Replies to post #423532 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Russian State TV Pundits Openly Question Ukraine War

"Coup against Putin ‘can’t be ruled out’"

682,963 views Sep 13, 2022

MSNBC

In the wake of Ukraine's recent victories against Putin’s forces, some Russian state media pundits have begun openly questioning the war on air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3uyImbZSOA

It's gonna be a tough winter as Putin weaponizes power to Ukraine and energy to Europe even more than he has so far.

[BOREALIS]

Who Knows What Putin Will Do Next?

Plus: A controversy about class
By Conor Friedersdorf
September 14, 2022, 4:05 PM ET

Question of the Week

What will determine your vote––or your decision to refrain from voting––in the 2022 midterm elections? What issue is most important to you? Which candidate or ballot measure do you want to see win or lose? No need to answer all of those questions, just pick something on this general topic that moves you. And briefly tell us a bit about yourself and your voting history, too. If you’re not American, what do you want U.S. voters to do?

Conversations of Note
The fog of war is upon us.

As reporters document major Ukrainian advances against Russian troops, I am heartened that some of the territory subjugated by a brutal invading force has been liberated. Although early accounts suggest a stunning victory that will be studied for decades, I remain warily cognizant that none of us knows what will happen next in the conflict.

In The New York Times, the Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski observes that a faction of hawks in Russia believe that Vladimir Putin has been conducting the war on the cheap, and that it “can only be won if Mr. Putin mobilizes the nation onto a war footing and declares a draft.” But mobilizing more soldiers “could shatter the passivity with which much of the Russian public has treated the war.” If it’s true that “escalating a war whose domestic support may turn out to be superficial could stir domestic unrest, while continuing retreats on the battlefield could spur a backlash from hawks,” who knows what Putin will do, or even whether or not he will stay in power?

In Foreign Policy, Alexey Kovalev argues that “a new Russian protest movement is coalescing, but it’s neither pro-democracy nor anti-war. Instead, it’s the most extreme of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters, who have grown increasingly furious at the unfolding military disaster for Russia in the six-month-long war in Ukraine. They want Putin to escalate the war, use more devastating weapons, and hit Ukrainian civilians even more mercilessly.”

My colleague Anne Applebaum argues that the United States must prepare for the possibility of Ukrainian victory because of the massive geopolitical challenges sure to accompany it. “When Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away,” she writes.

Thus, per her reasoning:

When I write that Americans and Europeans need to prepare for a Ukrainian victory, this is what I mean: We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.

To be clear: This is not a prediction; it’s a warning. Many things about the current Russian political system are strange, and one of the strangest is the total absence of a mechanism for succession. Not only do we have no idea who would or could replace Putin; we have no idea who would or could choose that person. In the Soviet Union there was a Politburo, a group of people that could theoretically make such a decision, and very occasionally did. By contrast, there is no transition mechanism in Russia. There is no dauphin. Putin has refused even to allow Russians to contemplate an alternative to his seedy and corrupt brand of kleptocratic power. Nevertheless, I repeat: It is inconceivable that he can continue to rule if the centerpiece of his claim to legitimacy—his promise to put the Soviet Union back together again—proves not just impossible but laughable.

The possibility of a succession crisis in a nuclear power––and the added possibility that a figure more hawkish than Putin could prevail in such a crisis––is the stuff of nightmares. Now imagine instead that Ukraine wins the war, absent any significant escalation from Moscow. Even that will pose seemingly unsolvable challenges, Noah Millman argues:

We can always hope that battlefield defeat will awaken Russia to the folly of the course it has set on, and that neighborly relations with Ukraine become plausible in the wake of a Ukrainian victory, if not immediately then after a few years and a leader or two has passed from the scene. But hope is not a strategy … Ukraine today is succeeding on the strength of its own people, but with American and other allied arms and intelligence and with Russia substantially cut off by sanctions from key trading partners that it needs to resupply its own armed forces. Are we willing to sustain that posture indefinitely?

Can we, even if we want to?
Russia isn’t quite as formidable as it wished the world to believe, but it’s nowhere near as pathetic as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and after twelve years of containment and sanctions that failed to achieve regime change in that country we got fed up and decided to make the situation worse by invading. If it makes sense for the United States to support Ukraine against Russia in its current war, then ipso facto the United States must strive to achieve a better end-game than the one I describe above, and achieve it on the assumption that Russia’s conception of its national interests will not change in any material way. A Ukrainian battlefield victory, if it comes, will be a victory for a stubbornly independent people against an aggressive invader; it’s impossible for any lover of freedom not to cheer for such an outcome. Achieving peace in the wake of victory, though, is at least as important, and at least as challenging. Perhaps peaceful coexistence is impossible unless Russia changes fundamentally. But if you don’t believe Russia will change fundamentally, then that means peaceful coexistence is impossible, full stop.

What might that look like? To cite but one example, see this from Spiegel International:

[ . . . ]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/who-knows-what-putin-will-do-next/671434/