I can’t say this about everyone here, but you’re one of the few that has intellect and the ability to decipher through vast amounts of military and political information. Most don’t understand the complexities around sending things like jet fighters and are driven emotionally to push our government to act for the sake of Ukraine, while ignoring other ramifications such as the possibility of nuclear war without the basic understanding of what this would mean. My message wasn’t for you, but for others who hasn’t quite grasped the potential dangers ahead and why our government has been navigating carefully.
I've observed for years that politics is not the art of getting everything you want, it's the art of achieving what's possible. There are many things that might we think are great ideas, but there is too much political opposition to it. Getting a few baby steps in the right direction is often the only thing that can be achieved.
As the war prolongs more stories like this will get out, as cruel as it is, Russians need to hear about it.
The video below is shared on YouTube by a 23 year old Russian girl who has studied hard all her life for a brighter future. Her description of sanctions paint a tough reality that average Russians are facing, the protests/arrests that continue, and why she feels leaving Russia is for the best. The way the Russian police are reacting tells me how paranoid Putin has become.
Russians under their early 40s have no first hand experience of what the Soviet Union was like. Even Russians under about 60 have few memories of the hardships before they started opening up a little bit in the 1970s. There were a fair number of western goods available in the last years before the USSR collapsed, and then there was a decade of hardship followed by Putin's rise to power. Putin and his cronies robbed the country blind, but they allowed in a wide array of western goods and the major cities saw rises in incomes that allowed a growing middle class to afford those goods.
That's why Putin has enjoyed such popularity. He's seen as rescuing Russia from the grips of the 90s chaos.
Russia is returning now to a world similar to the USSR under communism, but it's not the 80s fairly decent version of communism when Russia was opening up and a lot of the restrictions were lifting, it's going to be the 30s dark, grim world that almost nobody in Russia remembers. The hardliners who want the "good old days of communism" are thinking about the heyday of the 1980s and they are not going to be happy with the grim police state that is likely coming.
Ok... My bad. The text I quoted is a template that citizens in democracies can send to their democratically elected leaders. She didn't ask for US military involvement. She's asking for weapons so the Ukrainians can create their own "no fly zone" to combat Putler.
Why does US Military personel have to setup the Patriots? Why can't we teach the Ukrainians how to do it? Then they'll be able to do it themselves.
This war has now lasted some eight years. It's probably going to continue for years to come. It's long overdue to start factoring that in...
Putin has a shelf life and so does the army. Russia can't keep the army in the field much longer. Their losses have been staggering and they are doing things like shanghaiing men off the streets of towns in occupied Donbas to be thrown into the meat grinder and raising units of poorly equipped, untrained men from the poorest regions of Russia. They are also scouring their reserve pools of equipment for anything that runs.
One regiment commander committed suicide because of the replacement tanks he was given, only 10% ran. Almost all had missing optics and electronics that had been stolen and sold for whatever the soldiers could get for it. Some of the tanks didn't even have engines. All the vehicles had been sitting out in the Russian winters for 30 years and were in bad shape.
There are stories of soldiers sent out at night to take the uniforms off dead soldiers to give to new recruits. Replacements have been seen with WW II style helmets and rifles retired from frontline service decades ago. A few have been seen with WW II rifles. A video of a new unit recruited from a rural province showed them wearing cheap plastic rain boots you would see for kids at Walmart.
I have read several stories that Putin has put tremendous pressure on the army to capture the entire Donbas by May 9th (VE Day which is a huge military holiday in Russia) so they can declare a "great" victory and end the war. They are trying to do it with a very depleted army. If they hadn't tried to capture Kyiv and threw those troops at the Donbas, they might have succeeded, but the units that were engaged in the north have suffered huge losses and now are going to be thrown back into the fray with less to work with than they had in February.
