@danjac This isn't even a contradiction. The structures that are completely unable to get anything done properly, excel at propaganda and manipulation.
Russia can't conjure logistics and well maintained equipment with propaganda and manipulation, but it can easily influence politicians, elections, media.
@roknrol I'm not entirely sure he does. I think Putin is an old-school KGB apparatchik who rose from obscurity through a ruthless sense of self-preservation. He knows the value of propaganda and confusion, and how to play off one faction against another at home and abroad, but his own regime is inherently unstable (there is no line of succession, for example) and lacks any path to enrichment beyond resource extraction and territorial acquisition.
@roknrol in the long term, "Putinism" has no future, it will die when he does, to be replaced by something better or worse. On the way out though he will continue to do damage to Western democracies and his immediate neighbours.
@danjac Oh, you're absolutely correct on that, but I don't think Putin is looking for "Putinism" to be the thing. I think he's looking to restore old Soviet glory, and that's more than just reclaiming land - it means bloodying the nose of the West - which he seems to be succeeding at.
He knows his brand won't last, but if Mother Russia does, he'll go down in history as the man that restored it.
@danjac Fair enough, but his application of Russian propaganda tactics with Western Media can't be an accident, and Russians are kind of known for playing the long game.
@roknrol the Russians are not particularly good at the "long game". Examples from history: Nicholas II declaring war on Japan, Stalin forming an alliance with Hitler, Brezhnev invading Afghanistan, and Putin invading Ukraine.
@roknrol Putin is an opportunist, and is taking advantage of weakness in the West, particularly the polarisation created by its media and politicians and the lack of political awareness of its voters. But those problems are there despite Putin, not because of him.
This is a culture that transplanted citizens in order to raise children that would be sympathetic to the cause. Pretty sure the US doesn't even have shit like that taking place.
We can speculate how much capacity they actually have for effecting that kind of change, of course, and I think the war in Ukraine will be a pretty good litmus test for that. But I think declarations of Western victory are premature.
@roknrol I'm not saying the West will be victorious, but just that we have this weird idea of the Russian leadership as master chess players, when they very much are not. Putin is an opportunist and, like Hitler, a gambler. And as with all gamblers, they can have a winning hand, play well with a bad hand, or lose it all.
@roknrol I didn't say "luck". Putin sees an opportunity and decides to seize it. In the case of Ukraine, his problem was that he gambled on the assumption he had a better army than in reality, because his toady generals told him so (while they were spending the defence budget on Italian villas and yachts). After all, he gambled successfully in Crimea in 2014, and Georgia in 2008, so why not?
@roknrol will Putin prevail? Who knows, but his only route to success is to pull off another 2016 and get Trump back in power, cutting off support to Ukraine, and in the meantime, flipping European countries to his side, as he did this weekend in Slovakia. This is where he does have a good track record, partly because it is something the Russians genuinely are good at, and partly because of self-inflicted weaknesses in Western democracies.
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