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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to imagine any benefit to anyone from this disaster.

It is / was folly. Russia, other than hard firepower, does not have influence or economic heft to drive anything.

All this has done has been to antagonize others and consolidate rivals --I mean, even Maduro, maybe Cuba, are going against him, traditional "allies". His only "allies" now are other pariah nations/tyrants.

One day I'd like to find out what the calculus was.

At least with the Gulf War I, II and Afghanistan we kind of had parallel objectives, one economic and one for hegemony but lots of countries benefited and not just the US --and even then arguably the US lost (credibility among other things).

So this is just odd.

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Russia's economy, and the nation's well being as a whole, is dependent on selling gas to Europe. Europe doesn't want to support the regime and would prefer to buy elsewhere. Ukraine found lots of oil and gas reserves in the past decade or two but it takes a long time to turn reserves into deliverable product and they haven't yet. So for Russia, seizing those reserves, which are in the East and South, where they are attacking the hardest, would be a big win. But if they can't hold those areas, destroying infrastructure and government so they can't produce and market that oil and gas to Europe for another couple of decades is also a big win.

I think because of this you'll continue to see outsized investment in not buying oil from Russia.

I think they may have had the opposite effect in almost every realm they wanted to play in.

They have shown they are not a military power other than nukes, they have pushed nations into fast tracking NATO and EU memberships, They have weakened the interest in turning the blind eye and buying their oil. There will certainly be countries that will buy out of necessity but I expect that to become increasingly unpopular as this goes on.

Even if they take Ukraine for oil, I do not expect them to make back even close to what it cost them, both politically and financially.

The original plan was to do Crimea 2.0, just walk in and put a soldier on every corner. No one would resist.

That didn't go down as planned. The current plan is Grozny 2.0. Demolish cities with artillery and then capture the ruins.

China is not a pariah state.

Russia maybe was making a grab for the natural gas fields in Ukraine. Maybe they already saw Europe's gas business as a lost cause, and with the new pipeline to China, saw aggression towards Europe as worth the risk of losing the business.

Yes, because this move gives Russia all the bargaining power with China.

China ofyen violates the sovereignty of:

Vietnam

The Philippines

Japan

Taiwan

Malaysia

India

In addition they ignore UN sanctions and have issues with Tibet (Annexation), among other things.

I think the calculus is to capture Ukrainian territory whatever the cost now, if millions are starved/bombed, all the better, areas would be repopulated with some Russians and would forever join the "Russian world". Same thing was done by Stalin so the blueprint is there.

Then the West, which is weak in Putin's worldview, would drop some of the more disastrous sanctions cause Western politicians need to get re-elected and recessions are bad for their prospects. Putin would continue buying up Western elites, fostering divisions, and in 1-2 election cycles everyone would forget about Russia or Ukraine, stretch goal is the disintegration of NATO by American withdrawal.

So in a decade there would be no sanctions and Ukrainian territory would belong to Putin. Speed of Western abandonment of Ukraine would decide how soon Putin attacks other countries.

Obviously Russian people would suffer in between but 1) Putin doesn't care about them 2) They would be cheering anyway.

I think we are in a situation where this is a clear mistake for everyone but Putin and certain close yes men.

They are just doubling down on this because they left themselves no out for failure.

I struggle to understand Putin's reasoning as well.

My best guess is that he wants to leave a legacy of expanding Russia's geographic influence. I.e., it was a gamble based on a successful invasion of Ukraine.

My Hollywood-style conspiracy theory (which I very much doubt) is that Russia and China are secretly collaborating. The plan would be for Russia to draw NATO / U.S. forces into eastern Europe, leaving Taiwan under-defended. And then China would invade Taiwan.

How is this folly?

Joe Biden said, in 1997, that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states. That was several years before Putin became president. https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500782351831662592

He also said "good luck" to Russia when told that they may have to look to China as an alternative if NATO keeps expanding. In 1997. https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500784522023034882

We knew how Russia would react, with or without Putin. But it is now folly?

