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By the state / defense bureaucracy which is comprised (at this stage, after numerous purges) of ardent nationalists.
Where do commercial interests fit in? Is there some class of Ukrainian leadership/economic heavyweights which is hoping to gain from protracted slow-rolling defeat?
Yes the ones that are siphoning off percentages of US/EU aid money. Even one percent of two trillion dollars is a lot of cheese.
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Do you really think commercial interests are eager to go up against spicy nationalist types who have spent the last ~6 years at war or have seen all their friends die and have drone building and piloting skills ?
It only takes one team of fanatics to kill you dead, and when they can do it over a 3g network from the other side of a country ..
It's more that I have a hard time believing that the people in control aren't looking to gain something here, but are truly that ideologically committed.
You can't even fathom why people would be ideologically committed to their country not being consumed by Russia?
Yeah, pretty much. My model indicates that people who end up in power don't tend to have such hangups, though they'll definitely use rhetoric along those lines to get what they want.
'Keep fighting an unwinnable war because we love the (extremely recent) independence of Ukraine so much' is an odd stance for any competent person to take. Typically elites have lots of options including taking substantial assets elsewhere. Choosing to wipe out one's own population to prolong the inevitable doesn't strike me as particularly nationalistic either. Enough men are dead, and women are fled, that Ukraine as a concept is unrecoverable. There will be no substantial next generation. Why does it matter who the nominal rulers are, of empty farmland and disintegrating cities? Ukraine is gone.
So especially in that (famously corrupt) part of the world my expectation is that those in power are looking to take what they can from the situation, at whatever expense to the commoners, and make good their escape.
That anyone could believe otherwise makes me feel kind of sick. Lambs to the slaughter. What a wicked world.
I think the wrinkle in your model here is that the ones in power in Ukraine don't have much to gain from escaping. Unlike Russian oligarchs or Chinese millionaires, they probably lack in things like Swiss bank accounts, American anchor babies, or British summer homes (or what-have-you).
This whole framing of "elites choosing to wipe out their own population" is so bizarre to me. Maybe it makes sense if one imagines oneself as a dictator wanting to knock out two birds with one stone (ridding oneself of troublesome populations and killing as many of the enemy as possible), but I imagine that no leader truly views things in such cynical calculations. Sure, every medal on a general's lapel is someone's son, but at the same time, it probably gives no leader any great pleasure to know that their constituents' lives are spent doing something necessary.
because... what?
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