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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Can anybody explain the Polish perspective on the Ukraine war?

I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.

Still, Poland used to get in trouble with the EU for not wanting to take in a certain amount of them.

Moreover, Poland has also faced reprimand from the same union for their policies toward non-heterosexuals.

Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?

Now it seems that Poland is going toward ever more alignment with the EU and US.

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Is anybody of relevance in Poland even attempting to contradict the pro-Western turn?

  • -14

I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

Large part of that, at least in common narrative, is due to emigration of problematic people out of the country (as economic migrants). Ofc it wouldn't happen if we were not part of the EU. Because then immigration from Poland would be treated as, IDK, Mexicans in the US. Personally, if we were to somehow exit the EU (which is ~impossible given popular support for staying; if government fucked up that badly they'd probably rapidly lose power), I'd run away from the country.

It's really interesting how the relative position within a given group matters sometimes more than membership to the group.

The Polish people seem to be getting a lot more out of the EU than the Germans.

But who knows maybe I'm missing the big picture.

Btw Mexicans aren't really a problem in the US anymore, aside from being majority of the population in many areas.

The new invaders are from farther South, supposedly because anybody who wanted to move out of Mexico already did...

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Scared isn't the right word. They know that Russia is the number one existential risk to their independence and have a long history of generational greavences against Russia. They've seen Russian aggression chip pieces away from other eastern European countries and want no part of it.

All this adds up to absolutely salivating to inflict harm, any harm, on Russia. Afraid isn't the word I'd use; baying for Russian blood more like.

I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

This assumes as axiomatic that we all agree with white nationalism, which is consensus building.

Not necessarily. I understand that many Western Euros don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. Otherwise they wouldn't be so tolerant of all these immigrants...

Clearly there is something, perhaps 'Prussian' in Poland, that makes them enjoy their cleanliness, and their peace.

Why then get ever tighter with the aforementioned Western Euros + Americans who do not?

White nationalism seems foolish at this point as there are so many internal divisions within the species. Indeed most of the enemies of the continued survival of a certain type of European are European themselves.

As I see it, the future of that species is with an unification across borders. While TikTok and other online propaganda apparatuses are rapidly conquering masses across the planet, the resistance is becoming more and more diverse itself. Anybody with an ounce of interest in traditional culture and living can join, with regional differences fading as the enemy is global and common. The biggest obstacle being language, but this should resolve itself soon enough.

  • -15

Clearly there is something, perhaps 'Prussian' in Poland, that makes them enjoy their cleanliness, and their peace.

Come on now, this is well into the territory of suspicion. Poland isn’t that clean and orderly. Poles visiting Germany, always remark about the famous Ordnung muss sein, and I too agree with them.

I think it depends of the areas of Germany. I was in the formerly Prussian part of Poland and their commie blocks looked safe and clean.

Then I went to Western Germany (Hesse) and while Germany is quite ordered compared to some other Weuro counterpart, I could still tell that the commie blocks looked more sinister, degraded, with graffiti. It could just be that I saw the good part of one country vs the bad part of another. I do recall Bavaria being very neat a decade ago, but I also understand that importing millions of impoverished people from alien cultures has a cost.

I would not be surprised if Germany was neglecting some of its people while accommodating the foreigners.

Do you think western European cities are particularly dirty of unsafe? I live in a western European city and I've been to central European cities, albeit not specifically in Poland, and I didn't really notice a difference in cleanliness nor did I feel more or less safe to be honest. To test my impression from my own travels, I've looked at google street view at a couple of random places in Warsaw and Berlin and I can't really tell a difference between the cleanliness to be honest.

If you look at e.g. homicide rates there also isn't an obvious difference between Poland and western EU countries. Almost all of Europe has a very low homicide rate and whatever fluctuations there are within Europe do not line up with immigration. So I'm also very doubtful that western EU is significantly less safe compared to Poland.

The biggest difference is probably between more Mediterranean countries vs Germanic ones.

Here's some people discussing it

Which country is cleaner than which is not central to my argument, I simply noticed that Poland seemed unsoiled by the dirtiness brought by the most recent waves of boatpeople.

Migrant camps have sprung up over the last decades in French, Italian, UK cities etc. I think Germany simply spent a lot of money to house them instead.

Regarding safety, I'm mostly talking about petty crime. Street vendors selling counterfeit products, pickpockets, muggers, and then more violent stuff, rape gangs UK, mass molestation events Cologne.

Not necessarily. I understand that many Western Euros don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. Otherwise they wouldn't be so tolerant of all these immigrants...

This is assuming a lot without presenting any evidence beyond your assumptions. How many Western Euros do you think would agree with you that they "don't actually like clean and safe cities that much"? You may make the argument that "tolerance of immigrants results in unclean, unsafe cities," but you may not weakman your outgroup by asserting that "tolerance of immigration means they do not like clean, safe cities" unless you have some evidence as to this glimpse into their true motivations.

If you want to agenda-post, speak plainly without the dark hinting.

There is a trade-off to these EU policies that most Western European countries apply.

If they are on the receiving end of the migrants from Subsaharian Africa or the Middle-East whose countries were ravaged by their dearest allied CIA-controlled MIC, due to their generous social systems, then they incur significant cost in cleaning and peacekeeping in the areas where they are most concentrated.

I'm thinking of UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia.

While a large amount of Western Europeans despise the effects of these immigrants on their immediate living conditions, they still somehow end up voting 'in majority' for their causes.

'Voting wrong' seems to be worse than uncleanliness and relative lower safety.

Similarly in the US, a lot of people seemingly just let their own neighborhood get burned down by arsonists around 2020. Not much of a fire-preventing spirit them city-folks!

In general, if your views could be proven wrong by a five-minute conversation with a normal person or three, you should wonder first if it's true in the first place. Have you talked to anyone about this, or are these assumptions made of what you've been told by fellow extremely online nerds?

I haven't really held any conversation with Poles but my views on Western Europeans come from personal experience with them.

In terms of evidence, one can look at the mountains of litter left behind by hip and wealthy Western Euros after music festivals or spring breakers in Spain, or the valuation of so-called 'street art' (for example Banksy).

Anti-police movements also have their supporters in Western Europe, while police forces in the UK have been found to protect sex traffickers for fear of racism (racism is worse than sex trafficking for a certain subset of Weuros).

I haven't been to any music festivals in Poland, but I've been to the ones in Serbia. Whiter crowd than Western Europe, no different behavior. You're genuinely barking up the wrong tree.

Serbia, for that matter, has an amount of graffiti penned down I've not seen in any city where I live(the Netherlands). It's not even close. Not the very tiniest bit.

Certainly policing isn't something that makes the Eastern Europeans look good, either. Eastern European police officers take the job to wear a uniform, look cool, harass epople they don't like, and draw a salary from bribes as much as they do payment depending on where you're at.

I'll say it again: you're barking up the wrong tree. Any of the flaws you attribute to us Weuros - I don't mind the term - could be applied to Easterners, aside from the general charge of being vaguely anti-immigration.

In very slight defense of the claim, though not of how it was made, I remember at least one instance of a very normie Western Euro telling me (in the context of them preferring dirty, unsafe, hip Berlin to clean, safe and obnoxiously square Munich) almost in those words back in 2009 or so that they don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. As a Western Euro myself, I can actually empathise with the sentiment, though I did like Munich more (because I didn't actually find it that square, and I found Berlin's hipness to be a bit shallow when it came down to it).

I don't think so. OP is expressing his opinion on what Western Europe should look like, not saying "we all agree Western Europe should be like this".

The stated purpose of this community is for defending ideas. That is to say, users are expected to present earnestly held views, along with a reasoned case explaining why they believe them to be true. The OP has instead chosen to reel off a sequence of searingly controversial opinions—an explicit defense of white nationalism, as well as an implied condemnation of homosexuality—with markedly little effort to avoid polemical and ideologically weighted language ('tsunami of ... immigrants', 'drink the corn syrup'). To the extent that they prompt discussion, they do so by posing questions which invite only those respondents who agree with their stances on race and sexuality.

As a result of this framing, the implied terrain for debate is not 'is it important that Poland be a white ethnostate?' or 'is it right for Poles to oppose homosexuality', but rather 'given that Poland is relatively successfully defending itself against non-whites and gay rights, why would they undermine this by allying with America and the EU?'. It's frustrating and dull to unpick this sort of pre-discursive stage-setting, which is why most people who disagree with white nationalism or anti-homosexuality will simply roll their eyes and pass over comments like OP's. Thus, the entire thread is doomed to become an ideologically homogeneous round-table discussion that may raise some interesting points about the realpolitik of national alliances, but that—ironically for a culture war thread—will scarcely tackle the contentious underlying issues.

This is why consenus-building is disallowed. I'm happy to lay my cards on the table: it won't come as a surprise that I don't personally like white nationalism. Yet I value the fact that the Motte does not censor such viewpoints. It is critical, though, that when one presents controversial ideas, one does so according to the principles of the community, since laxity in this regard will induce an echo-chamber before you can say 'globohomo'.

But that’s not the point of his post. If he had to establish white nationalism was desirable first he would never be able to get to the questions he wanted to ask. I do agree that he could have probably gotten to his questions without revealing his personal preferences to such an extent though

See, if you had said "this is a weak argument" and asked OP to justify their position that'd be one thing. I can respect that. But you're grasping at the straw of "consensus building" when there's nothing in OP's post that is actual consensus building. Dropping a hot take without argument isn't consensus building, it's just... a hot take without argument. Which is actually against the rules! But come on man, if you're going to accuse someone of breaking the rules then at least cite the appropriate rule.

Laying out an array of controversial opinions and then inviting other people to discuss questions which are only coherent if one a priori regards those opinions as true is absolutely a form of consensus-building. It's not as explicit as saying 'we all agree that...', but it's equivalently powerful, because it still essentially obliges the subsequent discussion thread to conform ideologically to the root comment, lest the whole debate lose its consistency. The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.

In fact, this form of consensus building is more potent than the syntactically explicit form ('we all agree that...'), since though it is equally able to enforce conformity among respondents, one cannot as easily demonstrate with a quotation the manner in which debate is being ring-fenced.

I think you're reading a whole lot of things that just aren't there in the text. For example, this:

The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.

This isn't remotely true. What the discussion presupposes is not that the EU is inherently malignant, but that joining the EU is undesirable for Poland. There is an implicit claim, but you've (wittingly or unwittingly) rephrased the claim in a much stronger way and set it up as a strawman.

