Run-up to WW3

Worldly and otherworldly topics
User avatar
Senseye
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2021 10:48 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Senseye » Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:33 pm

Per Dot's comment on losing Chinese support, this is why I don't buy into any of the nuclear weapons bluffs. It seems clear to me China has to greenlight all of Russia's actions before they occur. Hence delaying the invasion until after the olympics, and Russian bloggers were also commenting on how the 'mobilization' only occurred after some high ranking Russian diplomats returned from China (ostensibly to get the green light for that).

I don't think China wants to get nukes involved. Instability and economic harm to the west is obviously beneficial to them, but any sort of widespread nuclear outbreak would not be.

It's hard for me to understand exactly why Russia would blow the nordstream pipes instead of just turning them off. Possibly a paranoid Putin would want them disabled to remove any potential temptation to remove him and turn them back on. It still seems to me to be a tactical error if Russian did it. Germany was happy to waffle on Ukraine to keep the gas flowing. Now that is off the table (for a while anyhow) there is no real incentive for Germany and other Russian gas dependent European countries to be lukewarm with their Ukraine support. It seems to me anyone with an IQ higher than their shoe size should realize Putin has to go before any sort of long term peace can be negotiated. The less success Russia has in Ukraine, the more likely that will happen.

Dot
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:40 pm

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Dot » Sun Oct 02, 2022 7:36 pm



I think they're wrong but also.
Image

User avatar
puerile_polyp
Posts: 173
Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2019 3:01 pm

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by puerile_polyp » Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:25 pm

I mean Putin already had demonstrated that he had a stranglehold on European energy, and was already using that advantage by not supplying the gas. Destroying the Nord Streams just takes that card off the table. It forces Germany to be fully committed against Russia no matter how much they might like to make concessions in exchange for that gas.

Who benefits from that is USA, particularly the American energy companies supplying LNG to Europe, and the American defense industry supplying arms.

Biden did also declare that if Russia invaded "there would be no Nord Stream 2" in kind of an ominous fashion.

This is why I heavily suspect that USA blew up the Nord Streams.

User avatar
Ferrus
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:10 pm
Location: Barcelona

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Ferrus » Sun Oct 02, 2022 11:22 pm

Dot wrote:
Sun Oct 02, 2022 5:49 pm
That's one of the scarier aspects to me, though. Putin must've known about these levels of corruption...in some ways, he designed it that way and benefited from it at every rung. But he chose to pretend it didn't matter. I just hope he won't fall for his own propaganda.
Well, yes he did, partially which is why he created his personal Rosgvadia army (also to protect him in a coup) which makes up 1/3 of Russian active manpower. He spent years pumping money into the Russian army professionalisation and moving away from this problems. After all had Russia continued to fight Georgia in 2008 these problems would be better known as they were becoming obvious in that short war as the Russian advance into the country stalled. Indeed Putin's reforms were a response to this.

No, his problem was underestimating Ukraine based on faulty intelligence, yes men telling him what he wanted to hear and not seeing how 2014 and the slow burn Donbas war had solidified an Ukranian identity even in Russian areas. I remember speaking to a Ukranian descended partly from exiles in the Spanish civil war who were hosted in Ukraine how 2014 was a moment of awakening, that created a sense of Ukranian nationality (Zelensky is as least partly a producr of this too). And forgetting that Crimea was a special case due to its demographics and history, no other partly of Ukraine would be so painless to swallow.
Senseye wrote:
Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:33 pm
Per Dot's comment on losing Chinese support, this is why I don't buy into any of the nuclear weapons bluffs. It seems clear to me China has to greenlight all of Russia's actions before they occur. Hence delaying the invasion until after the olympics, and Russian bloggers were also commenting on how the 'mobilization' only occurred after some high ranking Russian diplomats returned from China (ostensibly to get the green light for that).

I don't think China wants to get nukes involved. Instability and economic harm to the west is obviously beneficial to them, but any sort of widespread nuclear outbreak would not be.
I am not sure Putin cares enough about China to care beyond the purely transactional. China (and India, Kazakhstan, Turkey etc.) were clearly importuning him to shut the war down. He returned to Moscow angry and retaliated. So my perspective on the probability of tactical nuke use is a lot less sanguine than most here. I think it's likely, the question is will it trigger an escalatory spiral to a strategic exchange or lead to a rapid ceasefire.

