It seems to have settled into a long deadly grind, with Russia committed to capturing the city of Bakhmut and Ukraine committed to defending it, with both sides pouring troops into the months-long battle, and what they’re getting out of it is a lot of dead people and a bombed out city. Russia says they’ve finally succeeded, while Ukraine says they’ve still got a toe-hold and are busy encircling the city. It sounds to me like they both lost.
Even if I grant the Russians their “triumph,” it doesn’t seem to have been worth it.
In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, also asserted that the war has backfired spectacularly by failing to “demilitarize” Ukraine, one of President Vladimir Putin’s stated aims of the invasion. He also called for totalitarian policies.
“We are in a situation where we can simply lose Russia,” Prigozhin said, using an expletive to hammer his point. “We must introduce martial law. We unfortunately … must announce new waves of mobilization; we must put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition,” he said. “Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders … and work hard.”
Yikes. Russia started a war of aggression, and that’s what victory means — they have to become like North Korea? That’s a complete failure. Sure, close your borders, enslave your own population, alienate the rest of the world, and claim you won.
Of course, the people in charge will still get to live luxurious lives.
Citing public anger at the lavish lifestyles of Russia’s rich and powerful, Prigozhin warned that their homes could be stormed by people with “pitchforks.” He singled out Ksenia Shoigu, the daughter of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was spotted vacationing in Dubai with her fiancé, Alexei Stolyarov, a fitness blogger.
“The children of the elite shut their traps at best, and some allow themselves a public, fat, carefree life,” Prigozhin said in the interview, which was released Wednesday on video. “This division might end as in 1917, with a revolution — when first the soldiers rise up, and then their loved ones follow.”
I guess a Russian would know. Of course, Putin would know this too, and would know that he’s got to keep the pressure on, and that losing the war in Ukraine would possibly be the real trigger for revolution, more so than spoiled rich kids flaunting their wealth.
So many lives lost and damage done needlessly because Putiin couldn’t accept the old Russian empire was never coming back and Ukraine wanted to stay Ukrainian..
If Putin had stopped short of invading and just left it as saber rattling ntimidation show, how different would the world be now and how many lives saved.. How much more respect would he an Russia and Russians generally still have?
Prediction: Oligarchs are going to attempt to use angry mobs to kill other oligarchs as the tenuous cooperation between them for mutual power decays into a free for all as they all attempt to concentrate power among themselves. Especially if Putin’s health is really failing, the next 5-10 years in Russia are going to be extremely bad.
I don’t see a real revolution, I see a bloody decadence and backstabbing among wealthy elites and the average person just continues suffering.
To be fair, I think Prigozhin would be advocating for DPRK style government regardless of the situation. Authoritarians be like that.
@ ^ remyporter : So Russian history keeps on being Russian history with its peopel suffering and being absolutely miserable from the centuries (millennia?) long era of Tsars to Leninists & Stalinists to Putinists
tsardomdictatorship again now..That in hindsight all too breif window of hope we had under Gorbachov & Yeltsin.. Sigh.
^ Oh FFS. Only Tsardom meant to be struck out. Obvs?
Here is a re-run from early May:
Three milbloggers commenting on Putin’s great parade and laughing their asses off for three hours (just forty-seven vehicles including an antique tank!)
https://youtu.be/a1tCP8gZZAc
Nice idea and it isn’t impossible but it is unlikey.
Russia has never been a democracy and it has been ruled by one brutal and cruel authoritarian dictatorship after another.
Russia and the former USSR has mass graves of millions of people murdered by the state for one reason or another.
The Russian population has had a lot of practice in keeping their heads down, smiling and nodding, and not saying anything.
There is no sign right now that this is going to change.
When the war started I read a blog post by a young woman in Moscow. She said most young people thought the war was pointless but weren’t going to protest.
It wouldn’t do any good since Russia isn’t a democracy.
It would get you thrown into the Gulag and quickly.
Being publicly antiwar is a crime with a sentence of up to 15 years.
@7. Raven : “Russia has never been a democracy..”
