billbindc

Well...so much for the idea that all the Rus Nats are too cowed to critique the Kremlin.

Very well summarized. You nail something: lots of people have an opinion about where this war is or isn't going but only the pessimists have a sense of certainty about how it will end up. My optimistic answer to that is that this war will end positively for the West (and the world) when Russia has been forced to sue for peace and negotiate a reasonable settlement with Kyiv. No other outcome is worth even what we've invested so far or the fallout from the perception and reality of a Russia victory.

https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2022/08/24/sobrani-materiali-na-desyatki-ugolovnih-del-fsb-gotovit-zachistku-armii-iz-za-fiasko-v-ukraine-a23555 Let the games begin...

Dannatt is very similar to a lot of folks who work on this issue. They can tell you quite articulately how badly Russia is doing and how brilliant the Ukraine campaign has been but simply cannot see how Ukraine wins. I have had this conversation numerous times with legit experts and many cherish as an article of faith that Russia has another gear it can drop into an win the war...or at least not lose it. There are decades of attitudes and expectations in that view and it's just impossible for some folks to get over it.

Saw this Keegan quote on the internets today and it seems entirely apropos: "Inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out, and the strongest fear with which every commander lives—stronger than his fear of defeat or even of mutiny—is that of his army reverting to a crowd". In the case of this war, it looks like 80% of the Russian Army didn't become a crowd, it went in as one.

Would it be too simplistic to say that the MANPAD will do to armor what the bullet did to the heavily armored mounted knight? What was the result then? Lighter cavalry used as pursuit and heavier cavalry used occasionally as shock but both being much lighter in protection and higher in speed than before.

My money is on a non-state institutional actor (i.e. a oligarch's kvost, an internal fight among Russian nationalists over money, etc) with a lot of opportunistic after-the-fact action. What shall we bet? I'm partial to six packs of unfiltered IPA's myself.

If you talk to the guys who handle US mil recruiting on a macro scale, this is all they talk about. "We need more nerds and fewer grunts" as a USMC general put it.

I think the big thing that needs to be acknowledged is that we now see a proven and distinct lack of *capability* in the GRU, FSB, Russian army and state in general now. This isn't a regime that's firing on all cylinders and pursuing subtle strategies. It misunderstood its enemies, it misunderstood its own abilities and it misjudged pretty much everything related to the most important action taken by a Russian state since the USSR's dissolution. It's *our* perception of them that fuels the idea that some deeply thought through conspiracy is afoot.

There's a tendency in Russia watchers to assume too much conspiratorial nous to the state. The idea that "Russia can't defend your family at home, so go fight for Kherson!" is on its face absurd and I simply don't believe that the FSB would add the complications inherent with a highly public car bombing to some sort of ultra nationalist house cleaning. Windows work just as well and don't bring the capability of the state into question. My personal take is still that the precise who/what/why is a lot less important than the fact that players in the regime heartland think that a car bomb is something they can get away with. *That* is what's important. To Steve's point about the GRU: maybe. They are sloppy enough and dumb enough to do this in the misguided belief that it makes the FSB look bad. But it's less clear why they'd want to kill Dugin, who actually does have some traction within influential military circles. Also, the FSB would love nothing more than to be able to go to Putin with the news that the GRU was ****ing up the regime's stability.

You've hit most of the points I'd make about why this was likely some shabby internal thing between the players in siloviki-stan over money, pique or position.

Oh yeah...I knew some of those "managed democracy" folks. It was very much the "well, it's Russia, so you have to think about where we came from and what we are trying to achieve". The war against Georgia was where the milk started to curdle and then the writing on the wall was obvious in 2014, when the smart ones started to figure out how to get a job in Geneva, DC or London while the rest figured out to what degree they would allow themselves to be coopted.

I don't think we will see terror attacks on Americans. We will see hostage taking. The FSB certainly knows that its propaganda efforts aren't going anywhere at the moment so they will work harder at leverage and pressure. It isn't necessarily the smart move but smart isn't worth waiting for when the drive from the center is to do something, anything, to change the trajectory of events.

Yep. Russia's problem in Ukraine now isn't solvable with an uptick in mobilization or more intense political support at home. The repression's already at 9.5 and there's simply not a lot of slack in the available population. Russia's problem is that Ukraine is going to win eventually unless Western support is somehow halted or declines. In that light, it's pretty plausible that the FSB would hit on hostage taking as one route to try and influence American opinion.

Meh. Unless the FSB/Kremlin think there's a demonstrable win in terms of military recruitment, I don't really buy this. Political acquiescence within the country has already been thoroughly coerced and pretty much the whole point of the Putinist state is to avoid hard-to-control political mobilization of the population. The GRU might be stupid and sloppy enough but the FSB is still blowing on its fingers after getting burned in Ukraine.

Of interest: https://ridl.io/playing-by-new-rules/

Exactly. The attack makes Russia's enemies look *more* powerful without a similar payoff for the FSB or anyone else and the shambolic attempts at using the event were clearly opportunistic. The likeliest call here is that some sort of shabby intra-nationalist business was conducted more violently than usual because their usual minders have other things going on at the moment. The FSB is now just looking busy to appear to be on top of the situation.

You will all be happy to know that the FSB has found our culprit: Apparently, our Ukrainian super agent did the legwork for the hit in her Mini Cooper in the company of her 12 year old daughter. Case closed! In all seriousness, pretty much everything that’s been thrown up into the air on this in the last 24 hours is chaff. As Grigb has noted, the FSB’s “resistance group” effort barely makes an effort to be credible while the grand conspiracy behind the hit itself is fundamentally ridiculous. **This is not the sign of a planned FSB effort.** It looks a lot more like a bit of private enterprise that various factions are trying to use to their benefit.

Lol…also the average height of a parking garage interior is about 8-9 ft with tight turns at every ramp. You might get a T-72 in. Good luck getting it out again with or without a JDAM.

I'm pretty sure they get their funding from the Moscow Municipal Credit Association.

We'll know eventually. Either way, it's a loud notification that the system is less stable than it was 6 months ago.

My only quibble with this theory is that there's very little reason for the Kremlin to whip the Duginists into shape so publicly. Russia is already clearly not winning even to the Russian public. Beach goers in Crimea are fleeing. Lots of their boys aren't coming home again. A car bomb, while a salutary lesson to the nationalists, also says that the government isn't in full control even in the heartland. We don't know yet, of course, but the primary goal of Putin's team has been to ensure stability. It's why there's been no general mobilization. I can't see them doing this, in this manner, with the complications for the messaging they do elsewhere. Russia certainly doesn't lack for windows.

Looks like Galeotti is thinking what I'm thinking: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/alexander-dugin-darya-putin-russia-ukraine-assassination

I agree that the Dugins, père et fille are (or were) not big movers and shakers. My point is that the remoras are starting to fight over the scraps because the shark has other things on its mind.

The lack of an obvious logic to the hit and the overkill employed is exactly what I think is portentous. That we can't see the former is a very strong argument for this being a dispute of a private nature...either over money or influence. That the dispute resolution mechanism was a highly violent and possibly mistargeted one suggests that there is a perception that controls are slipping. Russia in 1917 was a largely peasant society in a revolutionary state...and reacted accordingly. Russia in 2020 is a mafia kleptocracy in an economic crisis. In that latter condition you don't see worker's soviets popping up...you see score settling and violent scrambling to secure resources.