What Happens to Russia After It Loses? [View all]

[Pluvious]

A bit long, but well written piece; here are the concluding paragraphs…

As Tom Nichols, a former Naval War College professor, Russia specialist, and current contributor to The Atlantic, concludes: “No matter how this war ends, post-Soviet Russia as a great power is finished for a long time to come. Putin unwound 30 years of social and economic development, somehow thinking he could sustain great power status on wars of aggression, selling natural resources, and keeping a nuclear arsenal. (Great powers do not have to go shopping for weapons in North Korea.) Even if Putin dies or is removed, the moral stain of the Ukraine war and its many crimes is going to last for generations, and a post-Putin Russia will not get the same benefit of the doubt from the rest of the world the way it did after the Soviet collapse. He's going to leave the country poorer, more hated, and more isolated than at any time since Stalin’s death.”

There is an irony in this. Putin avoided the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev because he considered the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its empire as the worst catastrophe of the past century. Yet, here he is compounding the missteps and the crimes that led to that event.

Indeed, the best case for post-Soviet Russia may well be that it becomes relative to China what the former members of the Warsaw Pact were to it, a satellite of a much greater power, at best the junior partner in a relationship with the one like-minded nation that has a chance to gain greater influence in the decades ahead.

For countries like Ukraine—fighting for their continued existence—all of this is secondary, of course. What matters is that they are able to continue their recent victories, that the West provides them with the equipment and financial resources to be able to capitalize on those successes and that in the end they fulfill the promise of Zelensky’s speech and push the invader out of their country. Should they do that, they will be doing the world a great service. And fortunately, they are aided in this not only by the commitments of leaders like President Joe Biden and his counterparts in NATO and the EU, but by the mind-boggling ineptitude of Putin and his army.

As one Ukrainian soldier put it, “We are very lucky that they are so fucking stupid.”

https://t.co/g2kEtLbM4Q