This is meant to elicit some reflections on Putin's practices, directed mainly towards a domestic audience. My claim is that it not only directs his actual programme, the protection of Putin and his group, an aim fundamental to his regime, but also establishes the longevity of his planned invasion of Ukraine. By tracing changes in Putin's claims, the genesis of his invasion can be established. The false narratives can also be traced to changes in the group around Putin. Putin's first PM was, or appears not to have been, the type to accept such false narratives. The criminal nature of many of his later cabal, such as Prigozhin, have tended to degrade its political nature.
1) What Russia does is immediately situated on the actions of others. The Donbas was originally a Russian invasion and the shelling of civilian areas done by Russia (witness Chechnya, Georgia, Syria).
2) The criminal nature of Putin's cabal was fixed onto their victims, Chechnya, and Ukraine.
3) Russia has never attacked any other state.
4) The rewriting of history from ancient times to Stalin's reign.
While there are many more, if readers choose to deny than reasons must be given.
Hi Stanley,
What about this point in isolation?
In the 60's USA moved missiles into Turkey effectively on USSR's doorstep. What followed was the Cuban MIssile Crisis as Kruschev maneuvered to do the same.
Ukraine has clearly become a place with increased and heavy USA involvement including established military-oriented activities, and most would say a state awash in corruption (and now money) and of questionable stability and predictability even without the current action, again on Russia's doorstep. Meanwhile the Western military alliance, much more fearsome in power than Russia's except for nukes, swells ever Eastward. Finally, USSR was defeated once recently already, very fortunately without hot war.
You are the leader of Russia. You are constrained by a limited economy. What do you do?
A second question. Libya agreed to give up its nukes and we saw what happened to them. Ukraine gave up its nukes. In general should a country give up its nukes?
Cheers,
K.
Karl, the US is also in decline. The difference, to the degree one exists, is that Russia's may be an endgame.
But aren't you placing the USSR and Russia as victims? If you say, and you might, that Russia needed to reconstruct reality as otherwise it couldn't compete or some other possible close-bound construction then fine. But this does not take away Putin's gangster background. Only by taking Russia from a declining state to a failed one is that possible. Putin and other KGB operatives made a state within a state, a criminal one in the kremlin itself. By limiting the power of thought in the domestic arena could they survive without exposure.
Russia has reaffirmed its old, USSR nature through conquests in a muscular approach to statecraft, which simply could not last?