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Poland must be “reminded” its western territories were “gift from Stalin”, says Putin
Lukashenko claims Poland is trying to annex Ukraine, Wagner troops want to invade
Just a reminder where Putin's eyes are looking at when/if he's done with Ukraine. We've been through this scenario before, where Putin prepared the invasion of Ukraine for 8 years, absolutely in public, never hiding his intentions, always claiming Ukraine is a fake state, ruled by illegitimate regime and must be liberated - and yet everybody was so surprised when the invasion actually happened. And yet, lots of people are lecturing me all the time about how Putin didn't actually want to do any of that and was forced to do it by "Western meddling". I don't expect many people to change any of their conclusions from this round of saber-rattling, and I don't also expect Putin to invade Poland tomorrow (or this year, or anytime before Ukraine situation has resolved one way or another), but the time may come to be oh so surprised again, because literally nothing pointed to this next move by Putin. And I am sure if that happen, the "meddling" will be blamed again. I certainly don't want to see this happening, but as things are going now, I am afraid I might.
For what it's worth, the general opinion of many hardcore pro-war Russian commenters that I've seen is quite different. They think that Putin should have launched a full-scale invasion in 2014 but was too cowardly and too dependent on connections with the West to do it, that he was very conflicted about intervening in the DNR/LNR back in 2014 and would have been happy with just Crimea, and that he then spent the next 8 years trying to reach a de-escalation with the West on the matter of Ukraine while failing to take the steps that would have been necessary to prepare the Russian army for a war of this scale. Steps like replacing his loyal cronies with competent leaders, expanding production of drones, and so on. Also that he is too closely connected with oligarchs who own property in the West and send their kids to live there, hence has no desire to enter into a true confrontation with the West and was always hoping that the West would agree to, at most, have a little proxy war with him in Ukraine that would not threaten any serious break in relations.
If this view of things is accurate, I could add as an immediate corollary that last February, Putin was hoping to have a quick shock and awe campaign that would quickly result in Ukraine offering concessions so that the whole thing could get de-escalated and the West would put up with the fait accompli. Which of course deeply misunderstands how ideologically committed Western foreign policy makers are to defending Ukraine, but it would not be the first time that Russians misunderstood the West. In any case, when the shock and awe campaign turned into a clusterfuck, Putin's only choices were either a humiliating withdrawal or to expand things into the full-scale war that he never wanted.
In short, many Russian hawks believe that far from being a careful long term aggressive planner with a strategy for seriously threatening NATO, Putin is actually a cautious and incompetent leader who has never been willing to confront the West in a serious way until he had a bit of a change of heart sometime around 2-3 years ago, but even then was not ready or able to do what it would really take to succeed and instead blundered into the current situation. Now, I am not saying that this view of things is necessarily true. But it is an interesting other perspective on things.
In any case, I think that Poland is almost certainly out of the question. The Russian army has barely managed to take the relatively small parts of Ukraine that it currently controls and simply does not have the strength to take on Poland's military in open combat while at the same time fighting Ukraine. And that is before we even get to the whole matter of NATO's Article 5, which there is close to 100% chance would be invoked if Russia attacked Poland and would mean either a swift defeat of Russia's conventional forces or nuclear war.
All that said, I did not think that Putin would invade last February, nor did I think that the Russian army would be quite as incompetent as they were, so take everything I say about this with a grain of salt.
I don’t think this narrative is accurate at all.
Putin had connections to the oligarchy during his rise to power. Anyone who would’ve attempted to climb that mountain would’ve had to have dealings of one kind or another with them at some point. There’s no avoiding that. But once he got in, he broke the back of the oligarchy quite thoroughly. Whether you want to say he just replaced it with his own well connected inner circle, is another matter, but that isn’t the point.
Putin never had a desire to annihilate Ukraine and go to war with it. There’s nothing that actually substantiates that, beyond people’s mere speculation. There’s nothing nobody can point to directly that’s the smoking gun which establishes that intent. Victims of the MSM and the American propaganda system loved to go around initially and proclaim, “Putin is losing the war! Their military is overreaching! They’ve overspent themselves!,” but it never dawned on them for even a moment that Putin was never trying to go full Mike Tyson on Ukraine.
The fog of propaganda is ‘dense’. On both sides. I think this comment doesn’t crack through the effort of the west’s attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of its citizens.
It's clearly absurd to think that the current situation is one that Putin wanted. Whatever he was trying to achieve, it wasn't this.
I don't think his desire was to annihilate Ukraine, to be clear. I don't even think his initial goal was to annex Ukraine. I think his desire was to kill Zelensky and install Yanukovych as a friendly leader. Obviously things didn't work out the way he wanted and we're now on plan D or something.
