At the risk of misinterpreting, I read @alekseivolchok as saying that he agrees with the perspective that Russia is essentially a failed state, but that it has the capacity to spread its misery more broadly at least within the ambit of the former USSR. Their success in doing so is, if I read what he’s saying correctly, facilitated by the West allowing itself to be jerked around by Russian disinformation. We see their posturing and build them up into a bigger threat than they are, which both boosts Putin and undermines Western responses (through fear of war), thus making it easier for Moscow to expand its sphere of misery.
If so, that’s a reasonable assessment I think. The trick is, what should the West do, and how should it do it? Because what Russia is doing, beyond the smoke and mirrors, is still dangerous and has rather significant implications for the future.
You probably saw a lot of people thinking in that direction. “A lot of you” was a clumsy way to say “a lot of people in faraway lands”.
Yes, that’s the question! I don’t know. Conservating the situation is probably the answer. Russia is in decline, so give them the ideological victories they want to brighten up their resource extraction enterprise. I’ve heard people saying that promising Ukraine will not join NATO for some period of time will technically change nothing but will allow the Russian government to celebrate a great hollow victory. It will probably be better than where it seems to be going now, with very limited support that leaves Ukrainians unsatisfied and Russians angry. But I don’t know how can it be combined with economic interactions between EU and Ukraine, how can further guarantees be applied, how are lines in the sand drawn. Maybe stoic inaction is the best way.
The only thing I know is that treating Russia as a great power in a bipolar world way legitimizes it.
After the threat of sanctions against Russian oligarchs property in EU Russia has greatly increased gas export to EU through Ukraine. Gas price in EU has fallen.
Of course correlation is not causation. There s a strong case for gas thing being purely economic.
Sometimes I wonder whether Putin & Co. are just enjoying themselves making the West hop around on one foot. Sure, they have interests in Ukraine and other things, but it seems like they are mostly just taking the piss out of the West as it were.
Don’t forget, it keeps Putin’s name in the news along with Russia. Unlike, Trump, I think Putin actually cares about Russia as an entity, but of course, he has a giant ego, like most leaders. So anything that keeps the news focused on Putin and Russia is good.
As to what to do about it.
I keep hearing about Cyber command tremendous offensive capability, and yet I don’t hear of any our operations, even underground.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why the oligarchs are not being continually targeted by US hackers.
- Their wives and mistress are continually being sent a steady stream of text, emails of photos, conversations of their affairs. (These don’t even have to be true,just likely)
- Their cars, mysteriously lose control and crash.
- The heat in their dacha been turned off this winter.
- the electricity in their factories getting shut off
- Evidence of their corruption being shared with their rivals and the Russia public.
- Most importantly, their offshore bank accounts being drained, frozen etc.
Basically, they should be driving 10 year old Ladas, using 20 year old computers, and communicating via carrier pigeons.
Stuxnet was 12 years ago, and targeting Iran. I’ve heard of a hell of a lot of hacks since then, almost all affecting the West. I’m sure there are lots of hacks that we don’t hear about. In this case, all the US needs is plausibly deniable. US spokesperson, “Vladimir Putin and his friends, have many enemies, and lots of money, which makes them a tempting target, I have no knowledge of US government activities like this.”
The problem with having an arsenal of cyber attacks up one’s sleeve is that all the really good ones are one-shot (or close to). They rely on exploiting a vulnerability in software that nobody else has found yet. Once the exploit gets used, the other side can probably reconstruct what was done and identify the vulnerability and prevent it being used again. Using that stuff for low level harassment of key power players is probably a bad return on the investment the US put into developing such attacks in the first place.
Now there’s still traditional measures such as social engineering and exploiting people bad at patching that doesn’t involve bringing out the real big guns. I wouldn’t mind if some of that was aimed at a harassment campaign. But I have to imagine every two bit cyber criminal has had the same idea and the easy prey has already been burned and learned to be more secure.
What @Tortilla said, plus, from a cynical perspective perhaps, we don’t want to start that tit for tat cascade. Too many of our own oligarchs stand to lose…
I dunno, sounds like a win-win to me.
I tend to defend our oligarchs on this forum. But it is not like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Musk etc. don’t have a good understanding of the risks, access to top technical talent, and unbelievable amounts of money, I’m not overly concerned about their well-being.
All I know is we’ve been promising that if Putin does XYZ bad thing, there will bad consequences for him, his friends, and Russia, for at least a decade. Now sanctions aren’t nothing, but at this point, if there was a sanction that would dramatically hurt, Putin and the oligarchs I think we would have used it by now.
I think deterring Russia from invading is pretty damned important. While there is some truth about hacks being one-shot or so, they all so have a shelf-line. It is not like my Window 95 hacks, are of much value today.
Oh, I’m not concerned at all about our oligarchs. Not one whit. But THEY are concerned, and THEY own a good chunk of the political system, which controls the assets that could do cyber war. So, what I’m saying is that we aren’t hammering the Russians because our own snowflake billionaires would get butthurt in the wallet by the retaliations.
Without a threat of military force, there’s only so much one can do, right?
I confess that this situation constantly reminds me of this famous exchange.
General Henry Wilson: “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?”
General Foch: “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”
Aceris
1874
I was reading up on this and reminded of what an utter lunatic Fisher was. A visionary who revolutionized naval warfare in multiple ways. And a lunatic.
But there’s always been a strong element of this thinking in the NATO forwards deployments.
Yeah, absolutely bonkers.
Scuzz
1876
In GJ Meyer’s book on WW1 he doesn’t have anything nice to say about any of the British Generals who were in charge. Not much nice about the French either.
WWI certainly seems to be a bad time to be a general. In fairness, the combo of poor command and control methods and technology, combined with astronomically lethal killing technology, in a context where the simple time frame of how long it took for people to climb the ranks meant that the generals in command had been trained in a type of warfare quite a bit different from what they actually had to deal with made for a brutal situation.
Not to excuse idiocy, obstinance, and sheer bloody-mindedness, mind you. Plenty off that to go around too.
I spend a lot of time on this forum shilling for ACOUP, but he did a great job explaining why this
is probably the truth of the matter.
