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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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In short, many Russian hawks believe that far from being a careful long term aggressive planner with a strategy for seriously threatening NATO, Putin is actually a cautious and incompetent leader who has never been willing to confront the West in a serious way until he had a bit of a change of heart sometime around 2-3 years ago

I largely agree with that (an interesting question may be what exactly happened 2-3 years ago that made him change his mind, but let's leave it alone for now). Putin is pretty cowardly person (remember his 1km table) and he usually attacks when he does not expect serious resistance, and that's what he expected in Ukraine - token resistance and quick settlement. But that ship has sailed and now he is in the action. So the question is - how far he will be willing to take it if he feels his political survival needs more and more bloodshed?

The only part I disagree is that there's no "what it would really take to succeed" - there's no realistic scenario that could "succeed" in a way that the above people mean - i.e. capture most or whole of Ukraine without destroying Russia on the way. The best case scenario is what Putin is rooting for near-term - freezing the current battle lines and keeping what they captured (maybe minus Zaporizhzhya - I don't think anybody wants Russian troops loitering around the biggest atomic power station in Europe) and rearming for the next round, while expecting (quite reasonably, given the history) Ukrainians to start squabbling between themselves and tearing themselves apart in the quest to steal the most of Western "reconstruction" money.

In any case, I think that Poland is almost certainly out of the question. The Russian army has barely managed to take the relatively small parts of Ukraine that it currently controls and simply does not have the strength to take on Poland's military in open combat while at the same time fighting Ukraine.

Oh of course. I imagine the Poland question only become relevant if one of the "peace" plans - involving freezing the current situation and letting Putin withdraw most of the forces from there without losing the territories. And even then it'd take quite a while - it took Putin 8 years to get bold enough to attack Ukraine even after he occupied Crimea.

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