Putin’s war comes home
Infidel753, Putin’s war comes home.
For most of the duration of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the majority of Russians have either supported the aggression or at least not objected too energetically. The war did not affect them much, except insofar as Western sanctions did. That is now changing, thanks to Putin’s ill-advised and stunningly incompetent mass mobilization.
Authorities are now simply grabbing men more or less at random off the streets, in workplaces, at railway stations — anywhere groups of men can be found. The victims of these pressgangs are being sent to the front in Ukraine with negligible training, often mere days after being “recruited”, often with grossly inadequate weapons and supplies. This is a recipe for mass slaughter. It’s also a recipe for mass unrest, since pretty much any man in Russia knows he could fall victim at any moment. Besides the extensively-covered hordes of men fleeing the country or trying to, others are making efforts to hide or to avoid places where the regime’s thugs are likely to catch them. For the first time, the war is posing a real threat to the safety of ordinary Russians.
(There’s another potential problem looming. Putin’s recruiters have been targeting convicted criminals in prison, offering them pardon and release in exchange for military service. Some of these convicts have been taking the deal, then deserting from the army, with their weapons, and forming armed gangs to commit robberies and other crimes in Russia. The average Russian will not be very happy to see bands of hardened criminals with military weapons roaming the country and terrorizing people.)
Throughout the war there have been reports from across Russia of urban protests and acts of resistance such as bombings of military recruitment centers. Now that almost all Russians potentially feel threatened (men directly, and women via the danger to male relatives), we shouldn’t be surprised if opposition to the war escalates to a mass level. Already the head of the mobilization campaign has apparently been murdered, and extra security for “mobilization teams” has been put in place. The regime’s enforcers are becoming scared of the people.
There are also already signs of conflict along ethnic and religious lines (non-Russian ethnic minorities, who are mostly Muslim, have been disproportionately used as cannon fodder throughout the war). For example, a shootout between Muslim and ethnic-Russian soldiers at a military training site reportedly killed as many as thirty people. If anti-military unrest combines with ethnic conflict, not only the regime but the integrity of the country itself could be in danger. And the loss of tens of thousands of young men killed and wounded in Ukraine, and hundreds of thousands who have fled, doesn’t bode well for Russia’s future.
Putin thought he was making Russia great again by invading Ukraine. He may go down in history as the man who ended Russia’s great-power pretensions once and for all.
Putin Expected to Lay Out Views on Foreign Affairs in Speech
NY Times – just in
Putin will give a high-profile address amid fears that he is escalating the war.
Putin Expected to Lay Out Views on Foreign Affairs in Speech
NY Times – just in
Putin Rails Against ‘Western Elites’ in Speech Aimed at U.S. Conservatives
NY Times – just in
The World According to Vlad
Boston Globe editorial – Oct 28
(Upon 2nd reading of the NYT post on Putin’s speech, he seems almost conciliatory, but probably isn’t really.)
So now it’s about gay people, too?
Having failed to convince anyone with his previous justifications for his invasion of neighboring Ukraine, now Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, are attempting to frame their aggressive foreign policy as part of a worldwide crusade against “cosmopolitan” elites and their “strange” values.
Putin, in what was billed as a major address in Moscow on Thursday, said Russia didn’t consider the West an enemy — but did see Western “elites” as an enemy. Also on Thursday, his political party introduced legislation to ban gay “propaganda.”
If his rhetoric sounds a little bit familiar — it should. The Russian president is echoing the language of the American right, trying to convince conservatives that they share the same enemies.
“In the United States there’s a very strong part of the public who maintain traditional values, and they’re with us,” he said. “We know about this.” …
(That would presumably be the GOP and Trump.)
Vaguely related?
NY Times: As Russian forces pillage occupied Kherson and Moscow rushes in reinforcements ahead of a looming battle for the strategic southern port, the city’s Kremlin-appointed proxy rulers dispatched a team to a majestic 18th-century stone cathedral on a special mission.
They were sent to steal the bones of Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin.
The memory of the 18th-century general is vivid for those in the Kremlin bent on restoring the Russian imperium. It was Potemkin who persuaded his lover, Catherine the Great, to annex Crimea in 1783. The founder of Kherson and Odesa, he sought the creation of a “New Russia,” a dominion that stretched across what is now southern Ukraine to the Black Sea, and when President Vladimir V. Putin invaded Ukraine in February with the goal of restoring part of a long-lost empire, he invoked Potemkin’s vision. …
Russian loyalists in Kherson abscond with the remains of a general who helped inspire Putin’s invasion
Putin: ‘New world order’ will compensate for Russia’s losses in Ukraine war
Washington Examiner – Oct 27
Putin: ‘New world order’ will compensate for Russia’s losses in Ukraine war
Washington Examiner – Oct 27
Very Trumpy stuff from Putin, it seems.
Let’s have some ‘Peace in Our Time!’, OK?
Actually, when Neville Chamberlain said it 1938, in Munich, it was ‘Peace For Our Time!’, but that’s not how it’s remembered.