I was going to start a thread on the Ukraine war, to follow up on the Ukraine war thread on the old site. But was listening to an interview with a Ukrainian commander on the radio. He said something which struck me as an issue which will become talked about more and more and particularly after the war has finished. He said that after the war has finished Putin will have to explain to the Russian people what the war was for and why so many Russian men had to die. Also why so many Ukrainian people had to die and so much destruction was necessary.
So it seems to me that the thread should be called Putin’s folly in Ukraine, rather than the Ukraine war. Because the topic of discussion will increasingly become about the reasons for the war and what Putin’s motivations and goals are. Whether it was all a monumental mistake and questions about Putin’s sanity. Because to put it frankly if any goals can be identified, they have not been achieved, or if they have, it was at great cost to the Russian people and their reputation in the world.
I don’t think Putin is insane (not in the clinical way, anyway). I think that people in power are usually so shielded from a proper understanding of the world, and have been indoctrinated or self-indoctrinated into abstract ideas about the state of the world, which call to them to do something, or claim power over something because that’s the measure of their reality.
I think Putin is deeply indoctrinated into the ideal of imperial power and being an authority in that manner. It’s the way he sees the world, regardless of facts telling him that the world has moved on from those ideals.
And having a group of yes-men around him, this self-radicalization pushed his confidence in how powerful Russia is, into the folly of invading Ukraine. He might even have believed that the Ukrainian people wanted to go back to such imperial ideals and underestimated how much they wanted more liberal Western ideals.
And now he’s holding on to the delusion as far as he can, with his yes-men not wanting to fall out of their balcony, continuously perpetuating the illusion of the need for Putin to do this.
I had the perception before that the rich and powerful had plans, regardless of how evil some of those plans are, but nowadays I’m beginning to realize, as we see stuff like the Epstein files, and interviews with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, etc., that these powerful people, politicians and dictators are just playing with the world like children.
There are no plans, there are only demands by powerful people who are essentially behaving like children, and the world is their playground.
Since there are no consequences for their behavior, they do whatever they like until there are.
There is no grand plan, there is only delusion. There is no actual vision, there’s only a child’s craving to reach such power that they get whatever they want with the wave of their hand.
It is people attempting to crown themselves kings, because no one stands in the way telling them no.
I don’t think Putin is insane. But I do think that he is a meglomaniac, with delusions of grandeur and power. Now he has to to be able to portray whatever outcome can be reached as a victory. He has to be perceived as winning which means at the very least owning a large slab of the occupied territories, which Ukraine will never concede. Hence the stalemate.
I don’t think Putin is a megalomaniac, Russia itself under this siloviki rule views itself as a Great Power totally different from an ordinary nation state. That’s why Putin sounds like a megalomaniac. Russia is like this.
I’ve noticed that it is extremely hard for some to understand Russia and were Putin comes from. First of all, Russia is not a nation state, but a remnant of a vast empire that survived intact well beyond it’s time thanks to the Soviet Union and only then collapsed. Yet Russia, even now still, has basically colonial territories obtained in the 19th Century, in this case linked by the vast steppe into Russia proper, not colonies overseas as other Great Powers had. Yet the rift is there: the War in Chechnya was basically something like the Algerian war for France with the difference that Putin prevailed (where Yeltsin had lost to the Chechens). This makes Russia totally different from Germany or France. This also creates the extremely important reasoning for Putin that many commentators (like Mersheimer, Jeffrey Sachs) totally disregard and a totally different situation for Russia how it acts in it’s near abroad.
First of all, why did Putin see the collapse of the Soviet Union as the largest tragedy of the 20th Century?
Imagine a British Prime minister that came to the conclusion that it would be far better for him to be the prime minister of England and being British is nonsense and basically one should do away with the United Kingdom and the British Parliament. Would Scotland reject this? Nope. What in this situation could Whales and Northern Ireland do? Nothing else than just to accept the dissolution of the United Kingdom. And the people that thought they were British? Well, they would have to learn new identities.
This is basically what happened when it was the Russian Federation with Yeltsin himself urging for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Without Russia proper, Soviet Union just ceased to exist. And this was the traumatic event that Putin has now all his career as the leader of Russia tried to correct.
Hence for Putin to call independent Ukraine “an artificial construct” shows just how deep the blatant imperialism goes. It is simply part of what this Russia is today. Imagine again a British prime minister calling Ireland being an artificial construct and the it being the most natural thing that all of the British Isles should be part of the United Kingdom. Yep, the Irish would be literally up in arms. But with Russia, we take this kind of rhetoric as “natural”.
Putin started his presidency with a war and wars have been a success story for him. It all worked really well until February 2022, when Putin as a bold gambler gambled too much. Likely he thought that it indeed would be a “special military operation” like the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. After all, taking Crimea had been quick and bloodless military operation and Ukraine had not been able to crush the insurgencies in the Donbas.
