What does Putin want?

[UnseenParticipant]

Finnish President: Putin’s goal in Ukraine is not regime change

 

[jakelafortParticipant]

Did not listen but from what i’ve read/heard he wants to make Russia Great again.

Guessing he likes Gorky’s Mother and any other literature glorifying its history.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

Whatrver he wants, he’s clearly not getting it without a fight from Ukraine. So far, 7000 dead Putineers. His own forces are working against him. Belarus troop units have turned against Putin, even though they risk imprisonment or even death from their own strongman Lukashenko.

Putin is making the exact same mistake the U.S. did in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan: No exit strategy. And by their very nature, empires have no exit strategy.Oncexan empire grabs territory, it has to hold on and never let go. That means continued engagements of troops.

“An army that is not stopped will burn itself out.”–Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling. Chqnged "mailing" into "making." Albeit, Putin is mailing it in
• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Taking the "8" out of "against," even though Putin is behind the 8-Ball

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

The Polish have a saying along the lines that “Once the Russians arrive they will never leave”.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Is that a very subtle Polish intelligence joke? The Russians under the Soviets obviously left Poland, and it looks like Russian Putineers are slated to leave Ukraine, tails between their legs. 😁

But, as always, must wait and see…

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

It’s even more differnt than I thought: 10,000 to 15,000 dead Putineers,the closest to Kyiv are 10 miles away and the convoy has faced damage with shortages of everything to the troops. There were inspiring calls for Ukrainians to resist the urge to attack Russian civilians and cities.

On the down side, mlllions are refugees (I’ve heard elsewhere 10 million,) worldwide grain shipments and prices have been affected, children have had to be airlifted for cancer treatments, and a Holocaust survivor was killed by Putin’s bombs. Damn! Let this end soon!

Russian military has lost more than 10% of combat force sent to Ukraine; new sanctions coming: Live updates
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/03/22/ukraine-russia-invasion-live-updates/7123227001/

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spacing
• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Link
• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I was told that proverb at a “working lunch” yesterday by a Polish colleague. I think it was not until the Warsaw Pact was dissolved around 1990 that the Russians left….45 years after the end of WW2.

[UnseenParticipant]

Putin may emulate his admirer, Trump. In other words, he’ll double down, triple down, quadruple down, and if he ultimately loses, he’ll claim it’s a victory.

One thing a lot of the experts say is that if you want Putin to leave before he reduces a lovely country into a glowing cinder, he needs an offramp, something he can claim to be an accomplishment.

That said, Gen. Pershing, way back around WW1 said, “Soldiers win battles. Logistics wins wars.” And lousy logistics is why the Russian advance quickly fell on its face. That, and bad planning, like having everything line up on one road, 2 lanes in some places, surrounded by muddy ground on both sides,  a queue 40 miles long eventually. Hell, what could go wrong? For one thing, take out some vehicles at the front of the line and the rest of the line has to wait, making them sitting ducks. Motors idling to keep the soldiers warm, they started running out of fuel. Food reserves were based on a quick victory, so soldiers left their vehicles to raid Ukrainian grocery stores.

Ukraine can win if they turn their country into Ukrainistan, a quagmire that threatens Putin’s desire to remain in power. He could have to deal with a popular uprising over mounting casualties or the possibility of a military coup, especially if he continues his practice of arresting his generals for ineffectiveness. They remaining ones will wonder if they are next.

 

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

Putin didn’t learn the lessons of of Russia’s dealings with Napoleon. Logistics was Napoleon’s undoing too. Moscovites stripped their city bare of anything edible or useful to Napoleon in advance of his attack. By the time his forces reached Moscow, Napoleon’s men were eating their own horses, which meant they couldn’t be used for comhat.

Putin didn’t even learn the more recent logistical lessons of his own nation’s experience with Stalin, whose agricultural polices of collectivization and Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscience starved not just Ukraine, but the rest of the Soviet Union.

Not one U.S. or British fatality in World War II was from starvation, but Russian troops and civilians starved by the millions, especially when under seige by the very Nazis stoked by Stalin’s Non-Aggression Pact and subsequent trade agreements.

And just as Stalin jailed, exiled, and murdered 80 percent of his best Generals, so too Putin is trying to do the same.

As both Stalin’s and Putin’s philosophical predecessor Hegel observed, the thing we never learn from history is that we never learn from history.

[UnseenParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

As both Stalin’s and Putin’s philosophical predecessor Hegel observed, the thing we never learn from history is that we never learn from history.

