To me, the real question is the next question: why start the Special Military Operation(™) to achieve any of the listed goals? What is the reason behind that?
Be it the conquest, or just toppling the government, or even forcing neutrality — why? To achieve what? To avoid what? And keep in mind, the cost is already huge, and keeps rising. What is the master reason that justifies the enormous cost? And when I’m referring to the cost, I’m not talking about Ukrainian civilian infrastructure or death toll (no one in Kremlin gives a damn, obviously), not even the Russian death toll (Kremlin is OK with that, too). Confiscated and frozen assets and decimated natural resources export economy-wise, halting nearly all the international cooperation science-wise, NATO expanding to the very borders (even Finland is joining now!) military-wise, and the SMO goal, whatever that is, is not even yet achieved!
I mean, every aspect I can think of seems to be a net loss for Russia (comparing to January 2022) as the result or the ongoing SMO, even when (and if!) any of the goals you’ve listed is achieved. What is a net win? A territory gain? I fail to see how it can be worth it.
Also, congratulations on the new website layout! I might steal a couple of ideas, I think.
Isn’t that the standard goal of almost all governments now?
I think the goal was to check NATO and create a show of force that teaches NATO and the EU that meddling like in Ukraine after the coup is not being tolerated.
I would think Finland joining NATO was priced into that. That was obviously coming anyway. Finland is already very much in the Western sphere of influence.
I think the problem for the Kremlin here is that they went all-in. They now can’t back down. They need to tie up Ukraine in this indefinitely. Otherwise, Zelensky will join EU and NATO in a heartbeat. And we’d be so dumb as to making that happen[1]. So that means they need to at least permanently occupy territory that Ukraine will continue to claim as their own, since the EU won’t accept member countries without a clear border and NATO isn’t so dumb as to onboard an ongoing Article 5 issue.
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I don’t want to offend anybody from Ukraine, but I do think that country is sociologically and culturally much closer to Russia than Europe. This is just from limited research into Ukrainian society when it comes to tech and infosec stories, but what I am hearing from people who lived there tells me the same. The way Zelensky is acting when dealing with European elected officials isn’t helping matters either. ↩︎
Ha! I was recently looking at your site and thinking the same. I think I’ll start with Webmentions. But that link card thing also looks very cool!
That, and also the economy part. Natural resources export has been a huge part of Russia’s economy, and now, thanks to sanctions, things are not looking too good. Russia could have pulled this trick had they captured Kiev in one week, but an SMO of attrition (like the one we’re obviously in now) is also an SMO of the economies.
Last time Russia has won in a Special Military Operation of attrition (the World Special Military Operation II) was in a huge part due to the Lend-Lease. This time, if anything, I’d say it’s Ukraine who is receiving Lend-Lease. Can Russia successfully pull off an SMO of economies against Ukraine? Absolutely, no question about it! Can Russia successfully pull off an SMO of economies against Ukraine and those who committed to help it? I have my doubts.
Interesting. I would have said that Russia actually is the world leader in resisting sanctions. The Soviets basically did it from 1914 - 1989. I’ve always seen this as not so much a factor of what the economy looks like but as a factor of how much your citizens are willing to endure before they rebel. The West is particularly bad at this ever since the French Revolution and Ukraine may have gotten too westernised to endure this situation for long. Whereas I think, correct me if I am wrong, the Russian population is still very used to substandard living in the name of fighting the great enemy. The question is if the propaganda can hold up as well as during Soviet times. But with the rise of propaganda and decline of critical thinking in the West, I’m inclined to think it might even work better these days.
You’re making a perfectly valid and sound point, and I think you’re right both about the Russian population’s readiness to endure and Ukraine’s westernization. However, Ukraine’s moral high ground is played very well by the Ukrainian propaganda, at least for the Ukrainian population (less so for the Western allies, perhaps).
There’s a common saying in Russia, attributing the demise of USSR to “the fridge beating the TV-set” (meaning that no amount of propaganda on TV could compensate for the lack of food in the refrigerator of an average family). It’s really hard to estimate how far the tipping point is, but the fridge does beat the TV-set eventually, and the (rather hopeless, I’d say) economy trend has to be accounted for. Even more so considering the fact that even if the SMO ends tomorrow (with any result whatsoever) the economy trend will hardly reverse in the near future.
As a westerner that has traveled in Ukraine and Russia, I’d like to add my 5 cents to the conversation fabsh and nekr0z are having. Having grown up in Canada, I had never known anything other than basically a first world standard western world. I have been rather lucky on having a lot of survival training, and growing up in a sparsely populated area, and I needed to rely on these thing in my travels. To be fully honest, I do not do well in cities here. On my first travels in former soviet territories, which were more than just Ukraine and Russia, I was taken back by the living conditions in many of the areas. I will not say they were bad conditions. I will say that the standard westerner will have lost their ability to live in those conditions. Where the western people have grown soft, the people that live in those conditions maintain a hardness and a survival skill set that is now lost to the west. I have experienced the use of “outhouses” here, and even in this sparsely populated area you will very seldom find them, and I have experienced them in eastern europe in cities that have over a million people. I have to take my hat off to people that live that life daily, because when things get bad, they have the skill set required to outlast the rest of us.
That’s a valid theory and probably true. But, one of my professors in uni always advanced the theory that the USSR fell because of East Germany. Basically, in his opinion, the Germans showed the Russian population that a peaceful revolution was possible and could topple the regime. He always said that, without there being an East German state, the USSR would have endured much, much longer. I think it might be a combination of both ideas. Maybe the Germans just need their fridges more…
I would tend to agree. If you except Finnish and Norwegian people (from my recent experience travelling these countries). And Australians, who are, for all intends and purposes, Westerners too, I think.
Your professor makes a good point, too. These things are always rather complex, with multiple causes intertwining into various outcomes. We’ll wait and see how this one plays out; hopefully we all will live to see the outcome.
I agree they are westerners, but when just about every animal or insect that you see, or don’t see, can kill you, it creates a whole different level of person. I am not a fan of our bears, cougars, or wolverines, but Australia brings a whole new level of nope.
That’s somewhat overrated. But depends on where you live. Insects aren’t that bad in Queensland. Spiders and snakes, though. I once had a black widow in my jacket for a day and only noticed when I hung it up in the evening. And we had a lot of taipans around.
While I hate spiders, I do enjoy the snakes and can deal with them very well.