billbindc

It's an open question for me if the eyes on Russia contributed to the way in which Afghanistan ended. I suspect so.

The idea that pulling out of Afghanistan was a sign of weakness was certainly a favorite trope for CNN journalists who made their careers there but what's never noted is that Afghanistan kept American resources (both diplomatic and military) tied up in a region that was completely removed from any strategic interest to the country. Worse, it forced the Pentagon into retaining a force structure that was not geared towards near peer warfare. The pullout was certainly not the US' finest hour but from a state competition standpoint, it was a net negative for Russia and China which would become more of a negative as the US reoriented globally.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/trump-administration-broke-law-in-withholding-ukraine-aid.html I'm sorry but that's an absurd statement. Russia didn't decide to invade because Biden was weak kneed on Ukraine. In fact, Biden has been seen as a hawk in DC on the topic since at least 2008 or so. Russia invaded because before his administration Putin had successfully out maneuvered Bush and Obama while Trump was fairly actively his acolyte. The good times were over, American military aid was about to ramp up and the Ukrainian government was no longer as amenable to pressure. In short, Ukraine was about to become much harder to swallow up (if not as easy as the FSB imagined).

It's been pretty clear for a long time that Wikileaks was beholden to both Russia and the Byelorussian KGB. Snowden was not originally but there's a relationship between how Snowden ended up in Moscow and Wikileaks as well. And now, of course, Ed's going to sing for his supper or he'll end up somewhere very cold and very much out of wifi range. https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia-ties

You would likely end up with a post-Stalin period of contending leadership at least initially led (de facto if no de jure) by this nasty piece of work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Patrushev

The way to understand Medvedev is to realize that he says exactly what Putin wants him to at all times.

Note: the clear evidence that one side is losing doesn't necessarily mean that the other side recognizes that it is winning.

A source note: "In mid-February 2022, Lira said that "no one over the age of 12 or with an IQ over 90 seriously believes that the Russians are going to invade [Ukraine] anytime soon"."

Worth every ****ing penny. Your updates have been excellent and enormously appreciated.

And of course, we must not forget the 80's Cold War movie standard (i.e. if they made an 80's movie about it, it never happened).

I've always been pretty skeptical of the stories about spetnaz infiltrations given the Open Skies treaty and the ease with which a Russian trawler could drop a couple of 'hunters' on the endless Alaska coast to do their recon.

That massive rearming of the Bundeswehr is going to be a powerful reason for many EU countries why that "patron across the Atlantic" cannot ever go away.

Yep. Erdogan is in real trouble: https://www.gmfus.org/news/upcoming-elections-turkey-unfair-real-and-competitive

NATO was designed to stop Soviet imperialism and now serves to limit revanchist Russian imperialism. It serves to prevent war in by far the most dangerous place in the world for a large war to start. That expressly does *not* mean it solves every other problem and no alliance does. Or does Russian colonialism not count for you?

I think with that statement, the argument that NATO is a threat to Russia can be put away for good.

Until someone figures out how to annul Russia's ability to nuke any invading force...as is their stated doctrine...then any idea that Russia is legitimately under military threat is absurd. This is about a oligopoly/fascist system that is under *political* threat because it isn't able to produce an attractive governing model. That is *not* NATO or Ukraine's fault or problem.

I live in The Swamp, sovok. Get it right next time.

That's exactly the part that I found rankling and it points at a larger problem. There is a profound lack of expertise on not just this particular war but what it means to fight a big/long war in general. American media is big on narrative and short story arcs. Their understanding and marketing of war falls into either "look at this thing that's going to lead to big results tomorrow" or "look at this heroic American soldier". They don't really do much else. It's an important problem because those tendencies affect eventually public support for Ukraine in a real way and those attitudes percolate into the foreign policy establishment as well.

I appreciated the analogy to the flawed strategy and management in the Russo-Japanese War but he doesn't address the larger political issue that there is no real political opposition left in Russia to pick up the pieces and there isn't even a Sergei Witte to try and manage the process. If the current situation does lead to regime retreat, it won't be even the stutter step towards a more liberal society that was attempted in 1905.

Yes. There was a coordinated campaign on the Russian side to drain stocks and hinder importation of alternatives. There were, for instance, a series of hacks on natural gas storage facilities across Western Europe in the leadup to the war which went unmentioned in the latest flap about "offensive cyberwarfare!!!!" by the United States. US Cyber Command wasn't escalating at all beyond what Russia had already committed to.

Something that fortuitously dropped into my lap this morning that gets deeply into the German conundrum: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-dependence-russian-energy-gas-oil-nord-stream?utm_source=pocket-newtab

There's plenty of room to critique Scholtz but your last point is spot on. He has been forced to navigate some quite difficult intraparty politics and reorient decades of German policy overnight. His own military isn't really onboard and the German foreign policy establishment is having to question every premise it held since the 1990's. It's easy to scoff at that but it's without question a barrier the German government has to surmount. We remember this guy, right? https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/01/24/german-navy-chief-resigns-following-ukraine-comments/

Heh. Whenever I hear a phrase like that I imagine how my German 48'er great-great-grandfather who fought in the cornfield all day at Antietam would react. I suspect it would involve a right hook.

Same in the US. It's only the very furthest left and a more sizable part of the right that's against our Ukraine policy. It's the one area of real consensus in American politics at the moment.

Rail can get out about 600,000 tons of grain per month while Ukraine's seaports were capably of doing 5,000,000 tons per month. There are pretty hard limits that "come on Biden, do somefink" can't change much when it comes to rail capacity. What can be done is already happening and it's unlikely to change things too much.