Interesting (if true) - Economist is in the major leagues in terms of reliability. There is a “They”, and it’s probably the intelligence services. And the actual method would probably be less dignified than a hanging.
Not only is there a “they”, but it says Putin is entirely self-aware about the situation, and that he understands that he is personally accountable for this war.
This isn’t an optimistic post - frankly the grim truth has always seemed that this industrial murder festival will go on as long as he does. Russia of the last hundred years has been essentially a crime syndicate. To say he’s a Tsar kind of misses the point - the REAL power is the intelligence servies, and the Tsar-proxy is kind of a figurehead.
If he said this, it’s very telling. He knows the war is going badly, he knows his life is personally depenent on the outcome, he fears “they”, he wants to live and he doesn’t know what to do. Seems highly likely he’ll conitnue to escalate until…? Russian history suggests that when things don’t go well, they purge the leader and put all the blame on him in retirement. Don’t think Putin will get the “Kruschev Dacha Retirement” package - he’s done WAY too much damage.
Hopefully “They” are paying attention too, and are getting tired of the lack of progress.
That’s ridiculous he won’t be hanged. He’ll be defenestrated.
Better out the door of an airplane with no parachute from 20,000 feet. Livestreamed with telephoto lenses.
Let him really think about it on the way down. And let anyone else who wants to use power and money this way a preview of what will happen to them.
My guess is his death will be personal and quiet. Poison. He’ll be blamed almost coloquially for this whole nasty affair “you understand the game, Vladimir. Now drink your tea”. And then there will be an awful power struggle in Russia along ethno-corporate warlord lines. The winning faction will take considerable time to consolidate their power. Total mystery who that might be, given that his dictatorship cult has deliberately forbidden faction cores that might compete with his own to exist. Lots of power brokers will pick the wrong side and end up dead.
Things will have to get very, very bad again, like the 90’s, before an appetite for an all-powerful national savior strongman emerges again. But glass half full - during that power struggle, Russia will not really have the jam to run state level invasions against it’s neighbours and it will be weaker than it is today when it’s done. Highly likely that Dagestan, Chechnya, Yakutia all break away and Russia shrinks into a rump state similiar to how the Ottoman empire lost its colonies over a long time frame and ended up with it’s current configuration in Turkey.
Unlikely we get a Gaddhafi style bayonet enema on video or a Ceaucescu gutter bleed-out. Russia’s way is to scapegoat the last guy, then pretend to be a society again for a while.
Agreed but I don’t think they’ll just pick more bodies with the same war aims. Getting 400k more troops gives him another 12 months or so of burn rate. And wars don’t end when the other side gets to zero troops - collapses hapen when enough people understand that defeat is inevitable and tomorrow’s planned assault isn’t worth dying for. They might be at or near that point already.
Do you ever think of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group and whether he could’ve actually ended the war in June 2023? Maybe if hadn’t done the rebellion then and waited until today where the Russian public has begun really feeling the consequences.
Thanks for asking. My thoughts - the most telling thing about the Wagner rebellion is that while nobody joined him - nobody stopped him either. The intelligence services called up all the Wagner leadership and said we will kill all of your family in 24h if you don’t stop now. You know - a good guys move. The strength and weakness of an authoritarian dictatorship oppressing fatalistic, cynical sheep citizens is that the people aren’t particularly keen to die for you - they just want to know who’s in charge.
Wagner would have been intentionally liquidated or relocated to Africa by now - they’d fulfilled their purpose. If I put on my Prighozin hat, he would have been better to hold Rostov and Belgorod hostage just as his leadership’s families were. Not that Moscow gives a wet donkey fart about the citizens of Rostov and Belogorod, but - they need those cities to run their Donbas invasion and the logisticis to keep Crimea, and project power into the Mediterranean and Africa. Priggy was a dead man the second he turned his wheels east, but he would have lived longer had he not marched towards Moscow.
I think he realized too late that he had been used, and that all his undeserved wealth was going to be siphoned away.
There’s nothing worse than an animal backed into a corner. If Pootin really things this, he’ll do anything to win, maybe even things like attacking NATO or ordering that an atom bomb be dropped on Ukraine. Let’s just hope the upper class in Russia forces him to the end the war before that happens.
Not to be too literal - but there are many things worse than an animal backed into a corner. Like an animal running wild thorugh your kitchen. On balance, this entire affair is horror. But it was always going to happen and i’ll take the current state of affairs over the alternatives.
Dangerous animals need to be killed sometimes.
But it was always going to happen
I agree with the rest, but I disagree with this: before 2014, Europe could’ve done something - anything to prevent Russia marching in. It didn’t. Until the major war broke out, Angela Merkel’s approach and that of the rest of Europe was the wrong approach to prevent further Russian escalation. The entire continent went pussy and just tried to become friends with Russia instead of standing up to them (and Pootin in particular).
NATO could’ve said “alright, now we invest in military”, it didn’t.
Germany could’ve said “now we go off of Russian gas and sanction them”, it didn’t.
The entire western EU could’ve just listened to the Baltics and Poland regarding the danger Russia posed. It didn’t.