And further, even if one disagrees with the premise (which is fair), that doesn't render subsequent discussion incoherent. One can respond to such a question by saying "you seem to believe that joining the EU would be bad for Poland, but I don't think it is in fact bad for them", and go from there. That's a perfectly coherent discussion to have. So no, it isn't really trivially incoherent to have such a discussion if you don't agree the EU is evil.

What the discussion presupposes is not that the EU is inherently malignant, but that joining the EU is undesirable for Poland

I disagree. The clear subtext of the original comment is that the EU is inherently malignant.

One can respond to such a question by saying "you seem to believe that joining the EU would be bad for Poland, but I don't think it is in fact bad for them", and go from there.

Yes, just as one can say: 'actually, we don't all agree that xyz' in response to explicit-style consensus building. The problem is that to do so cuts against the grain of the discourse, requires sticking a shovel into the ground instead of simply building constructively, and so is more arduous and less likely to be well received even if done in good faith.

See, now you're moving the goalposts. Before you said "it isn't coherent to have the discussion if you don't agree". Now you're saying it's harder to have that discussion. Those are two very different things, and the latter doesn't support your original argument for why the OP counts as consensus building.

And to be honest, your claim here is pretty silly. Yes, of course it's harder to have a discussion where you don't agree about the premises. But it's still worthwhile, and indeed is kind of the point of this board. If you personally don't want to, that's definitely your right. But it's not a problem for most of the people here in general.

Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.

Well I was always perplexed by Poland joining the EU because they are consistently among the black sheep with Hungary who oppose a lot of what the EU members collectively stand for.

I'm legitimately asking what was the original idea behind Poland joining the EU which implicitly and formally comes with a certain set of requirements, among which giving up some of your sovereignty, when in the 2000s Poland has been rejecting a lot of these requirements

So, rephrasing, did Poland really need money that badly that they had to join the EU, despite knowing that they would down the line not want to fulfill some of the requirements, like not going against EU rules created by countries that are much more pro-immigration and anti-Christian-family than them?

The short answer is yes. Poland was dirt poor and no longer wanted to be a European backwater. Twenty years ago European progressivism was a tiny unimportant worry compared to what it is today, and to this day even Polish Varsovians are regularly surprised by how different the West is to their expectations.

Sad. I can see how this is yet another consequence of the industrial revolution, a disaster for the human race.

The EU's advanced bureaucracy can be seen as a more advanced version of the technology used to manage the USSR and before that the Russian Empire/Polish-LithuaniaC/HRE etc...

Technology just doesn't go away. Can't put the dating apps back in the hat.

I can see how it might read as consensus building, but if it is, surely so is suggesting that thinking the European country of Poland should look like the memetic concept of Europe as depicted in the media (clean, safe and full of Europeans) - is white nationalism.

The trick isn’t saying a European country should look like one, the trick is implying the cleanness of the country is due to the whiteness of its residents.

Arguments on The Motte shouldn’t be bundled to the point where coherent discussion of the OP of a thread requires agreement with smuggled premises. That way lies the chaos and LARPing of 4chan/pol/.

While I may not be able to produce clean data to establish my hunch, the dramatic increase in immigration of the 2010s in Western Europe came with a lot of unsanitary conditions and street violence.

I'm not implying that white = clean, as it's Western Europeans who welcomed that uncleanliness, and there are many varied people that are very much capable of cleanliness, for example Singaporeans.

Based on the observation on the ground that (the surveyed areas of) Poland is a very clean country, I'm guessing that the Polish people generally enjoys keeping their environment clean.

The cleanliness is a result of a lack of a certain type of population, which is abundant in Western Europe due to EU policies.

This has me questioning why the Polish government is suddenly so strongly supportive of EU policies, despite what seems like a natural, intrinsic cleanliness of its people.

But Russia is very dirty, much dirtier than most EU countries. That explains why Poland is so much against Russia and prefer to be aligned with the EU :)

Hasn't Paris been infamous for it's unique odeur d'urine for something like a century?

I had visited Paris several times and didn't notice it. Probably true but the importance of many things are often exaggerated. While driving through Europe overall France seemed clean and orderly. Belgium was the worse and Poland indeed was clean and nice. But the climate and geography can also play certain role. Possibly that many immigrants coming from the countries without forests, have different aesthetic preferences that they don't care so much about beautiful things like Polish people do.

Funny that in Latvia since we got independence from the Soviet Union, when people rejuvenate their flats, they often call it euro repair (eiroremonts). It annoys me because what it has to do with Europe? But somehow people there associate nice things with Europe and old and ugly things with the Soviet culture.

I'm not implying that white = clean,

No, but you are saying that certain groups are unclean ("The cleanliness is a result of a lack of a certain type of population"). Which in itself is fine with me -- I am pretty close to a free speech absolutist, and am on record as advocating that social media entities be barred from engaging in censorship that would not be permitted were it done by the govt in the US -- but I have no idea what group you are talking about. Turks in Germany? Africans in France? South Asians in Great Britain? All of the above? Immigrants in general? Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?

And, btw, when those same supposedly clean Eastern Europeans came to the US in the early 20th Century, people complained about how dirty their neighborhoods were. So, perhaps you are simply confusing the effects of high population density with the effects of the presence of whatever group you are talking about? I don't know, because, again, you don't give enough information for others to assess your claim.

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Yes. Poland only ever exists as a sovereign nation when there are Western powers around strong enough to keep Russia and Germany in check. They were Napoleon's lapdog back in the day, they were the UK's lapdog during the inter-war years, and they're America's lapdog now.

A lot of what we now regard as the Russian sphere of influence used to be the Polish sphere of influence, including much of Ukraine, until the dwindling of Polish imperial power led to the loss of these territories to the Russian Empire, and the occupation and gradual irrelevance of Poland. Poland exists as the bumpkin cousin of the great European empires, never counted among the likes of Britain, France, Austria, Spain or Russia, and the Tsars in St. Petersburg were a major part of why - even before the Soviet era, Russia played the role of humiliator in the Polish psyche, the rocks against which Poland's great power ambitions ran aground. There's unlikely to be any Polish-Russian rapprochement for a long time.

Ok that makes a lot of sense.

Yet it would be apropos, considering that they are both seemingly nationalist countries in the same area with common interests, and facing an existential risk at this point.

It's even somewhat ironic that they would go to such great length for the integrity of Ukraine's borders, when Ukrainian nationalists themselves would love to claim a slice of Poland.

Who would say no to a slice of Poland?

Who would say no to a slice of Poland?

Rather famously, the British in 1939. And angry Brits can express this quite vigorously at time - roughly what you would expect from a soccer riot commanded by Sandhurst-trained officers.

Ukrainian nationalists themselves would love to claim a slice of Poland.

Would they? My understanding is that all the areas that were disputed between Poland and Ukraine were ultimately transferred to Ukraine after World War II, and Ukrainian nationalists are now satisfied in that regard.

My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.

You underestimate how recent the whole woke/proimmigration bent is. In late 90ies when EU negotiated expansion with new members, the negotiations were tough. As part of the acceptance criteria there were temporary periods where free movement of labor from eastern members were suspended for years exactly for fear of mass economic immigration from east to west.

Back in the day there was also strong debate about what EU is: is it Europe of nations and just pact of economic convenience, or is it European superstate with its own army and foreign policy and so forth? The overall makeup of EU institutions was skewed to the former with deeply rooted principles of subsidiarity and voting system with multiple veto possibilities. It was before Treaty of Lisbon of 2007 that amends 1992 Maastricht Treaty and which brings more power to EU structures compared to member nations.

So one can say that EU left some member countries as opposed to member countries somehow not realizing where they entered.

You underestimate how recent the whole woke/proimmigration bent is.

Not towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.

Are you aware of when the EU thought the Poles should take some of those in?

Yes, but that's not the point. My argument is that the whole woke/proimmigration bent is certainly not new a) in Western Europe b) towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.

It's also worth noting that one of the reasons why there are occasional attempts from EU to get the Eastern European countries to take in more refugees is that then the Western European countries wouldn't have to host those refugees themselves.

Meh. I just think such attempts were fundamentally dishonest and merely meant as a culture war bone thrown to Eastern European liberal opposition groups and their Western pals to chew on, and an excuse to complain about Eastern European barbarian badwhites.

And we can rightly assume such attempts were dishonest, because it's rather obvious to anyone that if, say, Poland or Latvia accepted a large group of African migrants, most of them would just want to move on and cross the border into Germany. And who'd try stopping them? Certainly not the local authorities, and very probably not the German border guards either.

I just think such attempts were fundamentally dishonest

That's a fair view to have. What would it take to convince you otherwise?

What would it take to convince you otherwise?

Any tangible sign on the part of Western European EU member states of a willingness to control the outer borders of the EU and to curb the influx of refugees to their own soil.

It seems to be the paradox of EU 'democracy'. While no individual EU state is individually strongly pro-African immigration, the collective response of the EU is to take them in. With some caveats, as they have developed some measures of containment with North-Africa.

This emergent property of the EU was not hard to predict, but of course the bureaucrats in charge are strangely sympathetic to the corporations that benefit from economic integration and industry relocation.

If this continues on this trajectory, Europeans as a people will not survive the EU, having survived the USSR and all kind of monarchies and fascist dictatorships previously.

You act like the West is a monolith of support for wokism, but there's no reason a country couldn't be a conservative, Western, capitalistic democracy where the voters simply reject the excesses of the left. History and economics shows this is one of the best setups a country can have, actually.

The EU makes it difficult to be conservative, due to their rules superseding national rules.

They can literally force unpopular changes on the locals due to their grandparents' government choosing to join the EU.

Additionally, whether the changes are intended or not, exposure to a broader market means that other countries gain access to your own market, and the EU by design prevents fine-tuning of internal market mechanisms to for example protect the local labor from foreign truckers, factory workers, farmers etc.

It's not an on-off button you can play with to get wealth out of. Once you're in your people's destiny is tied in to the EU's peoples' destinies.

For a small country like Poland the choice is to align with a block like EU or Russia or China or US or say a hypothetical confederation of Eastern Europeans countries... Either way, the choice matters for your people's future, and the Poles picked the atheist, gay pride block.

Yes I agree with this. There’s a reason Brexxit failed. Trade is inversely related to distance. You just can’t hit economies of scale (being about to produce at scale to buy expensive machine etc) without being in these broader trade zones.

