Russia just lost all the accumulated sympathy it had. Anyone who felt bad for it, how badly it was treated after 1991, tricked by the mean Americans, locked out of NATO and Europe, the whole song and dance. It has offered not even a semblance of believable pretext for this invasion—this stuff about a genocide in the LPR/DPR areas, the coming major Ukrainian offensive, it's complete low-effort garbage.
Putin says he won’t leave until he’s done “Denazification and demilitarization”—how are these terms to be interpreted exactly? Is the Jewish president part of that denazification? While there are obviously a few real live nazis there, until yesterday most average Ukrainians were just kind of generally small-nation nationalist and anti-Russia—and you can bet the previously ambivalent or apathetic will turn into ultra-nationalist street fighters now. “Demilitarization?” How does he plan to demilitarize a country that is consistently kept supplied by bigger Western countries without just going to war with these bigger Western countries and then, you know, the unspeakable. I am glad that Ukraine didn’t have nuclear weapons yesterday, because in general it seems like small nationalist countries like Ukraine are more likely to press the nuclear button to protect their own national interests rather than being concerned with world order.
I guess the lesson here is even if you have been given advance warning about something, you still hope for the best, it doesn’t mean you’re prepared for it to happen. The United States is the surveillance kingpin in the world. Eyes in the sky. Just like Vegas. They know everything. Even though everybody was so sarcastic about their claims (including me), sometimes, when it warns that something is gonna happen… maybe it's just gonna happen. I didn’t find the scenario to be believable—I thought there would be some limited thing where they consolidated the separatist areas they already held and took a little extra off the top—I thought it was exaggeration and I was wrong. It doesn’t look like Ukraine could find the worst case scenario believable either.
The “mother of all sanctions” won’t do the job (Russia has a commodities-heavy fortress balance sheet) but I believe in some way that is not yet clear, this will be proven to be a massive mistake—Putin throwing his hat in with Limonov and Prilepin and Zakharchenko and all the fringe former National Bolshevik/“Novorossiya” people that I’ve read the long academic books about… the truth is, they think they’re cool, they think they’re Russian avant-garde, but they glorify war in this way that the futurists did it in the 1920s, that the shock-art-freak writers and artists did in the 1980s (“whoa its gruesome and extreme and bizarre, does this OFFEND you?”) and I just find it all so extremely uncool… but most importantly they’re zealots and bad things come to zealots in the end.
Comments
No posts