So many lives lost for interests of select few, bunch of goblin cnuts.
Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
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Don't put words in people's mouths. Putin dying or being removed would sort out the Putin issue. You are also for some reason greatly underestimating Putin's agency.
And yes, the possibility is that someone worse would ascend, but maybe with such an extreme protagonist, the odds of someone worse are low?
1. No one can tell and it's kind of a wishful thinking yet... Russia is an authoritarian personalist dictatorship and those often do not survive the death of their creator, historically. There's not a single figure in Russia's governing circles that's fit for an immediate replacement if anything happens with Putin — and that's by design. When someone becomes too popular, not just from an opposition, they're quickly dealt with and humiliated — Medvedev is the most notable example.
2. The possibility of that isn't much bigger than that of a random asteroid hitting the Earth in the upcoming months. It's not non-existent. But it's not going to happen.
Then they will become increasingly irrelevant. Letting them dictate the fortunes of the rest of the world would be a ridiculous solution to easing their authoritarian death throes.
WWI was as bad it could get until Hitler came into power and said hold my beer.
The saying nice guys finish last is true in most spheres of power and I honestly don't see a nice guy coming in after Putin.
As @harms pointed out above, the odds of worse are low. And nobody suggested a nice guy at any point.
As mentioned english is not my primary language. I now understand the term is more unappropriate in english than my language, where it also has more meanings. I would like to apologize, as it was not my intent to cause offence, certainly not to gay people. Really, if you or anyone else wish to continue discussion on cultural and lingual differences we can do that via PM as I don't want to derail the thread.
I would like to sincerely thank you for taking time and engaging with me on this topic. It has been very enlightening. I'd also like to apologize for being argumentative and doubling down on the term. I should have immediately clarified I'm not native english speaker and asked to be more informed. Thank you.
I will no longer reply on this topic not to derail the discussion, as it should be about illegal invasion of Ukraine and/or current treatment of the same country by current US administration.
Are they low though?
What makes you think the likely hood of someone as bad or worse won't come in after him?
Putin is bad no doubt but there's been worse in history.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm playing devil's advocate here and asking questions
There have been worse, so yes it's possible, but so many more who haven't. It's just probability in my opinion. And it's just that, an opinion. Not one I see worth debating as it's mostly hypothetical.
Fair enough, I don't know the ins and outs of political figures in Russia and I thought there might have been realistic preferable people that could come in after Putin
This is going to be really tricky to get the details right so as not to give trump and vance and their new best friend Putin a way of an easy way out.
But at least Ukraine, who are by far and away the most important stakeholder is being given the opportunity to have their say
Hitler isn't the best example, given he made a massive personal difference. If he had been assassinated, things would have turned out very differently. Still bad, but not as bad. There's a reason why Germany continued fighting all the way to the abyss years after other nations would have given up, and then surrendered unconditionally - with no further resistance despite plans for redoubts and guerilla warfare - immediately upon his death.
If Putin is Hitler, his death will matter.
I think this is a great idea by Starmer, Macron and Zelensky.
I’m not discounting Putin, but others are characterising this as a Putin issue and a Russia issue.
That’s hard to say, but Russia has a very long history of strongman leaders.
And what was known about Putin before he rose to his current position? Was his trajectory foreseen?
Depends on if he is successful or not. If he is seen to fail then you can hope the political system he built might change. If he is seen as successful then it certainly won't and the example he has set gets copied.
And what are you basing that on? As I said to Moses, Russia has a long history of strongman leaders.
Foreseen is tricky, but if you were told it would pan out this way, I don't think there would have been too much pushback.
He was head of the KGB, and not to be reductive and from someone who always tends to look for any positives from Soviet Russia, they were no angels.
He was generally regarded as ruthless but not a widely known character.
Russian interference in Ukrainian politics goes back further. They attempted to assassinate the presidential candidate when he looked like he might beat the Russian stooge Moscow had funded.
I think a successful Ukraine is not something Putin could tolerate. Too many Russian speakers too many questions about why they would be doing better than Russians under Putin.
Low-profile type of guy. Yeltsin felt Putin wouldn't go after his assets and the oligarchs thought they could control him. I doubt this trajectory was foreseen but he did show authoritarian signs from the very beginning such as consolidating his control over Russian television.