Where the whole thing is falling apart is when the EU people also want to be cultural dictators.

Now this gets complicated because a currency union needs a fiscal union which means the EU needs some budgetary control over members etc. And if you have free movement you get brain drain.

EU individually with a lot of trade frictions isn’t a viable Geographic economic unit. Too small of market individually.

You are unaware, perhaps, that Poland and Russia have a bit of a history?

They do, but so do Germany and Poland, or even USA and Poland, let's not forget the Lend-Lease that helped the USSR conquer Poland in the first place.

Why are the Poles so afraid of Russia?

Or are they afraid that they will lose their sovereignty and be forced to do horrible things, like welcoming people they do not like and allowing disgusting acts to be carried out on their countrymen?

Are they afraid that the Russians will replace the Polish population with an indistinguishable mix of ethnicities and cultures that have no bearing to the original Polish people and culture?

Germany and Russia have history of long periods of peace and mutual economic development with burts of wars or proxy wars as they inevitably clash for geopolitical reasons only to make peace again for economic reasons.

Poland has history of being subjugated by both, although economic background is similar. This makes Poles much more cautious and paranoid.

How do you figure that Lend-Lease helped the USSR conquer Poland? Your own link says that it was passed in March of 1941. The invasion of Poland was completed by October of 1939.

As others have noted, your grasp of the relevant history and politics seems a little shaky.

Without the lend-lease, USSR logistics would have potentially collapsed before reaching Germany, and the USSR would not have been able to keep their annexed territories way beyond 1939, which is where a lot of the modern grudge comes from.

Presumably he's not talking about Lend-Lease enabling the 1939 invasions (plural; Hitler got half and Stalin got half) to happen, but rather enabling the invaded lands' retention afterwards. (Wikipedia says the parts incorporated into the USSR had something like 10M people, and of course the parts dominated by the USSR had everybody else) Without Lend-Lease we might easily imagine a world in which the USSR was too weak to be in any shape to race the other Allies to Berlin (or at least too weak to be able to afford a pause along the way waiting for Poles to get slaughtered, and too weak to object if we decided afterwards to let Poland return to the status quo ante bellum (because that's the natural Schelling point to discourage wars of conquest) rather than to the Potsdam agreement borders (because we were sick of war and because FDR was an idiot who played his hunch).

I'm not endorsing that theory, though. Alternate history is tricky, wishful thinking is easy. I don't see any reason why the good "USSR too weak without support, Poland freed half a century earlier" outcome would necessarily be much more likely than e.g. the atrocious "USSR way too weak without support, Nazis lock down Poland for years or decades longer and expel or kill tens of millions of Poles" outcome.

Either way, it's hard to argue that any of the major protagonists had the interest of the Polish people at heart while deciding its fate.

While Russia can be said to have somewhat recovered from its world-dominating communist fantasies, if anything the USA's foreign policy has only gotten worse.

While they had some semblance of justification to nuke Japan or firebomb Germany, hardly any moral observer can support the most recent US military interventions, which seemingly have to do with past allies turning into dictators or vice versa, and major US officials boldly reminiscing their history of coup d'etats.

Do you mean to imply that US foreign policy is more of a threat to Poland than is Russian foreign policy.

The Poles seem to think being under the American umbrella beats being under the Russian umbrella. Today, I can look at Serbia, at Armenia, at Kazakhstan, at Kyrgyzystan, at Belarus, at Ukraine, and see how the Poles have a point.

Why should they prefer being under Moscow's sway moreso than being under that of Washington/Brussel?

I'm not too familiar with the situation in all these countries. As far as I know, Serbia is relatively peaceful.

Ukraine is not exactly under the Russian umbrella, they are literally getting billions of dollars in supplies from the US to fight a war to the last Ukrainian.

After 50 years under Moscow, the Polish people still exists.

Aside from Ukraine and Israel, the US (or EU) are not really protecting the integrity of any country's borders, not even theirs, and that's one of the main expectations for a defense body.

Considering that they also flood their allied countries with consumerist and anti-natalist propaganda, they are a real risk for their allied country's people, at least from a demographic point of view.

The Poles find your arguments unconvincing, and are the most ardently anti-Russian people in the EU. I don't blame them. The Ukrainians might agree, and are fighting a war because they very clearly think people like you are wrong.

Mind you, the arguments you then bring forward are drivel too. Demographics in Russia and its sphere of influence are worse than the west's. You talk about propaganda without thinking for even a moment of what sorts of propaganda is blared from the other side. You talk about organisations protecting its borders that literally can't - the US because it is on the other side of the Atlantic, the EU because it doesn't have the people.

None of these things are oit-there facts particularly tough to find out about. They only require you to look beyond the part of the world that is extremely online. I don't know why you keep insisting on things that (large) nations of people nigh-unanimously agree on are wrong without stopping to listen to them and see what they are talking about.

Between this post and others, I don't think your model of how Europeans think and feel is a good one, east or west, nor do I think you quite understand what the EU does or even can do with its member states. Stefferi's post up there would be a good start for you to read; in short, immigration isn't as big a deal as you imply it is, and the EU has little influence on any particular nation's handling of it anyway.

and the EU has little influence on any particular nation's handling of it anyway.

This isn't as the ECHR, of which one must accept the authority of to join the EU, has significantly impeded the capability of countries to prevent illegal immigration.

Well not really, I would say that the situation is not as simple as that. Sometimes countries can take measures against illegal immigration with the unspoken consent of western Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushbacks_in_Greece

https://twitter.com/ECHR_CEDH/status/1544958198125404161

https://ecre.org/greece-systematic-pushbacks-continue-by-sea-and-land-as-meps-demand-eu-action-deaths-up-proportionate-to-arrivals-number-of-people-in-reception-system-reduced-by-half-mitarachi-still-not/

If the ECHR had battalions, I might in fact agree. In practice, it doesn't, and countries that flout it see no consequences.

One doesn't need an army if words suffice. Which in this case they do; countries act accordingly and change laws after ECHR deems them incompatible with its interpretation of the convention.

Can you provide evidence to the contrary, that is, ECHR ruling against a state, which decides to ignore the judgement and doesn't make claimant whole?

I don't get that last part. Claimant whole? I don't know how to parse that.

Probably "make the claimant whole". Read claimant as plaintiff/complaining party. Make whole as in do something to resolve the complaining parties issues to their/the courts satisfaction. It doesn't make much sense here since the assumption would be that a state would ignore the judgement for the purpose of not acting in the ways the complaining party would want to make them whole.

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First of all, the ECHR is not related to the EU; it is part of the Council of Europe, which includes all European countries except Belarus and Russia, the latter having been expelled this year due to the invasion.

Quoting Wikipedia:

The court lacks enforcement powers. Some states have ignored ECtHR verdicts and continued practices judged to be human rights violations. (...)

The number of non-implemented judgements rose from 2,624 in 2001 to 9,944 at the end of 2016, 48% of which had gone without implementation five years or more. In 2016, all but one of the 47 member countries of the Council of Europe had not implemented at least one ECtHR verdict in a timely fashion, although most non-implemented verdicts concern a few countries: Italy (2,219), Russia (1,540), Turkey (1,342), and Ukraine (1,172).

The article has a few examples of non-implemented judgments.

Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?

From what I've gathered from my Polish acquaintances and co-workers* the answer is pretty straight forward, they don't see themselves as "Eastern", they see themselves as "Western" a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on). More pointedly Poland got royally fucked over by a Russian German alliance in World-War one, and again in World War Two. Accordingly their towards both Russia and Germany today is essentially one of "Never Again". From the Polish perspective joining NATO defangs the German threat while pissing off their ancient rivals/enemies, the Muskovites, as far as they're concerned it's all win. Sure the duplicitous Germans and and effete Belgians can whinge about immigration policy but what are they actually gonna do, Poland is part of the Schengen Zone baby and they've been pulling the DeSantis trick of sending unwanted immigrants to the hometowns of politicians who promote immigration for years now.

As for the Ukraine war in particular, Kiev has long been an ally of Krakow and Moscow has long been a rival/enemy. Pieprzic Rossia, Slava Ukraini.

* Note most of those acquaintances and co-workers are in the Polish military/defense industry which probably colors things a bit.

Thank you for answering the question!

From the Polish perspective joining NATO defangs the German threat while pissing off their ancient rivals/enemies, the Muskovites, as far as they're concerned it's all win.

Seems a little bit careless. The Eternal Germ will not let them get away with it.

Sure the duplicitous Germans and and effete Belgians can whinge about immigration policy but what are they actually gonna do, Poland is part of the Schengen Zone baby and they've been pulling the DeSantis trick of sending unwanted immigrants to the hometowns of politicians who promote immigration for years now.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

It seems to me that their only saving grace is their unique language, for now.

Once they have the Americans 'helping out' with the Russian threat and the Germans 'advising' and the British 'training' they'll find out that their younger generations only want to speak English.

+if/when NATO finally takes out Russia, I imagine Poland would be in the runner-up for the next 'disturbingly native-looking' country in what remains of Europe then.

If anything, Russia is a good distraction from their little DeSantis tricks, it's not in their best long-term interest to have the Ukraine wedge take out the bear.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

We've been swamped with immigrants from Ukraine for a while now. What changed is that now we're swarmed with refugees as well, for what the distinction is worth. The crowd crossing the border fits the common image of what a refugee wave should look like - there is plenty of evidence, and I made a point of going through the central train station of Kraków a few times week during the first month or two just to see for myself.

Arrivals are not particularly controversial, though the various welfare they receive is, for example.

Poland does not like taking in economic refugees, and the fact that they are taking in Ukrainian refugees so readily is a measure of how much they dislike the entire concept of "Russia invades someone."

Russia has demonstrated that if it had the capacity, it would be an existential threat to all of Eastern Europe. It’s thus in most of those nations self interest to make it damn sure that Russia cannot achieve that capacity in the future.

+if/when NATO finally takes out Russia, I imagine Poland would be in the runner-up for the next 'disturbingly native-looking' country in what remains of Europe then.

Do you believe that a primary goal of the EU/NATO is to fill all European countries with non-White immigrants? Do you actually think the EU/NATO strongly object to the fact that the population of Russia is mostly ethnic Russians, and that the population of Poland is almost entirely ethnic Poles?