Russia has a tradition of getting antsy about changing leadership after a loss. The US can shake off the losses in Afghanistan and Iraq and move on. Most Americans don't even think about it. But for Russia their military success is a source of great pride and failures are a source of great shame. Most Russians who were old enough to remember the break up of the USSR see it as a huge national shame that needs to be erased by putting the empire back together.
Trying to do it and failing is another shame.
Russia has a very different history than the rest of Europe. There is a lot of Mongol Horde mentality in the culture. They also have a lot of paranoia because many peoples have invaded the country over the years. Because the most populated parts of the country are also very flat, it's fairly easy to invade. Russia built its empire over centuries slowly conquering all of northern Asia. They furthered that empire after WW II by making vassal states out of Eastern Europe.
Russia's growth hinged on conquering the people's who were already occupying the territory they invaded. They developed brutal ways to put down uprisings and would be uprisings.
The American empire is very different. North America is a vast, natural fortress and the United States has been blessed with only two land neighbors, neither of which ever posed a serious invasion threat after the War of 1812 and have been generally fairly peaceful. The US also had a continent that was mostly unpopulated. It was believed for some time that the population of the Americas when Europeans arrived was around 120 million, but a recent scholarly analysis has revised that down to around 40 million.
Quite a few died of diseases the Europeans brought with them in the first centuries, so by the time Americans started spreading westward, there were not that many people to oppose them. In hindsight it would have been much more humanitarian to come to some kind of agreement to share the continent. Unlike the Russians empire, sharing with the Native Americans could have been achieved without the fighting if the Europeans had been less racist about it.
But to conquer the continent the American government needed to give their settlers a fairly free hand to go where they wished and settle where they wanted because the main thing they were conquering was the land, and the people were just an inconvenience that was swept out of the way. (Not saying it was right, that was the attitude.)
Psychologically because the Russians have had such competition with other people for the land over the centuries, they freak out when they lose a war because on some level it feels like an existential threat to their existence. Logically Russia itself is not going to lose anything significant to Russia's existence if they lose this war, but the national PTSD over losing militarily will likely kick in.
Kamil Galeev is in the process of writing three essays on what will likely happen to Russia coming out of this war.
1) Putin survives and Russia turns into a hermit state like North Korea.
2) Putin is toppled and replaced with another autocrat who tries to reboot imperial Russia.
3) Russia's ethnic divides come out as the country goes into turmoil after the war and Russia breaks up into multiple countries.
He has written the first two, the third is coming.
I think the top leadership under Putin will give him a "Russian retirement" when it becomes obvious they have lost the war, put another autocrat in who is Putin-light, and blame the entire war on Putin. But with the economic chaos caused by the sanctions and mixed loyalties between Putin's old guard and the people who are backing the new guy, the ethnic divides will start to surface and various regions will start to break away from the union.
I see Kadyrov (Chechen leader) is preparing for this eventuality. His troops around Mariupol are making a lot of videos of their heroism which are clearly staged and they are doing none of the fighting. He's doing what Chaing Kai Shek did in WW II, trying to avoid combat with the current enemy to save his forces for the civil war that's coming. If Chechnya has a functional army and the rest of Russia's army is a broken force, Chechnya can declare its independence and there isn't much Russia can do about it.
Chechnya leaving could trigger a cascade of other regions wanting to leave. The provinces in far eastern Russia have little cultural connection to Moscow. In a weakened Moscow scenario they might see it as an opportunity to leave and the Chinese would support that. They could end up economic vassals of China, but they would be gone from Russia.
Other regions in Russia's south are Muslim cultures that don't feel much of a connection to Moscow either, I could see them leave too.
The Moscow-St Petersburg region would probably stick together. Culturally they have a fair bit in common. But I could see a lot of the far east and southern parts of the country leaving.
It is possible Putin will manage to hang on and it's also possible that a new autocrat could hold Russia together. A new imperial Russia is probably the most dangerous for the rest of the world. The Putin remaining scenario is probably grimmest for the people stuck in Russia.