There are certain fractions in Putin's government (I'm using it as a very broad term, as in everyone who plays a part in the political life, not just the actual government).
The so-called technocrats with Sobyanin being the most high-profile one. They hold most of the actual power as they're the most competent people who oversee all administrative processes. They're extremely practical and not overly ideological — if they'll get the possibility to lift the sanctions and to restore economical relationships with the West, they'll do it, sacrificing the insane ideological claims without any second thought.
The so-called siloviki (FSB, police, army and other enforcement agencies) are also pretty powerful but are constantly battling each other. With the tumultuous changes that will happen in the event of Putin's death it's highly unlikely that one of them will be able to unite a lot of them around him. If you're going to get a worse man than Putin, it's going to someone from there — but the caveat is, even if he gets to power, he'll be much, much less powerful than Putin as he'll have to make countless concessions on the way up.
The rest are pretty much non-entities — you have legitimate political parties like LDPR or the Communist party, you have Z-patriots (and I mean the active ones, which is an extreme minority that often criticizes Russia itself for not being aggressive enough in Ukraine).
Still, the most important bit was earlier. You can probably find someone who is an even worse human than Putin, especially in FSB or the army. I mean, Heydrich was probably a worse person than Hitler and I'm sure there were a few other cases like that in the Third Reich. But any new person won't have even the fraction of Putin's power which isn't simply administrative — the entire country has been brainwashed for the quarter of the century on how Putin is the greatest man on the planet, he's the nation's savior and "it's Putin or no one", he's literally the only, almost god-like, being that single-handedly keeps Russia from disintegrating. So even a marginally worse (and it's hard to be significantly worse than Putin, let's be real) successor with, say, half of his power, will do way less evil than Putin can — it's a simple math. And saying that "what if someone worse comes after Putin" is one of the points that Russia's external propaganda have been pushing for decades, so this is why it's triggering to me. That's one of the arguments that many European (and American) leaders believed in that led to the world that we're living in today — ask Merkel if she regrets leaning in into the "devil you know" approach nowadays.
I've edited your question into the post above after posting it but wanted to highlight one point. They don't exactly follow one another.
Ivan the Terrible was succeeded by Feodor I, a pushover tsar with a mental disability (and then there was the Smuta, a time of significant political instability that was in many ways the consequence of Ivan's strongman politics).
After Peter the Great there's been a huge mess of different successors for almost two decades.
Conservative strongman Nicholas the I was succeeded by a strong figure of Alexander the II... that took the country to an entire new direction with his reforms and the emancipation of Russia's surfs.
Lenin -> Stalin is probably the only relevant example but Lenin only actually was the country's ruler for a few years after the Revolution and he barely participated in governance since the late 1922/early 1923 when his health had deteriorated. What happened after Stalin's death, on the other hand, is probably our most realistic scenario for any hypotheticals.
Yup. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship, but Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev weren't dictators. Putin has much more power than any of those did.
So today there's a summit of European leaders in Britain. Let's see what they'll say.
That article sounds legitimately like a "I learned one framework during my eduaction, it is my hammer, thus everything in existence must be a nail". It's just a ridiculous amount of "it is knowns", "it needs to be seen this way", "it is alleged" with zero documentation. It's just atrocious as scholarly work.
The suggestions that Yanukovych received less help from Russia is just beyond absurd and I would love to see author's mental gymnastics to maintain that after 2014. Author has this insufferable assumption that a lot of Western scholars (I guess they get bonus points for being Indian at least) have where they legitimately write like Ukrainians turn into mindless zombies the moment they hear British or American accent and immidiately become incapable of any critical thought and just start acting against their best interest. They completely ignore insane amount of power projection by Russia by that point and legitimately claim that US has been dominating that country because of one unsourced quote by famously honest and precise Ron Paul. Seriously, it's amazing that those NGOs not only have level of coordination that comes straight out of Illuminati texts, are able to form massive conspiracies everywhere undetected, are insanely well funded, but at the same time they can't actually form any lasting change. It's always a mark of a good framework.