Well the EU/NATO are not exactly sentient entities, they are just vehicles, even technologies welded by the actual powers-that-be. While the rulers of NATO are not exactly the rulers of the EU, I believe the rulers of the EU to be vassals of the rulers of NATO.

Given that there is only dozens of extremely powerful people that are tied to all these entities, it's not surprising that the same billionaires who own the media companies that ultimately decide elections in Western countries are very close to the center of power.

I do believe that ethnically-homogeneous European countries are an obstacle to these people, and they actually let us know by transparently publishing it in the Guardian, NYT, HuffingtonPost, etc.

Also the population of Russia is a mix of ethnicities, 'ethnic Russian' would cover quite a varied array of phenotypes. It's hard to tell what exactly their issue with Russia is, but fighting a war to the last Ukrainian is definitely a good way to clean up some of these pesky homogeneous East-Europeans.

I do believe that ethnically-homogeneous European countries are an obstacle to these people, and they actually let us know by transparently publishing it in the Guardian, NYT, HuffingtonPost, etc.

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

Also the population of Russia is a mix of ethnicities, 'ethnic Russian' would cover quite a varied array of phenotypes.

It is true that many ethnic groups live in Russia, but ethnic Russians make up 81% of the country's population and they are relatively homogeneous. Chechens, Kalmyks, etc. are not ethnic Russians; they are part of the remaining 19%, which is the "mix of ethnicities" with "a varied array of phenotypes".

It's hard to tell what exactly their issue with Russia is

The obvious answer is "they're invading a neighbouring country for no reason and murdering civilians". The cynical answer is "Russia is a historical political and military rival and they're taking this opportunity to weaken them". You seem to have skipped both and gone straight to the batshit-crazy answer of "they hate Russians because they're White".

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

I haven't seen this, best I could find was this one where they insist on the racial homogeneity and call people that value it 'extreme nationalists'

The blood-drenched harrowing of the war, followed by post-war border shifts and ethnic cleansing, created a racially pure Poland for the first time in history — fulfilling the dreams of earlier generations of extreme nationalists.

This is the type of piece they are pushing against white people in the US, the country the Poles are making the choice of allying themselves with instead of Russians :

How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracy

I don't see why they would not similarly attack Poland in the future, to the tune of 'Poland took the money of multicultural democracies to defend itself from evil nationalist Russia, but they still refuse to accept multiculturalism'

The obvious answer is "they're invading a neighbouring country for no reason and murdering civilians".

The US do the same to countries they are not even neighbors of, and defend their allies engaged in the same practices, in Yemen notably.

What is so special about the borders of Ukraine that needs to be defended at all cost?

Plus Russia actually has a reason in protecting the Russian minorities

in the East shelled by the Ukrainian government since 2014.

While I understand due to historical reasons why this is not a popular sentiment in Poland, I think it would be better for the Polish people to get annexed by Russia -which I do not see as likely- than to spend another 50 years under EU/US dominion.

There is already a case study with the FRG vs GDR, with the Soviet-dominated side faring better in preserving original German culture and demographics, as demonstrated by this map of mosques

The continued existence of the Polish people is at stake, but I understand that that is not what most people are immediately concerned with.

I do find it amusing that some leaders of Poland explicitly said that they do not want to turn into Brussels (from 1st link):

Błaszczak warned that EU pressure on Poland to accept refugees “is a straight road to a social catastrophe, with the result that in a few years Warsaw could look like Brussels.”

It seems that they made the same connection as I do, regarding at least migrants and safety, but they apparently don't think leaning further into EU/NATO is compromising that position, or that position is not taking priority over the perceived Russian threat.

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

Here's an oldie but goodie

Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new, looking at the title: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Polish".

Also "By: authors", lol.

Everyone here is white. They are not ostentatiously white the way, say, Swedes are;

Most obviously, there aren’t many Africans, Arabs, or Asians. The rest of Europe seems a wonderfully Technicolor place these days—the metro in Paris, Rome, and London could almost be mistaken for the subway in New York. Heterogeneity is a tonic; it adds the energy of unexpected combinations—the woman in chador chatting with the blonde woman in jogging gear on the tube. Ah, cosmopolitanism! But alas, Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being.

Speaking of cosmopolitanism—Stalin’s favorite euphemism for Jewishness—there aren’t many Jews here, either. There used to be three million, but the Nazis took care of that. Forty percent of Warsaw was Jewish; the deficit now seems overpowering, they fill the empty spaces in the streets. And not just the Jews: Thousands upon thousands of Polish Catholics were killed at Auschwitz, thousands more were worked to death in Siberia; the officer class of the Polish army was slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland was the charnel house of the 20th century.

This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.

The economy stopped growing, as market economies will sometimes do. Unemployment stands at more than 18 percent. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the center did not hold. The former Communists, who had gained power posing as social democrats, remained in control, but the center-right opposition—largely composed of Solidarity remnants—collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialized as significant forces. One was the League of Polish Families, a party of Catholic nationalist extremists (which received 9 percent of the vote); the other was called Self-Defense, a frightening mixture of nationalism and socialism led by a bully named Andrzej Lepper (it received 10 percent, but its strength has nearly doubled in recent public opinion polls). By contrast, Freedom Union—the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals—received only 3 percent and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Sejm.

And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still-strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday). It is likely that the former Communists, led now by prime minister Leszek Miller, will attempt to move left, sloppily, in an attempt to ease the pain, outflank the populists, and keep their apparatchiks prosperous.

“Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America,” says Jaroslaw Kaczynski , leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist center-right political remnant of Solidarity. “People succeed here not because they’re talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: Thousands gain, millions lose. This is an oversimplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis—my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong.”

And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.

Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new

You looked at something explicitly described as an "oldie", and thought it was new? Why?

This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.

I don't think having a problem with homogeneity requires for the tone to be accusatory.

And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.

I'm sorry, I'm physically incapable of pretending media's boogeymen are uniquely bad, or that there is something wrong with populism.

What's a primary goal and what's a secondary goal? A primary goal of the EU is, charitably, to keep Europeans in the manner to which they have grown accustomed, i.e. to maintain their welfare states in an age of falling fertility rates and dwindling tax bases. They have decided that the optimal way to do this to usher in an endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and have repeatedly made statements to that effect. To the extent that any European country - Hungary, say, or Poland - objects that they do not want to take in large African populations, the EU has indicated that it will cajole, threaten and twist arms until it gets what it wants. After all, such objections are an obstacle to the goal of maintaining a particular economic state, and thus an undermining of the EU project at large. Given these facts, is it fair to say that the EU is at odds with the continued existence of European countries as majority-European states, as they want migrants in numbers large enough to affect demographic pyramids?

EU is not taking in an "endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East". The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population. Out of this, ca 600 00 are asylum seekers. If EU was actually intent on ushering in an "endless number of migrants", this would be an incredibly weak effort, considering how many Africans and Middle Easterns are actually willing to move; it would also be strange for EU to run a whole agency (and keep giving it more and more funds, and turn a blind eye to its migrant pushbacks) to coordinate ways to keep unauthorized migrants, mainly from these areas, out.

EU countries do, indeed, wish to utilize migration to save the welfare state, but when it comes to first residence permits EU issues for employment/education purposes, far and away the biggest group, already in 2021, were the Ukrainians. That indicates who EU wants to work, currently, and it's not hard to imagine that there's a number of Eurocrats currently seeing the Ukrainian refugee flows to Europe as a major boon, presenting an employable and uncontroversial constituency for further work. EU does, at times, weakly try to get Eastern European countries to take in more refugees, mainly as a form of "burden sharing" to take the load off the Western countries, but as one can see from their demographics, these efforts are not really an example of "cajoling, threatening and twisting arms", since that sort of a thing would presumably actually get results.

EU migration policy can mostly be understood through three mandates: getting a modicum of labor-based migration (often from other, non-EU European countries, though that's a diminishing category) and then trying to balance the quest to maintain some sort of a de jure refugee/asylum system, since that is an important part of EU's self-image/external image as the bulwark of the international system and its underlying human rights treaties, and the quest to de facto ensure there's not too many asylum seekers and refugees, let alone illegal immigrants, since that would be destabilizing. The push/pull created by the conflict of the last two mandates then makes the whole immigration policy rather an unwieldy contraption, not really something that most mainstream EU forces are willing to discuss.

I'd also like to add the huge amounts of money, plus various political concessions, given to Turkey in exchange for keeping the migrants at bay.

Yes, and the general way how many seem to believe that EU's migration policies are basically those few confused months in 2015 (or rather a certain interpretation of those months) essentially representing the entire EU migration policy until then and since then, instead of looking at all the things EU has done, both diplomatically and legislatively, to try to make sure that those months aren't repeated again.

You're leaving out the most culture war relevant part of the story, how this policy came to be. The turkey deal only happened after the crisis.

On one side, you have the blank statists, who thought it would be a good idea (they weren't confused) to import millions of MENA people . On the other, the far right and eastern europeans, who warned that they were unassimilable . As the evidence poured in, and the blank statists started losing elections, they changed course, and the state of affairs you describe is the result. Sadly yet predictably, Pol(and) was right again.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

"Refugees", almost entirely female and children, with a very legitimate and widely accepted claim, whose male relatives are fighting right across the border until they return. I am not very sympathetic to Ukraine personally but I can't comprehend how someone can't understand why Europeans are generally quite supportive of this refugee wave.

Also to mention one aspect which is often hushed (or unknown to Americans maybe), Ukrainian women have long been the number one source of white female prostitutes around the continent and beyond. In my native language of Turkish, the word Ukrainian is practically synonymous with prostitute. Until 10-20 years ago it was Russians who filled the same niche and the phrase "going to the Russian" was universally understood to visit a prostitute.

I am not writing this to be insulting but it is worthwhile to realize that this is one of the big reasons why the images of millions of poor Ukrainian women flocking to their countries is often not perceived as something threatening by the locals.

Your comment reminds me how in the recent Polish poll (that I can't find now), Polish women were slightly less supportive of the Ukrainian refugees compare to men. Sounds like they don't want more competition

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

Not immigrants; refugees. There is a difference, and the Ukrainian new-arrivals to Poland are legitimately refugees.

The context is comprehensively different from Merkel's third-world invasion. From my reading, the biggest difference is that support for Ukrainian refugees is massively popular in Poland--not just right-to-left along a generic political axis, but importantly, top-to-bottom from the Polish elite to the grassroots.

