Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Originally Posted by cyrille

Nothing misunderstood at all. I posted my on-topic opinion in response to yours.

The post above was someone being a dick.

Speaking of ‘whoosh’ … have you worked out Mendy’s book title yet?

In short … projection overload from you.

Trying to introduce your hatred of Johnson in this thread, and you claim it’s on topic? Oh dear. It would have been better to claim that you were drunk, or even kept quiet like you usually do when challenged.
You are retired now after all.
Me pointing out that you are a dick, is just like anyone pointing out that Backspin is childish. FFS get over yourself.

You would have thought journalists would know Putin likes killing them by now.

Sky News correspondent shot while covering Ukraine invasion

Take your grudges elsewhere, tubby.

My post was a measured, on-topic response to yours and, as usual, you can't sensibly dispute it.

Originally Posted by Backspin

Our resident Serb should have a look at Serbia right now.

YD, there are 2 sides to the story.

Russian Anthem sounding through the streets of Serbia’s capital Belgrade as thousands of people gather to show support for #Russia

http://Russian Anthem sounding throu...212; right now

They can go fuck themselves. I never went back to Serbia since I left 30 years ago. I will always be Yugoslavian and that's exactly what's written on my Canadian passport.

Good morning, time for your coffee break.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine has been a clarifying moment. Since he came to power in 2000, various Western leaders have tried to cooperate, accommodate, or negotiate with him. But by embarking on a war of choice against a country he claims doesn’t have a right to exist, Putin has forced the international community to see him for what he is: a belligerent leader with a remarkable capacity for destruction. The result has been sweeping new measures designed to constrict and constrain him—punishing sanctions against Russia’s financial institutions, bans on Russian planes over EU airspace, and increased weapons shipments to Ukraine. Even Germany, long reluctant to confront Putin, agreed to exclude Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, reversed its long-standing prohibition on providing arms to conflict zones, and substantially increased its military spending. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked nothing less than a sea change in international perceptions of Putin and what must be done to confront him.

Such a sea change could well be underway inside Russia, too. Throughout his tenure, Putin has maintained relatively high levels of public support thanks in large part to his ability to restore economic growth and stability after the turmoil of the 1990s. While most Russians have few illusions about their leader, recognizing the corruption that benefits him and the elite around him, it remained all but unfathomable to most Russians that Putin would launch a major conventional war against their Ukrainian neighbors. For months, many Russian analysts, commentators, and citizens alike were convinced that Putin would not engage in such an act of aggression. The news of the war and the economic ramifications that followed have led Russians to see both Putin and Russia differently; Russia is not the same today as it was last week.

The prevailing wisdom holds that Putin will be able to survive any domestic backlash. That is most likely true. In personalist authoritarian regimes—where power is concentrated in the hands of an individual rather than shared by a party, military junta, or royal family—the leader is rarely driven from office by wars, even when they experience defeat. That’s both because other elites are not strong enough to hold the dictator to account and because domestic audiences have few opportunities to punish leaders for their actions. But the thing about repressive regimes like Putin’s Russia is that they often look stable right up to the point that they are not.

Putin has taken a major risk in attacking Ukraine, and there is a chance—one that seems to be growing—that it could mark the beginning of his end.

There are good reasons to believe that Putin can withstand the backlash from his war. He has gone to great lengths in the last year to crack down on Russian civil society, political opposition, journalists, and the information environment. The regime’s brazen poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and banning of Memorial, the country’s most important post-Soviet human rights civic institution underscore the regime’s commitment to using repression to maintain control. Russians have gotten the message.

According to polling by the Levada Center in 2021, 52 percent of Russians fear mass repression, and 58 percent are scared they will be arbitrarily arrested or otherwise harmed by the authorities—the highest these indicators have been since 1994.

Such an uptick in repression is common late in the tenures of longtime autocrats. The longer these authoritarians remain in power, the more they lose touch with their societies and the less they have to offer their citizens. As a result, they have few other ways to sustain their rule.