This isn't supportable.
Putin desperately wanted to kill Zelensky except for the fact that he didn't even attempt a single decapitation strike against Ukraine leadership and still only attacks leadership in direct response to terror attacks against things like the Kerch bridge, much to the chagrin of his main detractors in Russia.
What evidence do you have Putin wanted to do this? He struck freely all over the country in the opening salvo of invasion, but just couldn't be bothered to specifically target leadership, many of which were still in their offices at the time?
What pro-russian or even neutral, non-western sources of information do you use to make your judgements about this conflict?
My evidence is that in the early stages of the invasion, Russian troops advanced on Kiev. My belief is that the goal in doing so was to capture Kiev and seize control of the Ukrainian government. I believe this primarily because it seems like a pretty decent plan if it works.
You seem to be reading me as alleging some kind of assassination plot? I'm not. I'm offering my explanation of the military actions we all saw play out.
okay, so you're arguing putin wanted to kill zelensky, but you're not alleging a plot to kill zelensky, but also the 25,000 riot police advancing on Kiev is evidence of your belief putin wanted to kill zelensky but this isn't evidence of a plot to kill zelensky
if it's not you alleging a plot to kill zelensky, then how is it evidence of Putin's desire to kill zelensky?
You're deliberately being obtuse. I'm drawing a distinction between an act of subterfuge and an open assault.
George Bush killed Saddam Hussein, but he did not assassinate Saddam Hussein. Putin intended to kill Zelensky in the exact same way.
I'm not reading into your post some alleged assassination plot, I asked you why you think putin wants to kill zelelensky and your proffered evidence is bad. The reason I don't buy it is because putin has the capacity to kill zelensky and other ukrainian political leadership and simply hasn't. He hasn't even tried. So what you're left arguing is he wants to kill zelensky, but only in a certain way based on evidence a military maneuver you've already admitted would have been smart policy anyway irrelevant of the desire to kill zelensky at all.
I'm deliberately attempting to get you to confront the issues in your own argument, however successful that's been. In any case, thanks for the discussion.
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What do you mean by "decapitation strike"? Lobbing a lot of rockets at the center of Kiev? First of all, he's not that precise. So he could ruin a lot of buildings, but without precise information about where exactly Zelensky is at certain point of time, it's just pointless. And I guess SVR/FSB aren't good enough to have real-time info like that. Second, most Soviet government buildings were designed with the scenario of "somebody is shooting stuff at our dear leaders" in mind, so even if they hit the right building, that doesn't mean they would kill him. In fact, Ukrainians had several targeted hits on Russian generals, and they frequently survived, either with some wounds or just with the need to change their pants. Third, Putin doesn't have air superiority, and missiles from way afar are vulnerable to interception, and if Ukrainians would concentrate their air defense abilities somewhere, it's near their capital. Fourth, there were strikes on Kiev, but they largely achieved nothing, exactly because Kiev is huge, and Russian targeting abilities are not that good.
There are other options, of course - like sending a small group of special ops operatives to execute the targeted kill. Ukrainians claim they captured several such troops, which of course we can disbelieve, but then we have no real way of claiming there were none, because Russians certainly wouldn't admit something like "we sent our best men to kill Zelensky and failed miserably".
The word "terror" has meaning. You can't just apply it to any thing you don't like. A strike against a piece of military infrastructure (weapons and material delivery over the bridge has been documented many times) is not "terror" - it's an act of war, and destroying bridges have been performed in war since bridges and war were invented.
I mean a strike aimed to kill Ukrainian political leadership, i.e., what the above user is claiming to know was Putin's intent. What evidence do you have that Putin was trying to kill Zelensky?
Putin has been pretty successful at killing people in leadership, the examples being in response to the first and second terror attacks on the Kerch bridge. Claiming he just doesn't have the capability to know where someone is precisely at what time to even bother trying at all isn't supported by the fact he has, in fact, demonstrated that ability to try and succeed at just that. He has demonstrated the capacity for very well calibrated strikes, e.g., on the SBU headquarters in response to the Kerch bridge terror attack. And yet, he didn't do that in the opening stage of the war even once. This doesn't support the claim the user was making. If you would like to provide evidence of their claim, I would like to see it.
Russia may not have air supremacy, but the RUAF does have air superiority over Ukraine with a demonstrated ability to strike at will deep into Ukraine around highly protected targets and even the anti-missile defense clusters of Ukraine itself.
