That third post could have been interesting, because there was a school of thought that Vladimir Putin was an Antonio Salazar or Lord Vetinari who wanted the good for his country and was willing to do whatever that took. But now it is clear that he is a Russian nationalist who still believes what his textbooks told him when he was 14. Even if he were better informed about the facts, a Putin who did not want ethnic Russians to dominate the former USSR would not be Vladimir Putin.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Putin is lucky that Needy Amin's stupid attack on Iran pushed his invasion of Ukraine down to the 2nd most idiotic military adventure so far in the 21st century.

Look, before that, he had a decent hand. Russia was a 2nd or 3rd rate power, but no-one knew it, because the shiny armed forces were just seen on parades. He was getting a decent chunk of cash from fossil fuels, Russia was a good place to do shady business in , and he and his freidns could stash all that money in UK and US banks and send their kids to university there. Every alt-right party could count on some rubles getting sent to them.

So he wasn't Peter the Great, but he wasn't some boyar losing battles with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth either.

In 6 or 12 months, Zelensky would be brought down by a combination of corruption and or shitty economy, and some Russia-friendly oligarch would use Russian disinfo to get elected and tie Ukraine even closer to Russia. But he just couldn't stand that somewhere there were Ukraine kids getting an education in Ukrainian and where the Holodomor was part of the curriculum.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

i think you're (you plural, not you singular) making the typical western mistake regarding both putin and ukraine:

putin was always an angry russian imperialist, he has built his position entirely on imperialist adventures (that were ignored by the west because who cares about chechnya or abkhazia, or other impossible-to-pronounce peoples of caucasus, really)
the russo-ukrainian war started in 2014 with the invasion of crimea and then donbas, after ukrainians decided they don't really like the russian-friendly oligarch who used russian disinfo to get elected. and notably that was what shifted the ukrainian support for dropping neutrality in favour for joining nato; until 2014 ukrainians favoured just tightening the political and economical ties with the european union.

putin didn't descend into the imperator madness recently, he started with it, it was what buoyed him to the top.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

I don't deny Putin is a Russian nationalist, I just meant that he could have more profitably reached his goals with a lighter touch. Invading in 2022 hardened Ukraine's opposition, highlighted the behavior of Russian troops in occupied Ukraine, and destroyed a lot of hardware and people.

Before 2022, Putin could project Russian power as this weird chimera of Russia as a promised land of white patriarchy, coupled with invincible military threat. The invasion revealed Russia as both military incompetent and brutal, making resisting Russia militarily the rational choice, and simultanously sidelining Russia's supporters. If you stand with Putin, you also stand with the people who destroyed Bucha.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 4 points 2 days ago

@gerikson @sneerclub Needy Amin is a great coinage, but can I suggest Idiot Amin instead? (The resemblance between Trump and Idi Amin is glaringly obvious now if you stand their rhetoric and style of government side-by-side. Only significant difference is that Trump started with more.)