Yes, I agree with your analysis of these rich and powerful men. Also about the problem of being surrounded by yes men. But I think we need to view Putin differently, like SSU’s depiction of a Russian leader. He isn’t behaving like a child, but being a visionary, a great Russian leader. With a grand vision of Russian imperialism. But it isn’t working out for him, or the Russian people. The invasion of Ukraine isn’t going well. The ceasefire negotiations keep stalling. He hasn’t achieved his (professed) goal of creating a buffer zone between Russia and Europe, the opposite has happened. Now Europe is re-arming and the lucrative trade in oil and gas with Europe is ending.
At home he is cracking down on political dissent, Navalney was obviously poisoned last year. People have to be careful what they say and to whom. As the situation deteriorates he may increase the totalitarianism and return the country to Stalinism.
I certainly don’t see Russia as achieving any kind of victory in Ukraine.
Yes, if he or Russia are perceived to have failed, the situation for Putin could become dangerous. He could lose his grip on power and the whole edifice he has created could fall like a house of cards. Also any sign of weakness will likely be disastrous for the campaign in Ukraine. Or if he loses his grip on power, the war will likely end and the blame game will begin. This would certainly mean prison or worse for Putin. Something he will be desperate to avoid. He might have a plan for exile in China, or something.
Yes, I do see Putin this way, having listened to some of his speeches and learning some Russian history. Along with commentary from Russia correspondents, I have realised the imperial nature of Russia. It seems like they are a conquering nation, continually prepairing for and planning imperial expansion. Going back a long way into history. I am beginning to wonder how this squares with the Communist revolution. Does communism sit alongside imperialism? They don’t seem like obvious bedfellows to me.
I am no particular friend of Putin (or any other involved leader), but it seems to me in discussions like this background of the conflict is often missing. Putin did not invade a united, peaceful Ukraine, as is often claimed. He intervened in a civil war that had been going on since 2014, when the (ethnically majority Russian) Eastern provinces declared separation from the newly installed central government in Kiev. And I do not really see how any other Russian leader could acted differently. Certainly not Medvedev, who would be 2nd in command. The roots of the conflict go back to the Maidan “color revolution” of 2014. For some background on that I would recommend to watch Oliver Stones “Ukraine on fire” documentary.
You mean the civil war he himself started? There would be little conflict if it was not instigated, mostly financed and controlled by Russians. This in the words of the main actor of the events, Igor Girkin, who has little reason to lie in the matter.
You have also forgot to mention that the conflict started after the annexation of Crimea, so yes, Putin did invade the peaceful Ukraine.
“There would be little conflict” is speculation. You do not run an extended civil war without support from the population, which in Dombas and Luhansk is majority Russian. And the annexation of the Crimea was geopolitical necessity. Can you imagine any Russian leader accepting Sevastopol becoming a Nato (aka US) base and the Black Sea a US lake? The whole situation looks different when you look at history and geopolitics. Does the situation not remind you at all of the Cuba crisis?
Both sides here are repeating arguments that have been appearing all over Facebook and YouTube comments threads for the last four years. Can you all please try to do better.
Putin has invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea when there was no civil war, so what you wrote above is simply false. Now you are pivoting to ‘geopolitical necessity’, hoping that we move away your first false claim. I am not interested in that.
Putin annexed the Crimea (after a referendum, which you can dispute if you want) as a direct result of the 2014 regime change in Ukraine. The situation with Sevastopol being in the hands of the new anti-Russian government in Kiev would have been unacceptable to any Russian government. Context is important to understand history.
Any of this does not make your false initial claim that ‘Putin did not invade a united, peaceful Ukraine’ more true. And of course Putin has annexed the Crimea after he have invaded Ukraine.
Offense is best defense. And when you insist that you are anti-imperialist, you naturally can act similarly as you are just broadening and exporting the revolution to other parts of the World!
Russia’s geography, The great Russian steppe and plains, is one fundamental reason that has made Russia behave so. I’ve quoted many times Catherine the Great as she said: “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” That really is the Russian mentality even today. If let’s say China would start on the Eastern side of the Urals, then the Ural mountains would be a “natural” border for Russia. But east of the Urals there were just the taiga, nomadic tribes and the remnant states of the Mongol Horde, which Russia could easily defeat and capture (especially after modern rifles put an end to the superiority of the Mongol cavalry). When the Russian Empire transformed to be the Soviet Union, the country had for the first time an unifying identity, all people being Soviet. And being the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninist, that imperialism of Russia could be simply denied to exist! They were all communists, you know. Hence the Soviet Union never solved at all it’s imperial past, it simply denied the question even existing. This was totally obvious when parts of the country, namely Armenians and Azeris, were already fighting their war even before the Soviet Union had formally ended. When Russia today has 25 official languages with vast regions that aren’t at all Russian, you can see the obvious problem. It’s one thing to have Muslim migrants in your country, totally another issue to have vast territories were muslim people with their own culture have lived for Centuries.