Your claims about Russian capability are simply wrong. They have the demonstrated ability to perform targeted, precise strikes deep in Ukraine which are, at least on paper, heavily protected by anti-missile defense, as well as targeting and killing leadership. What pro-russian or even non-Western neutral source do you get your information from?
yeah, Ukraine also intercepts 135% of the fired missiles despite me being able to watch them being "intercepted" in live video by the targets they were fired at
I can use words however I like. Here, I'm using it to describe using a possibly unsuspecting truck driver in a suicide attack on civilian infrastructure with civilians currently traversing it. Something being done in war before doesn't mean it isn't a terror attack. You don't get to claim misuse of a word just because you dislike the connotations or agree with the underlying action.
Yes, congratulations, you discovered technique known as lying, congrats.
Are you now going to claim that military airports are also civilian infrastructure? That bridge is primary military logistic link into occupied areas of Ukraine.
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Like whom?
Still not sure who do you mean as "people in leadership" that has been killed. Could you elaborate?
At just what?
Please stop with the abuse of the word "terror".
SBU headquaters is a building. It can't be moved. It's big. And yes, they managed to hit this huge building - even though SBU has nothing to do with attacking bridges and also, the funniest of all, SBU has been revealed to be thoroughly infiltrated with Russian agents (which probably coordinated the strike and that's the reason they were so accurate). But I'm not sure why hitting that building proves anything. Sure, they could hit another building in Kiev. They actually did, several times. So what?
He didn't use far strike capabilities in the opening stage of war at all. Because he was planning to a) capture Kiev and other central cities by ground troups quickly and b) achieve air superiority very fast. Only failing to do that, he had to resort to long-distance strikes. Of course, when he planned to capture (or kill, I'm not sure which he preferred) Zelensky, he planned it within the framework of his overall strategy, and by the time his strategy failed, he didn't have any capacity to do it anymore. I'm not sure what you refer to when saying "bother trying at all" - like, just shooting rockets at whatever hoping to hit Zelensky? Well, he's doing that for a year and a half now, at least the first part. I don't think he's actually stupid enough to believe any of them may actually hit Zelensky, so by now that option is closed to him.
No you can't, if you want to communicate with others. Otherwise wolves won't be flying the carpet by the grumble over the manatee because the gasket jumps blue ribbon. If you want to communicate with people, you need to use words in common meanings in commonly understood ways. And you actually know that, because you use the word "terror" not randomly. It's not some whim that puts random words in random places. You use it in common meaning to imply something that is factually false - i.e. you are lying. And I have called you out, repeatedly, on this lying - and if you intend to continue lying, I will just conclude that proclaiming known lies is how you prefer to communicate. You can say whatever you want, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
You are repeating Russian propaganda claims without any proof to it. Also, it can't be both "suicide" and "unsuspecting" - you need to separate your propaganda. Russian propaganda claims are often self-contradictory, but they rarely do it within the same sentence. And then you are lying again - the bridge is not a "civilian infrastructure", it is being used for military purposes all the time and is a legitimate war target, as anything in Russia connected to the war is (including all industrial infrastructure, all supplies used in war, all airfields and production capacities, etc. are). Civilians being present changes absolutely nothing - civilians can be present anywhere and are commonly used as human shields, including by Russians. This does not turn a military target into a a purely civilian one. We're not talking about kindergarten or a grain storage or a church (which Russians do attack, we have witnessed it just this week). We're talking about major supply artery which is used to carry military supplies. And any civilians that wanted to avoid the area of active warfare had a lot of advance warning. Nobody forces anybody to travel over that bridge, certainly not Ukrainians.
the reason you disagree with my use is because you know exactly what I'm communicating, so communication isn't the issue
do you dispute the way I used the word given my description?
if yes, explain how my description, taking it as face value the underlying facts I communicated are true (i.e., turning an innocent driver into a suicide bomber against civilian infrastructure), is an improper use of the word as it's commonly used
if no, this complaint is flatly based on your opinion the underlying facts of what occurred, it doesn't have to do with my use of the wrong word, but with a factual dispute you want to bicker about using Ukraine nonsense while laughably accusing anyone arguing differently of using Russian propaganda
in either case, this is about you simply not liking the connotations and the use in behavior you agree with in a war on behalf of a side you're feel you're on
it's not about "misusing" words, despite you wanting to turn this dialogue into that when it's initially about someone claiming Putin wants to Kill Zelensky
if you're going to ask ppl to support a claim, you should lead by example instead of what appears to be trying to set yourself up to be some sort of lazy arbiter who chooses the null hyp and then demands others have some sort obligation to proof it wrong or it remains
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