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Apparently, there is a viral video in Russia of a long discussion between a oppositional blogger and a pro-putin actor. I can only find a German news article on it, but I would love to see the whole interview (subtitled). However, I doubt such a video exists. For me, it is more the lack of effort by western media to gain insight into the thoughts of actual russians than the positions itself that I find astonishing and relevant to the culture war.
Both sides (pro-neutrality right and pro-ukraine left) have no interest whatsover to shed a light on the internal discussions in Russia.
Edit: The video exists on youtube, linked in a comment below. I feel dumb and incompetent now.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/russland-gespraech-zwischen-putinisten-und-regierungskritiker-18626426.html
"The West is waging war against us"
I have a simplified model of Russia. Imperial ambitions and territorial expansion is deeply embedded in their psyche. They never lost their colonial possession like the rest of Europe. Russian desires to dominate their neighbors is as deeply embedded as Americans clinging to their amendments. It’s what makes them feel Russian to be the top dog of their neighborhood.
Hence this is the war to end that with a humiliating defeat.
Centuries ago one people dominating the region may have been necessary due to the mongol/hun/etc, occasional European invasion threat due to geography. And hence Russia spent centuries fighting territorial expansion wars.
Losing over 20 million in WW2 is going to induce some intense paranoia about foreign threats. Russia lost 12% of its population in WW2, Belarus lost 25%! Ukraine was in the middle with 16%.
The UK lost 1% in WW2, 2% in WW1. The US lost 0.32% of its population, a rounding error. The horrors of the Somme, all the anti-war poetry and so on in our entire Anglosphere cultural canon... it stems from casualties that are negligible compared to those on the Eastern Front. We have not experienced anything like that.
We're dealing with a country that is still traumatized in ways we cannot truly understand, a country with a very large nuclear arsenal. WW2 was formative to Russia's leaders - Putin lost his brother in the siege of Leningrad. The impact on Russian culture is significant, to say the least.
If we think of colonies in a kind of abstract extractive sense where you take rubber from Malaya, secure naval bases and supply routes through Suez and it's all sort of unfair to take other people's resources and profit off them... well we're not going to understand people who see them as matters that decide the life or death of tens of millions of their citizens, providing desperately needed time and space.
This situation is literally unprecedented. There has never been a major proxy war with a nuclear superpower fought right on its border. We are wandering into a very dangerous situation, harassing a paranoid schizophrenic with a fully loaded machine gun. Our Ukraine policy should have been not to have a policy, like we don't have a policy on whatever terrible things Saudi Arabia does, invading countries and blowing up civilians. Saudi Arabia is a can of worms we shouldn't open and they're useful as a partial ally. Russia is the same - it had tremendous possibilities as a counter to China, the real danger. The issue is that people like Brzezinski and co with understandable grudges against Russia arrived in the West and pushed this line of argument: 'Russia is innately imperialistic so the West must harass them at every turn and break their will to resist'. The interests of Poland or the Baltics should not unduly and expensively affect Western foreign policy.
If Russia was attacking important countries like the oil-rich Middle East or Taiwan, then it would be wise to defend them and obstruct Russia. But Ukraine is not important. What are we defending? There's some gas in Ukraine but far more in Russia, which we have now lost access to. They have some titanium but Japan produces far more. The moral argument against invading countries is ridiculous given our Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya adventures. There are still US troops in Syria.
On the first part I agree they have a reason to paranoid and traumatized but it is in fact paranoia and irrational.
Even when America has invaded and occupied it’s been fairly good for the occupied. Germany and Japan were rebuilt. Iraq and Afghanistan suffered no long term decline in population trend. Barely a one year blip. Then a fuck ton of American money to rebuild anything we broke and then some. Afghanistan basically doubled per capita income under American occupation. Our aid spending was basically 100% of preoccupation gdp.
Which if we consider what a NATO occupation of Russia would be if we invented a device to deactivate every nuclear bomb in existence and could go in. After we invaded, conquored, occupied it would be a bunch of checks written to elites for their cooperation. It would be a bunch of money for development. It would be selling every commodity they could for more riches. Pre-war Europe exported a ton of machine parts for industry basically in exchange for energy and commodity exports. That would resume. Russia has always depended on western importation of industry and that includes under the USSR when western consultants pored in and built their factories. It would be everything we’ve ever done for them but more of it. And a bunch of checks written to Russia with some of the money stolen by oligarchs for a decade and a bunch of fat consulting fees for the McKinseys and less known Booz (which specializes more in that space). This is the true “realism”.
Ukraines kind of important too. It’s not like Ukraine isn’t the buffer that protects Poland and a lot of other countries that hate Russians who use to be Russian colonies. Who are just like Ukranians who are not NPC and hate Russians because of what Russians have done to them. The Ukranian war is popular in Europe because that country protects the rest of Europe from the Russian threat.
