I don't think Putin has miscalculated his military capabilities.
His security apparatus have told him what he wants to hear.
It was inevitable, if the only acceptable answers to your questions or demands for 20 years is yes and you surround yourself with an increasing shrinking circle of hard line nutters, you will tend to get gross erroneous information.
To say the mood is awkward in the Kremlin war room at the moment would be a understatement.
Be prepared to hear the news that an advisor or 2 tragically falling out windows.
I hope you're right. Geopolitics is so abstract and unempirical that it feels a bit grandiose to engage in it. Europe is a prize for sure. (No wonder there's been so much feckin' fighting over it.)
Indeed I think they are letting them through so they can try and get them back to the leasing companies.
I was watching a bit of the Fox news yesterday. Chomping at the bit some of them are to go in some how.
One ex general was saying that they could send fighter jets o the Ukrainian military and give them some fighter pilots, serving or ex military to fly them
Apparently it's not without precedent, it was done before
They will handle civilian airliners in a civil manner (impounding planes etc). They are not going to start sending up jets to intercept civilian planes.
I posted earlier in the thread about the Russian psyche, but accepting all that stuff means they have to be treated with suspicion (and maybe disdain). Whatever the reasons behind it all, we are where we are and if they lack basic faculties on a mass scale then we need to bear that in mind.
I think it was this thread I shitted on about different groups in politics. High-info principled voters, high-info selfish voters, low-interest voters on each side etc. Point being in the last week we've seen them go from not knowing to not caring. Whatever the reasons for getting to this point it's the point that we're at now.
He has absolutely miscalculate everything and it all comes back to his own self imposed bunker syndrome. During Covid he isolated himself multiple times and reduced and reinforced his inner circles so nobody will tell him no or give bad news which means he was being fed completely wrong info leading up to this about the way Ukrainians would receive russian tropps all the way to the state of the russian military itself. I go back and forth on this but the only way i see this going is Putin eventually being ousted by military with the backing of the oligarchs but it wont happen i dont think until there is visible mass public discontent so when that might happen is a question nobody can answer.
It sounds crazy to say at this moment in time, but eventually people will realize that Russia and the EU need to be working together to counter the might of the two real dominant global powers, China and the U.S.
The US is a waning power, who let their rich offshore their manufacturing base to China, lining their pockets while the American poor grow and their middle gets increasingly squeezed chasing The American Dream(tm) that's a lot harder to chase than it was. In the midst of Covid and this latest horrible distraction, China is looking down the barrel of the largest asset bubble in world history, their economy runs on slim profit margins and they're rushing to get rich before they get old and the demographics are against them. Europe and the EU is more stable than either, with a much narrower wealth and health and living standards gap than either. Europe is doing OK. More than OK. Actually in world history of the last 3000 years it's been a rare enough time when Europe wasn't doing OK, or wasn't the dominant economic and cultural power.
Putin's brave peacekeepers protecting the world from a father, son and their dogs
All the Putin bots, Putin apologists and but but both sides assholes can go f*ck yourselves
Yeah maybe we should try and integrate production and manufacture and try to foster economic inter-dependence like the EU. Except Europe's been doing that for a couple of decades with Russia. Can argue "That's just about making money" but I think that's an incorrect (at least partly) assessment. Russia has shown it cannot be trusted and the people of Russia so far seem fine with that so they have a lot of rehabbing (20 years to get to where they were 10 years ago and another few decades at a minimum for economic restructuring) before they should be treated as anything other than a nutcase in the corner with weapons that can end humanity.
Too much anti tank weapons and piss all SAM or anti aircraft weaponry. The place should be covered in drones taking out these missile launch sites.
Great post Wibbs. Putin has completely miscalculated his own military capabilities and the world response.
How do you see it playing out?
In fairness, that's very easy to say from this side of the world. That is the problem, they have grown up knowing no different. They see someone who has improved the quality of life there. For every one person to speak against him there's probably another 5 to say their nutters. Its not as easy as flick a switch and oh yes we get it now, this mentality is engrained in Russia. I hope they eventually see him for what he is, but I dont think the world has time to just sit and wait for that to happen either.. Its infuriating sitting here at my desk (meant to be working! 🙊) hearing all this going on, minute by minute people being killed and not doing anything.. I am probably the least confrontational person people know (apart from when it comes to bullies) but I really believe at this stage, we (Europe, NATO, The world) need to take on this bully directly. I mean when you strip it all down, it comes down to basic human decency here. how can we sit here and look on at what is happening to Ukraine, that Mr playground bully wants a toy that doesn't belong to him, and we're sitting back saying ah he shouldnt be doing that, but we're not stopping him either!
sorry rant over now.......
I don't see any reason for Russia to do that. Controlling the power stations is power over electricity. Why would they not want that?
This is true. There was a lrish woman on the radio who went over to live in Russia age 14 to study ballet. She stayed over there for years. But Yeltsin was president when she first came and she said they never got paid, they were living on next to nothing..she said she used a razor to slice her vegtables to ration as much as she could. Putin came in and three months later everyone was getting paid properly. So you can imagine if you are 40+, in a blue collar job, maybe you've never travelled, basic level.of education, you watch state tv...you are going to view this man as a saviour. And I'm pretty sure those type of people make up a significant percentage of the russian population.
All we can hope is the economy tanking wakes up some of them.
Infighting like this on European territory suits those powers better than it suits us. We (as in Europeans and Russians) need to be sure we are not being played.
If the Putin regime could be removed, by Russians, say this year, collaboration should be on the table. End of punitive sanctions. Free elections. EU membership. Time scale: a generation. (I suffer from bouts of optimism.)
Russia would absolutely veto
Ok?
There were reports when this all started that the Russian forces had mobile crematoria with them ...
Any chance the UN can send in peacekeeping to defend the nuclear stations. Surely it’s in everyone’s interest that there’s no bloody explosions near a nuclear reactor…..
Should let them land and then seize the aircraft.
They know or have a fair idea what's going on alright, but they have a very different reading of it, born of multi generational cultural propaganda and an odd mix of fear and admiration of the state. If they have too different a reading of it to the state, they'll tend to keep quiet.
Even the Russians I've know living and working in the west, some even married to westerners, it's has been both fascinating and shocking to me how much of that old Soviet bullshít they buy into. The Give me the boy I'll give you the man principle at work. At best if pushed, their goto response is avoidance and deflection to the bad things 'The West' has done. If everyone is bad shure nobody is 'argument'. When anybody has to run to deflection and avoidance you can be sure their argument is thinner than a Parisien runway model, that they haven't applied any thought to their hand me down opinions and are afraid to do so, because they know it's bullshít that they'd have to admit they're believing.
I wonder if its a case of a leased plane being repatriated OR the leasers were able to get it permission with the hope they can try impound it in Budapest.
Passionate speech
They are but flights seem to keep popping up in banned airspace ,I would have thought they would have started to intercept flights and force them back to Russian airspace
An Aeroflot plane went from Moscow to Budapest through Poland. Thought they were banned from that airspace.
That's fine, but at the end of the day they know what's happening and are choosing their reaction. There can be no claims of ignorance among most of the population any more.
They could start a new EU, the Eurasia Union.
Well the world is not as safe as it was since last week that's for sure. Don't know how much safer Brazil is tbh. People like me , you have zero clue about me so deep end I went. Cheers.
To paraphrase Spock in 'The Wrath Of Khan', that's very two dimensional thinking. The borders of a country include the sky above as well as the real or implied lines drawn on the ground. Sending in aircraft is exactly the same as sending in ground troops, which is why NATO has been unwilling to do that or to declare a no-fly zone.
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