The great Russian empire depending on prisoners, poor young boys from the -stans, India and Africa. Should Europe be afraid? I don’t think so
Capitaine wrote:
NATO has logistical problems in Europe: no EU or Schengen for the military
PR says there is, and it is even wider than the Schengen area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Mobility
France (and Malta) don’t participate (or France didn’t but now does?), non-EU Norway, UK, Canada and USA are part of it, etc.
Arun wrote:
Surely Putin’s plan was not to rebuff the level-playing field with the west that Russia had and grovel before China, India, Iran, North Korea etc. to sell oil and buy ammunition/drones – sunk cost fallacy analogy comes to my mind.
Yea sure. And of course the war has cost a lot of Russian businesses their existence or at least made their lives really uncomfortable. That is what I meant with being perplexed. Particularly those who built up businesses or professional lives in the West lost out quite a bit. Still their take is highly ambivalent, many openly support Putin while others are either openly against the war or simply shut up out of fear. Of course, those people are a very tiny minority given the whole population.
aart wrote:
Should Europe be afraid? I don’t think so
Being afraid is what the goal of the whole rethoric is. Putin wants to instill fear and he does not really know or care about the difference between respect and fear. The way he’s been acting, his whole operation and stance against the West has been to instill fear of (nuclear) retribution if the West was to openly interfere, i.e. with boots on the ground in Ukraine. So far, it has been people like Medvedev, the once president who at the time appeared to be a lot more liberal than Putin was, who keep barking up the European tree and threatening the West with armageddon, but obviously he does so under orders and with a purpose.
Afraid, no. Concerned, yes. Ready for further “military operations?” by all means. Many respected analysts today are clear on the fact that Ukraine is by far not the last ambition Putin has. He even now starts making noise in the Baltics, moving sea borders and so on. My bet is that any next move he might want to consider will be to reconnect Kaliningrad with the “Rodina” by force. The baltic states clearly are on his shopping list, as is everything which used to be part of the USSR.
One analyst I listen to very attentively is Colonel Markus Reisner of the Austrian Bundesheer on their youtube channel. He is well worth listening to as opposed to others, his analysis is mostly free of emotional baggage and to the point of a military professional.
Putin has been very open about his objective of making anybody with a brain leave Russia.
Certainly dumbing down the already heavily brainwashed population makes things simpler for him.
Communism and socialism etc has always thrived on the stupid and lazy who like the day to day stability. Czechoslovakia would have eventually gone the same way but they had it only 1947-1989 which wasn’t long enough (plus CZ has a history of initiative etc) whereas Russia has had it 1920-present and is almost certainly beyond recovery even if Putin vanished.
aart wrote:
The great Russian empire depending on prisoners, poor young boys from the -stans, India and Africa.
That’s one of the tactics to provide resources for meat grinder and at the same time avoid body bags hit Russian urban area.
Peter wrote:
Communism and socialism etc has always thrived on the stupid and lazy who like the day to day stability.
Scaring those who have something to loose or whose ambition is beyond the daily bread and sausage ration into submission and providing “stability” for those who don’t care beyond it indeed.
It beggars belief how many people in former Soviet puppet states still look back at this in nostalgia…. they do die out slowly but there are still a good few who keep telling me how nice everything was organized under Zhivkov and similar folks.
This shows how modern cruise missiles don’t fly straight to their targets
Especially defenceless in the UK with the Labour Frontbench wanting to disarm our nuclear arsenal.
Peter wrote:
This shows how modern cruise missiles don’t fly straight to their targets
This is interesting, thank you
An article from the New York Times on Ukrainian buildings damaged by war, based on before/after comparison of 50TB of satellite photos by a geography PhD candidate. Even if you don’t read the text, I recommend looking at the graphics to get an idea of the scale of destruction. The estimates are conservative; the sources and methodology section at the very bottom gives more information and is also interesting.