Kerensky’s govt in that breif period between the fall of the Tsar & Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Revolution
The days of Gorbachov & Yeltsin before Putin took over?
Don’t forget that this is Russia attempting to genocide Ukraine and the Ukrainians.
That is why the Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
What choice do they have?
It is literally fight or die.
The Russian leadership makes no secret of their genocidal goals. They openly say it often.
Russia has their plan for genocide and they are carrying it out as we watch.
and
@ ^ raven : Spot on. Agreed. 100%.
StevoR: The only fair election was in 1991. Yeltsin and the communists didn’t get along and ended up having a coup in 1993, with Clinton backing the increasingly autocratic Yeltsin (but it’s not like his opposition were all cuddly or anything). There hasn’t been a free and fair election since.
Russia has a procedure they’ve used many times to erase non-Russian minorities in the Russian empire, the USSR, and now the Russian Federation.
They call it “Russification” but that is just another name for genocide.
The Russians aren’t going to set up mass extermination camps with ovens that hold thousands of bodies. That is too much work for too little gain and besides it looks bad to the rest of the word. It’s a waste of perfectly good slave laborers.
Where they occupy someone else’s land, they drive out some of the population are refugees, deport millions to the arctic and Siberian hinterlands of Russia, fill up the Gulag slave labor camps.
Right now they are kidnapping huge numbers of Ukrainian children, claiming they are orphans when many are not, and sending them to Russia to be turned into…Russians.
Kill off or exile all the native cultural and political leaders.
Suppress their language and make them all learn and use Russian, by taking over the mass media and the education systems.
Suppress their culture and burn their books, movies, and TV programs.
It takes a while but in the end, it works.
It’s what they’ve done in Belarus. Belarus is so far gone that it is occupied by the Russian military, almost no one speaks Belarusian any more, and the government is actively trying to get rid of the Belarusian language.
The USA and NATO really need to do a lot more to help Ukraine win, and win quickly and conclusively. Time is not on Ukraine’s side. Only a fast, hard, unequivocal ass-whipping will have any chance of deterring Russia from further aggression and eternal “frozen conflict” harassment of their neighbors.
And no, giving the Ukrainians fighter-jets and training them in their use probably won’t be enough. It will probably take direct intervention by US and/or NATO forces, in the air and on the ground, to finish this bloodbath ASAP.
The Russians have even introduced a new term into the Russification vocabulary: “Filtration” is used to describe the forced evacuation of Ukrainian children and families to the Russian Federation, giving the brutal practice a clinical feel.
Yeah, that does make it sound kinda…eugenic…doesn’t it?
Putin’s just trying to undo the Kievan Rus expansion a thousand years after. Despite it disintegrating by the year 1200. And epically failing, as he’s been busily trying to use the same methods that failed the Nazis when they invaded. With the added wrinkle of threatening nuclear destruction, which he entirely didn’t follow through on, as a reply in kind would occur the moment a NATO nation got hit with fallout.
I’m only surprised that he confined the threat of salting warheads to produce cobalt-60 only to us, rather than threatening Ukraine (and hence, Russia itself) with them.
Raging Bee, not a lick of the Ukraine invasion really makes sense from any claimed sociological perspective. Wanting a warm water portage makes sense, but not a single ethnic or sociological thing does. It’d be like the UK trying to become ethnically pure by eliminating all Anglo-Saxon derived peoples.
But, I disagree on any bandaid US invasion effort. It’d play into Putin’s propaganda efforts too well and the current stagnations and failures are undermining Putin’s power in Russia at an ever increasing rate. If he continues to fail, which is likely, I anticipate a “health crisis” causing him to resign and not be heard from in his remote, heavily guarded dacha fairly soon. That’s another fine Russian tradition, for when defenestration wouldn’t be as well received.
That Putin’s gone with Nazi German tactics isn’t being missed, that’s a still open sociological wound for Russia that he’s been picking at, while adding Stalinist tactics like the Ukrainian pogroms to. Think Xi running around a Chinese coastal city warmongering, while waving a katana around. That’d turn swiftly into a steel suppository.
@14. Raging Bee :Yes. yes, it does.