A strong EU, I believe, would’ve scared Russia away.
I try to be exceedingly fair in the posthumous review of the facts. It was objectively crazy from a financial perspective for the russians to do what they did. They’ve destryoed their primary, most profitable and local energy market for a generation. All of the easy-to-access oil has already been extracted - everything else from here on in is more expensive to bring to market, and that’s even IF they can get the equipment and expertise due to the sanctions they’ve earned. The european thinking was that it was a win-win setup - cheap energy for them, and reliable revenue for the Russians. There’s no cure for greed though.
And - in 2014 the U.S. was not quite insane yet. Obama was president, Trump was a punchline, the US seemed totally committed to it’s Cold War role as europe’s security guarantor. All the shitstorm that has followed with Trump’s ascension is somewhere between unusual and unique.
The lack of response to Crimea aboslutely lit the fuse on this invasion, and what it indicated was badly misjudged by Western leaders. But - I can understand their inaction. Baltics and Poland are junior members of NATO - they just are, and their voices don’t carry as much weight compared to Paris, Washington, Berlin and London. The EU was complacent (and still is, to a degree) - depending formerly on American strength, and now on Ukrainian resolve.
The necessity of a strong response from Europe to the seizure of Crimea seems obvious now - but that forgets that it still seemed crazy that Putin would do what they have, or that it would go so badly if he did.
TL:DR - Europe should have taken the threat more seriously, but they misjudged that energy dollars would keep Putin at bay. Obama, Merkel, Hollande and Cameron all failed the test,
That’s the point. When he goes, then we can go after Trump, Xi, Netanyahu, Kim J Un, etc. They can all go together.
One would certainly hope so. The common denominator with all these vile fuckwits is that they are locked into corruption and 20th century thinking. I’ve tried to understand the Ukraine invasion as the last gasp of the Cold War - a 30 year vanity revenge project from shitheads who can’t let go of grievances. Including the russians who never let their psyche accept the collapse of the USSR, and clung to this notion that “if we HAD ever fought NATO, Stronk Russia would have won, because we are so awesome and the west are feckless pussies”.
They are a failure as a society, they are trapped in medieval brutalism, they have 4th rate allies that only run on bribes and they are a fading power similar to how the Ottoman Empire slowly collapsed over 300 years by losing it’s western colonies, losing wars it should have won and getting an increasingly poor crop of leadership over time. At least the USSR had a philosophical veneer of communism that could generate some meaningful contrarian ideological allies around the world. The obvious petromafia gangster state that is the modern Russian Federation has no political credibility at all - it’s a brazen crime syndicate with no laws, no institutions and no rules. Only power. So no wonder anyone with an entrepreneurial brain or noble ambitions has already fled the country. It’s gangsters all the way down, which isn’t any kind of basis to run a modern country.
The best thing that could happen for the world is for russia to complete it’s collapse into a rump state from the Urals to the Ukrainian border, and from Murmansk to rostov - like how the Ottomans collapsed into a more homogenous Turkish Republic after losing Africa, Europe and Arabia. They’ll remain a regional power, but their delusions of being a global superpower are drawing to a close. I think we’re closer to the end of Putin and Russia than many realize. Being defeated in Ukraine and the limitations on their power going forward will supercharge that collapse.
Yeah… that new round of mobilization just seems more and more like it’s going to happen.
Agreed but I don’t think they’ll just pick more bodies with the same war aims. Getting 400k more troops gives him another 12 months or so of burn rate. And wars don’t end when the other side gets to zero troops - collapses hapen when enough people understand that defeat is inevitable and tomorrow’s planned assault isn’t worth dying for. They might be at or near that point already.
Even at Russian standards of mobilization, it takes 2-6 months to get fresh bodies at scale into the line. Those new recruits who are right now working in tire shops, mines, IT offices and coffee shops will be less effective than the low-functioning grunts being blow into spaghetti-O’s in blasted puddles of rainwater and crushed concrete right now. They have less equipment, shit leadership, no experience - which means they’ll die faster. Much faster. And these are not volunteers - these will be conscripts that the Russians didn’t want to tap into before. Society’s sensitivity to their lives being pissed away so that a black hearted gangster ghoul doens’t have to say he was wrong is much higher than the in-it-for-the-money slobs that came before.
If they announced mobilization today, they will endure several more months of crushing losses, oil and gas infrastructure and warehouse destruction, increased shortages and inflation way before the first reluctant mobik is blown out of his boots by ukrainian drones.
Then what? Mobilization by itself doesn’t change the outcome of this war. They’re going to do something else wild and provocative. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Anything else is just buying a small slice of time.
🤣 good one
If he can hold on until the French and/or German elections, he can flip a big chunk of NATO.
very true. And likley to a frightening degree. The only retort i have to that is things will get a lot worse for Russia before that happens.
And I think an outbound Macron and Merz team would do a LOT to load up Ukraine with enough support to really REAAAAALLLY make ending this war painful for Russia.
They’d also hang his inner circle and generals, unless Vlad were to have an accident with one of Moscow’s notoriously unsafe windows.
One of those guys is the one most likely to hang him.
