Assessing facts, evidence and accountability - Ukraine v. Russia by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Assessing facts, evidence and accountability - Ukraine v. Russia

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, November 24, 2022 13:14
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Wednesday, June 1, 2022 7:45 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Comrade Polish Russian Collaborator Signym says I am brain washed.

She's wrong.

One must have a brain before the washing can begin.

--------------------------------------------------

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Wednesday, June 1, 2022 8:49 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
THUGR has once again established himself as the most brainwashed and gullible person here.

Son, while you were insisting that Ukraine was "winning" I was accurately predicting the opposite.

While you were insisting that sanctions were destroying Russia's economy and finances, I was accurately noting that it was the EU'S economy and currenct that was shrinking, while Russia's economy and fiance's were growing more robust.

It is not being supportive or a troll to post THE TRUTH, instead of hogwash and hopium. You OTOH keep posting both.

Grow up.

Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin designed and runs. He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians. He has been doing this for twenty years without our help.

Ukrainians understand this, which is one reason that they become irritated when we suggest that they concede territory or victory to Russia because of a concern about Putin's internal mental state. They know that this is not only unjust but pointless. What matters in Russian politics is not Putin's feelings nor battlefield realities but the ability of the Putin regime to change the story for Russian media consumers. It is senseless, as the Ukrainians understand, to sentence real people to suffer and die for the sake of Russian narratives that do not even depend upon the real world.

What happens if Putin decides that he is losing in Ukraine? He will act to protect himself by declaring victory and changing the subject. He does not need an off ramp in the real world, because that is not where his power rests. All he needs to do is change the story in Russia's virtual world, as he has been doing for decades. This is just a matter of setting the agenda in a meeting. In virtual reality there is always an escape route, and for this reason Putin cannot be "cornered." (Neither, for that matter, can the actual Russian army in actual Ukraine. When Russian units are defeated, they just cross back into Russia).

Putin's power is identical with his ability to change the subject on Russian television. He does this all the time. Think about how the war began. Until late February of this year, the entire Russian media was clamoring that an invasion of Ukraine was unthinkable and that all the evidence was just warmongering by the CIA. Russians believed that, or pretended to. Then, once Russia did in fact invade Ukraine, war was presented as inevitable and righteous. Now Russians believe this, or pretend to. In 2015, when Russia's last invasion of Ukraine failed to meet all of its objectives, the Russian media changed the subject from one day to the next from Ukraine to Syria. This is simply how Russia is ruled: invasions and storytelling about invasions. If the invasion doesn't work out, the story changes.

If defeated in reality, Putin will declare victory on television, and Russians will believe him, or pretend that they believe him. He will find a new subject on which to fasten their attention. This is the Kremlin's problem, not ours. These are internal Russian mechanisms in which outside actors are essentially irrelevant. It makes no sense to create an "off-ramp" in the real world, when all Putin needs is an "off-ramp" in his virtual world. It will be built by propagandists from pixels, and we are not needed for that. Indeed, there is something more than a little humiliating in Western leaders offering themselves as unpaid and unneeded interns for Russian television channels.

The odd thing is that Western leaders know all of this, or should. Given plenty of time to reflect after Russia's last invasion of Ukraine in 2014, we have become aware of the primary role that political fiction plays in Russian life. Everyone who matters in public discussions ought to be aware that Putin governs in media rather than reality. Just three months ago, we all just watched as Putin changed the story from "war unthinkable" to "war inevitable." And yet, for some reason, some Western leaders ignore this basic structural fact of Russian politics when they advocate appeasement.

To be sure, Putin might err, in this war or in some other one. He might wait too long to declare victory in the virtual world. In that case he loses power, and someone else takes over the television networks. We cannot save him from such a misjudgment. It will happen sooner or later. It is possible that power in Russia will change hands during this war; we will know that has happened when the Russian media landscape changes. Regardless of whether Putin falls during this war or later, his power over media will be complete until the moment when it ceases. There is no interval where our actions in the real world will be decisive.