The new arrivals are, indeed, refugees, but even before the war, Poland was actually swamped by “temporary” workers from Ukraine. But that’s not the point: the difference between Ukrainians in Poland vs Africans in Germany or Sweden is not so much based on legal status, but rather cultural similarity. If US today got mass immigration from English Canadians, who just happened to speak as incomprehensibly as rural Scottsmen, but quickly learn local dialect, it wouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, compared to mass immigration from Latin America. This is closer to the today’s relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, despite recent history of genocide of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (unlike with Blacks in US, in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities).

The issue I see with it is that they're building an infrastructure and customs to welcome and accommodate refugees. This attracts a certain type of people that will not leave once the current Ukraine crisis is over.

It's a slippery slope.

What if Turkey has a civil war, or even Germany, which is starting to look a lot like Turkey, demographically-speaking, aren't they too 'neighbors' etc?

The current wave of refugees is women with children, which is much different than single young males from Africa. If they end up staying, then given cultural similarity, that’s a win too, considering the dire state of demographics in developed world. Germany will not have civil war, and if Turkey has one, Poland simply will not admit any of them, as it did not admit the big wave of Middle East refugees a few years ago, or the ones trying to illegally crossing through Belarus.

What you seem to be missing is that the current government of Poland, as much as they screw around with the rule of law and principles of republican government, they are not hostile to their average constituents, in a way that, say, US government often is. This reduces the downside risk.

They are not hostile to their constituents but deepening the ties to governments that are.

The power imbalance between Poland and US is not in Poland's favor, they will not be able to keep protecting their people.

I think the Polish people is underestimating the risk of staying in the same failing boat as the EU / US.

You keep repeating the same point, and keep failing to look at the other side of that line: of what things look like for pro-Russian countries. They're doing worse. Much worse. The Poles know this, the Ukrainians know this, just-about everyone who isn't an internet contrarian knows this. Why do you insist all of these people are wrong?

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I agree--I think that cultural similarity is one of the big factors that contributes to the widespread popularity of welcoming the Ukrainian refugees. A shared concern over an expansionist Russia and simple human compassion for a neighbor's plight are the others that occur to me offhand.

in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities

Not least because a typical European country has historical reason to have a grudge against most of their neighbours. Acting on all of those would obviously be a huge negative when it comes to economic and other prosperity.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants.

Sheltering the women and children of your ally while the men fight your hated enemy is the least one can do as a good ally.

a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on).

Sometimes to a cringe-inducing degree. See Christ of Europe

I think it's interesting that Poland sees Ukraine as a friend. Didn't Ukraine basically carve the western part of their country out of former Polish territory (killing the Poles that lived on it)? Or is this more of a conscious choice to ignore the various ethnic purification projects that formed the current map of Europe, because they know that it would be dangerous to reopen that topic?

(Online) people bringing it up since the war started are shunned. Before, it was frequently brought up.

There is a conscious effort to set aside the appetite for regular gestures of remorse from Ukrainian side, for practical reasons. A mix of seeing Ukraine as a weak, confused country we can siphon for valuable people, an ally we can create a power block with to rival Germans / Russians, a fear of appearing self interested, or far worse, angering our great and generous ally overseas.

Partially a conscious choice to drop all outstanding border controversies with Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus to avoid driving them into Russia’s arms - the approach was developed in the exile press during the Soviet period, and benefited from the discrediting of the interwar extreme nationalist approach by the events of WW2. They also wanted to maintain established borders to avoid reopening the question of the territories “recovered” from Germany (West Germany had earlier refused to make a final, binding agreement to respect the new borders pending a future reunification with East Germany during a period when more of the refugees from Prussia, Silesia, and Hinterpommern were both alive and unreconciled to the expulsion). Poland has already been compensated for the loss of ethnically mixed Galicia-Volhynia (main site of the Ukrainians anti-Polish massacres) and other parts of the Kresy with the newly-monoethnically-Polish German acquisitions, so it’s not like they need the area for anything.

The Soviet Union decided it was keeping what is now western Ukraine rather than giving it back to Poland after WW2, but that’s not modern day Ukraine’s fault.

When people in Europe think about the EU, they don't think about immigration or gay marriage or whatever, or even Russia (well, these days they might, but still, it's NATO that is more relevant as an actor here). They think about trade. Behind all other stuff, EU is still primarily a trade pact, and what it represents to your average European is wealth and stability. Of course both of these are extremely important to Eastern Europeans, for reasons that probably don't need explaining. It is impossible to understand the popularity of EU without this frame; it's particularly impossible if one insists on looking at European politics through American culture-war framings.

Whatever attempts there have been from EU to get Poland to be more socially liberal have obviously been failures, thus far. (It's worth remembering that the whole spat EU has with Poland is not EU saying "you need to take in more gays and immigrants and have abortions", it's been about EU being concerned with PiS court-packing and other challenges to rule of law.)

Regarding Russia, it's also worth noting that Poland is not "going toward more alignment with EU and US", Poland is significantly more anti-Russian than EU and US and Polish politicians have many times demanded these parties to take more aggressive action against Russia and to protect Ukraine, going as far as to flirt with direct intervention in ways that EU and US have refrained from doing.

This, of course, does not just come from nowhere. Throughout the war, social media has been replete with constant Russian TV clips going around in social media on how they hate Poland, in particular, and blame Poland, in particular, for brainwashing all the Ukrainians to believe Russia is not their friend, and how Russia needs to conduct a SMO against Poland as soon as possible. And there seems to be an even longer history of anti-Polish hostility from Russia (quoting from a Google-translated Finnish blog post):

A certain Central European state has constantly taken center stage in the Kremlin's calculations as the main opponent of the country, and the policy pursued by Russia in its immediate periphery would ultimately be easy to explain through this tension alone. In Vladimir Putin's eyes, one of the countries standing in the way of Russian hegemony stands out above all others: Poland.

The essay published by the Russian president in July 2021 on the historical connection between Russians and Ukrainians has been quoted widely, and is a telling example of Putin's understanding of history. The essay is a straightforward narrative about the destinies of Eastern Europe spanning half a millennium. Few readers paid attention to how, in connection with each historical turning point he presented, Putin specifically named Poland not only as Russia's main opponent in the Ukrainian region, but also as an incomparably worse oppressor of Ukrainians than Russia.

Putin's essay tells how history took a fatal turn already when, as a result of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, Ukraine ended up in the sphere of influence of Catholic Christendom, which broke the connection of the Eastern Slavic peoples. This was followed by the revolt of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky; the struggle for freedom, in which the Ukrainian people sought help against Poland from their brother-in-law, the Tsar of Russia. The divisions of Poland meant for Putin the return of the "old Russian lands" to their true state unity, and in the 19th century Ukrainian cultural identity naturally developed as a "Little Russian" part of the empire; the tsarist regime's censorship measures, on the other hand, were only a reaction to the efforts of Polish nationalists in Ukraine. After the collapse of the Empire, the Poles suppressed the independence of the Western Ukrainians and used the "People's Republic of Ukraine" founded by Symon Petlyura only as an intermediary in their fight against the Bolsheviks. In the period between the world wars, the Polish-administered western regions of Ukraine were oppressed. According to Putin, the current rapprochement between Ukraine and the EU countries is still underpinned by an "old Polish and Austrian project" — a reference to the cooperation between Polish independence activists and the Habsburg dual monarchy — whose purpose was to create an artificial "anti-Russia" out of Ukraine.

Rhetorical attacks against Poland have become a regular part of Putin's arsenal since the annexation of Crimea. In December 2019 , Putin accused the government of interwar Poland of colluding with the Nazis and named Poland complicit in starting World War II . A month later, the Holocaust commemoration held in Jerusalem turned into a new stage in the historical war between Moscow and Warsaw with Putin's speech . In June 2020, the ruler of the Kremlin continued on the same topic, declaring that the wartime suffering of occupied Poland was the fault of the country's own government. In Russian foreign policy, history has been turned into a weapon, and in this respect, the front of the hybrid war had been turned towards Poland long before the asylum seeker crisis at the turn of last year on the border of Belarus. The nationalist, right-wing populist government that has been in power in Warsaw since 2015, which, like the Kremlin, has enacted its own historical laws , has been a favorite target for Putin.

It is clear that the struggle for domination of Eastern Europe is defined in the Kremlin as a struggle primarily against Poland. Among the new EU and NATO countries after the collapse of communism, Poland is in a class of its own; For ten years, Poland's economic growth has exceeded all expectations , the recovery of the country's economy from the corona crisis has been fast , the country's armed forces are the fifth largest in the European Union , and from the beginning Poland has pursued an active neighborhood policy specifically in the direction of Ukraine, also using the means of economic cooperation.

Poland's eastern policy has a long history. The "Eastern Borderlands", Kresy Wschodnie , were once part of Polish nationalist nostalgia; the regions from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea appeared as a lost, beautiful Arcadia, the scene of the great days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The background of Poland's current neighborhood policy is more recent, and its starting point was the views expressed in the Kultura magazine by two émigré journalists during the Cold War, Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Mieroszewski . "The Giedroyc-Mieroszewski Doctrine"required Poland's unreserved support for the independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, rejection of the big brother and great power attitude, agreement on historical pain points, and the joining of all countries to United Europe. After the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Polish government practically adapted its Eastern policy to the Kultura magazine and tried to pave Ukraine's way to Western institutions. Although today's Poland has become more authoritarian and anti-EU than before , the country's commitment to Ukraine has not wavered.

Poland's neighborhood policy has been yet another "geopolitical" threat factor for the Russians, and as such a particularly painful one. It is no surprise that in the eyes of Vladimir Putin, Poland's rise to a new regional power factor and active politics in the neighboring regions are defined in the light of five hundred years of history. In this interpretation, the Warsaw elite is once again expanding its sphere of interest at the expense of Russia; Poles are at the forefront of challenging Russian supremacy in Ukraine; Poland actually threatens to question once again the entire Russian national birth myth dating back to the days of Kievan Rus; and at the same time, Poland, specifically Poland, is bringing Western weapons close to Russia's heartlands, whether it's NATO's missile shield or arms deliveries to the Ukrainian army.

