Putin’s folly in Ukraine

[neomac]

@Pseudonym

Well. We have a good summary.

…Of your misunderstanding skills.

@Pseudonym

Your analysis is more enlightening but not by any actual measure so we can’t disprove it.

I just said I’m not interested in putting numbers. Besides I argued why I think geopolitical analysis has a greater explanatory power and greater accuracy wrt ideological driven analysis. My considerations are epistemological and must be addressed on their merit.

@Pseudonym

You can’t defend your claim that ethical analysis is about preferences.

Well if I claimed it, you can quote me. Besides even if one made such a claim, how could you disagree with him? You said “All opinions are biased” (so, also ethical opinions) and if “bias” doesn’t refer to a cognitive failure then it is about preferences, right?

@Pseudonym

But you’re clear whilst you’re far too Smart and Logical to allow your ideological biases to affect your conceptual analysis, others cannot muster the same levels of sheer brilliance when doing ethical analysis,

I was just rebutting to your poor objections and so far you didn’t bring any compelling argument to prove that my conceptual analysis is ideologically biased. The only attempt you made focusing on my conceptual analysis is to associate my notion of political competition to capitalism, but the association is an epic failure since also communism has a notion of competition between classes. And even the pacifist political agenda competes against those who support military aid to Ukraine. So there is nothing inherently ideological in the notion of “political competition”. As much as in the notion that politicians can use certain arguments and slogans to stir an emotional response from their audience.
To prove your point you started moving around the goalpost, bringing up alleged evidences of my ideological bias independently non inherent to my conceptual framework. So you wished to associate my appeal to experts like Kissinger and Brzezinski (instead of Mearsheimer), to my anti-pacifist stance concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Unfortunately for you Kissinger was way closer to Mearsheimer’s positions than to Brzezinski’s, so if I mention both, it’s unclear why this is supposed to show my anti-pacifist stance. Then you wished to associate my ideological biases to my dialectical dispositions: sneering attitude toward pacifists, people I commented to in this thread. But again my first comment was to Punshhh who supports military aid to Ukraine against Russia. And the sneering attitude is related to the intellectual dishonesty of political militants like you, not like Astorre .
You also tried to counter other claims I made e.g. about the discriminative semantic value of words, or about the possibility for conceptual convergence in a political competition, but forgot to make any association to my ideological biases. The argument was too abstract for you to even give it a try.
Meanwhile, rhetoric tricks aside, you kept launching your dialectical attacks on very shaky grounds made of non-shared assumptions about “permanent competition”, “bias”, expert dispute undecidability, “likelihood”, “evidence”, solipsism (there is not evidence of other minds beliefs and intentions), “ethics”, “measurability”, “knowledge as a non scarce resource”, et similia which were mostly self-defeating.
This is a more accurate summary than the pseudo-summary you draw.

@Pseudonym

even though ethics and ideology are not the same.

All right, what’s the difference? Try to elaborate instead of making such constipated claims. Are you scared?

@Pseudonym

If you point out advantages, that should be sufficient for all of us.

I just clarified the reasons which support my claims, perfectly in line with your wishes. So now I’m surprised to hear it’s not sufficient. And even if that’s not sufficient to you (all of you?!), why should I care?

@Pseudonym

Philosophy increases your knowledge of your own conceptual apparatus (but apparently not by actually finding oneself initially mistaken - see below).
It requires no omniscience, nor expertise to detect bias, but if I attempt it in your analysis I cannot do so without mind-reading.

Given your assumptions you can’t. Since the notion of “bias” is psychological and you believe that we have no evidence of other people’s beliefs and intentions, how can you detect biases at all? No idea how you can provide an argument supporting such a possibility that is precluded by your own conceptual framework, but if you can then I’m looking forward to reading it.

@Pseudonym

Presumably, only you have this power to detect bias in others, but your own analysis is immune form such detection.

Yet another pseudo-argument. Never made such claims, nor believe them nor one can imply them from my arguments.

@Pseudonym

Normal people do include the possibility of being mistaken in their analysis, but you don’t need to because such a claim only applies to generic humans, of which you’re presumably not one.

Normally, the possibility of being mistaken is not “included” in anyone’s analysis at all. Indeed, it is a meta-analytical consideration. One must first provide an analysis on a subject before reflecting on the possibility that it may be mistaken. Moreover, if considering such a possibility is not circumscribed and compelling enough to guide actual troubleshooting, then it plays no role in one’s knowledge revision.

@Pseudonym

I think that about wraps us up.

Whatever makes you happy and good luck with ending the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Palestinian “genocide”, Western imperialism and capitalist permanent competition.

[ssu]

@neomac

Unfortunately for you Kissinger was way closer to Mearsheimer’s positions than to Brzezinski’s, so if I mention both, it’s unclear why this is supposed to show my anti-pacifist stance.