@11. numerobis : Your thoughts on Kerensky?
War is where filthy rich old white dudes (from a place of safety) send poor kids to destroy a nation and then be murdered in the process. Human Society is a failed experiment. Reform it now or destroy it!
Shades of the stories about Galena Brezhnev and Boris the Gypsy in the old dying USSR. Some things never change.
StevoR,
There was a brief period in 1917-18 when many of the features of democracy were present in Russia – multiple parties, free press, freedom of speech and assembly, free trade unions… but Kerensky never won (or fought) an election to become or remain Prime Minister, and made the appalling error of launching an offensive in the ongoing WW1. When that failed, as it was bound to do*, it gave the Bolsheviks their opportunity and they seized power. Ironically, there was a free and reasonably fair national election after the Bolshevik takeover, but because they lost it (they gained around 1/4 of the votes, it was won by the Social (or Socialist) Revolutionaries, a largely rural party, and the one to which Kerensky belonged) the Bolsheviks simply dispersed the Constituent Assembly (intended to draw up a new constitution) which it had elected.
*In my view, Kerensky should have stayed in the war, but told the allies Russia had to stand on the defensive. Admittedly, the army might have disintegrated anyway, as the largely peasant conscripts went home to join in taking the land from the rural aristocracy and gentry.
Er… no. The Russian nationalist myth, to which Putin adheres, views (Muscovite) Russia as the historical continuation and rightful heir of Kyivan Rus. So anything which ever formed part of Kyivan Rus is rightfully part of Russia – and that, of course, includes Ukraine. I highly recommend Timothy Snyder’s course of lectures (to Yale students) on the history of Ukraine.
KG, actually, wouldn’t the converse be closer to true, that Moscow and her possessions really belongs to Ukraine?
You missed in your objection an operative part, that whole collapse 800 years ago.
Conquests don’t last all that long, as anyone would learn had they bothered to ask the Mongols about it.
Especially for Vikings. :P
Bakhmut has become in Ukraine what Stalingrad was in World War II. It didn’t matter if Russia took the city in the end, it was the losses they incurred while doing it that matter. I have no concrete numbers to cite, but I’ve seen estimated death tolls of Russians to Ukrainians anywhere from 3:1 to 6:1, and far worse losses in hardware. Ukraine is getting replacement equipment like F-16s and Swedish tanks, Russia is recycling T-55s as artillery. Ukraine’s replacement troops spent the last six months training with NATO, Russia’s replacements are 40+ year old conscripts who left the military 20 years ago.
The massive Russian wave crashed against Bakhmut. Even if they wash away the city, the wave spent its energy and they have little left to be a danger elsewhere.
Capricious Horses.
Intransitive, good comment.
Mind you, before Bakhmut , there was Mariupol.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol#2022_Russian_siege_and_subsequent_occupation)
I think the important take away here is just how evil those black-hearted Russians are, and how we are so clearly morally superior.
@ 7 raven
Pointless indeed! Can you imagine invading a nearby country that was once in your thrall because it has chosen to ally with your enemies? Fortunately, here in the west we’ve always had principled leaders like the great president Kennedy who would never contemplate such a thing.
@ 7 raven
Shocking! Americans, can you imagine ever persecuting people for being anti-war?! Utterly alien to our way of life. More evidence of our superiority. It’s inconceivable the US would ever persecute people for being communists, for example. Just never happens.
@ 12
Quite. We can hold our heads high that the US has famously always opposed slave labor. I can’t believe these Russians are such inhuman monsters.
@ 12
Well that’s the final straw! We in the west would never take lands from others, put them on reservations, or force them to assimilate and speak our language.
We are forced to the conclusion that Russians are an innately evil and villainous people. But we can comfort ourselves that we are entitled to bask in our righteousness.
LOL.
Loquaciousbob:
Not the Russians, rather the Russian State. Different things.
And, of course, one can consider others evil without considering oneself morally superior.
Actually, Europe tried to woo Russia via cooperation, on the basis that it might appease it while capitalising on the post-Soviet peace dividend.
Thus the energy blackmail Russia tried.