Russia knows the hyperpower is China now and is acting accordingly. China encourages Russia to oppose NATO in Europe, preventing the US from focusing fully on Asia, forcing the EU to become more independent and weakening the US' influence on the world stage. And Europe pretends to want to become independent from Russia but that requires an full transition to non-carbon energy – and this won't happen anytime soon (since Europe is still following a neoliberal playbook that make such transition a "folly" in the leaders' eye). Russia knows the West's weak points and understand that now is the right time to exploit them. The West continues to believe it's Putin's folly but they're the one losing a critical ally to China. I'm sorry to war victims, but this is far more important than negotiating Ukraine's neutrality. Too bad we had to let Putin go to war as NATO and the EU could have a agreed to this and avoid a war (that weakens both Europe and Russia in the short term, and the West in the long term).

The NATO expansion angle seems like a distraction. The rambling speech Putin gave at the outset of the invasion outlined his pet theory that Ukraine is part of broader Russia and that he doesn't see them as a separate people. He's long said that the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest catastrophe in Russian history. It's pretty clear that his aim is a revanchist restoration of historical Russian territory.

It is also worth noting that NATO does not expand by invasion or recruitment. Member nations all have to apply to join and be democracies, meaning that at least notionally their people have to want to be in NATO. And why would former Soviet Republic want to be in NATO? Most of them say it's because they're afraid of Russian invasion. It's worth noting that Russia has recently invaded Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Those fears don't spring from a place of pure paranoia.

It also seems unrealistic that there will be long term alignment between Russia and China, they're natural rivals. Russia still holds contested territory that used to be part of China. Even under the Soviet system they tolerated each other at best, and entered into armed conflict in 1969. China officially calls that conflict an act of Russian aggression, even after hammering out a deal with Lavrov in 2008.

So we'll discard everything about Ukraine that Western strategists said before Putin started his war?

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592

That cannot be a distraction. You speak about the rambling speech but what about his 2007 speech? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_speech_of_Vladimir_Puti...

I'm sure Putin was angry about the missile shield project in 2007, but that's an insane reason to invade a country that isn't part of Nato in 2022. I've read all of those arguments from the think tanks, but again NATO doesn't pick new members like some sort of playground kick ball team. New member ask to join because they feel threatened by Russia specifically. NATO could turn them down, but that's not really in the spirit of the treaty, and gives a hecklers veto to Russia.

Putin's earlier speeches essentially boil down to a threat that he'll invade any neighbors who try to join a defense pact designed to protect them from Russian invasion. You could call that realpolitik, but it looks an awful lot like revanchism.

I would also point out that NATO has never attacked Russia, but Russia has attacked a bunch of places that aren't part of NATO. Defending Eastern Europe from Russian invasion isn't aggression against Russia.

I actually don't even like NATO or think the US should be part of it, but all Putin is doing here is using it as a pretext to capture territory. He made that perfectly clear on the eve of the invasion.

>And why would former Soviet Republic want to be in NATO? Most of them say it's because they're afraid of Russian invasion.

So you have a big countries that, for various reasons (WWII and Cold War, for one) fear about its security. They said repeatedly that they'll act if the US continues to expand NATO further onto Russia's borders. Russia intervenes so countries close to Russia fear they might be invade.

I fully understand the legitimate fear of these countries but why NATO wants to continue to expand when the US/EU knows perfectly that this only makes Russia more aggressive. We (the West) knew that Russia would act (military if need be https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592 but because we refuses to tell Ukraine that NATO is full, we have Russia invading Ukraine and we refuse to defend them military. How is this positive for Ukrainians? They won't join NATO (because the West doesn't want to go to war with Russia directly) but they'll be ruined by a tragic war. Only China is winning here.

> but why NATO wants to continue to expand when the US/EU knows perfectly that this only makes Russia more aggressive

This seems ridiculous to me. Russia has been aggressive to its neighbors for a hundred years.

> They won't join NATO (because the West doesn't want to go to war with Russia directly) but they'll be ruined by a tragic war.

They couldn't join because the second Viktor Yanukovych was gone, Russia invaded the east and took Crimea. You can't join NATO while in an active conflict. People seem to be forgetting that the very second his henchman got tossed out he invaded. The precipitating event was a trade deal with the EU, not a bid to enter NATO.

Yes, I understand that we the west have reneged on a tacit agreement to not expand NATO in certain sensitive border areas.

And Joe Biden is guilty of bravado… but Russia going in like that makes no sense whatsoever. They are antagonizing everyone but a handful of countries and it’s resulting in galvanized opposition to him —even internally.

To use an overwrought phrase the invasion was a huge foot-gun.

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