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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I'm not at all clear on what Putin gains with expansion. Russia has way more land than they need. Their population has been flat since the 80s. Their military is already depleted and skeletal. Anyone who's played Diplomacy understands that if you spread too thin as you expand into your neighbors, they will keep taking back your gains like we see here. Complete occupation is clearly out of the question at this point, they're going to keep fighting over a stolen sliver here and there. No ego has been satisfied here, nor will it be.

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According to Peter Zeihan, it's not so much that Russia needs more _land_ but that its current land is difficult to defend militarily given the facts of its geography. I'm not necessarily defending Zeihan's view, but simply claiming that there is some analysis which suggests there's a strategic benefit for Russia here. (or perhaps there would have been back when they thought the war would be easy) And let's also not forget the importance of Crimea with regard to Black Sea shipping. It's also the case the the "Kievan Rus" has quite a bit of historical and cultural importance to some in Russia.

Now to be clear I'm completely opposed to the war in Ukraine, and I'm quite happy to see Russia getting pushed back. My hope would be that Ukraine takes back all of its remaining territory. But, I think there are at least some justifications that could have made sense for someone who thought the war would be easy, and who did not care about the human cost either side would bear.

Zeihan is a strange guy who seems to take a lot of his information from online discourse, which is a poor substitute for first-hand knowledge. The ground truth is very blunt: Russia has not bothered to install even a chain-link fence along its European border. Some sections have a sand strip to detect crossings, others not even that, most of it looks like this: https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/misc/FIRU/DSCN237... Mushroomers and other foragers often get lost and end up walking into Russia (and vice versa) without even realizing it. This is such a regular occurrence that it receives only warning or a small fine, and a few sentences in local newspapers.

A counterexample comes from post-2022 Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland: every single one of them is digging anti-tank trenches along the border with Russia, installing everything from surveillance systems to reinforced bunkers and pillboxes, preparing minefields to be laid and bridges to be blown up. Things have gone so far that some of them are discussing dismantling railway lines connecting with Russia to prevent them from being used by invading forces.

No such preparations can be seen on the Russian side of the border, because in the post-Cold War world, everyone recognizes that an attack from Europe is a delusional fantasy. There's no will and no means for that.

>Zeihan

Why is he even a thing? A guy wrote a couple of books with some failed predictions? Only thing I can think of is that he mostly tells people what they want to hear, with some minor bit of contrarianism to have the semblance of telling truth to power. Add in self-promotion, and I guess that is the recipe for success (or at least being internet quotable)?

I think it's simpler than that and isn't talked much. Ukraine has been on a direct path to join European Union. Russians and Ukrainians have had significant ties - parts of families living in one country, parts in another, marriages, shared language, given that all Ukrainians know Russian and a lot of them have even spoken Russian at home at least until the war broke out.

Putin couldn't let Ukrainians join the EU, start getting all the EU fund money and actually started living like Europeans. Russian population would see that at a large scale and start asking questions. He couldn't get back the influence over the country diplomatically so he resorted to terror.

Edit: I also wanted to add that this was the reason Putin and other Russian propagandists have been calling Ukrainians the brotherly nation (to show them how they care about them), the nazis (to show that their government is harmful) and that Ukraine doesn't even exist as a country (to show that they should all be the same people under the same borders).

Not trying to defend Russia in the least, but isn't their fear more about Ukrainian accession into NATO rather than the possibility of joining the EU?

EU membership isn't the golden ticket it used to be. Russia basically had an inside man in there for years with the Orban administration in Hungary. Member nations like Greece, Malta and Bulgaria also seem to have experienced more brain drain to the higher income countries in the bloc than they have in economic and industrial development.

My guess is as good as anyone's. But I think NATO was used as an excuse for war because it's a military (although defense) alliance. It would be impossible to justify war for country joining the EU.

As for the golden ticket metaphor, I agree, but when the country is so economically and institutionally behind than the rest of the EU, this would still benefit them a lot. All Eastern countries experienced big emigration but a lot of the citizens previously having emigrated are now returning.

Ukraine war has never been about more land or resources for Russia. It was all about NATO expansion by overthrowing governments in post soviet countries and installing hostile regimes there. For Russia an independent Ukraine was fine as long as it doesn't join a hostile military block, and that's exactly what was planned to do since the coup in Kiev in 2014. So we have war.

Total nonsense.

The “NATO expansion” so often mentioned by Russian apologists, are free nations correctly observing they are more safe against their past oppressor by joining NATO. Russia is a bully, and smaller nations are strong together.

For Russian leadership, an independent Ukraine was fine as long as Ukrainian leadership was controlled by Kremlin.

As soon as Ukraine started moving towards the west, Russia invaded.

Agriculture, industry, even more oil and gas, a pretty big economy and population, a better climate than most of Russia. And a place at the center of Europe instead of the periphery.

Without Ukraine, and probably soon without Transnistria, and maybe even Belarus, Russia can be quarantined and contained. Eventually the Russians will decide they want to be more European than they want to be North Korea.

there is land and there is land.

most of the russian land is frozen tundra, and even if global warming improves that slightly it'll still be mostly to largely useless.

crimea, meanwhile, is a highly desirable warm water port that has been the subject of many conflicts throughout the ages.

ukraine is a breadbasket and produces 40%-50% of the food of all of russia but with 3.5% of the land. a considerable number of soviet era heavy industry was there, such as the azon steel plant, and it is the gateway to europe, the black sea, and anatolia.

> What Putin gains with expansion

Personal survival. He needed a war to justify the dismantling of the remaining democratic institutions. That the war lasts plays in his personal interests also.

P.S. Don't forget that he is 73 years old.

Exactly this.

Putin been killing civilians back from 2001. This diagram cleary shows that together with propaganda machine you can drastically shift population opinion https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/28383.jpeg.

Simply, they underestimate how much Ukraine is able to resist.

What Putin gained was not having a culturally-adjacent country next door with a functioning democracy. That was a threat, not to Russia, but to Putin. He couldn't accept that, because Russians might get ideas about how their culture didn't require a strongman at the top in order to function.

Democracies aren't automatically immune to voting in illiberal leaders. Russia and the west have both been heavy handed in their efforts to swing Ukrainian elections in their favour.

Why assume it's rational? The Ukraine belonged to the USSR, Russia sees itself as the legitimate successor to the Soviet Union. So the Ukraine and the Baltic states belong to it, as far as Putin sees it.

By the same logic, US belongs to the crown.

No one says there is any logic behind it.

Yes, and the War of 1812 happened. The US grew too strong to be plausibly taken by the UK.

it belonged to the tsar before that.

moscow always called the shots in kyev and they prefer to keep that going.

also don't underestimate the black sea access and the pan-slavic, pan-orthodox "3rd rome" thing -- those also shape perception.

> pan-slavic

Panslavism has died in 19th century when other slavic states figured out that it is just different name for Russian empire. Then panslavism was revived after 1945 as Eastern Block. It has been an economical disaster.

On the other hand, it is extremely Russian to not surrender no matter how badly it is going and regardless of the cost in human life. Leningrad, Stalingrad, even burning Moscow to keep it from Napoleon. For nationalist purposes, it doesn't matter if the objective is worthless or unachievable.

Like so many other situations, we have to wait for him to die.

Wait for whom to die?

Only one person was mentioned in this thread.

I hope Peter Zeihan lives a long life.

That’s a different thread

that didn’t even exist when the comment you’re replying to was posted.

So…

Find something better to do.

I’m going to.

That's fair.

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