Tu quoque.
Tu quoque.
Tu quoque.
If your ‘we’ includes you, then it does not include me.
Cross-posted with the Infinite Thread – “Jon Batiste – FREEDOM.”
@19. KG : Thanks for that. Much appreciated.
@25. Silentbob : This war is Putin’s fault not that of the Russian people. I have plenty of sympathy for the Russian people – although no sympathy for Putin who chose this easily avoidable invasion of a peaceful country nor those who have committed war crimes. That’s a lot of whatabboutery you posted in your comment there and just because the USA has done and in some areas still continues to do awful things does not make it okay for Putin and his military to do awful things. I’m disappointed that I need to say this to you having expected better.
Shorter Silentbob #25
“Ukrainians deserve to suffer on behalf of all the sins committed of the West”
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s people in Ukraine, not in the West that have their cities turned into rubble, their citizens willfully enslaved and/or murdered and their identity threatened. Blabbing about all the evil done by the US and compatriots to excuse Russian atrocities just shows that you do not mind such actions as long as they are done by the team you are rooting for.
[Slava Ukraini!]
And displaced people.
And stolen children.
—
Pretty fucking rare there’s such a “goodie” and a “baddie” vibe, such unprovoked aggression.
—
Gotta say, I think Noam Chomsky is in his dotage, going by various interviews whereupon he opines regarding this conflict that I’ve seen.
—
[OT]
For wzrd1, I am impressed by your resilience after your loss. Respect.
Allusion I think you’ll get: Clarke’s First Law, re Chomsky.
(Whether or not you agree is irrelevant, but hey. Good on ya)
For those who are STILL buying into the rhetoric of Russians being like the evil Darth Varder led empire crushing the helpless Luke Skywalker led resistance that is Ukraine: Here’s a map of the actual geopolitical situation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#/media/File:NATO_31_Members.png
The blue bits are the NATO countries, a nuclear armed power bloc. The big purple bit is Ukraine, historically a soviet country. Red is Russia and allies. Those three blue countries stacked on top of each other, under the Scandinavian countries, are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – former soviet countries that were acquired by NATO. In recent years, NATO via various shenanigans, has overthrown the pro-Russian government of Ukraine to install a pro-NATO government.
What is not shown on the map is the position of Moscow – which you’ll just have to trust me is closer to the border with Ukraine, than the size of Ukraine. In other words, Ukraine has always been a buffer between Russia and the NATO powers, and if it falls, Russia is fucked.
Now you may think that’s fine. You may think Russia is evil and deserves it. And I’m not suggesting otherwise.
All I’m saying is; stop being idiot children who think this is some Evil Empire versus Brave Rebels situation, and understand this is a (former?) world power facing an existential crisis and fighting for survival in the exact same way your own country would if, say, the USSR had taken all of South America and was trying to place nuclear arms in Mexico. Do you think the US might try to keep, or assert, control of Mexico? Do we have any historical precedent to suggest it might be so?
Why yes I think we do.
Fuck you are dense, bobchatterbot!
Things were kinda fine until Putin, by then a decade and a half into his rule, decided to salami tactic Ukraine — this after Georgia, this after Chechnya (remember those bombs?), this after… well, a lot. No tu quoque here, btw (to pre-empt your silliness), since this is not a comparative thing.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia
Anyway, Russia began this war. Russia is prosecuting this war.
Salami tactics in 2014, stupid strategy in 2022.
Delusions of grandeur by Putin. Great suffering ensues.
Simple as.
Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine.
You’re parroting Russian propaganda.
They did this to themselves, by over-reaching.
They kinda did — some softer sanctions aside — in their 2014 annexations and their “little green men”.
But 2022 was a stupid, stupid, stupid move.
And, superfragiliciously, Russia is the worse for it, even more than the world as a whole is the worse for it.
(Why, one might wonder? I think I know why: nukes)
—
Way to double down.
So, you reckon Mexico is all worried about tank columns and cruise missiles and stuff like that.
—
How’s that war in Ukraine going, anyway?
I can’t help but elaborate, being in a mood.
