Subj : Russia's Defeat
To : Dumas Walker
From : Kaelon
Date : Wed Aug 02 2023 01:14 pm
Re: Russia's Defeat
By: Dumas Walker to KAELON on Wed Aug 02 2023 07:29 am
> It is certainly a surprise that he would model Hitler as you suggest. One
> or two reasons he might do so:
>
> 1. He thinks he learned from the Nazi mistakes and can do it better (which
> could also mean he is crazy)
There is no doubt that Putin believes that Hitler's failure was a failure of imagination, not a failure of design. The central tenet of the expansion playbook - recognize nationhood among ethnic peoples, give them your citizenship through passports, and then intervene in other countries on their behalf - is exactly what Putin has done in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. It's the Sudetenland Playbook almost verbatim.
> 2. If you study the early roots of the Russian Revolution, and what Stalin
> was up to in those years (thugs and chaos), it is possible he believes he is
> employing Stalinism rather than Hitlerism. Point #4 would then be covered
> by Putin's own dissappointment that the USSR was disolved and, as you
> pointed out, many of the USSR's best and brightest came from Ukraine so it
> makes sense to try to bring them back into the fold first.
Absolutely right. Certainly Stalinism is something that Putin admires, but the bigger problem is the demographic deficit that he needs to solve. First and foremost, the collapsing birthrates and population numbers in Russia (and in Ukraine) are attributed to the demographic collapse of its people stemming from the population inbalances borne from the Second World War (and the ~100M Russians and Ukrainians that died).
Secondly, and this one is far more complicated, recobbling the Soviet Union is a delusional objective that is divorced from the fundamental geopolitical realities with which the Russian Federation is faced. People forget that in the mid-1990s, Russia had a GDP smaller than Denmark's, and it was only through use of the petro-dollar and energy wars that Putin was able to construct a Russian economy that was largely extractive of value, not building said value.
This is not a recipe for any of the constituent former USSR member-states to want to rejoin a Union State under Russia's leadership. Except, of course, for those who have significant economic and political dependency on Russia. Such as Belarus. And before 2014, Ukraine.
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-=: Kaelon :=-
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