Now let's think of what we are asking of the Ukrainians when we speak of conceding Ukrainian territory for the sake of giving Putin an "off-ramp." We are asking the people who are the victims of a genocidal war to comfort the perpetrator. We are expecting Ukrainians, who know that Russian politics is all about fiction, to make sacrifices in the world where their families and friends live and die. We are asking Ukrainians to sentence their own people to ethnic cleansing in order to make life slightly easier for Russian television producers whose genocidal hate speech is one cause of the atrocities.

As Ukrainians keep telling us, cliches of "cornering" and "off-ramps" will make the war last longer, by distracting from the simple necessity of Russian defeat.

When we start the story from Putin's psychic needs and run it through our own misunderstanding of Russian politics, we push Ukrainian democracy to the side. Rather than acting like allied democracies, we behave like amateur therapists for a dictator. We are no good at that. We are directing our empathy towards a dictator who will only exploit it to continue a war, and away from a people who must win that war to end it.

Appeasement of Russia distracts us from the people who really are cornered: the Ukrainians. They are facing extermination as a people, and that is why they fight. President Volodymyr Zelensky actually does need a way to end this war, because he does not govern by fiction, because he is an elected leader, and because he feels responsible for his people. Unlike Putin, Zelensky cannot simply change the subject. He has to bring his people along. At this point, Ukrainians by huge majorities believe that the war has to be won, and are unwilling to concede territory. Unlike Putin, Zelensky will have to make a case, referring to what is actually happening on the ground. He therefore really does need help, both to win the war as quickly as possible, and in giving Ukrainians a sense of a post-war future.

All reasonable people want this war to end. That means thinking more about the Ukrainian people, and worrying less about problems that Putin does not in fact have.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-off-ramps?s=r

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 1, 2022 1:18 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SECOND: Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin designed and runs. He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians. He has been doing this for twenty years without our help.

Bullshit. Until very recently Russians had full access to western press. That way, average Russians could see all of the nasty things that the west was publishing about them. The west, however, had been practicing psyops and censorship for decades. ("Manufaturing Consent" Noam Chomsky) and it's gotten to be a nonstop operation since just before Trump's election.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Tuesday, June 21, 2022 7:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

June 20, 2022

The Nobel Peace Prize put up for auction by the Russian journalist Dmitri A. Muratov to help Ukrainian refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million to an anonymous buyer, obliterating the record for a Nobel medal.

The proceeds from the auction will go to UNICEF to aid Ukrainian children and their families displaced by Russia’s invasion of their country.

Mr. Muratov is the editor in chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which suspended publication in March in response to the Kremlin’s increasingly draconian press laws. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said he was inspired to auction the award he won last year by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who sold his medal to help civilian relief in Finland following the Soviet invasion of that country in 1939.

“We hope that this will serve as an example for other people like a flash mob, for other people to auction their valuable possessions, their heirlooms, to help refugees, Ukrainian refugees around the world,” Mr. Muratov said in a speech from the stage before the bidding began.

The previous record for auctioning off a Nobel medal came in 2014, when the prize belonging to James Watson, who shared in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, sold for $4.1 million ($4.76 million, including the commission that goes to the auction house).

Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale of Mr. Muratov’s medal, has sold five former Nobel Prizes, including the one awarded to Watson’s co-discoverer, Francis Crick. That medal sold for $2.27 million in 2013.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220621050446/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/06/20/arts/nobel-auction-muratov-ukraine.html

Will Putin be auctioning his Nobel Prize Medal to aid Ukrainian children?
First he has to win the medal.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 21, 2022 9:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Timothy Snyder -- Suddenly everyone’s a Russia expert and Ukraine expert now. I’ve been thinking about Russia and Ukraine my whole career, and I know the languages and I go to the places, and I’m sometimes shocked by how certain people are about things.

My own sense is that the best way to evaluate it is in terms of what Putin expected and then what hasn’t happened. So what Putin expected was that the whole country would fold up within three days. And that expectation was based upon a political assumption about what Ukraine is or what it isn’t. That obviously didn’t turn out to be true, but, as we know from lots of other historical examples, once you start a war, no matter how dumb your premise is, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to say, “Oh, my premise was dumb. I’m changing my mind.” People double down. And of course, Putin is going to double down. And I think he probably still in some way believes in his own basic premise.