The question now is how the US will respond to a tactical nuke. Supposedly Biden plans to just attack the unit that fired it - still quite risky for triggering a full scale nuclear war given Putin faces only annihilation in a conventional war with NATO. Putin may feel directly surviving a conflict with USA is a face-saving relative victory and be more willing to negotiate from a sense he has achueived neutralisation if the US. Or Biden might arm Ukraine with weapons that it could hit Russia back on their own.

One has to think through this deadly strategy. Russian conventional power is broken - for now - and allowing Ukraine to contine the advance may trigger Korean war style escalation ala MacArthur on the Yalu before China entered. In a pre-nuclear age the current rout would be an unalloyed boon for NATO. A dirty ceasefire with no de jure recognition might be the worse least option, given the hard reality the nuclear revolution has imposed on our world. After this Europe and Ukraine will need to use the time it takes for the Russian army to reform and learn their mistakes to arm themselves to the teeths (and maybe Ukraine will need more than conventional weapons) with a massive conventional force ready at the border, just like between West and East Germany during the Cold War.
Ex falso, quodlibet

Dot
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:40 pm

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Dot » Mon Oct 03, 2022 6:59 am

Ferrus wrote:
Sun Oct 02, 2022 11:22 pm
Dot wrote:
Sun Oct 02, 2022 5:49 pm
That's one of the scarier aspects to me, though. Putin must've known about these levels of corruption...in some ways, he designed it that way and benefited from it at every rung. But he chose to pretend it didn't matter. I just hope he won't fall for his own propaganda.
Well, yes he did, partially which is why he created his personal Rosgvadia army (also to protect him in a coup) which makes up 1/3 of Russian active manpower. He spent years pumping money into the Russian army professionalisation and moving away from this problems. After all had Russia continued to fight Georgia in 2008 these problems would be better known as they were becoming obvious in that short war as the Russian advance into the country stalled. Indeed Putin's reforms were a response to this.

No, his problem was underestimating Ukraine based on faulty intelligence, yes men telling him what he wanted to hear and not seeing how 2014 and the slow burn Donbas war had solidified an Ukranian identity even in Russian areas. I remember speaking to a Ukranian descended partly from exiles in the Spanish civil war who were hosted in Ukraine how 2014 was a moment of awakening, that created a sense of Ukranian nationality (Zelensky is as least partly a producr of this too). And forgetting that Crimea was a special case due to its demographics and history, no other partly of Ukraine would be so painless to swallow.
I don't think Putin's military reforms were a genuine attempt to fight corruption (after all, Rosgvardia itself has always been extremely corrupt). It seems to me that they were for external media/analytical consumption, which is why their terror campaigns in Syria were so carefully and cautiously staged. If so, they worked, judging by the awestruck tone of articles like these:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-b ... orce-15315
https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/1 ... -of-reform
Didn't age well.

Putin's propaganda network also contributed to this being one of Russia's primary advantages over its rival democracies. Such systems gravitate towards fear-based reporting, whereas Putin's media world (at least until this week) only gives the good news for Russia. Capitalizing on this, the relative ease of projecting strength, translated into real strategic benefits and could've led to a decisive victory in Ukraine if Zelenskyy had listened to US intelligence about the 'overwhelming strength' of the Russian military. It also convinced China to model their entire military strategy and doctrine after that of Russia (but I've heard that the culture of corruption in China is very different from that of Russia...that's another huge topic though).

I don't believe that Putin ever truly intended to root out corruption in any form. It served him, and those close to him, both financially and culturally to keep every level of Russia's military and espionage infrastructure insecure. This would be in keeping with the historical leadership's rhetoric for a very long time, paying lip service to corruption reform while ensuring that it persists and contributes to their power. To truly work on eliminating corruption would not only delegitimize Putin's rule, but drastically heighten the risk of a coup.

And as a result of that, I suspect Putin did not have misconceptions about the corrupt nature of his military. His misconception was about the nature of Ukraine, like you said. And he thought that it, as part of the network of Western media and intelligence, would immediately capitulate in fear, if not with the buildup at the border, then when Russian forces would cross the border...and then it just never happened. I do think he held out with his wishful thinking then really far past the point of rationality.
I am not sure Putin cares enough about China to care beyond the purely transactional. China (and India, Kazakhstan, Turkey etc.) were clearly importuning him to shut the war down. He returned to Moscow angry and retaliated.
I don't think mobilization has to be interpreted as retaliation against Chinese/others' pressure. Again, I think Putin doesn't have as much agency as he pretends, and he was under tremendous pressure from the hawks to do something for a very long time, in order to raise their status. That something could have already, theoretically, been a nuclear weapon. To my mind - and I haven't researched this much, but it's just my intuition - these two choices lead in opposite directions, and what Putin chose by mobilizing instead of using a nuclear weapon is the long game.

I don't trust US military analysts. They seem too prone to getting trapped in bubbles. They were wrong about the strength of the Russian military, and then many of them stated as fact that Putin would declare mobilization on some special magical date months ago. The panic about that date reminds me of their current discussion of Russian nukes, and it's the type of media/analytical behavior that Putin wants.
The question now is how the US will respond to a tactical nuke. Supposedly Biden plans to just attack the unit that fired it - still quite risky for triggering a full scale nuclear war given Putin faces only annihilation in a conventional war with NATO. Putin may feel directly surviving a conflict with USA is a face-saving relative victory and be more willing to negotiate from a sense he has achueived neutralisation if the US. Or Biden might arm Ukraine with weapons that it could hit Russia back on their own.
I'm not sure if/why things changed but I remember earlier on, there was another level of the ladder, where Biden said that he would just apply diplomatic pressure if Russia deployed nukes a certain way. But from what I've read, if there are nukes, then everything leads to the end of the world one way or another.
Last edited by Dot on Mon Oct 03, 2022 8:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Dot
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:40 pm

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Dot » Mon Oct 03, 2022 7:31 am



^long game thinking

Dot
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:40 pm

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Dot » Mon Oct 03, 2022 11:22 am

^early morning ramblings, idk if anything I wrote there is intelligible because of all the commas and run-ons. But anyway, now they're "consulting with the population" to figure out what regions they "annexed" and promised to defend with nuclear weapons, which doesn't really support Putin's claim that "this is not a bluff"

User avatar
Ferrus
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:10 pm
Location: Barcelona

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Ferrus » Mon Oct 03, 2022 3:43 pm

Dot wrote:
Mon Oct 03, 2022 11:22 am
^early morning ramblings, idk if anything I wrote there is intelligible because of all the commas and run-ons. But anyway, now they're "consulting with the population" to figure out what regions they "annexed" and promised to defend with nuclear weapons, which doesn't really support Putin's claim that "this is not a bluff"
Peskov recently dismissed Kadyrov's outburst as an overemotional response too. Russia's messaging is all over the place. Which needless to say in a world of nuclear signalling is a danger in itself.

Worth a watch:

Ex falso, quodlibet

User avatar
Catoptric
Posts: 1413
Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:06 am
Location: 1187 at Hundertwasser
Contact:

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Catoptric » Tue Oct 04, 2022 4:13 am

North Korea fires apparent ballistic missile over Japan: Ministry of Defense
https://abcnews.go.com/International/no ... d=90941767
Societal egress and ennui
Hello / Goodbye / Just a moment / Nothing / Cosmic / Man / Dream / Civilization / Open / Contact / Tremble / Gas / Memory / Transcend / ^2

User avatar
Catoptric
Posts: 1413
Joined: Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:06 am
Location: 1187 at Hundertwasser
Contact:

Re: Run-up to WW3

Post by Catoptric » Sun Oct 09, 2022 10:55 pm

Putin has nuclear weapons transported by train?
https://fb.watch/g32GNHFQVP/

This was reported prior to the Crimean bridge explosion (so it was probably in retaliation for knowing what they were doing?)

12th Main Directorate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_Chief_Directorate

This Russian Force Stands Between Putin And A Nuclear Strike
https://www.newsy.com/stories/this-russ ... ar-strike/

Russia unleashes biggest attacks in Ukraine in months
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... bc0880ac8c

Rocket blast impact as woman was recording.
Societal egress and ennui
Hello / Goodbye / Just a moment / Nothing / Cosmic / Man / Dream / Civilization / Open / Contact / Tremble / Gas / Memory / Transcend / ^2

Post Reply