“Those who do not repeat history are condemned to forget it.” — Unseen

[DavisModerator]

Putin and those who help keep him in power are completely uninterested in the long term anything per the Russian economy, security, regional stability, quality of life and so on. And they are just as uninterested in what Russians think (they are telling them what to think under threat of severe penalties otherwise). Until a significant threshold of people would revolt (say at least 5% of the people openly defiant of the severe consequences of protesting, something unlikely even as Russians see their quality of life and options crumble) then none of this matters. Remember:

A leader can stay in control and make obscene profits (along with those who help keep them in power) even as the country becomes somewhat less stable, life becomes miserable, the economy remains stagnant or even shrinks and things go the way the majority of the people are not pleased with.

Putin and those who help keep them in power have either calculated that this is a way to consolidate their power and increase their interests. We don’t know enough about why they thought this was the right move. Perhaps they are distracting an unhappy populace (war is great for that and an easy way to clamp down on rights [note this happened in the US and the west is hardly immune to this]), they honestly thought they could get their hands on all of Ukraines energy resources, some other stuff we don’t know about.

Was this an unusual miscalculation? We don’t really know. If it was…can Putin still survive without losing much himself (and those who keep him in power) despite Russians severely hurt by this? Yeah…it is hardly outside the realm of possibilities.

So…I wouldn’t say he is not learning lessons from history. History shows us that leaders often do fine doing things that go against the general interests of the state and that sometimes calculated risks are inevitable.

[DavisModerator]

Putin and those who help keep him in power are completely uninterested in the long term anything per the Russian economy, security, regional stability, quality of life and so on. And they are just as uninterested in what Russians think (they are telling them what to think under threat of severe penalties otherwise). Until a significant threshold of people would revolt (say at least 5% of the people openly defiant of the severe consequences of protesting, something unlikely even as Russians see their quality of life and options crumble) then none of this matters. Remember:

A leader can stay in control and make obscene profits (along with those who help keep them in power) even as the country becomes somewhat less stable, life becomes miserable, the economy remains stagnant or even shrinks and things go the way the majority of the people are not pleased with.

Putin and those who help keep them in power have either calculated that this is a way to consolidate their power and increase their interests. We don’t know enough about why they thought this was the right move. Perhaps they are distracting an unhappy populace (war is great for that and an easy way to clamp down on rights [note this happened in the US and the west is hardly immune to this]), they honestly thought they could get their hands on all of Ukraines energy resources, some other stuff we don’t know about.

Was this an unusual miscalculation? We don’t really know. If it was…can Putin still survive without losing much himself (and those who keep him in power) despite Russians severely hurt by this? Yeah…it is hardly outside the realm of possibilities.

So…I wouldn’t say he is not learning lessons from history. History shows us that leaders often do fine doing things that go against the general interests of the state and that sometimes calculated risks are inevitable.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Actually Enco it was a scorched earth policy in the war of 1812-not just Moscow. For an excellent first hand account of the campaign see Diary of a Silesian Foot Soldier. If memory serves 600,000 soldiers under Napoleon entered Russian and only 60,000 survived. Human life is cheap. Cheap cheap cheap…beep beep beep.

My bigger query is not what Putin wants but why the world sans China is woop da doo 24/7 about this conflict. The repercussions are already terrible and promise to worsen. Not just the Ukrainians and Russians dead, not just the refugees, not just rolling the dice with deployment of nucs, not just the rising price of food causing people to go hungry and starve, not just the innocent Russians all over the world who are victimized by irrational zealots who condemn any Russians as being guilty by association, not just the shameless media exploitation of their business model, or even the approach of a point of no return that may involve new western combatants but the ongoing demonstration of herd mentality that signals our end.

Well to that end i stumbled on this podcast which is kind of interesting.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3dha2luZ3VwLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwiQo7PP7tz2AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&hl=en

[UnseenParticipant]

People who aren’t news addicts may not realize that there are wars going on in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that the U.S. ignores or contributes to in one way or another. Yemen comes to mind, where the U.S. is providing material aid to Saudi Arabia’s war on the Houthis. What’s their problem with the Houthis? They are backed by Iran, so underneath it all, a lot of it is a religious war Suni vs. Shia.

Countries Currently at War 2022

 

[jakelafortParticipant]

Unseen, good link.

Man alive, in Yemen at least 120,000 deaths since start of it and 20k in 2020. Violence all over!

[Author]

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