billbindc

I have a friend whose grandmother was nicknamed "le Pigeon" in the the French resistance. The stories are wild.

Btw folks…if you are impressed by the ‘FSB letters’ you should be asking yourself what information contained therein couldn’t be gleaned from a reasonably informed reading of pretty widely known public facts and how easily could it be written by anyone with a pastiche level of knowledge of the way the Russian security state thinks/talks? Once you have the answer, you know how seriously you shouldn’t be taking them.

As a person closely involved with that imbroglio said to me (in effect): “It doesn’t matter if you think Kotkin engaged in essentialism. He’s right!”.

To be clear, Kotkin is saying that it didn’t matter if/when countries joined NATO. Russia, for a host of historical, geopolitical and cultural reasons, was going to do what it’s doing now eventually anyway. He’s trashing (quite thoroughly)the argument made by Mearsheimer and others that NATO expansion was the catalyst. Kotkin is one of the good guys.

This is sad.

Except that the partisans are fighting on the other side of the conflict and have the ability to take on and defeat tank brigades.

Most of these men are dead or captured.

Honestly, this was the least convincing part to me. Xi doesn’t need a “small victory to be re-elected”. That’s not how power in China works or reflect Xi’s extremely dominant position in China. Maybe the putative FSB guy is dumb but that bit is a good reason to exercise some caveat emptor.

What's the over/under on the actual percentage of running stock in the Byelorussian tank crops?

Sanctions aren't going anywhere for a long time because they are not now just about getting Putin to withdraw from Ukraine...they are also intended to make it difficult for Russia to play this game again. There's been a revolution in geopolitical thinking and immense political capital spent to service it. Nobody is going to want to run for office in 10 years against "Why did you let the Russians come back...*again*".

This is a superb walk through Putin's regime. Julia knows her stuff and has a lot of contacts in the Russian government. Really quite good.

I recently described the recent turn in Putin's circle as "Andropovian" and I think that holds up given how badly the paranoia and biases of the leadership led the intelligence assessments.

Exactly this. There is plenty of evidence that the elites, the senior intelligence elements and most of the military assumed what the proponents of a "rational" Putin did too...that is was an enormous bluff. How could it not be since they didn't bother to do the most basic footwork? It's the one part of that story that really rings authentic to me.

Question: how big was the assumed size and what is the current estimate based on the above.

As I've been putting it to people, a Russo-Japanese War but ending in a Tet rather than a Tsushima.

Just had a dosomefink flashback.

I'm not a believer in the "Putin's crazy, he'll start throwing nukes" thesis but I do think you can expect at minimum everything he's done in Syria to be tried out in Ukraine. Claiming a bio/chem/nuke atrocity by Ukraine is not escalatory in any real sense and I think he thinks that the pressure it would create in NATO might fracture some of the unity he's facing. He knows he's on the hook on this one so while he's not suicidal for himself or Russia, the likeliest outcome is that he finds something that can justify this debacle even if only for domestic consumption.

An economist of my acquaintance described it as the economic equivalent of going from Texas to Tennessee in under six months. When all is said and done, the costs may be much closer to your percentages than seemed possible two weeks ago.

https://twitter.com/Blue_Sauron/status/1501459371791892481?s=20&t=T10Hrg4CMK9gnaSIludJCg Indeed.

A question: how much is abandonment of tanks driven by the lethality of Javelins, etc. In other words, how much is low morale and how much is a rational reaction to vulnerability?

Flying fighter jets from a NATO country into a combatant is exactly the kind of thing Putin wants to justify the war as a fight against a NATO incursion. It also is quite escalatory. We’ve already escalated a ton. We have to demonstrate to the Russians and to everyone else that there are limits to what we will do. That makes Russian escalation harder and lowers the chances this gets out of hand. People have to get their Cold War game faces on. That’s how you fight without everyone dying immolated in a nuclear explosion. I understand and sympathize with the immediate desire to end this as fast as possible but the MiG's are mostly symbolic at this point. They won't actually end things faster and quite possibly make things worse. Ye

Well aware of that history. But that was dragging bombers into a non-combat theater. Very different.

Sorry...weird double post. Just an fyi, those Polish MiG's are very likely not going to Ukraine. The thorniest issue is that they'd be flying from a non-combatant NATO country into contested airspace and Defense and the intelligence community clearly think they are escalatory. In addition, it doesn't seem like the most militarily efficient idea to take the Ukrainian air force from down 10 to 1 to only down 8 to 1. There are less destabilizing and far more useful arms transfers that work on Russia's weaknesses instead of Russia's (at least potential) strengths. This was a hot potato that nobody wanted. The Poles just tossed it into our lap.

Hey John, feel free to delete!

Well…it looks like maybe we know why Russia hasn’t blinked out the cell networks in Ukraine: