Russia - threadbanned users in OP

There's a rather excellent podcast released by the New Yorker in the last few days, it's an interview with a Yale historian who specializes in Eastern Europe.

One of the standout points he makes (and I'm paraphrasing a lot here) is that unlike the EU on its doorstep, Russia under Putin is institutionally feeble, hasn't made the effort to strengthen political or civic institutions since the collapse of the USSR, and the state overwhelmingly relies on Putin's personality and his inner-circle who are old security hands drawn exclusively from from the FSB /GRU/SVU. The economy is commanded by Kremlin filtered oligarchs who they feel won't go off the reservation. And that's the grand bargain, probably less than 50 men who matter in the whole country.

These men, as well as Putin, are instinctively paranoid, are acutely aware of Russia's institutional weakness, but their background doesn't allow for liberalization or flowering of an open society with free press, civil society engagement with politics etc.

This is sustainable only until Russians or countries broadly in the Russosphere come into contact with different political systems and economies that offer social mobility. The closer the proximity of these counterexamples to the Russian model (if it can be called a model, because the dispensation is cobbled together with kickbacks, political intimidation, censorship and violence against the opposition and the media), the more acute the embarrassment and existential threat to Putin.

Putin knows that if jig is up, the consequences for him and his circle are severe, probably best-case scenario prison, exile to another country, and maybe even death.

The game they run is a zero-sum one. They know that deep down Russians don't trust the system, so they spend their time taking political options off the table for them internally by whatever means necessary. Externally, they can't do this, so they focus their attention minimizing neighbouring countries' engagement with Western institutions by coercion, kickback or intimidation in whatever elite or ruling class they are targetting. If these options don't work, Putin is well capable of rolling in the tanks, because he simply doesn't have the economic inducements to win them back.

They know full well they aren't offering a suite of palatable options to either their own citizens or former Soviet states, so instead of talking up the merits of how they do things, they try to drag the West down to their level.

Essentially the message is this: "Yeah we know we're not a democracy, but Western democracy is a joke anyway. Yeah we know we've stacked the media with mouthpieces and murder proper journalists, but the BBC lie. Yeah, we took parts of Ukraine illegally; so what? What about Iraq?"

Of course, the broad masses of the West, including former Eastern bloc countries wouldn't trade in their liberties, security and economic opportunities in a million years to be under the Russian yoke or too exposed to the vicissitudes of paranoid old men in the Kremlin, but it's good enough for them if that message sinks-in on the extreme left and extreme right where it can. And it has to a certain extent.

The message isn't hearts and minds of the masses of the West or their near abroad - it's to get a critical mass of people peddling conspiracies, sowing misinformation, obfuscating on behalf of Russian nationalists' interests so give enough breathing room to maximize their autocratic agenda.

He also makes the point that underneath it all, NATO isn't the real gripe, Putin doesn't seriously countenance a conflict with NATO, it's that NATO severely limits the backstop of the threat of military coercion or actual military force when the near-abroad strays too far from his political and economic script. It's near-abroad's (Ukraine, Georgia etc) economic and political engagement with the West, and particularly engagement with the EU that truly threatens Putin and the system he has built around him.

I presume that's Timothy Snyder. He is superb. "The Road To Unfreedom" is required reading on this subject.

Are we all ready for the "imminent" Russian invasion?

I can't wait for the invasion