Along with repression, Putin can manipulate Russia’s information environment, shaping the way many Russians understand events in Ukraine. Already, Russia’s security actors are harassing individuals who post antiwar messages on social media and censoring facts and details about the war. The authorities also moved to shut down Echo Moskvy, an independent radio station broadcasting in Russia since 1990. Although younger generations get more information from non-state-controlled outlets, the regime remains dominant in the information space. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, polls show that large majorities of Russians supported recognizing the Russian-backed breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent countries and that they blamed Ukraine and NATO for the conflict.

Together, repression and information control could help prevent Russia’s antiwar protests from catching on. So far, the regime has arrested more than 5,000 people for actively demonstrating against Russia’s invasion, which may deter others from joining. While other Russians may be willing to risk arrest if they think the demonstrations will snowball, censorship makes it difficult for potential protesters to know how many citizens are upset with the war. Most likely, the Putin regime will only further ratchet up repression to deal with a more restive Russian public. Personalist regimes are more likely to use repression in response to protests than are other autocracies, and they are especially likely to do so when engaging in expansionist territorial conflicts (as Putin has with Ukraine). Moreover, many of the Russians fed up with Putin will opt to leave Russia, as some already have, reducing the pressure mounting against the regime.

Putin has also gone to great lengths to inoculate himself against another threat: elite defection. In a highly choreographed meeting of his national security council, Russia’s president forced each member of his team to publicly pledge their support for his decision to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. This reduced the council members’ ability to credibly defect and claim that Putin is taking Russia in the wrong direction. Likewise, Putin convened his country’s most powerful businessmen the day after the campaign against Ukraine began to discuss the economic shocks that would follow. Putin’s goal was clear—remind them that their fates are tied to his continuation in power.

But there are also good reasons that the tides might turn. Despite the repression, protests have taken place in more than 58 cities across Russia. The early demonstrations are remarkable not just for the bravery that they reflect, but also for the potential that they hold—protests in highly repressive regimes are more likely to be successful than protests in less repressive environments. That is because when people take to the streets even when the costs of doing so are high, it sends a powerful signal to other citizens that their dissent is shared. In this way, these early antiwar protests have the potential to trigger cascading opposition. The fact that Russians view Putin’s war as being unjust and egregious makes it especially likely to prompt widespread backlash. It is moments of acute injustice that have the greatest ability to mobilize people—as when Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after local officials humiliated him and confiscated his wares, launching the Arab Spring in 2011.

The war also has famous and influential domestic opponents—and they are not just known dissidents. Several Russian celebrities have signed letters opposing the war. Russian tennis star Andrei Rublev wrote “no war please” on a TV camera. The Russian head of a delegation at a major UN climate conference apologized for his country's invasion of Ukraine, and the daughter of Putin’s press secretary reportedly posted “no war” on her Instagram account. (She deleted it hours later.) There are even signs that Putin’s cozy oligarchs are getting uncomfortable. Former energy magnate Anatoly Chubais posted a picture of Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader murdered in front of the Kremlin, on his Facebook page. Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska called for peace and negotiations.

Even if Putin’s actions don’t immediately push him from power, the war in Ukraine creates long-term vulnerabilities. Punishing economic sanctions are already shredding the value of the ruble, and the economic damage is expected to intensify. Over time, this could weaken Putin domestically. Personalist dictatorships generally cut government spending when faced with sanctions, making life even harder for average citizens and increasing the odds of growing unrest. Sanctions also tend to be more effective when targeted at personalist authoritarian regimes than when aimed at other types of autocracies because personalist dictators are the most dependent on patronage to keep power. So far, Russia’s elite have never had to choose between the life they wanted and Putin. But Chubais’s and Deripaska’s comments hint that could change as the effect of the sanctions sets in, especially if they are coupled with stepped-up anticorruption efforts by the United States and Europe. If they are squeezed tight enough, Russia’s elites may come to decide that Putin can no longer guarantee their future interests and try to replace him with a leader who would withdraw from Ukraine and prompt the West to unfreeze their assets.

Finally, the conflict in Ukraine may well evolve into a drawn-out insurgency that slowly saps the patience of the Russian public.