The second part of the story is that obviously the Ukrainian nation does exist, contrary to Putin’s assumption. Ukrainian society is decentralized. It’s a society which is very suspicious of central authority in general, and obviously suspicious of somebody else’s central authority. And Russia is a very centralized type of society.

But this has all proven to have a kind of battlefield efficacy because Ukrainian doctrine was to break into small groups and to allow lower-level officers to have a great deal of autonomy in the field, and that’s proven to work quite well. So it’s interesting because what we have is not just a clash of armies — it is a really a clash of mentalities or a clash of systems. You can say it’s autocracy versus democracy and that would be true enough, but it’s also maybe more interesting to talk about it in terms of this highly vertical Russian way of doing things versus this much more horizontal, Ukrainian way of doing things.

Sean Illing -- Do you think Putin can somehow “win” in Ukraine, whatever that might mean?

Timothy Snyder -- I think what a lot of commentators miss is that Putin's power is 100 percent coextensive with his ability to change the story. So he can say he’s "won" in Russia almost no matter what happens on the battlefield.

Which is why a lot of this hand-wringing that we do in the West about whether we let him save face or give him off-ramps to climb down is just completely beside the point. Because he can decide today that he’s won. He can decide tomorrow he’s won. He could have decided last month that he’s won. He could decide next month that he’s won. And then the Russian people will believe him, or they’ll pretend to believe him, which amounts to the same thing.

The Ukrainians, though, can only win on the battlefield. Zelenskyy is a democratic elected politician. He doesn’t operate in virtual reality. He has to operate in the real reality and he could only win when his people allow him to win, or you can only end the war when his people allow them to end the war. So it’s an asymmetrical situation in that sense, but I think the Ukrainians can win. They know what they’re fighting for. It’s quite literally the existence of their state and of their people that’s at stake. And that’s why they’re fighting the way they are. And that’s why they’ll fight whether we arm them or not.

Timothy Snyder -- The Ukrainians have definitely bought us some time to think about all this. If Kyiv had really fallen at the end of February of this year, this would have been a very dark spring for democracies. If an extreme right-wing regime in Russia managed to destroy democracy in Ukraine that would have had effects for everyone.

Conversely, if Ukraine, despite people’s expectations, manages to hold this off, that will be a great boon to democracy. Because I think it either goes one way or the other. I don’t think there’s such a thing as stasis. So the Ukrainians have given us a chance to think. We need to realize that what the Ukrainians are doing is a very compressed example of the kind of courage that you actually need to keep a democracy going.

https://www.vox.com/2022/6/21/23165718/vox-conversations-ukraine-russi
a-timothy-snyder-democracy

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 22, 2022 1:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How to understand Russia and the war

by Alexander J. Motyl, Opinion Contributor - 06/21/22 7:00 AM ET

Navigating the debates on Russia’s war in Ukraine can be confusing for the uninitiated. In fact, the differences are largely due to different assumptions regarding politics in general and Russian politics in particular. The assumptions matter, because they inspire policies. They also matter because some assumptions are more plausible than others.

To what do you ascribe the greatest explanatory value?
To a) policymakers, their policies and their rhetoric?
To b) the institutions in which policymakers, policies and rhetoric are embedded?
Or c) to the still larger systems and cultures underlying all of the above?

If you opt for a), you’re likely to believe that Western policies and rhetoric had a decisive effect on post-Soviet Russia’s evolution. In particular, the decision to enlarge NATO — and possibly to have broken promises to the Russians not to do so — appears critically important in explaining Russian animus toward the West and its allies, such as Ukraine.

The strong point of this kind of analysis is that bad policies and bad rhetoric may be undone. Ending the war, therefore, can be achieved by means of negotiation and compromise, as many in the West suggest. The problem is that ascribing so much explanatory weight to policy and rhetoric ignores history, ideology and culture, and presupposes that Russian leaders are exceptionally sensitive human beings who start or end wars because of real or imagined slights. Given what we know about Russian elites, they appear to be the exact opposite: They’re tough, unsentimental and vicious. If so, then hoping to end the war by means of good-faith negotiations is doomed to failure.