Anyone who claims Russia should hold on to any of the Ukranian territory they conquered by force of arms and all sorts of shenanigans as being necessary to any peace deal is basically saying one greater power can attack a lesser one and do some conquering, then sue for peace and keep part of the territory because peace is O so desirable, even at that price.
(Fuck the concept of sovereignty, right?
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum )
—
Finally, can’t resist:
Actually, if you paid attention to the topic of this post, the war is going from shitty to shittier for Russia.
So. Your analogically allusive attempts are feeble: the Empire was led by the Emperor (duh) and Darth Vader was his tool.
(The proper analogy is [Emperor:Darth::Putin:Prigozhin])
PPS (since it’s quiet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal#Impact_on_Ukraine-Russia_relations
(For a while, the Russians had an useful idiot available)
War is no laughing matter, but it is fun when fascists screw up.
Here are some milbloggers having a good time discussing the latest Russian fuckups 😁
“Ukraine invading Russia? Nafo reacts”
https://youtu.be/hxCDC5nPPPQ
No, the converse would not be closer to the truth, because valid territorial claims cannot be made on what a state that completely disappeared controlled centuries ago (or for that matter, millennia ago – I’m looking at you, Israel). And no, I didn’t “miss” the “whole collapse 800 years ago”, because, while I was aware of it even before I watched Snyder’s excellent series of lectures (which points out that “nations” are a modern invention, and that both they and state boundaries are historically highly contingent), it was completely unnecessary to mention it, if only because you had already done so in misinterpreting Putin’s motivation.
<blockquote.All I’m saying is; stop being idiot children who think this is some Evil Empire versus Brave Rebels situation, and understand this is a (former?) world power facing an existential crisis and fighting for survival – Silentbob@33
The Tankie contempt for the Ukrainians, the denial to them of any agency, is right out in the open here. I absolutely agree that NATO should not have expanded after the collapse of the USSR, as this made it more likely Russia would succumb to fascism, but there is not a shred of evidence that any NATO state had or has the slightest intention of invading the Russian Federation. What Putin is scared of is the possible existence of a democratic and (relatively) prosperous Ukraine on his borders, acting as an example to Russia’s own people, many of whom have (or at least, had until February 2022) close links with individual Ukrainians.
BTW, Silentbob, whataboutery is an infallible sign that the whataboutist is defending something which they know, at some level, is absolutely indefensible.
@ 37
A bit into the podcast, they put up a map of where the free russian and free belorussian forces have pushed into Russia, and it looks just like a… ahem, just like Florida .
Putin is really getting fucked.
@ 37
At 2.27 they show a photo of the feared “dragon’s teeth” the russians had put up to prevent a Ukrainan offensive.
milbloggers: “ROFL”
“Acquired”, eh? That’s an interesting (read: tendencious) choice of word.
In fact, they were actively beating on the door to be let in, because they were worried about exactly the kind of thing that Putin is doing right now.
Every European nation bordering to the former Soviet Union wanted into NATO.
Sweden had the Baltic Sea as a buffer which explains why it took the invasion of Ukraine for the country to abandon neutrality.
Silentbob, Russia is facing an existential crisis because it’s being run by a corrupt nincompoop and his mafiosi partners who are sucking the country dry of its wealth like ticks and leeches. Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia is a third world country where running water, indoor-plumbing and drivable streets are a rarity. All the money that Russia used to rake in with its resource sales went straight into the pockets of a wealthy few, everything else was left to rot and ruin. Due to this the Russians took to excessive drinking, childlessness and dying early. All the smarter Russians rightfully see no future in this increasingly authoritarian country and so either drive into external or internal emigration and stop contributing much.
THIS is where the crisis originates from and not one single NATO soldier had to fire a single shot to make it happen, it’s all home-made.
And you have the gall to say that Ukranians need to endure the horrors of war because Russia’s leadership so utterly tanked their own country?
It’s also cute that you try to downplay Russia’s crimes by using comparisons to cartoon villains. No. We don’t need to go for cartoons, Russia in Ukraine 2022-23 is Germany in the USSR 1941-1945. Except Hitler’s armies weren’t so incompetent.
