Subj : Russia's Defeat
To : Dumas Walker
From : Kaelon
Date : Tue Aug 01 2023 03:07 pm
Re: Russia's Defeat
By: Dumas Walker to KAELON on Mon Jul 31 2023 09:10 am
> This is an interesting point. The Spanish Civil War was indeed a trial run
> for several of Germany's new war technologies and strategies. It is
> possible that Putin (or others) saw Ukraine as a similar test.
Certainly it has been a test for other authoritarians, and in particular China, to determine (a) what the World's reaction to an unprovoked seizure of a smaller country would be, and (b) how effective said seizure would unfold. It was clearly China's policy to enter into this "no limits" partnership with Russia as a way to supply and study Russia's occupation of Ukraine.
Things turned out very badly for Russia - and by extension, as the senior partner of this endeavor, China - given Russia's absolute paper-tiger syndrome with its incompetent military, and obviously, the world's dramatic intervention into and support of Ukraine. So the calculus surely has gone something like this:
China evaluates the feasibility of seizing Taiwan, which it must do in order to manage global confrontation with the United States. Ukraine becomes the testbed, like thge Spanish Civil War was the proving ground for Axis participation against democratic forces. Russia collapses, in large part due to corruption and incompetence (both of which are also rampant in the Chinese system). The World isolates Russia and it becomes a pariah state. China, desperate to distance itself from its terrible gamble, starts to float peace plans and deny alignment with Putin.
China, however, doesn't have many options. Like Hitler and the Third Reich, Xi must seize Taiwan and control the world's microchip supply if he is to truly cement his legacy and provide China's ascent to super-power status. So I expect confrontation is all but inevitable at this stage, but it looks really messy for China and the West seems all the more ready to help Taiwan extract a vicious toll from any aggression.
> If this were the USSR days, I have no doubt that Putin would have been
> moved aside by now. You bring up another interesting point, that much of
> the territory of Russia includes republics that are not ethnically Russian.
Russia has had significant cultural and demographic challenges that were largely obscured by the Soviet Union, which at least on its surface was titularly universalist and not aligned to any of its constituent republics' cultures (even if it was led by and controlled by the Russians). Now that the Russian Federation has had to contend with multiple separatist movements (Chechnya, as you mention, but also the other peripheral states), we see the terrible price that cultural and demographic discontinuity poses on a consistent basis for the Russian leadership.
> I have found some irony in this war in that one of Putin's supposedly most
> ardent supporters is the leader of Chechnya, which in the recent past had a
> strong separatist movement and is majority muslim. The current leadership
> has apparently gotten rich off of being an ally of Russia. Otherwise, I
> would expect that area to be the first to try to break away.
Chechnya today is very different but not necessarily because of, for example, a Spanish-Basque detente. In that case, Spain recognized that economic disparity was the primary driver of Basque separatism, and spend many years investing in the autonomous region's prosperity in order to quell independence. It worked. But in Chechnya, Putinism was the strategy employed. This is deeply problematic for several reasons.
Putinism, in essence, is a cult of personality similar to Hitlerism in the Third Reich. In many ways, Vladimir Putin clearly has modeled his confrontation strategy after the Fuhrer's. It's surprising given just how unsuccessful the underlying strategy was. It goes like this:
1. Value loyalty over competence, always.
2. Nurture acolytes willing to protect you (i.e., take the blame).
3. Deploy thugs to manufacture cassus belli and/or chaos to control the security narrative.
4. War.
In Chechnya, Putin leveraged the FSB - the modern-day KGB - to forment pro-war sentiment by staging terrorist attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then blamed it on the Chechens. He then invaded Chechnya with overwhelming force, and used several key acolytes in the military to reduce Grozny to a pile of ash, to set an example for any other breakaway region. Finally, he installed similar thugs to "run" the new Chechnya, in essence, like a mafia: through intimidation, corruption, and crime.
Kadyrov, as the very thug who leads the feared Chechen military, has been deployed to Ukraine and has been humiliated repeatedly. People may forget, but his elite squadron of murderers were sent to infiltrate Kyiv and assassinate Volodimyr Zelensky, and they were all killed by Ukranian troops except for Kadyrov himself. He's now relegated to propagandist behind the scenes.
Russia is run this way: like a criminal enterprise whose sole purpose it is to drive Vladimir Putin's storyline - which prior to this invasion was simply limited to his own wealth, but now clearly has imperial ambitions. French President Macron has observed - because he had weekly phone calls with Putin during the pandemic - that at some point around October of 2021, Putin had a sudden personality change. Whether he suffered a stroke or a psychotic split, the result is the same: cabin fever turned this man into the impulsive monster that the world will have to end.
> I have not kept up recently with other areas of unrest in the Federation.
>
> IIRC, the Crimea is more ethnically Russian than Ukrainian. Crimea was
> moved under the Ukraine SSR by Moscow sometime during the Cold War.
It's surprising that Nikita Kruschev's cession of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR was not reversed earlier, given that it was largely a publicity stunt designed to "reward" Ukrainian people. Let's also not forget that Kruschev, like many Soviet Secretary Generals, also led the Ukrainian SSR, even though he himself was ethnically Russian. Ukraine has long represented some of the finest soldiers and scientists that the Soviet Union had access to, a fact surely not lost on Putin who laments the dissolution of the USSR as an "unforgiveable crime against history."
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-=: Kaelon :=-
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