Research shows that personalist dictators are more willing than other authoritarians to tolerate military disputes with high casualties, but that doesn’t mean their citizens are. In Libya, for example, former leader Muammar al-Qaddafi engaged in heavy-handed repression to maintain control of the country as the costs of his wars increased. But eventually, when faced with dire economic conditions, ordinary citizens violently overthrew his government.

In the Soviet Union, a lengthy and expensive invasion of Afghanistan helped drain faith in the Communist Party’s regime. It is not inconceivable that Putin’s grip on Russia will slip if Ukraine becomes a morass.

Predicting the downfall of an authoritarian leader is a fool’s errand. Weak and embattled autocrats can limp along far longer than analysts expect. Former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe survived hyperinflation and electoral defeat, staying in power until just two years before his death. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro remains in office, even though Venezuela’s economy has utterly collapsed. Similarly, leaders that appear strong can be suddenly ousted, as happened to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali that same year.

But analysts do know that personalist leaders such as Putin are more likely to make foreign policy mistakes than are other autocrats. They surround themselves with yes men who only tell them what they want to hear and withhold bad news, making it difficult for these dictators to make well-informed decisions. Whether or not Putin’s war of choice becomes the mistake that unseats him from power is an open question. But Russia is experiencing rising dissatisfaction from the public, fissures among its elite, and broad-based international punishment. Putin’s downfall may not come tomorrow or the day after, but his grip on power is certainly more tenuous than it was before he invaded Ukraine.

Originally Posted by pickel

This whole Ukraine war should be in one thread.

I would say two threads. One for the Three Stooges and one for the rest of us.

Originally Posted by YourDaddy

They can go fuck themselves. I never went back to Serbia since I left 30 years ago. I will always be Yugoslavian and that's exactly what's written on my Canadian passport.

Respect.

Originally Posted by sabang

That shouldn't be too hard- Ukraine is not a member of Nato. I doubt it ever will be either.

You are skeptical of the full invasion. I was too. But this article really makes it understandable.

OPERATION BARBAROSSA IN SLOW MOTION — THIS IS THE OFFENSIVE CAPACITY THE US WAS PREPARING IN THE UKRAINE UNTIL LAST WEEK

The US has been installing American-directed military bases in the Ukraine for stockpiling advanced weapons to strike Russia by land, sea, and air.In these plans for attack deep across the Russian frontier, Ukraine was already a platform with the potential for nuclear battlefield operations without formal admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO); without acceptance by the NATO member states; without comprehension or vote of approval by the Ukrainians themselves.

On December 17, the Russian Foreign Ministry proposed

a non-aggression treaty

with the US which included explicit provisions to negotiate the withdrawal of this threat. Article 3 proposed “the Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.”

The State Department reply released on February 2 dismissed each of these proposals. On February 19 in Munich, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky made his threat to deploy nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory; he expressed this as his unilateral revocation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum although Ukraine was not a signatory of the agreement. “This is not empty bravado,” President Vladimir Putin responded two days later in his Donetsk and Lugansk recognition speech on February 21. The Ukraine threat to attack Russia was “a foregone conclusion, it is a matter of time”, Putin added.It is Operation BARBAROSSA, the code name of the German invasion of 1941, in slow-motion.

Putin was also specific in his geography. “I would like to add that the Maritime Operations Center in Ochakov [Ochakiv], built by the Americans, makes it possible to ensure the actions of NATO ships, including their use of high-precision weapons against the Russian Black Sea Fleet and our infrastructure on the entire Black Sea coast. At one time, the United States intended to create similar facilities in the Crimea, but the Crimeans and Sevastopolians thwarted these plans. We will always remember that.”“Many Ukrainian airfields are located near our borders. NATO tactical aviation stationed here, including carriers of high-precision weapons, will be able to hit our territory to a depth of up to the Volgograd-Kazan-Samara-Astrakhan line. The deployment of radar reconnaissance equipment on the territory of Ukraine will allow NATO to tightly control the airspace of Russia up to the Urals.”US NAVAL INSTITUTE MAP OF AMERICAN-UKRAINIAN NAVAL BASES, 2019



MAP OF UKRAINIAN AIRBASES WITH NATO CAPABILITIES

Published on Tuesday in

Vzglyad

(“Viewpoint), the leading Moscow source for security strategy and tactics, Nikolai Storozhenko has analysed the recent history of the Ukrainian cause of war, and the targeting of the Russian demilitarization campaign. His report has been translated and reproduced here without editing; the illustrations have been added.

