I still (steal and) listen but every time he describes Russia’s actions in the war as really stupid it just grates on me. No doubt you can identify mistakes but “lmao putin dumb” is just dogshit liberal “analysis”. Looking forward to hearing this episode, either way.
Except the war has been going since 2014. Ukraine increased their shelling of civilians in the leadup to the Russian invasion. An anti-war perspective would agree that that eight year long aggression must be stopped.
Civilians in the Donbas are very safe now. The military aged males? Even safer.
Stopped by dominating the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk? Certainly.
But warped by making a long-shot push to take the capital and install a new government, and then turning a third of the country into a bombed-out combat zone? That’s a bit inept.
Putin should have fully invaded all Ukraine in 2014, not just Crimea, and destroyed the fascist NATO putsch decisively before they built up an army. Letting fascists fester only leads to more and more working class deaths in the future, they must be excised
2014 Russia would’ve collapsed under the weight of sanctions and financial isolation. 2014 was very different from 2022. It’s very doubtful 2014 Iran, 2014 China, and 2014 India would’ve gone along with Russia. 2014 China, for one, actually condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea. You really think they would’ve actually supported Russia if Russia tried to invade the entire country instead of annexing a peninsula where everyone there was either Russian or Crimean Tatar? Plus, there’s also the matter with Syria, where half of 2014 Syria was controlled by ISIS. Obviously, if Russia had to devote the vast majority of their military to invade Ukraine in 2014, what would happen to Syria?
What the Western world gravely misjudged was thinking absolutely nothing happened in the subsequent 8 years. ISIS was completely crushed in Syria thanks in no small part to Russian and Iranian military support, Assad was able to maintain power in Syria, Iran had a change in government with the entrance of the so-called hardliners (ie people who refuse to suck up to the West), Russia had 8 years to begin economically decouple from the West, and China had a taste of open Western hostility and also began to economically decouple from the West.
tbf russia would have gotten absolutely wrecked by the current sanctions package had it been implemented back in 2014
in retrospect the only thing they really fucked up on was letting themselves get dicked around by the minsks, as opposed to not taking the west at its word and preparing more fully for the inevitable kinetic confrontation
I love these guys, but they don’t understand how Russia believes Ukrainian neutrality to be a key tenet of their ideology. It really would be like if Canada or Mexico was given missiles to point at the US from China.
America would invade in those scenario, and the campaign would be full of problems.
America would invade in those scenario
I mean, we gamed this out in practice back in the 60s. Cuba got missiles. America did not invade. Just the opposite. Invading Cuba has been something neocons have wanted to do for decades, but that the Deep State simply cannot stomach in a way that is surprising given the lengths we’ve gone to invade places as far away as Afghanistan and Vietnam.
If Mexico had nukes pointed at the US, I suspect it would be far more resilient to invasion than it is even now.
The reason they didn’t invade Cuba is because at first Cuba was backed by the USSR, and then after the USSR collapsed because Cuba no longer poses any threat and they figured it would also collapse sooner or later.
An amphibious invasion from Cuba into America is absurd and would never happen. Cuba never posed any actual threat to US territorial integrity in any way.
That is not analogous to NATO, the world spanning empire, amassing one of the largest armies on Earth on your land border that you have been invaded through 3 times in the last century
You live in a world of ideals and dreams, you are not serious or pragmatic
I’m no military strategist, and information is so poor that I would never play armchair general. I will play armchair diplomat though… Personally I didn’t expect any better, but it was still incredibly disappointing that after decades of speculation about this scenario (literally predating the dissolution of the Soviet Union) that Russia’s/Putin’s response was, well, what it was. That it got to the point where Russia had to militarily invade… The failure to maintain their sphere of influence and prevent a military conclusion could well point to a tremendous lack of imagination and diplomacy on Russia’s part. How is it that the US/NATO are just that much better at propaganda? I know it’s a declining superpower, but the writing has been on the wall since the Soviet-Afghan War at least: If you invade a neighbor because the US has been fomenting conflict, they will pour billions of dollars, weapons, and CIA/JSOC training into arming radicals in that country to create a US-Vietnam style embarrassment and destabilize the region probably permanently. They just walked into it, again despite decades of forewarning from even the liberal foreign policy crowd, and with 8 years between the previous flare-up and this round.
every time he describes Russia’s actions in the war as really stupid it just grates on me
The amount of blood and treasure Russia has thrown at this conflict suggests their leadership went in half-cocked, having failed to game out the real long-term impact of a ground invasion. Maybe their military leadership could have simply done a better job of targeting and killing critical masses of people in the Ukrainian territory. Maybe they should have been more conservative and simply taken/secured the Donbas like they took North Osetia and Crimea. Or maybe the whole invasion was ill-conceived.
However you slice it, the real military consequences of endless pitched battles on the Russia-Ukraine border combined with the loss of valuable infrastructure (Nordstream 2, et al) and the alienation of regional allies (China, most notably, but possibly Türkiye and chunks of East Africa by the time we’re done) will have long term negative consequences for the Russia state.
“lmao putin dumb” is just dogshit liberal “analysis”.
No worse than “lmao Bush dumb” or “lmao Bernie Sanders dumb”, at the end of the day. They’re right to note that Putin’s inner circle failed to give him good actionable advice. They’re right to note that Russia is giving up a not-insubstantial number of young people and a not-insubstantial amount of domestic resources to play tug-of-war with DC and Berlin over a mere corner of its western border. They’re right to note that wars are, generally speaking, a failure of foreign policy at a very basic level.
What these analytics often leave out is how disastrous this war will be for Western Europe as well. Or how it ultimately distracts from more pressing Western interests - most prominently Chinese socio-economic expansion along the Pacific Rim. Or how the Western states are investing their own blood and treasure in a fruitless shit-flinging competition while their domestic institutions crumble. Or how America - in particular - has a large body of white nationalists sympathetic to Russian media and ideology who may pose an existential threat to the American neoliberal hegemony in the same way that neoliberals in Russia ultimately brought down the Soviet state 30 years earlier.
Much like how Iraq transformed from an American tentative ally to a regional thorn to a massive self-defeating quagmire, Ukraine is shaping up to be the death of both Russian and US-backed modern leadership. Its Lose-Lose.
