Wagner mercenaries were on Thursday reported to be trying to head back into Russia after threatening retaliation over the suspected killing of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on the orders of Vladimir Putin. “The convoys are likely heading towards the border with Russia,” the centre said. “There’s a lot talk right now about what the Wagner Group will do,” he said.
Not necessarily, because (I suspect) less soldiers Putin have more he would be willing to press that red button.
Putin’s unwillingness to push the red button is due to it resulting on every single nation in the World including China turning against him and Russia if he did do that (because if the first nation to use nukes offensivelly isn’t examplarily punished for it, every nation in the World will rush to become nuclear capable - if only for self defense - which funilly enough flattens the capability of the giants such as China to push the little ones around hence even if only because of that they’re against it) and likely Russia, he himself and his family ending up nuked sooner or later.
If there is one thing the Invasion of Ukraine has taught us is that if he thinks get away with it and end up better from doing it, no matter how evil. Putin will do it or have somebody do it for him.
Does Putin seem reasonable to you? I think it’s pretty possible that he will be willing to take the whole world to the grave with him.
Absolutelly - so far he seems to be rational.
Not necessarily wise, certainly not morally upright (quite the opposite), but yeah, absolutelly rational.
He started a war to conquer territory and resources, likely based on certain expectations of capability of the Russian Military which were far from realistic as well as expectations on the Ukranian Military and Society which were also far fromrealistic. He went for a decapitation attack expecting Zelenskyy to be killed, captured or flee but none of that happenned and thus the “easy way” failed. From there onwards, as a dictator who has anchored his authority on an image of “strong man”, we couldnt simply back down so everything that has been happenning since has been him trying to ideally gain something out of a bad situation or at least not to lose face.
All pretty rational. Not exactly strategically intelligent but certainly rational.
As for the use of nukes, notice how the ever increasing talk about using it from the russian authorities maybe a year ago suddenly stopped (except for fringe types and well known powerless russian muppets) when China made it very clear they would have to do something about it if Russia used those…
Even a strategically inept but rational actor can’t miss the implications of China turning against Russia.
In hindsight, all he had to do was setup an assination squad before mobilizing troops in 2022. Had he killed Zelensky before the real fighting happened I think the country would have been very demoralized and it would have been much harder for them to get aid with a new leader, even if it wasn’t a Russian plant.
And the more gains that they would have made earlier on, the less likely the West would have been to send aid, less it fall into the hands of Russia or some new corrupt politician.
Without the aid, Russia would have already won by now.
What was rational in this war?
We can’t change that regardless and can’t forever cower under every threat Putin makes. Unless we just want to make him dictator of the world.
Appeasement never works, we should have learned that by now, but we need to make it clear.
Then they’d have no soldiers