The Mongols didn't need an economy to create chaos and conquer most of Eurasia. Babylon was conquered by Macedonia, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and Rome to the Vandals. Mixing up economic power with willingness to bleed for a mythical cause is a mistake. Also, who needs an economy when you can just have a big army and take booty? Definitely not Russia.
This is not the modern-day version of USSR vs USA. It's the modern version of the Mongol Horde vs Civilization. (No offense to current Mongols; you guys are cool).
Modern Russia is not an unstoppable army of nomadic warriors with a strong martial culture arising from their making their living as herders. It's a badly run kleptocracy trying desperately to remain relevant.
Come and see. They don't have to hold land and in most cases, the strategic goal is to have puppets hold it for them. USSR was three levels deep in puppets (four if you count "republics").
They tried puppets in Ukraine for some time. They also have a dependent client state on another of Ukraine's borders, in Belarus, "led" by a terrified semi-lame autocrat who needs to prove his loyalty to Putin to continue in office.
Bad things (and increasingly belligerent, isolated psychopaths) on two sides.
Not only does Putin have nothing to lose from all of this, there is more than a hint that he has nothing to lose full stop. More than one analyst and political aide has observed that Putin has changed significantly on a personal level, and appears to be paranoid about Covid and about all his generals and advisers.
It's not just a threat; at this point it is a risk.
Agreed. The attack on Ukraine is actually rather later than I imagined that it would happen (I thought this would happen immediately after Trump lost the election).
What happens next is anybody's guess and that's a very bad feeling to have in times like these, the fate of the world as we know it is in the balance.
As we have seen before, only very recently: bad things happen when psychopaths start to unravel, especially malignant narcissists.
Putin has long kept his narcissism under a kind of control.
A bit of bare-chest, bareback horseriding. A few ice hockey matches with opponents who comically offer little resistance.
A gigantic pseudosecret palatial residence that looks like a seat of power for a Bond villain, but is actually his safe space.
But even in Russia's nationally televised broadcasts Putin appears to be struggling to control his emotions and his temper.
It's not particularly difficult to see that loyalty to a psychopath loses its currency when that psychopath has no use for you, but also that using your loyalty as a constant mediating influence becomes impossible when the psychopath departs from reality.
The question for any kind of diplomacy, hardball or softball, is this: is Vladimir Putin still in full control of himself? Because he's behaving unusually on the basis of his prior record. Only a handful of years ago he was a very different figure on the world stage. If his narcissism has no supply, no moderation, things could get even uglier.
And yet again he is signposting it -- "all relevant decisions have been taken."
We kept pretending his signposts were diplomatic noise, when in fact he's just a psychopath telling people what he is going to do to them.
Maybe he has nothing to lose from threatening. But he would have a lot to lose (namely Moscow, and any place where he's known to usually spend time) if he actually fired a nuke at some EU capital.
I'll bet that that would not be Paris or London. But to try to guess what someone who has nothing to lose will do is folly, Putin might very well be beyond caring even about such stuff: he wants his legacy cemented and there are two ways out of that that would satisfy him: the fact that he is remembered as a great Russian or that there isn't anybody left to remember what kind of an idiot he was.
For some idea of this mentality, if you haven't seen it yet I highly recommend the movie Der Untergang, which is as historically accurate as they could make it, and which gives a unique perspective on how things could get so bad that parents would poison their children to avoid them having to live in a world where they weren't the victors.
NATO article 5 is a meaningless piece of paper in and of itself if the will to retaliate isn't present and we will only find out about that at the moment someone wants it invoked. I would not necessarily bet on knowing how that ends. The response against what happened just now is underwhelming, and the various investments in fomenting nationalism/isolationism may well pay off. These are very dangerous times.
> I highly recommend the movie Der Untergang, which is as historically accurate as they could make it
And in case anyone didn't make the connection, is also the movie where the scene used in all those "Hitler hears about..." YouTube clips is taken from.
Nuclear weapons require constant, ongoing maintenance if they have any hope of going bang. Russia doesn't have the assets to keep that up anymore. Their nuclear arsenal is probably a fraction of its theoretical capability.
In addition, if Putin tried to launch nukes, I doubt the other oligarchs would go along with his mass suicide plan.
If there is one thing I've learned about Russian technology then it is that in general it will operate 'good enough' to do what it was designed to do even if that means that it isn't designed in a way that we would consider elegant. Assuming that Russia's nuclear arsenal is dysfunctional or even non-existent would be a very large - and possibly fatal - mistake, especially given that it never was designed as a precision tool anyway but relied on massive overkill. You may well be right, but if history is any guide here making assumptions without hard evidence about the nature of an enemy arsenal, either positive or negative will lead to trouble.
I had a couple conversations with an engineer who worked a long career on maintaining nuclear warheads. I was rather surprised when he told me that he didn't view nuclear war as likely.
As he explained it, plutonium warheads break down over time. They create helium gas pockets and sometimes internal fractures that prevent detonation.
The solution is to reform the warhead every few years.
The problem here is that plutonium has over a dozen crystalline forms. If they don't achieve a uniform crystal, the warhead will fail to detonate due to the imperfections along the lines where the different crystals come together. This takes a ton of time and money (and often many, many attempts).
Together these mean that the warheads are getting very old and the upkeep to keep them working is huge. Russia can keep a few in working order, but not nearly what their previous arsenal would imply.
I have always wondered this. Nuclear Apocalypse scenarios always assume the ICBMs will all function as specified. Maybe they will, but it's not like you can thoroughly test each one. But I guess they don't need to.
There were assumptions that lots of missiles would malfunction or not reach their intended targets and so various cities and strategic objectives were targeted with multiple warheads from different launch sites. This led to 'overkill':
This is not the modern-day version of USSR vs USA. It's the modern version of the Mongol Horde vs Civilization. (No offense to current Mongols; you guys are cool).