It is also clear to Putin that, of all his opponents, Poland is the one that won't give up, and Poland is the only one of the EU countries that is ready to defend Ukraine, even on its own . Moscow's foreign policy has achieved results in a few countries of the former Eastern Bloc, above all in Hungary, but on the Polish side the contradictions are completely irreconcilable for historical reasons. Russia's goals in Ukraine therefore require action in relation to Poland and the isolation of Poland from its allies, in which case Russia could take the measure of its opponent alone — according to Pushkin, "only among the Slavs". Until now, the government in Warsaw has messed up its relationship with the EU itself — although one can ask how much the Union has benefited Poland against Russia, especially considering Germany's energy policy needs, in the end — but as a NATO country, Poland's shares are on a good course.

While I agree that the EU framed itself as a trade-focused entity, things have shifted since then, as georgioz explained.

Didn't the EU just enact trade sanctions against Russia with a great negative impact on the cost of energy for its members?

I don't know what the current energy situation is like in Poland, but this demonstrates that being part of that trade-group is not always helping the Polish economy.

While Putin's views of history come with their own bias/inconsistencies/falsehoods perhaps, but at least his vision takes into account history.

What is the EU's views of history?

'Before there were empires and it was bad because they were European and Christian, but now there is no more empire -disregard that we are deeply aligned with the American empire and forcing rules on our 'member' states and giving a hard time to members trying to leave- so things are gonna be great now! Wealth, diversity and gayness for everybody!'

Didn't the EU just enact trade sanctions against Russia with a great negative impact on the cost of energy for its members?

Yes.

I don't know what the current energy situation is like in Poland, but this demonstrates that being part of that trade-group is not always helping the Polish economy.

The Poles are the nation most in favor of sanctions, and would love for them to be stricter. Arguing that it's bad for Poland when the Poles (with broad popular support) disagree with you is peak tier ivory tower thinking.

While Putin's views of history come with their own bias/inconsistencies/falsehoods perhaps, but at least his vision takes into account history.

This is a meaningless sentence.

What is the EU's views of history?

Putin is one man, and the EU is one of the most disjointed and inconsistent autonomous political entities in the world. If it has a version of history, it isn't the stupid caricature you're talking about. Instead, it'd look like the following:

'Before, Europe routinely tore itself to shreds, from the dark ages all the way to 1945. Today, we recognise this was a terrible thing, full of death and pain and destruction; we never want to go back to that, and we will be better off for unifying under the blue flag with golden stars, whatever that ends up looking like.'

So far, the EU has managed to do this. Between Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, and now Ukraine, I'd argue that the unprecedented peace of the past seventy years inside the EU has been a resounding success, and no amount of wrongheaded bitching about immigrants or gays from ornery foreign rightists is going to convince me that such a peace as we have isn't worth it.

From the Russian side, I can attest to having been fed a trickle of memes since childhood that cast them in a role of a sort of mild ancestral enemy, more specifically something like a vindictive envious distant relative who is stalking you and perpetually scheming to get their comeuppance if you are down on your luck. (Similarly-flavoured trope is that of the nasty relatives who appear out of nowhere to try to cheat the children out of the family inheritance after the reclusive patriarch died. Think wildbow's Pact.)

A particular one I remember is the story of the False Dmitrys, when Russia was thrown into crisis by Ivan the Terrible's dynasty dying out without leaving a male heir. The last heir, one Dmitry, died under unclear circumstances, and rule passed to a regent (Godunov) that at least some early modern historiography chose to interpret as "best thing to happen to Russia in a while, but tragically sabotaged at every turn due to lack of royal pedigree". Royalists coped with stories that Dmitry actually survived (in that version, typically a cowardly assassination attempt by the low-born Godunov). These stories were picked up and answered by a series of pretenders claiming to actually be the surviving Dmitry, who supposedly actually fled to Poland and secured the gracious backing of the local nobility. Each of the pretenders strutted into Russia as what was basically a Polish-backed civil war faction to try and seize the throne (at least the first one briefly succeeded), adding internal strife to what was already a difficult period involving famines and external wars (including one against Poland). This, it was made clear to me, was something that the Poles would just naturally do, because they could not possibly let a chance to make Russians suffer go by unused.

(Some details may be wrong; I'm ultimately very uneducated regarding Russian history and am just trying to recount what stuck from informal cultural programming.)

This is a more or less accurate summary of the Dmitriads. One of the more darkly amusing sequence of events in world history (set in motion by Ivan the Terrible randomly murdering his only non-retarded son). Highly recommend reading about the whole episode in detail for anyone into history for the entertainment value.

What is the response that the US government will have toward Russia if (when?) they deploy nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict?

What's the response other European countries, or NATO will have?

It seems more and more likely that Russia will be facing a choice between capitulation on Ukraine or further escalation, and I personally think its rather likely some kind of nuclear bomb will be detonated somewhere in the next year or two. Would the western response be different if it was the lowest form of escalation, i.e. a "demonstration explosion" over some unoccupied area of Ukraine? Is the response to get serious about forcing Ukraine to negotiate a peace, even if that means giving up territory?

I don't think reciprocal nuclear escalation is really on the table (nor would I want it to be), but what can the US/NATO do in that situation? Clearly there is a plan, I just wonder what it is, if it differs from what was "communicated to the highest levels of the Kremlin" by US, and what you all think it should be.

Personally, I wonder if in that situation, whether there really are any downside to escalating, not on the nuclear front, but on a "special forces boots in Russia decapitation strike" front. Or even a public, US government sanctioned/sponsored bounty on the heads of Putin et al.

obligatory substack article that first got me thinking about this: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/a-nuclear-zugzwang

They (some e.g. former US commander of European provinces) claim they'd to start hitting them with conventional weapons everywhere and destroy all their units in Ukraine, that's counting Crimea too.

That is, a real war would start. I'm not sure about that. By most accounts Russians have killed at least fifty thousand Ukrainians troops so far, if they nuke several thousand would that change anything? Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it's going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up.

Americans must surely know this. We've seen America talk about red lines and then do nothing repeatedly, so what's crossing one more red line for a desperate state ?

US should also be aware that it's far less in american interest to fight a war over Ukraine than it is in Russia's interests. Completely lopsided importance.

And in any case, even a real air war and some cross-border raids by NATO would not be very impressive to the mayfly attention span of cosmopolitan consumers.

The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets. Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question..

Also, escalation wise,it's not clear at all whether China would let Russia lose; they have a very serious interest in not acquiring any more unfriendly nations on its borders, which would be the result of 'decolonising' of Russia.

Arms shipments by the world's biggest industrial power or even 'volunteer' units could make a lot of difference. After all, why should only Ukraine have large volunteer formations? There's a rather amusing precedent for China there.

Russians has a more attractive option of evening out the odds though - closing the skies, destroying all satellites by launching kinetic anti-satellite weapons at their own satellites or just releasing lots of crap in a reverse orbit. That'd prevent Americans from tattling to Ukrainians locations of objects of strategic interests, and make any subsequent war against the hegemony that much easier, as American military uses satellites more than anyone else.

Wouldn't kill a person, no pesky radiation, and will negate most of US advantages in this and the upcoming Taiwan war. Also it's going to make astronomers happy because it'd kill Starlink too and a decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.

decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.

What does this mean, was there an accidental double negative here?

Nope. People don't like change that much and going from building huge ground telescopes to building satellites is quite a change.

A lot of vendors are going to be angry they won't make the transition, etc.

There's probably some amount of resistance.

There is no "real" war with Russia and NATO. The only threat Russia has to NATO are nukes. Russia's conventional military and technology have been demonstrated to be a joke. Russia is not a peer, and hasn't been in at least 40 years if it ever was, their advanced tech is vaporware. If Russia is fighting Ukraine with one arm held behind Russia's back NATO is holding them off with NATO's pinky.

The only threat Russia has to NATO are nukes.

Yeah, sure buddy. It's not like they have deep diving submarines that can do god knows what, or can launch about half a ton worth of warheads in hard to intercept suicide drones out of one shipping container. Or, you know, launch cruise missiles just off the coast of North America.

What do you think would happen if Russian secret service got a truck into say, Ludwigshafen and targetted a 20 drones against various choice storage tanks in the plant area ? You really think every vulnerable location in old world American provinces has point defense anti-air guns ?

Even if it's just the former biggest chemical plant in the world, if it was set on fire in two dozen places at one, it'd be impressive.

technology have been demonstrated to be a joke

The 'joke' that has killed by UA admissions more Ukrainians in six months than Americans killed by North Vietnam over a decade. We might be getting into Korean war deaths territory if Russian numbers are to be believed.

The 'joke' that has drained NATO arms inventories to the point where they're stopping training because they're short.

Not such a useless joke. Disappointing, sure, but it only shows Putin is no militarist or imperialist, but just a bog standard somewhat competent autocrat.

Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question.

Have to admit I was expecting a link to some Russian wunderwaffen instead of a 1980s tracker that can be completely foiled by turning your radar off (like anti-radiation missiles haven't been a thing for decades).

The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets.

This RUSI link from January is a fun throwback too, I imagine the assessments of Russian IADS have changed somewhat since then. Note that it doesn't say it would take months to carry out effective SEAD, but: "The question is not whether the Russian IADS could eventually be degraded and rolled back, but whether NATO forces could do so quickly enough to avoid defeat on the ground while deprived of regular close air support in the meantime."

Not a particularly relevant concern re: Ukraine.

Have to admit I was expecting a link to some Russian wunderwaffen instead of a 1980s tracker that can be completely foiled by turning your radar off (like anti-radiation missiles haven't been a thing for decades).

a) no, it can't. These systems work by comparing reflections of second hand sources, e.g. navigation beacons, etc.

I imagine the assessments of Russian IADS have changed somewhat since then.

After some embarrassment (e.g. entirely avoidable losses due to Bayraktars), Ukraine doesn't dare to fly their jets above treetop height. The only one who has done so was Russia, and even then in a neighboring country (Belarus).

but whether NATO forces could do so quickly enough to avoid defeat on the ground

Since Russia is unlikely to be attacking, that'd mean NATO, to fight, in response to a desperate Russian move, would have to cross the border into Russia to engage in a ground fight. Russia doesn't have any tactical artillery nuclear shells, but it probably does have lots of tactical nuclear warheads on short range rockets.

I'm not sure how enthusiastic NATO would be about advancing out of the Baltics while dodging nukes daily.

Easy to confuse them, but no, Tamara is a PET (passive ESM tracker) while the systems using second-hand sources like TV broadcasts are PCL (passive coherent location). PET does rely on you having your radar turned on.