@Silentbob #33
It amazes (and depresses) me how dishonest and disingenuous promoters of genocides like you are. The Baltic countries were not “acquired” by NATO, you lying sack of shit, and neither were any other countries in the former USSR sphere of influence “acquired” by NATO in order to flex muscles on Russia. We have joined NATO because, in the whole of its history, Russia has never tried peaceful coexistence with any of its neighbors for any meaningful length of time. We needed some protection from being abused by Russia. You fuckers always act like we in Central and Eastern Europe have no agency or say in with whom we wish to align.
We do have agency and we chose to align with NATO. We got to look at how Russia treated us and how NATO treats us and we continue to want to align with NATO.
Again with this nonsense, insisting that people in Eastern Europe have no agency and will of their own, they either have to be forcibly commanded by Russia or nefariously manipulated by NATO. Here’s the news that failed to reach your shit-for-brain – Ukrainians, not NATO have overthrown the pro-Russian government and Ukrainians were only slightly pro-NATO right up until Russia invaded -click-. It was Russia’s invasion in 2014 that has changed support for NATO in Ukraine from minority to bare majority and it took full invasion to shift it from barely over 50% to over 80%. And it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that has changed support for joining NATO from minority to overwhelming majority in Finland and Sweden -click-. The biggest cause of NATO expansion? Russia’s shitty behavior towards its neighbors both in the past and in the present.
You fucking assholes have had over a year of the Russian government publicly gloating about their intent to commit genocide and lying through their teeth at any opportunity any sou still repeat the lies that were debunked multiple times over.
I am wondering how long it’ll be until Russia rolls out their T-34 and T-44 tanks and original crews. Against a nation with a bit under 1/3 of their own population.
birgerjohansson @ 42, yeah, “dragon’s teeth”, because it’s harder to soil their undergarments with any credibility showing a tank ditch.
Re 33:
Nobody likes having a hostile foreign nation/alliance located strategically close to their own heartland, but smaller countries often just have to deal with it. The only possible reason large countries shouldn’t have to do so is that they might be practically able to subdue neighboring countries and build a buffer zone against the wishes of said neighbors.
That’s different from having neighbors who more or less align with you politically and culturally, and are willing to be your buffer in an alliance against someone else – if only because they dislike that someone more than they dislike you.
(Hello to all NATO fellows – I’m here to represent the newest acquisition. Speaking of which, where is that acquisition ray gun and shouldn’t we be firing it at Sweden already?)
Piling on.
This is simply false. A large majority of Ukrainians overthrew their government in a popular revolt.
Ukraine joining NATO does not significantly change the nature of Russia’s defensive posture. NATO already bordered Russia. Ukraine joining NATO does not significantly increase NATO’s first strike nuclear capabilities. Also, I’m sure it was – and still is – on the negotiating table that nuclear weapons shall not be placed in Ukraine. You are a fool for fell for the Russian propaganda. This was never about NATO being a threat to Russia because of possible invasion. This has always been the threat from NATO against Putin’s plans of Imperialistic expansion and control.
They are not facing an existential crisis. They can go back into their corner, back across the well established international boundary lines. NATO isn’t going to invade them. Their massive arsenal of (maybe) working nuclear weapons is more than enough to guarantee that.
Again, this is not like the Cuban missile crisis because NATO placing nuclear missiles in Ukraine does not significantly increase their first strike capability compared to what they already have, and because no one is talking about placing nuclear missiles in Ukraine and Zelensky and the Ukrainian government is more than ready to end the war today if it only took accepting Russia’s demand that Ukraine do not host nuclear weapons in their territory. Again, NATO has no need to host nuclear weapons in Ukraine; it doesn’t give them any significant advantage. All of this talk about Ukraine being a necessary buffer between NATO and Russia is entirely preposterous; in the first place, it assumes that Russia could actually defend itself militarily against NATO, and that is now shown to be clearly false. Based on the last year, I bet Poland alone could attack and overwhelm Russia and be marching in Moscow within a month against the current Russia army (ignoring nuclear weapons).
A more personal take: