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Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
But I digress.
Russia’s actions don’t generally look like existential terror. Pushing Finland into NATO? Withdrawing from the INF treaty? (Possibly Trump’s fault, I guess.) Threatening tactical nukes?! That’s not how you deescalate the situation.
Keeping NATO missiles out of Ukraine is a tiny benefit compared to the other consequences.
This is natural, isn't it? The 'Putin is a huge bitch' narrative was pushed so heavily right from the start that any new information is likely to update in favour of Russia simply by virtue of regression to the mean.
Not for people who were already pointedly ignoring that narrative, no.
I would just like to underscore what a huge bitch I still think Putin is.
I've heard commodities traders say Gazprom would be the world's most valuable company if it wasn't inside of Putin's oligarchy, for example.
He has made the world strictly worse, especially for Russians.
That last part is a pretty difficult argument to take seriously given the absolute state Russia was in when he got the job.
Given that the US very much wanted Russia to join the capitalist democratic world order and get rich and fat and bent over backwards to try to make it happen I don't see that as a huge credit to him. There was an oil boom, forgiveness of debts, invitation to the WTO, and even talks of having them join NATO and he squandered all of it. It was like a once in a civilization offer.
That’s what the US said meanwhile they were pillaging the Russian economy, sponsoring Chechen terrorist groups, and muttering darkly about how it would be better if Russia just collapsed.
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Before Summer 2022, though, before the Kharkiv/Kherson offensives, even the mainstream pro-Ukrainian narrative was basically committed to the idea that Kherson and the areas taken in the north by AFU during that time were basically lost for good and any advance in those regions would only be the sort of small-scale grind that we've seen after that, from both sides. Only the more hysterically out-there pro-Ukrainians were saying that Ukraine could actually take large areas of territory back.
The narrative "right at the start" was that the near-certain outcome was a quick Russian victory leading to a messy insurgency.
There was a major shift in favour of Ukraine when the Russian blitzkrieg failed, and another one when the Ukrainians started fighting back. The narrative has shifted back in favour of Russia following modest Russian successes on the battlefield.
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Does it help to say I still think Putin is a huge bitch, like tinpot-dictator paranoid, and I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and if I had my choice we'd hit Putin with a nuke while he's hiding in his giant palace and only kill his most devoted sycophants? On a moral level, why the fuck can't Ukraine join NATO? Like they have every reason to distrust Russia and should be allowed to side with NATO.
Like somewhere in the above I wonder if we could actually be cold and logical enough to just first strike nuke Russia and totally wipe out their ability to retaliate and rid ourselves of this problem. Sure it's ghoulish, but think of it: a world without any threat from Russia ever again. The best time to have nuked Russia was in 1945. The second best time is now. Sorry we ever doubted you, John von Neumann (PBUH!)
How's that for finding alpha?
As I said somewhere in a related descendant of this thread, I think Putin was expecting Ukraine to cave immediately and demonstrate why you should not gesture in the direction of NATO. This isn't going how they planned and all of their actions afterwards have been bad.
All the Russian moves seemed to have assumed a more-or-less immediate collapse of the Ukrainian government and its armed forces. Everything about the first two weeks of the war, and Russia's grand strategy in general, seems to have been predicated on that. It will be really interesting to see if we ever get a behind-the-scenes history of the decision making involved because I would bet a lot of crazy things were being said behind closed doors immediately before and after the start of the war.
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