I didn't mean TAMARA but the general class of systems. Almost certainly that's not the only such system in existence as both Russia and China have a very strong interest in detecting stealth planes.

PET does rely on you having your radar turned on.

Yeah, because the many electronic and electric systems in a plane have no emissions whatsoever, right ?

Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it’s going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up

What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?

Ok, try to imagine that China is unified and vaguely democratic. It'd still be China and an enemy country of the US out of sheer rivalry. Hegemons hate competition, China is simply too big. "Democracies aren't enemies is a BS concept" - UK and USA almost came to war before WW1.

Then try to imagine Texas secedes because it's fed up with D.C. and signing up a mutual defence treaty with this alt-history China, that would probably also involve basing Chinese military. Would D.C. crowd acquiesce to this?

That's about how Ukraine becoming an American ally looks like to Russia. Absolutely unacceptable to Russian state.

The US and UK didn't have global competition like anything the US has done against the USSR or China. The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war. There might be some light competition, but if China was truly democratic then the US-China relationship would look very different.

The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war.

The UK just lost the biggest war there ever was. Without WW2 which put two great powers very keen on decolonisation onto the world stage, it'd not have given up its empire so easily.

It ended the war broke and in a large amount of debt to Americans, who then gleefuly proceeded to 'decolonise' the empire and snap up the resulting quasi-states for its own sphere of influence.

It probably would look very different, but not necessarily more friendly.

Democracies are vulnerable to demagoguery and there's plenty of genuine grievances for a Chinese demagogue to get people riled up about.

Yeah, well, Russians didn't give up in '41 when their position was far worse, and they're really not likely to give up now.

Maybe they'd have considered it once, but all the talk of 'decolonisation' made it impossible.

'41 was existential for the Russians. This is, at worst, existential for Putin and the die-hard nationalists/imperialists.

You really think a median Russian would be fine withe the partitioning of Russian federation ?

More fine than dying at war or from a nuclear exchange, I reckon. Many countries were partitioned over the course of history without their entire combat-able population dying in one final hoorah. Many of them, I suspect, more patriotic and less concerned about the value of their lives than a median Russian who just wants to grill.

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The people running the place would likely end up dead, probably after being tortured, or in a very unpleasant prison for the rest of their lives (if they’re lucky). And it’s their incentives which drive Russian decision-making around this war. On top of that, what many ordinary Russians seem to find intolerable about the consequences of giving up and going home is that they think the subsequent regime collapse would leave Russia as (something like) a Western colony.

The people running the place would likely end up dead

Why on Earth would Putin lose his life if he lost the war?

If you meant people besides Putin, whom do you mean? Who is this class of people who both have the power to perpetuate the war and not the power to keep themselves alive should it end poorly?

Why on Earth would Putin lose his life if he lost the war?

Not very familiar with the history of Russia I see, the Anglosphere's history of relatively peaceful transitions of power every decade or so going back over a century is an aberration rather than the norm.

Why is it that every time you respond to me, you have to engage in putting-down behavior?

I don’t understand, who are all of these tinpot dictators you’re thinking of who have decisively lost wars of choice, much less ones with the US or its proxies, and then ridden happily off into the sunset? What is the precedent for that? Mussolini was strung up from a lamppost. Gaddafi died on the end of a bayonet. Najibullah was hanged on a traffic pole. Just to name a few.

Wars are very expensive in terms of political capital and betting your capital on winning a war is extremely different from having the ability to preserve yourself if that bet goes terribly wrong. The question here is really, “How could there be people who can start and sustain a war as long as their populace thinks they’ve got a shot at winning, but not protect themselves from the backlash or the victors when they lose?” And put like that it is self-answering.

Dictators who lose wars in their home country that result in the toppling of their government tend to get killed. You've given no examples of dictators losing a war on foreign soil being killed; so, even by the standard of cherry-picked anecdotes, you've given no evidence that is relevant here imo. You've already responded to my preferred way to reason about this topic, but, suffice to say, I think my collection of comparison events is far more relevant than yours.

You didn't say "not protect themselves from the backlash" you said "likely end up dead" - that answer is not a self-answering question.

Putin is losing a war on what Russian elites regard as Russian soil right now, seeing as they just annexed it, and it’s internal perceptions that matter here. However, there’s nothing unique about losing on your own soil, what matters is the stakes, and wars that impinge on your own country simply tend to be higher-stakes than those that don’t. That doesn’t mean the only really high-stakes wars are of that kind.

I said end up dead or unpleasantly imprisoned, which is what that backlash generally consists in. I doubt anywhere would take Putin as a non-criminal exile were he deposed.

I said end up dead or unpleasantly imprisoned, which is what that backlash generally consists in. I doubt anywhere would take Putin as a non-criminal exile were he deposed.

There is a long history of finding small pro-Western countries to offer asylum to dictators the West wants to encourage to retire. Most obviously, the Gulf sheikdoms will admit billionaires no questions asked as long as they keep the vodka and bacon discreet.

Gaddafi, Milosevic, and Saddam didn't just lose wars on symbolic home ground - they lost wars against people who were explicitly after them. Gaddafi lost a civil war, Milosevic and Saddam lost to foreign interventions that had their removal as a goal.

Putin's loss scenario in Ukraine is humiliating, but the Ukrainians aren't coming to get him.

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Gaddafi died on the end of a bayonet.

I'm not going to disagree with your overall point, but Gaddafi was engaged in direct military conflict with the Reagan administration several times (almost dying in a 1986 US airstrike), but managed to rule for almost two more decades before the bayonet incident. Saddam Hussein survived the overwhelming loss in the Gulf War and ruled for at least another decade. Castro died of old age, despite the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiascos. Kim Jung Un and Khomeini still rule their anti-American fiefdoms.

Being a tinpot dictator isn't alone sufficient to guarantee a bad outcome, although you're correct that there are plenty of examples of it happening. In this particular instance, I expect either Putin loses power (either violently or through some sort of brokered exile) or Russia continues its current path towards irrelevant North Korean-style dictatorship.

Gaddafi's downfall came after a deal was struck where he agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons and America agreed not to interfere in Libya.

The subsequent NATO intervention in Libya was a message to the world that the best way to hold on to your sovereignty is to have a plausibly functioning nuclear weapons program. North Korea was prescient in its nuclear ambitions. Its territorial integrity has not been violated save for some shenanigans at border crossings that aren't reflections of state policy.

Snow Crash is fiction, but it seems to have understood this concept as well. The world's only remaining sovereign tows around a nuclear weapon that is wired to go off in the event of his untimely death.

despite the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiascos.

Despite? The Bay of Pigs was not a fiasco for Castro but the United States. It was a victory for Castro.

What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?

Putin would lose credibility and probably his life.

Could you (or someone) expand on this? Why would a quasi-dictator be likely to lose his position/life over a failed war?

Putin is indeed a quasi-dictator whose control of Russia is based in substantial part on his control of the Russian security state. However, it's important to remember that these structures are made up of actual people, who in fact might choose not to cooperate given the right circumstances, causing that control structure to melt away entirely.

"A failed war" is one of the biggest potential causes for subordinates to question the competence of their superiors. A terror-infused security state is likely to hold together somewhat longer than other structures, as the penalties for being the first to step out of line are much higher, but it's also more brittle--once that preference cascade starts, it moves with blinding speed and totality.

Will that preference cascade be what brings down Putin? Maybe; it's up there with "randomly dies of non-window causes" and "resigns peacefully" as potential endgames. Will it happen any time soon? No idea.

Some real work has to be done to flesh out exactly why Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons makes that preference cascade less likely, not more.

In my view, "Putin orders the use of nuclear weapons" is more likely to lead to a preference cascade than "Putin ends the Russian invasion of Ukraine and withdraws." However, I think the second case is more likely to occur than the first. The two circumstances probably lead to fairly different preference cascades--in "Putin orders nukes" --> "internal coup," I'd expect the motive to be "Putin's gone crazy with the aggression; we need to not do that NOW," but in "Putin retreats from Ukraine" --> "internal coup," I'd expect the motive to be "Putin's weakness has betrayed Mother Russia; strike while he's vulnerable."

And of course NATO can change the personal risk assessments of a Russian missile silo operator by our public messaging about the consequences of nuclear escalation.

Putin's family might survive in a nuclear bunker. But the guy who actually pulls the trigger - he is looking at the picture of his wife and kids on the shelf and thinking "So, punk. Do you feel lucky?"

For the same reason that Putin is supposed to be simultaneously an irrational madman in madman theory, but also someone who can be placated by via rational concessions: internal incoherence between rationals gives way to allowing evaluators to express their personal bias on the pretext of objectivity.

It's outsourcing personal opinions to theory, without testing theory to practice or from other perspectives. How / why, specifically, should any other party believe that there's such a precise information awareness that Putin can know the consequences of use / not use, and will act accordingly, when the consequence of a coup is only possible as a result of lack of internal information needed to make the evaluation?

'You have to let me do this, or else I face a coup' is naturally going to be responded to with 'Well, if you know that, why don't you crush the coup plotters instead?'

IIRC, literally no Soviet or Russian leader has ever been killed in modern times (e.g. post WWII). This despite Russia being involved in quite a few wars. Even just looking post-collapse, we see exactly one leader who lost a war: Boris Yeltsin ordered a ceasefire just a couple months before an election - he won. He survived 7 years after leaving office, and (afaik) didn't suffer at all for having lead Russia to its first military defeat.

You might be right that losing a war is theoretically a potential cause of a coup. But, from what I've gathered, Putin has significantly more power than Yeltsin, so why should he be worried about literally being killed for simply not winning a war?

For the purposes of my analysis, I'm bucketing together two outcomes that are different, but I think are sufficiently similar for our purposes--"dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime kill him" and "dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime force him into retirement." In both cases, Putin is no longer in power due to losing control of the Russian security state, and the loss of control came from within the Russian security state. (I'm also agnostic on whether the dissatisfied elements reject what they see as Putin's military overreach or Putin's insufficient resolve--those each lead to very different futures, but share the "Putin is no longer in charge" aspect.)

Ok, but, again - if literally nothing bad happened to Yeltsin, why would anyone expect something bad to happen to the much more secure Putin? Heck, a literal economic depression occurred under Yeltsin, and (afaict) this didn't see him forced into retirement or killed.

Like, it seems like we have one comparable historical event and one far worse historical event - both under someone with a far weaker grip on power. An no "dissatisfied elements" did anything as far as we can tell...