This is actually true, before 2022. Before his death, Kissinger purposed the “Finlandization” model for Ukraine in 2014. After the 2022 invasion, he changed his views (he died in 2023).

I think this issue is worth to mention if we want to look at just why Putin chose to invade Ukraine in 2022. Kissinger’s earlier view should be viewed more carefully.

Yet even in a Finnish-neutrality/ “Finlandization”, there has to be a reason, a pushback for Russia/Soviet Union to choose this option. In Finland’s case the option of occupying the country, like Soviet Union did with Eastern European countries, meant the Soviets would find themselves fighting a war and perhaps a long insurgency. After the 1944 peace the Finnish army prepared for Russia to attack and prepared for the insurgency option, yet the Finnish government offered appeasement, “Finlandization”, to being really nice to the Soviet Union. From the two choices, war or Finlandization, meaning having Finland as a neighbor that never said anything critical about the Soviet Union, Stalin chose the latter. If there wasn’t any reason for this (like the fact that the Finnish armed forces hadn’t been crushed, for starters), then why opt for any “neutrality” if you can take it all? This is the crucial point to understand here.

The situation with Ukraine was totally different after especially the annexation of Crimea. Prior to 2014 Putin himself had been well respected in Ukraine. Ukrainian political leaders were and had been influenced by Russian intelligence services for a long time. Just to show how much influence Russians had over Ukraine was the fact that in 2014 the commander of the Ukrainian Navy happily became a Russian admiral!!! Not only did he collaborated with the Russians, but joined the Russia military itself. In the Finnish example Russian intelligence services had underperformed and simply didn’t get any Finnish officers to become agents for them prior or during WW2 (the Western intelligence services did get one Finnish higher ranking officer, a colonel if I remember correctly, to act as their agent). And the former Ukrainian leader chose to seek refuge in Russia, as even the insurgents in Donbass now opposing Ukraine didn’t want the fucking guy around.

Thus the true “special military operation” of Crimean annexation was a spectacular success. A real cakewalk. It had been easy, bloodless, with Ukrainian military being just dumbfounded about the Russian invasion.

(“Little Green Men” in front of an Ukrainian Garrison in 2014. The Ukrainians have simply just barricaded the garrison entrance with a vehicle.)

Even if the “Pro-Russian” revolt only happened in the Donbas, Ukraine’s response had been very mild and the conflict had become a somewhat “frozen conflict” prior to 2022. Russia truly dominated the media sphere during this time. Hence the idea that Ukraine was a pushover, would fold quickly was totally reasonable, when the actual changes how Ukrainians felt and how Ukrainian resolve had strengthened was totally disregarded. Likely anyone in the Kremlin or in the Russian military that had held criticism of this special military operation were silenced. And it seems quite likely that the positive intel of Ukraine folding quickly was then fed to Putin. After all, NATO and the US had been humiliated in Afghanistan just earlier and hadn’t done much after the Crimean annexation.

So why worry? It would be a spectacular success…

[neomac]

@ssu

This is actually true, before 2020. Before his death, Kissinger purposed the “Finlandization” model for Ukraine in 2014. After the 2022 invasion, he changed his views

All right, Kissinger’s views evolved before his death but even after the Russian invasion in 2022, he kept making claims such as:
“I think the offer to put Ukraine into NATO was a grave mistake and led to this war,”
(Ukrainian conflict triggered by aspiration to bring it to NATO: Kissinger | The Business Standard)
“Kissinger says Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end war” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/24/henry-kissinger-ukraine-russia-territory-davos/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[ssu]

I think because of old age Kissinger was put on a pedestal. As the latter interview from 2022 continues:

That said, he added that the Biden administration has done “many things” right. “I support them on Ukraine,” he says.

“From my perspective, the Ukraine war is won, in terms of precluding a Russian attack on allied nations in Europe,” the senior American political figure insisted. However, he thinks that there are “other dangers that can rise out of Russia.”

Pretty curious for someone to say that the war was won in 2022. Putin could still reach his objectives, even if that seem unlikely. And the issue isn’t naively that Russia would attack in a similar way Western Europe as it did Ukraine. This is about influence, how many European countries opt the Hungarian policy towards Russia if Russia would be victorious over Ukraine.

Russian policy has been logical in it’s aim to a) to break up the Atlantic link between US and Europe and b) take a stance against the European Union. The reasoning is simple: without the EU any European country is at a disadvantage in a bilateral setting. Yet with the EU and NATO, tiny countries like the Baltic States have backing. Once it goes into bilateral relations, Russia can get influence over many smaller European states.

