He wants entire buffer countries. He wasn’t content with just Donbass.

Demilitarising Ukraine makes Ukraine the buffer-zone. I didn’t mean to say that the aim was for Donbass to be the buffer. I just said that missiles in Donbass is particularly scary. Donbass was supposed to become independent from Ukraine to further Balkanise and weaken Ukraine and their ability to threaten Russia. Donbass being independent republics or federated with Russia doesn’t change the effect drastically.

He poses a much larger existential threat to Ukraine

Not Russia’s problem. Putin isn’t the president of Ukraine, and doesn’t make decisions for the good of Ukraine.

It’s an absolute nonsense argument that tries to justify Russian exceptionalism and imperialism.

I’m not saying it’s moral. I’m saying it’s rational. Conquest is less rational. And more importantly, if your concern is ethical rather than campism, then on top of being more rational, it’s also much easier to work with and manage, to prevent wars. If the western powers were acting morally and wanted to minimise suffering among Ukrainian people, then using this model where we assume Putin has been telling the truth since 1999, then we could’ve given him concessions that would’ve made this invasion and the annexation of Crimea irrational. That would have prevented all this death, and allowed whatever economic integration with the EEA that Maidan proponents want.

This war is the result of years of intentional provocations by the west. Is Russia guilty for invading? Yes of course, they could’ve chosen self-destruction. Or perhaps there still was room to extract concessions from the west by grovelling and begging harder. But neither of those are rational actions. Who is also clearly to blame are the NATO powers who engineered and provoked this war, and destroyed off-ramps as they became visible.

This is also not imperialism. Imperialism is creating an empire and extracting wealth from your vassals. The Donbass will not be subject to unequal wealth extraction. That would be too risky with their precarious legitimacy. This is called expansion.

He uses nuclear blackmail to force other countries to let him take Ukraine

He’s using nuclear threats to deter attacks against Russia. Other countries are already trying to prevent him from taking parts of Ukraine. There are foreign weapons actively being used in Ukraine, foreign countries have enacted official sanctions against Russia, and yet Russia has never used a nuclear weapon on anyone. More than just foreign weapons and soldiers, the Ukrainian army is cooperating with the USA for military planning. Clearly no one is deterred.

I haven’t seen anyone making fun of Putin for not starting a nuclear war.

Okay. If the reference doesn’t resonate with you, then your preferred media probably isn’t guilty of it.

He’s really not making a secret of his imperial ambitions. I don’t know why you’re trying to sell a different narrative.

I’m repeating the Russian messaging as told by TASS and RT, and by Putin in foreign interviews and from what I’ve seen of the yearly Putin Q&A. Is your impression formed from primary sources like the ones I mentioned or psychoanalyst pundits and ‘Russia-experts’? You were upset that OP would link a primary source earlier.

Initially I thought you were arguing in good faith and simply had a skewed understanding on some details. But your most recent reply is very disappointing and shows no effort on your part to consider my arguments or even understand the argument I was making.

Why do you believe Russia won’t cede land when it’s inconsistent with the map data? Russian battlelines wave in and out, while Ukrainian battlelines stay ridged until collapse. What their specific tactics are isn’t moralistic or something we can derive their quality from. I don’t know which of the two tactics is better. Perhaps they’re both the best tactic for their given army, irrespective of their goals. But you had it wrong. Why?

Why do you claim to want to find truth, but shun primary sources? And if you shun primary sources, why are you linking Ukrainian sources?

Why is it so important for you that Russia be unknowable and irrational? Is the reason that your world-view is built on a shoddy and precarious narrative that doesn’t survive scrutiny?

That’s certainly what they want you to accept. What Putin wants you to believe.

The USA empire doesn’t work by having individual governments enter secret conspiracies to obey the USA in favour of their own interests. The USA government and military are just stewards of the empire, the empire doesn’t exist to benefit them.

Ultimately the majority of oligarchs whom the USA empire exists to serve are born in Europe, or they come from European dynasties that happen to live in the USA. It’s simply a system of systemically and organically empowering those who benefit capital.

The EU, which has incredible sway over the politics of EEA nations, is explicitly an organisation that exists to create oligarchs out of capitalists. And who are the European capitalists? Are they staunch nationalists? No of course not, they’re globalists with huge amounts of wealth tied up in USA stock exchanges. That means that with only one level of separation, the EU’s explicit mission becomes an implicit mission to strengthen the USA empire’s power over EEA nations.

But this is clearly a case where US and European interests diverge.

I would recommend this video to you on the topic: https://youtu.be/J_4srRdIK4k It’s recent and current, made by a person who supports social democracy, that is to say, he’s not a socialist or a Marxist. He doesn’t use marxist dialectics in his analysis but still comes to the same conclusions. I think you’ll find him more agreeable. He presents clearly without making assumptions about prior knowledge, citing all his claims, as much as possible using Western sources.

I’m not. BrainInABox is the one talking about a movie. I’m not.

I was explaining the joke. BrainInABox was obviously making fun of what you said, because it’s a silly thing to say. Imagine a comment saying “They ate mushrooms to grow bigger” and someone replied with “Source: Super Mario”.

Putin wants to control Ukraine. At any cost. He wants Stalin’s empire back.

No, this is wrong, this is a story that is pushed by western pundits, but it’s based on nothing. If we instead assume Putin’s statements are true, then he has been consistent for decades. In fact, you’ll often see a sort of double-reality in the words of western commentators, where they both make fun of Putin for declaring and stressing his red lines (and then not following through with the threats), and at the same time stating that there was no way to predict what actions would lead to retaliation. One thing that has been abundantly clear to me following this war, is that Russia has been able to maintain their narrative in the form of goals and roadmap since the very first day of the war, and that the NATO-aligned countries have to adjust their narrative rapidly.