And if the Central Asian countries or the people of the Caucasus got to suffer violent oppression, with the Circassians suffering outright genocide in the 19th Century, Russia can try to influence others by other means those that it doesn’t reach.
My country is the best example with having being an autonomy under Russia (got that great deal because Alexander I was back then worried about Napoleon and wanted to pacify territories gotten from Sweden). The Russification of Finland was attempted only during the twilight of the Russian empire and hence Finns and Finnish historians have actually a positive view about the time when Finland was a Grand Dutchy of Russia. Later we had “Finlandization” in the post-WW2 Cold War era.
This means that Putin isn’t going to send tanks to every country: yet it will use it’s power to seek influence otherwise. If Russia could be able to negotiate with every European country on a bilateral basis, it would be the more powerful country. Thus EU (and NATO) is Putin’s enemy and the present US policy towards the EU is a heavenly blessing for Kremlin. The positive thing is that Europe has woken up to this.
If there is something that Russia needs, it’s a revolution, because that is the only way it can stop behaving as an imperial power and transform to something else.
I’ll say up-front that I’m against the Russian state’s invasion of Ukraine. It was a stupid, brutal, and cynical move that prioritized power over people, and as such was and remains morally indefensible.
But I’m sceptical about this claim of yours, because it attributes a fixed trans-historical essence to a nation. I don’t think there is much support for such a view, at least among historians and social scientists.
You say “going back a long way,” but this papers over huge changes in context and motivation. Russian history includes periods of subjugation (under Mongol domination), consolidation and expansion under Muscovy, the imperial projects of Peter, Catherine, and later Tsars, and then the very different ideological framework of the Soviet Union. Generalizing across these periods might obscure more than it explains.
Those centuries were not marked only, or even primarily, by outward expansion; there were long stretches of internal consolidation, defensiveness, and retreat.
And though I certainly don’t want to engage in whataboutism (a speciality of Putin’s, incidentally), I do want to push back against the suggestion that Russia is uniquely or especially imperial. Comparatively, territorial expansion has been a normal feature of many large states, not least the European empires whose legacies still shape the world today to its detriment (and, in a different form, the American sphere of power).
Great point. The Bolsheviks initially proclaimed the right of the former imperial territories to self-determination, but in practice many were reabsorbed into the new Soviet state during the Civil War. From the Bolshevik perspective, this was not “imperialism” but liberation: they believed they were replacing national domination with an internationalist socialist order that superseded imperial rivalry.
In practice, the USSR often functioned in imperial ways, especially as central control tightened under Stalin. So communism and imperial-style power were not theoretically aligned, but historically they coexisted.
Some Marxists argue that the failure of worldwide revolution forced the USSR into conventional geopolitical competition, seeking security, power, and influence beyond its borders like other major states. I.e., they were forced into it by international capitalism. But this still leaves open the question of whether such behaviour differs in substance from the imperial politics it claimed to transcend.
‘Reabsorbed’ is a rather gentle way of putting it. The Soviets have invaded Georgia in 1921, fought with the Ukraine’s Republic and Poland in 1919-1921, invaded Poland and Finland in 1939, the Baltic States in 1940 and Romania in 1941. So the ‘reabsorption’ was done mostly with the use of force against the unwilling nations.
And of course after the USSR has been given control over most of the Eastern Europe after the WWII, it has crushed any drive to self-determination, with interventions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, near intervention in Poland in 1956 and with the crushing of the Czech Spring in 1968. Even after the perestroika Russia tried to intervene in the Baltic States in 1991.
So yes, Russian ‘communism’ sat alongside imperialism quite comfortably - it was just of many facets of how the declared values of communism differed from the reality. After all, communism has promised to give all the power into the hands of the people, while in reality the bloc has been ruled by a small clique of hand-picked authoritarians.
It’s not a claim I’m making, I was agreeing with SSU’s assement, it wasn’t a claim I was intending to make as the OP is about Putin. I only have an entry level understanding of Russian history. But there are historical examples of Russia expanding and imposing Russification on its neighbours in Eastern Europe.
The point I was heading towards regarding Putin is that he is portraying himself and seems to think this way himself as a visionary leader with a kind of make Russia great again vision. There is an imperialist slant here, which is what I was getting at. So I see Putin as someone who has legitimised his actions to himself and therefore portrayed them as legitimate to the Russian people and claims they are to onlookers and opponents abroad.
This what I was getting at, I see the result as a monster, a sleeping bear which awakes from time to time. Both imperialism and communism lend towards centralisation to a small clique of self appointed individuals who then exercise their power over the people unquestioned. When it is questioned, the dissent is rooted out. Take the example of Navalney’s treatment. Surely there is a risk ever present of a return to Stalinism. Something which I fear is starting to happen now.