[neomac]

As far as I understand it, Kissinger has generally stressed the importance of a balance-of-power logic in which Russia’s security concerns, including its perceived sphere of influence, should be acknowledged and negotiated rather than simply rejected—especially in the case of Ukraine. This is why he long opposed Ukraine joining NATO and instead viewed it as a potential neutral buffer between Russia and the West. Even his support for Western military aid to Ukraine was largely consistent with the aim of strengthening Ukraine’s position in eventual negotiations with Russia, rather than pursuing Russia’s strategic defeat in Ukraine—hence his openness to the idea of territorial concessions. What I think is fair to say is that, like Mearsheimer, he acknowledged for a long time that Russian policy had an important defensive dimension, particularly in relation to NATO expansion, at least before 2022. However, after 2022, he also emphasized the role of aggression and strategic miscalculation on the Russian side. Concerning your understanding of Russian aims I find them rather plausible even beyond what Kissinger was willing to acknowledge.

[ssu]

@neomac

This is why he long opposed Ukraine joining NATO and instead viewed it as a potential neutral buffer between Russia and the West.

Especially before 2014 and still before the 2022 invasion, many European NATO members resented the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine, which the US President (Bush) called for alongside Georgian the membership. Not just Orban’s Hungary, which still firmly opposes membership. Even in the cusp of the 2022 invasion, Germany was willing to stand against Ukrainian NATO membership, if Russia would just send it’s forces back to their garrisons from the Ukrainian border. And we should remember, that all it takes is one NATO member being against Ukraine’s membership.

Hence if this war would have been only about Ukrainian NATO membership, then Putin could have sent his forces back after a successful show of force. But of course, this wasn’t the only objective for the war, as the annexations and the Russification of Ukrainians in the occupied territories clearly have shown. That this is still debated by some shows just how strong the influence of the Kremlin is on the discourse. Or the idea that every conflict in the World is a “forever war” marketed by the US military-industrial establishment.

While Mearsheimer doesn’t care about Russian domestic politics and the internal reasons behind the war and sticks to his own theory of Great Power competition, I guess Kissinger obviously was an example of a Cold War warrior who was used to thinking in spheres of influence. And it should be noted that European countries also accept the sphere of influence -thinking when it comes to the US and Latin America. Only Spain has been active in opposing Trump’s actions in Venezuela (and in Iran). But when it’s Europe itself and the idea of Russia having a sphere of influence (with the exception of Belarus), that doesn’t fly. That Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, is the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy tells something about this.

Of course now a lot of things are changing. Clearly the European security environment is under dramatic change and here the possibility of Ukrainian EU membership holds also a security element. Ukraine, assuming it survives this war with Russia, might play a huge role in European security alongside Poland. And after Trump’s second, NATO might never be anything as it was before.

[Punshhh]

@ssu

Of course now a lot of things are changing. Clearly the European security environment is under dramatic change and here the possibility of Ukrainian EU membership holds also a security element. Ukraine, assuming it survives this war with Russia, might play a huge role in European security alongside Poland. And after Trump’s second, NATO might never be anything as it was before.

On day one of the Ukraine war, Putin made a grave mistake. He threatened (a serious threat) Europe with Nuclear attack. At that time, he was still expecting Ukraine to fold in 3 days. The dramatic change in the European security we are now seeing was started immediately following that threat. I pointed it out at the time in the Ukraine thread on the last forum.

It wasn’t the nuclear threat itself that caused the change, it was just words after all. But the combination of the threat with a large scale land invasion of a European neighbour. There was also a deception element aswell. Up until the point that the tanks started rolling across the Ukraine border, Putin had been insisting this was not going to be an invasion, it was just a military exercise.
The way these actions would have been interpreted in European capitals was clear and unanimous. This was an existential threat, even if strategists realised that Russia was not going to be able to attack NATO head on. The risk of Europe being embroiled in a large scale European conflict was introduced and by an aggressive deceptive actor, who only a a couple of decades earlier was the opposing side in the Cold War.

Not only this, but the era of friendship, integration and cooperation which both European countries and Russia had engaged in going back to Perestroika was betrayed. Not to mention the Budapest memorandum. Although there had been a gradual breakdown in relations for over a decade. A lot of the ties had remained.

All this was ended in that one threat by Putin.

[ssu]

@Punshhh

Not only this, but the era of friendship, integration and cooperation which both European countries and Russia had engaged in going back to Perestroika was betrayed. Not to mention the Budapest memorandum. Although there had been a gradual breakdown in relations for over a decade. A lot of the ties had remained.

All this was ended in that one threat by Putin.

Or with the largest war in Europe since WW2, which now isn’t going at all well for Russia.

As Ukraine is gaining back ground and as it has obviously made advances in the crucial drone technology, any kind of victory is even more distant for Putin. Perhaps he can pin his hopes on his most trusted friend, Donald Trump, to save him.

Latest Ukrainian attacks on oil installations near St Petersburgh happened just 60 kilometers from my summerplace and smokestacks could be seen from the Finnish border. This just shows that Ukraine is achieving it’s own ability to strike Russian targets deep inside Russia.