Click to read the original in Russian.

Originally Posted by cyrille

Take your grudges elsewhere, tubby.

My post was a measured, on-topic response to yours and, as usual, you can't sensibly dispute it.

I assume this witless diatribe is aimed at me.
Yrt another of your post lacking clarity, because that might give you denial. That is not very well thought out or appropriate response.
Did you, or did you not introduce the off topic and irrelevant dig at Johnson? A simple yes or no should suffice.

No one expects apologies from a person who considers himself so superior, that any hint of an apology is beneath him. In his mind anyway. Crack on superman.

^^Accrding to you, Putin is already not guilty and this fabrication of no events, is the reason? FFS which country did you wake up in today, and which psychotropic medications are they using on you.

Anther massive fail caused by you swallowing propaganda.

Originally Posted by Switch

FFS which country did you wake up in today

An Asian one, with glorious beaches, quiet Wats, wild elephants, edible bugs allegedly and let's not forget the flexible ladies.

You?

Originally Posted by Switch

Anther massive fail caused by you swallowing propaganda.

Your own propaganda is more acceptable to you, it seems.

Originally Posted by Switch

which psychotropic medications are they using on you

My last experience caused my brother and his boyfriend such worries.

C'est la vie.

Trop tot a juger

Originally Posted by david44

Trop tot a juger

Il est trop tôt pour juger de la mesure dans laquelle cette stratégie réussira.

trop tot pour juger - Translation into English - examples French | Reverso Context

Originally Posted by OhOh

Il est trop tôt pour juger de la mesure dans laquelle cette stratégie réussira.

trop tot pour juger - Translation into English - examples French | Reverso Context

Elle a des idées en dessous de sa gar


Vachement mon vieux branleur, parce que même, pour en revenir à nos moutons peut-être n'a-t-il jamais dit ces fameux paroles ?

Originally Posted by bsnub

I would say two threads. One for the Three Stooges and one for the rest of us.

Next thing,…………getting rid of that TD daytime moderator Fvck off David

Mods, can we have just ONE thread where we don't have to listen to the three stooges and their endless fucking drivel please?

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Mods, can we have just ONE thread where we don't have to listen to the three stooges and their endless fucking drivel please?

This +1000!

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Good morning, time for your coffee break.

A brilliantly written an highly thoughtful article.
While OhOh replies from his sunlit uplands and Backspin swallows more Soviet style propaganda, such a well considered and unbiased article deserves much more credit than it will receive on these pages.
Thanks for sharing.

Definitely hitting home!

Russia accuses the West of 'economic banditry'

In a statement this morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has accused Western leaders of "behaving like bandits" in their response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Mr Peskov claimed the West was involved in "economic banditry" against Russia - and warned that Moscow will respond.

He did not specify what this would entail, but said it would be in line with Russian interests.
"This does not mean Russia is isolated," Mr Peskov said. "The world is too big for Europe and America to isolate a country, and even more so a country as big as Russia. There are many more countries in the world."
He went on to warn the US against imposing sanctions on Russia's energy exports.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Definitely hitting home!

At least the Russian people understand economic banditry. They have been subjected to it by Putin for the last two decades.

Originally Posted by OhOh

An Asian one, with glorious beaches, quiet Wats, wild elephants, edible bugs allegedly and let's not forget the flexible ladies.

You?


Your own propaganda is more acceptable to you, it seems.


My last experience caused my brother and his boyfriend such worries.

C'est la vie.

I think everyone already knows which sewer you get your propaganda from. The questions were directed in a reply to another Putin pussy. Backspin.

You we’re very rude to interrupt his reply.

Originally Posted by Switch

I think everyone already knows which sewer you get your propaganda from.

It is disruptive and tiresome. I am not advocating censorship, but I do think that the Three Stooges should be compartmentalized. The same as Russia. These lowlifes should not get top of board access.