First opinion: Ukraine is winning Second opinion: Ukraine is toast, Russia is winning
Of course both can’t be true and the opinion makers don’t have functioning crystal balls. I have my own bias, I want Russia to lose, but what I want is irrelevant to the outcome.
Because the internet’s veracity is dubious I listen for inconsistencies, conclusions based on unproven or fallacious assertions.
Just because aims coincide at any particular moment does not make the parties long term allies. The best example is Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s decision to join forces with Stalin to defeat Hitler. It was a decision taken straight out of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Just because an American is an isolationist does not make him/her/it pro-Putin.
In my opinion Timothy Snyder’s summation of the war is the best I have yet heard.
I am not a lawyer. When you post on the law it gets drawn out. For me that is blinding. I can not get bogged down on details that would flop in the wind in every court room. Only to be told they are ironclad.
Oh, sure. Well, sometimes there’s a lot of ground to cover in talking about legal issues. I usually try to make it clear in the first few sentences, though, what my point is.
When posting videos - especially long videos - it’s just nice to have a brief description of what the video is about, rather than a blind link.
I was about to post the same video, which quite usefully is of Timothy Snyder in discussion with the once powerful éminence grise Bill Kristol, a scion of neo-conservativsm in the USA, and one of my undergraduate classmates in Government classes. We rarely agreed.
This is a sometimes brutal and fascinating (Kristol is evolving!) profoundly informative video.
Snyder does not have a simple talking point beyond that Ukraine’s existence being problematic/unacceptable to Putin is the crux international issue of our times.
I think it goes beyond Ukraine with Putin. He wants other European nations and wants the ME.
He is trying an economic gambit that he can produce his way to a better economy. A war time economy and better.
It won’t work because he is printing to pay for the war effort. He does not have the capital markets to print. This is like Germany’s Weimar Republic printing with no easy access to larger capital markets.
If the war ends in the next two years he can spring into a peace time economy. Which would work.
The issue is how bad the inflation gets first. If Russian military pay sinks low enough Putin will be in trouble. If this is not over in two years along with inflation he may be in trouble.
It absolutely goes beyond Ukraine. This is why stopping him here is so important. We either stop him here, or we risk an invasion of a NATO country with all that brings with it. And none of that is good. Unless, of course, you are TFG and you just plan to tell him “do whatever the h*ll you want”. And that isn’t good either.
So if you think the Ukraine situation is messy or expensive or whatever, just wait until what comes next.