And to be honest we never really had a Ukraine policy before the war. They couldn’t join NATO with territorial disputes. They had some trade deals.
And I disagree with an assertion that the west has harassed Russia. When have we invaded them? We basically built their industry and war machine. Italy and Germany lived off exports to Russia. They didn’t want to build an army to conquor Russia when they could just send them machines to pay for oil.
The west didn’t pick the proxy war. They let Russia take 3 territories and were fine with the status quo.
Funny as I go thru this thought process the best resolution to this war would be Putin asking for a trillion dollars in aid, removing all sanctions (100 billion stolen by putin friends), a western friendly government, and no pride flags (Japan deal). Would put a lot of pressure on China.
Firstly, we can't have such a device because it doesn't exist. If we did, we'd simply have to occupy Russia, a task that is notoriously difficult. They'd probably dump smallpox or bioweapons on us if we nuked them.
Secondly, the NATO/neolib occupation of Russia was tried in the 1990s with 'shock therapy' and US interference in the 1996 Russian elections to help Yeltsin, a drunkard and a putschist, stay in power. The guy made Jan 6th look like a tea party in a dollhouse, he had tanks shell the Russian Parliament in 1993 and killed 187 people. This was the guy we gave massive aid to - Putin is the reward we earned with our own efforts. If you massively subsidize and assist a cartoonishly villainous thug who steals from the people and shells the Parliament, people are not going to trust in your goodwill.
We already had the McKinsey school and Chicago school go in, we gave cheques to local elites - they made a complete mess of things. If your last experience of liberal democracy was grinding poverty, economic collapse, national humiliation, horrific life expectancy collapse and the creation of the oligarchs... why would you not be paranoid about the people who propped up Yeltsin? I'm not exaggerating about the 1990s, there were incidents where workers went without pay for months just to keep their jobs since they certainly weren't getting other ones if they quit!
I am not satisfied that we know how Russia should be run and have the skills to avoid making a massive economic disaster, even if we had the power to force the issue. At the time Western influence was greatest in Russia in the 1990s, it was wrecked 10x worse than anything this war could possibly do.
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-per-capita
Thirdly, our intervention in Afghanistan was a tragic farce. We funded institutionalized pedophilia in the Afghan Army, integrated Afghanistan into world heroin markets and funneled vast amounts of wealth into a newly created class of Afghan oligarchs. Some of our trillions trickled down to the population, who are now starving since we cut off the funds. We totally failed to create a liberal democracy. Rather similar to how we totally failed to make a liberal democracy in Iraq and Russia. We are not very good at this and should stop.
NATO and nuclear weapons protect the rest of Europe from the Russian threat, not the Ukrainian army. It wasn't the Ukrainian army that warded off the Soviets during the Cold War. Furthermore, is there a Russian threat to Europe? There's a Russian threat to the Baltics and maybe Moldova where there are large Russian minorities. If we look at both this war and the Georgian war, we see that Russia only invades countries in some kind of conflict with a Russian minority. Simply avoiding conflicts with Russian minorities will avoid war.
The Russian threat in offensive conventional terms is greatly overrated, the Europeans vastly outspend them. Russia's power is 95% nuclear. Ukraine is soaking up nearly all of Russia's offensive conventional power but they still have enough nuclear weapons to raze Europe and North America, a fact that won't change regardless of what happens in this war.
There's the bombing of Libya, where the Russians were hopping mad that their oil and gas contracts with Qaddafi were lost. There's our proxy war against Syria, Russia's closest ally in the Mediterranean. What about sanctions in 2014? What about our media complaining non-stop that Putin was behind Trump's election from 2016-2020? Withdrawing from the ABM treaty and basing ballistic missile defense in Eastern Europe, weakening Russia's nuclear deterrent? What about our massive aid to Yeltsin who wrecked their country? Providing significant quantities of weapons to Ukraine under Trump, such as Javelins? Our Ukraine policy was to build up Ukraine and use it to put pressure on Russia, that's why we were training their army and providing them with weapons. That was why we orchestrated a coup to evict Yanukyovich, who was too close to Russia.
We made Ukraine our proxy. The National Endowment for Democracy and Open Society Foundation worked hard and effectively, molding Ukrainian politics and media, turning the country into a weapon against Russia. We were providing NATO weapons and training to the Ukrainian military.
We should have just done nothing. Done nothing in Iraq, done nothing in Afghanistan besides some intensive bombing to take revenge for 9/11, hunt down Al-Qaeda with special forces. Done nothing in Libya, done nothing in Eastern Europe. We sit back behind our nuclear weapons and powerful militaries and focus on China, the greatest threat.
