Wagner mercenaries were on Thursday reported to be trying to head back into Russia after threatening retaliation over the suspected killing of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on the orders of Vladimir Putin. “The convoys are likely heading towards the border with Russia,” the centre said. “There’s a lot talk right now about what the Wagner Group will do,” he said.
Does Putin seem reasonable to you? I think it’s pretty possible that he will be willing to take the whole world to the grave with him.
Absolutelly - so far he seems to be rational.
Not necessarily wise, certainly not morally upright (quite the opposite), but yeah, absolutelly rational.
He started a war to conquer territory and resources, likely based on certain expectations of capability of the Russian Military which were far from realistic as well as expectations on the Ukranian Military and Society which were also far fromrealistic. He went for a decapitation attack expecting Zelenskyy to be killed, captured or flee but none of that happenned and thus the “easy way” failed. From there onwards, as a dictator who has anchored his authority on an image of “strong man”, we couldnt simply back down so everything that has been happenning since has been him trying to ideally gain something out of a bad situation or at least not to lose face.
All pretty rational. Not exactly strategically intelligent but certainly rational.
As for the use of nukes, notice how the ever increasing talk about using it from the russian authorities maybe a year ago suddenly stopped (except for fringe types and well known powerless russian muppets) when China made it very clear they would have to do something about it if Russia used those…
Even a strategically inept but rational actor can’t miss the implications of China turning against Russia.
In hindsight, all he had to do was setup an assination squad before mobilizing troops in 2022. Had he killed Zelensky before the real fighting happened I think the country would have been very demoralized and it would have been much harder for them to get aid with a new leader, even if it wasn’t a Russian plant.
And the more gains that they would have made earlier on, the less likely the West would have been to send aid, less it fall into the hands of Russia or some new corrupt politician.
Without the aid, Russia would have already won by now.
Apparently he did try it, several times, after the invasion started.
I suspect that in Putin’s mind, before Zelenskyy revealled himself as a real leader (“I don’t need a lift, I need ammo”), he was nothing more than a week “western-style politician” and comediant who would easilly fold.
It’s very easy with hindsight to say he should’ve tried to take him out beforehand but at the time he (or, lets be honest, any of us, even the US President) really didn’t know Zelenskyy’s character: for all he knew back then, killing Zelenskyy might’ve just be taking out a weaker man and end up with a stronger man leading the Ukranian Government only by then Putin’s hand would’ve been revealed.
Sure, it makes sense now, but back then knowing what he knew then, for Putin it clearly did not.
Again, it’s like failure to do even the most basic research. He had all sorts of plants in Ukraine in before all this started, it would have been relatively easy to have spies to a character assessment. Just like I really don’t understand why he wouldn’t have done an equipment specification before moving all this equipment with dry rot and other failures. He had to have known that the everyone was skimming at best, and straight out stealing at worst.
Considering that even the US’ intelligence failed to spot Zelenskyy’s character as a war leader, I think we should be wary of proclaiming that the russian’s could’ve find it out with “the most basic research”…
In fact people often don’t really know if they’ll rise to the occasion in such a life and death situation themselves until faced with it.
As I said, it’s easy to look at it now and think “it was obvious”, but that’s due to hindsight.
What was rational in this war?