The much more realistic assumption, rather than Putin role-playing Bonaparte, is that Russia feels NATO in Donbass is an existential threat and wants a buffer region. This is consistent with Russian statements, with Russian war-goals, and with the reality that NATO is dangerous and destroys countries.

He’s waging his war because he lost his puppet, and he wants to prevent Ukraine from making its own independent decisions.

This is true.

They throw ridiculous numbers of soldiers at pointless human wave assaults just to gain a couple of meters ground.

If this was true, then we should see a large discrepancy in the number of dead soldiers between either side. Russian causalities are published, so the data is easier to gather. But either way, sites like Mediazona and UAlosses.org compile lists of confirmed dead, and it’s similar between the two armies, despite Ukrainian losses being confidential and unpublished. Why is Ukraine worse at fighting? They probably aren’t, the more likely conclusion is that you’ve read a stupid article with cartoon-logic, and that in reality Russia uses the most effective tactics available to them.

Generals don’t want to lose ground

There’s a website called liveuamap.com, where you can see troop positions over time. And something it shows clearly is that prior to fortifications being installed somewhere, the Russian army does not stick around when there is even the slightest amount of heat. The actual evidence is the complete opposite of your narrative. They’re extremely willing to give up ground. Why do you believe a narrative that’s so disconnected with reality? Is it a one-off or could it be that the bar for evidence is low for the outlet that sold you that particular narrative?

It’s a dysfunctional mess, but every part of it makes sense for the people involved.

Maybe. But let me pitch you the Russian narrative, and you can see if that fits the reality better, and makes everyone out to be more rational actors.

• Russia claimed they were going to fight a war of attrition, not conquest. The reasoning is that their goal is the complete demilitarisation of Ukraine.
• Russia has ramped up production of military equipment and is now producing more than the combined west. This makes sense for attrition, but it doesn’t make sense if you want a big push and expect to break through quickly, as building and staffing factories takes years.
• The combined west has sent weapons to Ukraine as they could spare them, but are running out or low and weapon shipments have decreased over time, meaning Russia is winning the war they themselves say they are in.

And since this started with you saying we shouldn’t trust TASS, you might think that I’m saying Russia is completely trustworthy. But I’m not. Just that on the war, their interests align closer with being honest. In this news story about POW exchanges, there are only two possible sources, Russia and Ukraine, anyone else wouldn’t be able to verify the information. So it makes zero sense to dismiss the Russian account if your goal is to find truth among narratives. You’d be left with a single narrative, and at best your intuition for bullshit.

And if you pay attention, you can see similar perverse incentives at work in western countries too. People as rational actors is a lazy lie used to justify dysfunctional systems.

I never made any claims about people. I made claims about sufficiently large organisations. Rather than blaming dysfunctional systems, you should analyse if there is a reason why institutions you rely on would intentionally fail you when they fail you, and then you should test your hypothesis across as much data as you can test against and adjust as you’re proven wrong. Eventually you’ll end up with Marxism.

Also consider IDF soldiers committing cartoonishly evil atrocities against Palestinian kids because it makes sense in their heads. That doesn’t make it any less evil.

The sadists are people. People don’t need to be rational. The IDF is rational. Their goal is genocide. To further that goal, it makes sense to promote, protect and enable sadistic and evil individuals. It’s rational for the state of Israel to push dehumanising narratives about Palestinians. It’s rational for the oligarchy to direct their servants (USA and European governments) to give Israel as much support as they need, to allow them full reign, while taking on as little responsibility and complicity as possible, and that’s exactly what’s happening in Israel and in the EU and beyond.

Isn’t that bad optics for Ukraine? If they’re killing more and capturing less, then that has to mean something like Ukraine is killing POWs (a war crime), or Ukrainian soldiers have a higher desire to surrender, which could be indicative of idealogical sympathy or of horrible treatment by the army.

Why are you even bringing up a fictional movie in the first place?

I mean it wasn’t me, but that’s because that’s a scene in the film. You or your source were confusing the plot of the film for reality.

Is that seriously the argument you’re going with? You do understand that the only possible conclusion after making such an outrageous claim is that you’re here to deny Russian atrocities, right? You’re exposing yourself.

Russia are not cartoon villains. They are rational villains. No large organisation acts like cartoon villains. When they do evil things, it’s for the sake of a goal that makes sense. If someone has told you about atrocities committed by Russia which don’t further Russia’s goals, then they have lied to you. Those atrocities either never happened or were not committed by Russia.

The person you’re replying to claimed Russian state media is more reliable than the fiction film Enemy at the Gates. If you’ve seen a diverse set of Western outlets claiming Russian military strategy is shooting their own soldiers, then I’m afraid the outlets you trust are less reliable than Russian state media.

Okay. Thanks for explaining.

I haven’t claimed they are and I don’t understand your reservation. The USSR is not the pinnacle and unapproachable goal of humanity, every country should strive to be at least as good. Russia failing to adhere to the same standard is a failing of Russia, it’s not excusable by saying they aren’t the organisation which achieved it.

They have the same enemies. They literally have the same nukes and missile silos. If the USSR could do it, if China can do it, then Russia with the world’s strongest conventional military, can also do it. Of course two countries can be compared, and Russia and the USSR are more apt to compare than any other country.

Not ‘no shit’, the USSR had a ‘No first use’ policy. As does modern China, as does modern India.

Doesn’t say in the article but the Game + DLC edition is 90€. (Just the game is 60€).