If you opt for c), you’re likely to believe that Russian policies and rhetoric — and, of course, the decision to go to war and commit genocide in Ukraine — are the product of deep-seated political, social and cultural structures that have molded Russian society for hundreds of years. To its credit, this kind of analysis, which is usually favored by historians, takes into consideration Russian history and culture, and thus is grounded in Russian reality.

But that same strength is also this approach’s weakness. For one thing, structures appear to deprive Russians and Westerners of agency, dooming them to a repetition of historically codified forms of thinking and acting. Thus, many in this camp argue that it wasn’t Vladimir Putin who created the system, but that the system and culture created Putin — just as they created a whole string of dictators throughout Russian history. If culture is ultimately responsible for the choices Putin and his cronies have made, there is little to be done about Russia. It is not and will not be democratic, rational and enlightened in any way that the West would recognize. Peace is, therefore, impossible. The best one can hope for is a cold war and an impenetrable iron curtain surrounding the malignant Russian state.

I’ve left option b) for last, because it strikes me as most persuasive, possibly because it avoids the extremes of ignoring history and culture altogether or giving them sole responsibility for Russia’s behavior. According to the logic of this middle option, history and culture have molded the institutions, policies and discourses found in Russia, but elites — and especially powerful authoritarian, totalitarian and fascist elites — have the capacity to tailor institutions to their aspirations and needs. Russian leaders aren’t shy wallflowers who take umbrage at any scowl or frown, but neither are they puppets of large historical forces. Instead, they shape political, social, economic and cultural institutions — just as those institutions constrain, but do not predetermine, their policy choices and rhetoric.

Seen in this light, a change in rhetoric won’t lead to peace; nor is peace impossible because “that’s the way Russia is.” Instead, the war is the product of Putin’s choices on the one hand, and of the fascist system he built that requires imperial expansion for its legitimacy on the other. Peace is possible, though not easy to achieve. It will require Putin’s physical or political departure and the replacement of fascism with some form of “run-of-the-mill” authoritarianism or decrepit democracy. Merely flattering Putin, or doing everything possible not to insult or annoy him, is pointless, just as it’s equally pointless to assume that fascism can never be dismantled and that tyrants cannot fall.

The final advantage of this middle option is that it places Ukraine — wherein the war is taking place, after all — into the center of things. Creating peace isn’t just a matter of waiting for the demise of Putin and his system; instead, peace can be achieved only if Ukraine wins the war. Only a humiliating victory can hasten Putin’s departure and create fissures that could destroy Russian fascism. And, better still, a Ukrainian victory is within relatively easy reach.

The Ukrainians have soldiers who are determined to save their country. The West has weapons that the Ukrainians need. Victory over Russia — and the demise of Russian fascism — is simply a question of bringing the soldiers and the weapons together.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3527285-how-to-understan
d-russia-and-the-war/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 22, 2022 2:37 PM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Putin, like Trump, doesn't care if something is moral or legal in any sense, and Putin surely doesn't care about "peace." He only cares about what he can do. I don't see this ending well for either side, but Russia has more of everything and can lose a lot more than Ukraine and weather the beating they're taking. I can't see any way for Ukraine to "win," except with Putin's death or a Russian coup (pretty doubtful). There are some abstract wins for Ukraine that are possible, but they won't mean much in real terms (honor, diminishing Russian authority globally, damaging Putin long term). If Russia stops at Donbas, it's probably just to bury their dead, replace some generals, and make some more threats while they build more bombs and missiles. Then it's back to genocide, phase 2.

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Wednesday, June 22, 2022 7:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!

Shut up, idiot.

P.S....

CBS NEWS: Russia's ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-ukraine-ruble-currency-russian-eco
nomy-2022/

There you go, you dumb shits.

LET'S GO BRANDON!

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Saturday, October 8, 2022 11:52 AM