NP - How Putin backed himself into a Ukraine invasion he never wanted

[alice malice]

He has little left but the waving of his nukes at the world. Poor
fool, he will be run out by his rich friends in Germany in due time.

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 4:24 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.vox.com/2014/8/29/6082769/one-chart-why-putin-invading-ukraine
>
> In late 2011, after a few years as prime minister, then-Prime Minister Putin
> announced that he would run for a not-quite-legal third term as president
> (Russia, like the US, has term limits), and his party won big in fraud-heavy
> parliamentary elections in December 2011. Putin expected another
> boisterously positive reception, but that's not what he happened. Instead,
> he got protests in majorcities, opposition candidates, and, even according
> to the highly suspicious official tally, only 63 percent of the vote.
>
> Putin panicked. He saw his legitimacy slipping and feared a popular revolt.
> So he changed strategies. Rather than basing his political legitimacy on
> economic growth, he would base it on reviving Russian nationalism: imperial
> nostalgia, anti-Western paranoia, and conservative Orthodox Christianity.
>
> Then the Ukraine crisis began in late 2013, as Ukrainians protested to
> replace their corrupt pro-Russian government with a clean pro-European
> leader, and it was a gift to Putin. He used state media, which he had put
> under his thumb, to create a parallel universe in which American-backed
> fascists were toppling Ukraine's rightful pro-Russian leader. He worked his
> citizens up into a nationalist fury at the West's meddling and stoked a very
> real fear that literal Nazis had returned in Ukraine and were threatening
> their Russian-speaking, Slavic brethren. Russians rallied around the flag,
> and Putin's approval rose.
>
> In March 2014, Putin indulged his own rhetoric about saving Ukraine's ethnic
> Russians — and seized an opportunity to reclaim a former Soviet strategic
> port — when he launched a stealth invasion of Crimea, which he annexed. His
> popularity soared. This wasn't just Putin's popularity recovering from years
> of doldrums — his approval rating skyrocketed to 80 percent, a high he had
> not seen in years.
>
> Putin had backed himself into an impossible position. By early August,
> Western sanctions over his meddling had pushed Russia's economy to the point
> of recession, making Putin more reliant than ever on maintaining the
> nationalistic fervor over Ukraine. But the violence in eastern Ukraine was
> spinning out of control, with Ukrainian military forces looking like they
> were on the verge of overrunning the rebels.
>
> In a rational world, Putin would have cut his losses and withdrawn support
> for the rebels. But, thanks to months of propagandistic state media,
> Russians do not live in a rational world. They live in a world where
> surrendering in eastern Ukraine would mean surrendering to American-backed
> Ukrainian Nazis, and they believe everything that Putin has told them about
> being the only person capable of defeating these forces of darkness. To
> withdraw would be to admit that it was all a lie and to sacrifice the
> nationalism that is now his only source of real legitimacy. So Putin did the
> only thing he could to do to keep up the fiction upon which his political
> survival hinges: he invaded Ukraine outright.
>
> What makes this so scary is that it means that Putin does not have a
> rational strategy in Ukraine, because he is not invading for rational
> strategic reasons. If he had a specific objective, then the West could make
> some concession or find some way to meet him halfway. But he does not. He is
> invading because the momentum of the crisis he himself created is careening
> beyond his control, and there's nothing that he or Ukraine or the United
> States can easily do to stop it.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l