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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.
True, and I agree with that. But that argument has a very small payload, and I don’t accept that framing of the issue. I think if you look at it more through a geopolitical and International Relations (IR) lens, ask yourself what Putin should’ve done if you were in his situation. I can’t think of a good decision to make either, but his hands were tied.
Did you know that Yanukovych was the democratically elected President of Ukraine before the western backed Maidan coup happened?
I don't believe for a second that this was an inevitable war forced on a reluctant Putin. He had choices at every point - the most important of course being the choice to invade Ukraine, which he could have simply not done. Now, he may have decided that war was the best path forward for his interests - and maybe that was even a rational decision based on the information he had at the time. He certainly wouldn't have been alone in thinking that Ukraine would not be able to put up much of a fight. But I highly suspect that if he had known the path that the future would take, he would have chosen differently.
His hands were not tied. He made a decision - and it was the wrong decision.
Yes. I'm also extremely confident he no longer has popular support in Ukraine.
nor was the kiev coup (the second one in 2 decades) against a legitimately elected president some sort of inevitable action
framing these sorts of things as if the US & satrapies' behavior is some sort of natural, inevitable event and the only agent here was Putin is disingenuous
no, I doubt he would have made a different decision at least on the general question of whether a direct physical confrontation with Ukraine was necessary or not
how would you know? political opposition is banned in Ukraine and mild criticisms of the war effort at the very least earn people a visit from the secret police and a humiliating beatdown which is filmed and posted to the internet
I have made no such claim or implication and it is disingenuous of you to say that I have. My view is that there are a lot of people with meaningful agency. Putin, Obama, Biden, Yanukovych, Zelensky, and many, many more people all have made many different decisions that have all combined to lead us where we are now.
I am not arguing that Putin is the only person in this situation with agency. I am arguing that he is a person with agency - and in particular, it was his decision to begin this war.
It's my assessment that Putin is currently extremely unpopular among Ukrainians, and that Yanukovych is perceived as being aligned with Putin. Do you think I'm wrong?
when anyone in this discussion talks about the behavior of not-russians, you turn the convo back to the russians and insist on discussing the agency of the russians and what they didn't "have to do,"
perhaps this pattern of framing was unintentionally, but what it does is remove context of actions of any party in the conflict
no, Putin isn't the only actor who caused the war anymore than a person who is badgered and bullied and eventually fights back is the person who "decided" to start a fight
Ukraine didn't have to bomb ethnic russians for 8 years killing 15,000 of them, Ukraine didn't have to ignore the minsk agreement or the minsk II accords
Ukraine was in a civil war with a large part of "Ukrainians," wanting to be inducted into the Russian Federation, so no Putin isn't currently "extremely unpopular" among "Ukrainians" and he wasn't "extremely unpopular" in 2014 when the western-caused violent coup happened which caused the civil war to begin with
this is another example of your framing, unintentional or not
People keep raising Ukrainian bombings of their own "ethnic russian" regions as something that's supposed to be analogous to "bullying Putin", when there is no evidence Putin cares any about "ethnic russians".
he talks about them repeatedly, he sent them help, he's given them dozens of billions in aid and cheap gas among other things, and he launched a war ahead of a planned Ukrainian offensive on their territory
that's evidence
you can claim the above actions have ulterior motives, but you cannot claim the above isn't evidence
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