The magnitude of Putin's f**kup reveals the extent of his mental deterioration
He has defined unachievable victory conditions. Seriously, it doesn't take a high-level military strategist to understand that the invasion, occupation, and conversion of another state rests on a whole lot of factors that were PATENTLY not present or not favorable in Ukraine.
He has put his prestige and his credibility on the line for this unachievable goal, and then executed his deployment and engagement with stunning ineptitude.
And finally - and here's the kicker: He might have been able to get what he said he wanted, without firing a shot.
He believes Ukraine is, essentially, Russian. Culturally, historically, etc. There is actually a grain of truth there - Ukrainians and Russians are more alike than not in many ways. Like the English and the Scots, they're also defined by some pretty important differences. But they are more alike than either of them is like (for instance) the Kazakhs or the Estonians, or the Poles. They do share a lot of history.
And during the Soviet era and in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, they still shared quite a large overlap in economic activity, resource exchange, and mutual investment.
And Ukraine has always had a substantial segment of its population that have been ideologically aligned with a lot of the right-wing, nationalist, white Christian supremacist beliefs that Putin has gone to such pains to support in Russia and its helot states.
What Putin wanted was a Ukraine aligned with Russia, willing to be a buffer against the West.
He might have been able to achieve that, had he heeded the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Working slowly and steadily to build economic ties with Ukraine, to couple their fortunes in mutual development ventures, continual support of pro-Russian political parties, magnates, and politicians was on the verge of paying off for him.
Then came the loss of the Yanukovich regime.
The old, needle-sharp ex-KGB stinker that was the Putin of the 90s and the early aughts, would have welcomed an opportunity to identify and begin undermining the pro-Western opposition, sowing chaos the way he has done so effectively within the Western democracies that terrify him.
An operator who can bring the United States of America to the brink of rejecting democracy over a slow, quiet, 25-year campaign should have been able to subvert the growing liberal European-aligned parties of Ukraine in his sleep, standing on his head, with one hand tied behind his back.
But he didn't. He got rattled. He got impatient.
And that should have clued the world in... he was losing it, even then.
Of course, anyone who has amassed that much raw power, killed that many opponents and "nuisances" with vicious impunity, is going to continue to be very, very dangerous, even as their cognitive skills deteriorate.
They become even more dangerous, in many ways, as they become less effective.
And that's what we're working with now.
This will be a costly decline and fall.
For all of us.
somberly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
May be true, but may not. It's a predictable one in this backlash against his breaking over 70 years without war in Europe (glossing over other invasions, the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war, etc).
Your descriptoin of massive, unnecessary fuck-up that migth prove to be disastrous may well turn out to be true, though. Hope, hope. A foreign affairs expert pointed out that all of Russia's numerous Cold War aggressions one way or another forced more build-up of defenses and resistance against Russia, describing Putin as a product of the Cold War who hadn't learned from those ultimately disastrous lessons.
Hoping that this will finally bring on that decline and fall, of him and his inner circle.
