Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I agree about the armchair warriors bit. I do think their motivation for the war is much deeper and more fundamental and not really like Putin thought he could grab Ukraine all quick and easy and is now in over his head. Instead, I think the entire Russian power structure is existentially petrified of invasion from the West. It's all long memories about how horrifying Operation Barbarossa was to be on the receiving end of - this also fits in with how they talk about "denazifying" Ukraine. This is why they're willing to make incredible sacrifices to ensure that Ukraine remains in their sphere of influence. That also explains how there doesn't seem to be all that much discontent in Russia about how this war is going. I'm not super confident in my ability to determine exactly how much unrest there really is in Russia, but I would have expected to see more signs of it with how much of a grind this war seems to be for them.
On the IT side, I also discovered the Ukrainian scam call center thing - big article about it in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well. Apparently there's a ton of these call centers actively working to scam random Russians out of money and blackmail them into committing various petty, and maybe sometimes not so petty, crimes. Thinking from the Ukrainian side, it's understandable that they'd lean into that sort of thing and attempt to integrate it with their formal intelligence agencies to gain an asymmetric advantage when so many things are stacked against them. But then from the Russian side, that is a much more reasonable explanation for why they're cracking down so hard on the communication and messaging systems.
That sounds awfully…charitable.
What advantage does the cultural trauma theory have?
Accusing your enemies of Nazism is a proud tradition in and out of Russia, so you’d expect to see it whether or not the leadership were motivated by such.
Moving your borders closer to NATO does not suggest a fear of invasion. Neither does draining your manpower and weapon stockpiles. Both of those things are more compatible with the five-minute adventure theory, though.
Creating a geographical buffer between your enemies and your core is absolutely valid strategy, even if it costs some -- what it's worth is another question of course.
My current operating model is that Russia and China are both still playing "Great Game" diplomacy, in which military wargame type considerations have a voice at the table -- most of the West is definitely not, with the US being an exception in that it's torn between Deep State 5-d chess and Fukuyama-flavoured quokka-ism.
Hold on.
I agree that Russia feared NATO expansion into Ukraine. I would say that is adequately explained by the “five-minute adventure” model: if Russia thought the cost would be really low, the benefit of a puppet buffer would be easily worth it. Now that the cost is sunk, Russia doesn’t want to back down, because now it definitely gets a hostile neighbor.
What it doesn’t offer is any reason to prefer the cultural trauma theory. I don’t find it reasonable to say having Ukraine as a neighbor was comparable to having the Nazis on the border. That sounds like a post-facto justification, and a pretty silly one.
What do you mean?
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There is plenty of discontent in Russia about how the war is going, included among the opinion makers. It does not rise to unrest because unrest is outlawed and the law is enforced.
(The discontent among the opinion makers is, admittedly, primarily of the "we should be having this war but the leadership are thieves, morons and cowards" kind rather than "we shouldn't be having this war" kind because expressing discontent of the latter kind as a public person is extra no bueno.)
I do not believe Putin has memories of Operation Barbarossa, he wasn't there. Invocations of WW2 sentiments just sound extremely fake and contrived to me.
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