The most realistic conclusion to this war is a lot more Russians who hate the West, some kind of negotiated peace where the Russians get bits of the Donbass and a land connection to Crimea, cheap Russian energy for China, European economic decline and more Russian assistance for whenever China fights the West, perhaps opening up another front in Ukraine. We have once again made things worse for ourselves at vast expense and cost of Ukrainian life.
This feels like well propaganda to me.
You get basic facts wrong like not respecting Iraq as a democracy. Afghanistan you some how blame us for no longer giving them money.
Nuclear weapons aren’t protecting Estonia (part of nato in your view) if we aren’t willing to fight in Ukraine. Then we aren’t dropping a nuke on Moscow if they invade the Baltics.
There’s no evidence we turned Ukraine west. We didn’t turn Belarus west, ukranians just CHOSE us.
I never supported US involvement in Syria and always liked Assad. So don’t paint me with that.
Not sure what you are accusing us of doing in 2014 - didn’t Russia invade a neighbor that year? Russia declaring war is suddenly something bad the US did? Makes no sense.
The Russian threat is overrated? Haven’t they obliterated a few countries and some of Ukraine with artillery? Keyboard warriors can say that but not when Russian artillery is outside their town.
Hate to tell you this but the most likely conclusion is Ukraine wins. Sometime next year their getting f-18. If the west got the guns then why not use them and kill some Russians? Fuck I pay a ton in taxes for the military and like Ukranians so we better give them whatever they need to kill Russians.
Iraq is not a liberal democracy, as I said. Even the Atlantic Council agrees with me. It's a massive fragile mess of Iran-backed Shia militias, ex-ISIS militias and Kurdish militias.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-truth-about-iraq-s-democracy/
The US went into Afghanistan, got hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, expanded Afghan drug production with their incompetence, subsidized bacha-bazi in the Afghan Army (also known as the rape of boys), squandered trillions of dollars in corruption. Then they left and obstructed famine relief, confiscating $7 billion from their national bank. The US really is not interested in the welfare of Afghans, otherwise this wouldn't have happened. It was a complete clusterfuck.
The Nuland phone call has a recording of them plotting out who will be in the new Ukrainian government. US-based NGOs like Open Society and government backed organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy have spent billions in Ukraine, funding NGOs and protest groups. This is well documented. That buys loyalty and influence.
Do you understand what an alliance is? Azerbaijan invaded Armenia - the US is not obliged to do anything because they're not allied. If China invades Nepal, the US is not obliged to do anything. But if Russia invades Estonia, they are obliged to fight because they are allied. It was a foolish idea to bring these small countries into the alliance, they contribute very little while creating risks. But now they're there we have to stick with them.
US and EU imposed sanctions on Russia that year because the Russians took Crimea. That's harassment. They didn't declare war, they still haven't declared war. Nobody has declared war.
There are discussions over sending F-16s to Ukraine, not F-18s.
You don't understand what I'm saying. The conventional threat to the West is overrated, the nuclear threat is underrated. The US has wrecked a few countries in the last 20 years but that doesn't mean Belgium is threatened by the US in the same way Iran or Syria is. Threat is relative.
This is a really unsophisticated argument. Have you thought about what you're saying for more than 10 seconds? If the Ukrainians ask for your whole army, navy and airforce would you hand it over? Your nuclear arsenal? Foreign policy has consequences. These can include fuel shortages, inflation, making enemies, getting into wars, starting nuclear wars. It should be approached carefully.
You are literally ridiculous. Your first article that you cite said most of the election irregularities are just poor losers but should be investigated. By that definition America is NOT a liberal democracy. Did you even read the article - it supports a position that Iraq is a Democracy.
Sure we didn’t transform Afghanistan but we didn’t make it worse. There population grew on trend the entire time. No excess deaths.
We also signed treaties with Ukraine that we would protect their sovereignty. Baltics would be very hard to defend if Russia controlled Ukraine. And once you break one vow to defend then I’m not sure how you can assume we would keep a vow to defend Estonia. Come on man make some sense with your arguments.
Lol it’s harrassment that when a country invaded your friend you limit trade with them.
Dude if you haven’t been paying attention F-18 are when not if.
Don’t insult me for not being sophisticated. I’ve thought it thru and completely support giving Ukraine whatever weapons they want and support American boots on the ground. Nukes I wouldn’t give them. Russia literally has zero chance to win the war. Even if they get a breakthrough there would be a NATO counter probably polish boots. Again I pay taxes for military weapons. I want to use them to kill Russians.
NATO goes into Ukraine then your city is toast. Why do Americans feel so part of this anyway? It’s a fight thousands of miles away.
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