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I don't know if he will use nukes. I thought the war preparation itself will resolve as a bluff to assuage the wounded pride etc. Miscalculations are hard to predict.
but it's my extremely strong belief that he's not a Nationalist (of course neither was Brezhnev). He's not any -ist or -ian or whatever. He's a tiny psychopathic Mafia don out of his depth. He's occasionally aping a Nationalist, an Orthodox Christian and a strongly identifying Russian because that gives his overwhelmingly Nationalist Russian Orthodox plebeians (which is to say, just Ruskies with default firmware) some warm fuzzies; back when they weren't reminded enough of this cheap and robust mindset, he would talk more about economic ties and development and shiet. He will turn on a dime and call himself a liberal, then appoint a homosexual to oversee traditional morality (including beatings of gays), then criminalize hate speech and Russian Nationalism so that nats die in prisons, then say he's reading a Russian Fascist Ilyin and sign an essay endorsing nationalistic talking points, then go kiss the Wall in Israel, then fedpost on air about Judeo-Bolsheviks, then endorse tribal minorities abusing Slavs, then send them and Slavs together into the meat grinder to subjugate a slightly different sort of Slavs. He'll call Azov «neonazis» and threaten retribution, then release them. He really is unshackled by any ideology, moral code or decision theory, and his behavior is, if scrutinized in good faith as the behavior of some political visionary, grotesque and mostly incoherent.
But he can get very serious on particular occasions. Insults (Nemtsov and Saakashvili who called him a shorty, foreign leaders who don't respect his autoritah and don't want to listen to his bloviation). Legitimate threat to safety, power and prestige (Navalny, journos digging his dirty laundry). Betrayal (Litvinenko, Skripals). And trouble for his vassals. He does not tolerate betrayals, and he seemingly does not betray his own. Right now, Russia has conducted a prisoner exchange with Ukraine. 215 Ukrainian and foreign fighters for 54 Russians and this piece of shit Medvedchuk. You see, he's Putin's kum: Putin is a godfather of his daughter. They're family.
Sure he has embezzled resources provided for subversion of Ukraine and implementation of those frivolous Imperialist schemes. Sure that's cost tens of thousands of Russian lives, and possibly everything. But Russia is a footnote to the clan's well-being. Mere substrate. A project dedicated to the promotion of Russian power is only another кормление, a domain to extract rent from, for a clan member.
Opportunist?
...Good catch.
But he's not a consistent opportunist either. Maybe a nihilist? Anyway he does not subscribe to any systematic ideology like nationalism; if his guiding heuristics were reified into abstract formulas, I can believe that they'll be what he says on the matter of «lessons of streets of Leningrad». Hit first etc. – very rudimentary game theory.
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