

I checked the arrivals at the place above and the place below and they say they don't expect you. I agree with Jericho that NATO can't be calling bluffs with nuclear war.

That doesn't mean there's no way to oppose Russia, as I don't think they're totally suicidal, but there are terms of conflict that everyone has sort of accepted.

The war is particularly devastating for Ukraine and Ukrainians but they decided early on they do not want to surrender. The argument from some that the west is willing to fight "to the last Ukrainian" is based on the assumption that Ukrainians would surrender or that it would be less deadly to allow Russia to annex all of Ukraine. Russia has showed they commit summary executions, they don't reprimand soldiers for doing so, and that the only way for the bloodshed to end is for Russia to give up its illegal ambitions.

Sadly, there is no peaceful outcome unless Russia chooses it. Russia has to be defeated and it has to be defeated by western armaments and Ukrainian soldiers.

[Stavros]

Sadly, there is no peaceful outcome unless Russia chooses it. Russia has to be defeated and it has to be defeated by western armaments and Ukrainian soldiers.

The question used to be 'what do we win when we win?', whereas your comment asks the question, 'what does defeat look like?'.

I am not sure either side can claim either victory or defeat. It doesn't look like Russia will succeed in annexing the Ukraine, which was the original mission. Not even with the mobilization of 'reserves' in Russia, including Ukrainians under Russian occupation in Luhansk and Donetsk. How those reservists will fight is not clear, but they can't be better than what Russia has offered so far. Russia has to hold on to parts if not all of Luhansk and Donetsk, otherwise this is a defeat of sorts, though I doubt their position in the Crimea will change.

But what would it mean for a Russian defeat in Eastern Ukraine, because if Ukraine regained sovereignty there, how will it treat the ethnic Russian and pro-Russian citizens who live there? Can we be so confident only Russia has committed war crimes against one side and other is squeaky clean?

I don't know if Putin can survive another year, but if he goes, a replacement is not going to simply withdraw from eastern Ukraine. The fighting war may fizzle out, and the situation revert to what it was between 2014-2022 with no resolution. If this enables both sides to claim a victory, then it is up to the spin doctors to make it work at home, though Russia has been more significantly damaged than Ukraine, and I think is heading for a decade of instability.

Territorial disputes can drag on forever -Palestine and Kashmir have been going since the late 1940s, the Korean peninsula remains divided since the 1950s, and I see no threat to the bogus republics created by Russia out of Moldova and Georgia. And in the end, can NATO or Russia afford to keep the war going?

So I see no conclusive defeat. Only a winding down of the war, and no desire to talk, and decades of dissembling punctuated by 'incidents'. In the end, people learn to adapt to chaos and instability. I wish it were not so, but I don't feel optimistic about this war.

[broncofan]

While I can't be sure Ukraine is squeaky clean there's good reason to infer that most of the human rights violations are committed by Russia. First, the only people killed by Ukrainian soldiers have been soldiers, mainly because they're not in Russia or rolling tanks through Russian streets. Second, there's an enormous number of eyewitness accounts in Bucha and Mariupol that Russian soldiers are trying to kill all the survivors. There have been bodies found with hands tied behind the back and shot at close range. There's also the death toll at this point which is catastrophic in a short period of time. But we will know more eventually and if Ukraine commits atrocities they should be condemned.

Then there's the sequence of events. There was no actual threat to Russia. Maybe a threat to its influence but no attempt to kill its citizens or breach its border or invade the country. They decided one day they wanted to invade Ukraine on the grounds they're "Nazis". Yes, they saw the potential for inclusion as NATO as a threat but it wasn't a threat to their territorial integrity, an invasion, or anything that international law recognizes as an excuse for their actions.

The only way for Ukraine to win is to repel the Russians from their country or for Russia to decide they never should have invaded.

I'm not saying there can't be peace. But I don't see how it can happen if the country that led an expedition to conquer Ukraine doesn't leave the way they came.

[broncofan]

They decided one day they wanted to invade Ukraine on the grounds they're "Nazis".

I'm also ignoring the revanchist claims to Luhansk and Donetsk because while there are Russian speakers it looks like a pretext to roll over Ukraine.

[Stavros]

I'm also ignoring the revanchist claims to Luhansk and Donetsk because while there are Russian speakers it looks like a pretext to roll over Ukraine.

It has been an old Nationalist tactic since at least the first decade of the 20th century when Serbian nationalists argued with regard to the 'ethnic mix' in the Balkans, 'wherever there is a Serb, there is Serbia'. Hundreds of thousands died in the Balkan Wars before the Serbian Nationalists murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the city hosting the kind of diverse range of people that drove Serbs mad with rage. That the creation of Yugoslavia after the War bottled up rather than dealt with the pre-existing Nationalism of the Serbs is now regarded as a cause of the wars of the 1990s.

You will be aware of the claims Nazi Germany made on the Sudetenland, so in this context, it is spooky that when Russia claims Eastern Ukraine is really Russia but has fallen to 'Neo-Nazis' who attack Russians there, the result is not so different from what happened in 1939.

Yes, it can be argued that there are historical links between what is now Ukraine and Russia, that the Kievan Rus of the 9th century is considered the fons et origo of the Russian State, but are we to believe nothing changes in a thousand years of history, that there is some sort of 'pure' condition the restoration of which will end all wars? Putin seems to think he can be the contemporary equivalent of Peter the Great, which gives some indication of how this distorted Nationalist narrative is used to justify his war, a war he fights from behind a desk. And Peter was at least Six Foot Eight or just over 2 metres tall, which makes the comparison even more ridiculous.

As ever, Nationalist extremes produce extreme results, soaked in blood, the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and businesses just part of the necessary actions taken to achieve some perfect world. On this basis alone, Putin is doomed to fail. But there is no guarantee Ukraine will win either. It is a mess, and it will remain a mess.