No kidding that there is a lot of nuance there. Which is why it would be nice if the conversation actually included some specifics instead of quoting complete randoms with no inside knowledge and treating them as some sort of oracles that could never exaggerate for their own goals and actually not using the same lazy framework as a complete explanation for every process in every country from Central America, through East Asia and entire USSR for the entire century.
Also, it's not really key, but I found claims that receiving funding from Soros foundations as an indicator of being a pawn of American imperialism written on a site that got similar funding quite funny.
That point has been moot for decades, since development of nuclear arsenal that could erase humanity multiple times over.
The insecurity argument is also just odd. Not only it's completely unverifiable, never fixable, there is always the next country to act that insecurity out on and if that was enough for anything it could be used to justify vast majority of historical atrocities.
How exactly was this avoidable? If you're going to be another guy that goes with "Ukraine just should have ditched attempts to join NATO and focused on economic ties with EU", you deserve all the abuse you can get here, seriously.
Not commenting on the specific article you mention in any way, but Zbig is absolutely a valid source to quote. He wrote The Grand Chessboard in 1997, essential reading for anyone interested in geopolitics, and he was still very plugged into the nat sec apparatus of Bush admin.
I could take that as a complement given the hive mind that exists on many topics in this place.
Some political wrapped thoughts and prayers. We're with Ukraine in thoughts
No comment on US or Trump
That'll be my guess
I should have fully expected that this is as much going into detail as I was ever going to get. I'm sure you'll be back to crying about lack of nuance after this.
Okay. I stand corrected. Thank you. I personally never heard of him and I know he had no official role in the Bush administration.
I personally don't think americans cared much about Ukraine and only when opportunity presented it self, US and west asserted some soft pressure, mostly diplomatic.
But it's funny how folks are critical of US for instigating orange revolution, but don't stop to consider that maybe Russia was far worse. Considering all election shenanigans and that Yuschenko was actually poisoned.
If only everyone "just asked questions" like you.
That's probably one of the best quoted claims in the article, but the quote itself is basically summed up by "Ukraine is an important country for geopolitics in Europe", which really isn't that much of an amazing insight.
Just like everyone else, I’ve been quite shocked with the Oval Office encounter. Vance is a humongous twat and the sycophant who asked the suit question is ridiculous.
However and I know this won’t be a popular opinion on here…I’ve just watched the whole interaction.
Considering that the USA is what it is…and Trump is what he is. That seemed like a real failure of diplomacy from Zelenskyy. What exactly did he think would happen when he asked Vance those questions in front of the media?
What a disastrous meeting for Ukraine.
However and I know this won’t be a popular opinion on here…I’ve just watched the whole interaction.
Considering that the USA is what it is…and Trump is what he is. That seemed like a real failure of diplomacy from Zelenskyy. What exactly did he think would happen when he asked Vance those questions in front of the media?
What a disastrous meeting for Ukraine.
That NATO argument is intellectually dishonest argument.
a) NATO is a defensive pact.
b) Russia has nuclear weapons, it's not gonna get attacked.
c) Russia could have always used soft power to block Ukraine acceptance via Hungary, Turkey or Germany. Prior to war germany had better relations with Russia then Ukraine. I remember ukraine blocking gas pipes during winter because of its disputes with Russia and this made germany particularly angry.
Yes and particularly from someone with polish ancestry.
When asking questions:
"hive mind"
"do your own research"
"looking for alternatives to mainstream media"
When asked for sources:
-debunked Mearshaimer interview
-not found
-not found
Rinse and repeat.
"hive mind"
"do your own research"
"looking for alternatives to mainstream media"
When asked for sources:
-debunked Mearshaimer interview
-not found
-not found
Rinse and repeat.
I wouldn’t really class it as a failure as such. The meeting went exactly as the US intended, it was already a pre-determined outcome. You could argue Zelenskyy shouldn’t have taken the bait, but realistically he wasn’t in a position to turn it down. I don’t think the public nature of it has done Zelenskyy any real damage either. If anything, it’s cast a bigger spotlight on the US administration.
Would be the first time Russia did anything economically questionable while thinking the opposite...
If the Russian state was talking sense this entire thread wouldn't exist.
Now and then it is important to remember that Putin thought all of this would be over in 3-4 days. A week max. Can't even blitz properly the little ...
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