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このMOLOCHだ！
28d ago
What's the evidence that absolute poverty is what matters, rather than inequality? Many uprisings happened in societies where the 5th-percentile poorest person was better off than the 5th-percentile richest person in some historical society that remained stable. It seems to be a common belief in many circles that humans are mostly motivated by relative status.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
28d ago
For the same reason as why you want to cut the top off your power economy by having rule of law and a constitution, presumably.
More pragmatically, historical precedent shows that if you don't the plebs eventually rebel and you have to spend a lot more resources on suppressing them, or actually just wind up being hung from the lampposts.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
28d ago
But why would Putin attack the Baltics? The only situation in which I can imagine it making sense for him is if they escalate their own hostility to the point that he has no choice with the alternative being a path that leads to him losing control internally - say, by them engaging in a boots-on-the-ground intervention to aid Ukraine, or a full blockade of Kaliningrad. Such actions would almost certainly be justified by rhetoric like yours, arguing that they must strike the Russians while they are weak because surely Putin will come for them afterwards otherwise, leading to the usual crybully escalation cycle that should be familiar from the CW setting ("They're dangerous! We must punch them! They punched back? See, I told you how dangerous they were! You were an idiot for arguing against punching them! In fact this situation is your fault, because we should have punched harder!").
Medvedev
The man has gone full shitposter in his political afterlife; quotes from him should be treated like the "former British intelligence specialists" Russian channels like parading around claiming that UA collapse is imminent every week.
Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries?
Well, they did that for America's middle eastern meatgrinders. Besides, Ukraine has shown how much the effectivity of any army is magnified when backed by operational depth and modern C&C (satellites, patrol planes, analysis) that for political reasons can't be touched by their adversary. I imagine the effect would be increased manifold if there were no sanitary barrier of the kind that requires manually preprocessing intel that is passed to Ukraine lest the crown jewels of alliance capabilities leak to an adversary. In a battle of Estonia plus NATO minus non-Estonian NATO meat vs. Russia on Estonian territory I would not bet on the Russians, and I don't think the Russians would either.
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このMOLOCHだ！
29d ago
Eh, my sense is that we have maybe one-digit number of hardline American jingoist posters who overwhelm any remotely Ukraine-related thread by participation and effort, and many more people who just generally lower the sanity waterline by seeing it as yet another metaphorical battleground for the US culture war where the only thing that matters is Hunter Biden and which side is more (fake and) gay. This seems to be about what to expect for a topic that attracts agenda posters but lies outside of the specialisation of anyone producing the sort of deep dives that tend to cause productive discussion around here.
Also in response to @georgioz's parallel answer, if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things. There were many good reasons for them to go for Ukraine, and few reasons against (with the main ones, their revealed ineptitude and everything downstream from it, being one that they presumably were genuinely unaware of).
The military base reason loses weight if the base is already gone, and likewise none of those states have had Russian client governments since around 1990. Indeed, I think that in '91 it was eminently reasonable to expect a Russian invasion in the Baltics, but not in 2024. Conversely, if 30 years had elapsed after Maidan with nothing happening, the Russian bases in Ukraine were long gone, the ethnically Russian population thoroughly sidelined and Ukraine had joined NATO, I would also confidently predict Russia would not invade anymore.
What do you think was the reason, then?
Sure, Trump was also generally not predicted to construct the Torment Nexus. It seems like the maximally evil thing that is still somewhat plausible and more importantly demands concrete action from Western governments and citizens.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument. There are some pretty out-there things generally believed in particular countries, and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief. Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
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