I mean, I guess there's a chance Putin gets removed from power because of this, but it seems like a pretty remote one.

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Why would he lose his life? Is not endlessly escalating a war against the US also a good way to lose his life?

That is just what happens when America really doesn't like you and you lose.

If you're a deposed ruler that America never really cared much about either way you can escape to Sweden Switzerland with a plane full of cash and live out your days. Or, maybe America does dislike you but you escape to Russia, like Yanukovych did not too long ago.

If you're a deposed ruler that America doesn't like you may find yourself impaled ass-first on the end of a knife, like Qaddafi. And if you're the ruler of Russia, you can't escape to Russia. If we don't assist your domestic enemies in an extrajudicial killing, we'll still find you, try you in a court for whatever we want, and most likely execute you. Maybe you'll get lucky like Slobodan Milosevic and get a Hague trial so that you die in a Dutch prison instead of being executed in your home country.

Now now, give other people at least some agency. One imagines the opinion of the Libyans had something to do with the fate of the Libyan dictator who just weeks prior had been trying to kill the Libyans who were engaged in an uprising.

And now they're all wishing they never started with the civil war business, just like in Syria.

One would have expected the Japanese to withdraw from China in 1941 after having their oil supply cut off. They bombed Pearl Harbor instead, knowing full well they couldn't win the war. Russia has weapons far more dangerous than aircraft carriers. They must not be given any reason to use them.

The more knowledgeable and wise parts of their leadership knew that a win against the US would be very unlikely. Others understood they were at a serious disadvantage but thought that they could win a decisive battle or three before the US was fully spooled up and that the US would lose its determination and settle. Then you have the racist fools in their leadership who thought that Japanese were so superior in fighting spirit that they could overcome any materiel advantage.

They must not be given any reason to use them.

What would be a reason to use them? The US using its nukes sure, or a drive on Moscow that they find themselves unable to stop conventionally. The US sending some HIMARS and HARMS and Javelins to Ukraine? Not so much. It isn't an existential threat to Russia, but the US nuclear response to a Russian nuclear attack would be.

just to own the hohols.

No, he specifically says it's to own the Americans and secure a multipolar world accepting of diversity.

The "fuck the world if we can't have Russian glory" mindset is not rare. I do doubt Karlin and the likes are sincere about it, though. Would require either ironclad principles or very low impulse control.

The Gulf War, NATO would drive Russia out of Ukraine like Iraq out of Kuwait with highway of death 10x with most of Russia's surface fleet joining the Moskva as reef enhancement.

Hard to take seriously an article that asserts:

[Putin] was almost surely behind the sabotage of the natural gas pipelines reported by the Swedish and Danish authorities

and moreover, implies that the next best competing explanation is:

to expose the vulnerability of European infrastructure to clandestine Russian sabotage

I don't just mention this because I find the current arguments for these allegations to be really poor, but because Russia right now is talking about the possibility of repairing the pipeline. The Anglosphere seems motivated to put forward the version that these pipelines are done for while Russia is claiming the fix can be made in as little as a matter of days. That doesn't support the theory that Russia is trying to signal a complete point of no return. In effect, all we have is mobilization and annexation, which Russia has already done before. This looks like an exit move. We have all the ammo we need to win the PR war. Russia had to institute a mobilization to fight little Ukraine, Russia captured much less than they had set out to, Russia's pipelines are gone, NATO expanded, and our official stated objective is simply to bleed Russia dry, which we can easily say we did. We humiliated them by just sending our old equipment over. I just don't see nukes happening because for us this is just a sliding scale of how hard we want to win, not an actual objective to restore Ukraine's borders.

There will be no decapitation strike or strikes on Russian strategic nuclear assets, special forces or not, because that is equivalent to nuking Russia from a nuclear war perspective. The maximum response I would expect from NATO is the deployment of air and air defense assets in Ukraine to support the war effort and to intercept further nuclear strikes (if that is even possible). This could include limited conventional strikes inside the internationally recognized Russian territory as a supporting effort for SEAD.

What is the response that the US government will have toward Russia if (when?) they deploy nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict?

really bad for Russia? which makes me inclined to beleive it will never come to that. Putin hasn't even unleashed his full military might (no no airforce) agaisnt Ukraine. Why would he resort to nukes.

I would suppose that if there were an escalatory option that would significantly improve Russia's performance in the war short of the 'partial mobilization' that's just being done, it would probably be less costly and thus would have been resorted to before. Perhaps there's a reason everyone else knows why unleashing the full might of the Russian air force would be more risky for Putin than bringing the war to the Russian civilian population through the recent mobilizations, but I can't offhand think of what it is.

Putin hasn't even unleashed his full military might (no no airforce) agaisnt Ukraine.

Why is the assumption that Putin is holding back the air force instead that the VVS has little might?

Russia hasn't used much of its airforce because it doesn't have robust airforce capabilities, and isn't really able to conduct enough SEAD to get through Ukrainian air defenses consistently. It's used planes in occasional situations, and there are multiple confirmations of them being shot down.

At this point, Russia has used basically all of its conventional assets. Assertions that it's holding a bunch of stuff back (e.g. best units, best tanks, air force, etc) are not credible.

I believe that unleashing the air force, unless it's for something like firebombing cities, would achieve little and result in much of the airforce being lost. At this point, Ukraine seems to be able to use its air defense with near-impunity, as it gets US-quality targeting information and incoming warnings in near real-time and has actually functioning horizontal integration of battlefield information, whereas Russia's SEAD and counterbattery fire still operates on the principle of "report all the way up the chain of command and hope they will pass an appropriate order back down within a few hours".

At this point, Ukraine seems to be able to use its air defense with near-impunity, as it gets US-quality targeting information and incoming warnings in near real-time

I've heard it described in scuttlebutt as like one of those shitty safari tours where the guide finds the animals, helps the tourist aim the gun, and then the tourist pulls the trigger and goes home bragging about what a great white hunter he was in the bush. Like the Americans are phoning the coordinates to the Ukrainians, the British trainers are explaining on the phone how to punch the coordinates in, but the Ukies pull the trigger so "the US and UK aren't parties to the conflict" under traditional international law.

I mean, yeah, in a way this war is close to a perfect setup for the Imperium to fight against the Russians - in a properly declared war between the parties (nukes barred), contained by some gentlemen's agreement to Ukrainian territory, one could surely expect the Russians to at least shoot at the AWACS drones that have been circling around Ukraine's borders since the start and possibly even Kessler low-earth orbit for the next few decades (which doesn't seem to be all that hard). As it stands, they get a massive and highly motivated fighting force at no domestic penalty, and can continuously employ outrageously fragile intelligence platforms that normally would not survive in a conflict with a near-peer adversary to their own advantage.

It was described incorrectly then, and you should read on that more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Armed_Forces_of_Ukraine#Air_defense_systems

Ukraine operates mostly old Soviet equipment for counteracting cruise missiles (Like "Buk"), and no American instructor will pull the trigger for a Stinger or some other Western MANPAD. NASAMS are not yet deployed AFAIK.

Probably though, Americans warn Ukraine when submarines with Kalibrs launch their rockets though. But Russia switched to Iranian drones for strategic strikes in the last week.

And even if it was US, and UK personnel doing almost all the work and the Ukrainians "just pulling the triggers" (and I agree with you it isn't). It wouldn't exactly be an unprecedented level of involvement in post WWII wars were one major power was fighting a small power that was receiving a lot of aid from another major power. In Korea, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, Soviet pilots fought the USAF. Also China, while not an open full blown combatant like they were in Korea, had construction and AA units in North Vietnam. In neither of these cases was it considered a reason to go full WWIII on either the USSR or China.

It would be nice of you to expand on the specifics of how Putin hasn’t even unleashed his full military might, because he’s certainly using his Air Force. We have photographic and video evidence of dozens of Russian jets being shot down in this war, and in fact several just in the past week.

As far as I know they haven't begun to use chemical weapons, which is sort of in between typical arsenal and nukes.

Some chemical weapons are easily created (see: people inadvertently gassing themselves at home by mixing the wrong cleaning supplies), some chemical weapons are very costly to the targets (Novichok lethal doses are supposedly fractions of milligrams), but are there any that are equally easily created (in volumes useful for war) and costly?

Weaponized fentanyl is probably worth worrying about, especially since you can equip your troops with an antidote.

That ... is actually really interesting. The manufacturing process doesn't take state-level support. (this assumes China's bans aren't just "bans", but while I'm sure they're not crying their eyes out over the West getting ironic payback for the Opium Wars, I don't think the OD crisis here is a CCP op either) The lethal dose isn't nearly as low as state-of-the-art organophosphates but it's still in the milligrams range. ... Looks like the biggest issue may be that skin absorption ranges from less dangerous to much less dangerous than ingestion? To get fentanyl or carfentanil airborne you want a dry powder, but to get it to absorb quickly enough through skin to be dangerous it needs to be moist. I can't find any research about whether it penetrates skin when moistened by oil (or anything else that I'd expect could be finely aerosolized without just evaporating) ... maybe that's for the best. Do we know how Russia weaponized it in Chechnya? Might have been easier to make it useful against indoor targets whose ventilation is controlled by the attacker, might simply be that a research team working for a few years could implement ideas that I can't even imagine in a few minutes.

Since I don't know much about either drug, maybe my quick searches this morning are misleading me. In particular, I'm reading that, while carfentanil is 100x more potent a narcotic than fentanyl, the lethal doses are around the same ... so why the hell is anyone still making fentanyl? I know, drug kingpins aren't noted for their overwhelming concern for human life, but killing your customers does still cut short future revenue, and even if it didn't you'd think the relative ease of smuggling 100x less volume to achieve the same potency would pay for any extra difficulty in manufacturing.

Personally, I wonder if in that situation, whether there really are any downside to escalating, not on the nuclear front, but on a "special forces boots in Russia decapitation strike" front. Or even a public, US government sanctioned/sponsored bounty on the heads of Putin et al.

An assassination plot against the leader of a country is a great provocation. The only greater provocation I can think of would be bombing of civilians, nuclear or otherwise.

The US joins the war conventionally is about the minimum I've seen communicated. Since a non-strategic nuclear first strike by Russia in Eastern Europe or the Baltics is probably the single most examined scenario by the US post-ww2, I'd be surprised if the playbooks don't have the timings down to the minute and statements prepped like a newspaper's obit drawer.


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