Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 9 of 1104
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Originally posted by second:
Americans tend to see the world in much the same way as President Joe Biden frames it in his speeches, divided neatly between “democracies” and “autocracies.” But the reality is that authoritarian states exist on a political spectrum depending on how much power is exercised by a single individual—and where states land on this spectrum has a big impact on matters of war and peace. At one end, you have civilian-run regimes, like Hu Jintao’s China or Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where political power is checked and shared within a ruling party. At the other, you have personalist dictatorships like that of, say, Saddam Hussein, where rivals are purged, loyalists are rewarded, cults of personality flourish, and all authority runs through the glorious leader.
The political science literature suggests that personalist dictatorships are more erratic and dangerous to the outside world than other sorts of autocracies.
Researchers have found they are more likely to start wars, for instance (institutionalized civilian-run regimes are about as apt to use force as democracies), and also tend to perform worse militarily (not surprising, since their leaders are often surrounded by yes men). But while civilian-run regimes might be less apt to launch destructive, harebrained conflicts in the short term, in the long term they can still be ticking time bombs.
That’s because as they age, their intricate power structures often devolve and allow dictators to consolidate personal control. In a forthcoming paper, Andrew Leber and Matthew Reichert of Harvard University and Christopher Carothers of the University of Pennsylvania theorize that this tends to happen when there’s no influential old guard of political elites who can stop them. All of which pretty much sums up what has happened in Russia over the last two decades.
While the world’s news readers may long have thought of Vladimir Putin as a dictator, most Russia analysts and policymakers saw the Kremlin differently. And for most of Putin’s nearly 23-year journey in power, they were right to do so. What once existed, but not now, was a complicated regime beyond one man where lots of people exerted influence and could check Putin’s impulses.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/ukraine-invasion-putin-is-
ruling-alone.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
A quote from your link I agree with.
"Instead, it has transformed into what political scientists call a personalist dictatorship, where the whims of one man, and one man only, determine policy, a fact that has terrifying implications for Russia and the world."
T
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T
Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations discusses why the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its fifth day has gone much worse than Russian President Vladimir Putin could have imagined.
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It's amusing watching Ted just drink up all the diarrhea.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Russia's economy bleeds, as negotiations starts. Day 5.
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Quote:Russian President Vladimir V. Putin announced a "special military operation" to "de-Nazify the Ukrainian government" so as to halt the supposed "genocide" being committed against Russian speakers in Ukraine. There is not a shred of justification for any of this. The extreme nationalist fascist groups in Ukraine do not support and are not part of the current Ukrainian government, whose leader is half Jewish. Putin has also complained of a supposed move of Ukraine to join NATO, but no such move has been going on at all.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
It's amusing watching Ted just drink up all the diarrhea.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
This is pure and unadulterated aggression without a shred of justification. Reportedly missiles are now striking Ukraine's capital city, Kyiv. Putin has lost his mind.
More at Vladimir V. Putin Loses His Mind And Becomes A War Criminal
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2022/02/vladimir-v-putin-loses-his-mind
-and.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ukraine is trying to argue that Russia's taking the Soviet place on the UN Security Council was never debated and approved (unlike for China). That would be quite the coup, so to speak: kick Russia off the Security Council over a technicality. Putin hurt by his own kind of thinking.
Kick Russia off the U.N. Security Council!
Russia sits in one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council, and in theory could veto such a move, as well as block any attempt by the General Assembly to remove Russia from the UN altogether. But there has always been some question about the legal process by which the USSR's seat was transferred to Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. After all, the constituent republics of the USSR declared in 1991 that the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and with it should have gone the legal right of any of those entities, including Russia, to sit on the Council.
There was never a formal process to admit Russia into the U.N. after the USSR's demise, and the Security Council seat was granted via a decision from the UN's legal counsel with no action requested from the General Assembly. That edict could be revoked, and the U.S. could demand a vote in the General Assembly on Russia's Security Council membership. Would such a maneuver save Kyiv? No, but Moscow must be besieged on all fronts if there is any hope of rescuing Ukrainians from a Russian occupation. The worst crisis in post-war Europe demands nothing less than concerted, dramatic action aimed at Moscow's total isolation, and the time to start is now.
https://theweek.com/world/1010568/kick-russia-off-the-un-security-coun
cil
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut down NATO and the UN.
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Russia Is a Potemkin Superpower By Paul Krugman
The Ukraine war has revealed the Putin regime’s true weakness.
Beware, Vladimir Putin: Spring is coming. And when it does, you’ll lose much of whatever leverage you had left.
Before Putin invaded Ukraine, I might have described the Russian Federation as a medium-size power punching above its weight in part by exploiting Western divisions and corruption, in part by maintaining a powerful military. Since then, however, two things have become clear. First, Putin has delusions of grandeur. Second, Russia is even weaker than most people, myself included, seem to have realized.
It has long been obvious that Putin desperately wants to restore Russia’s status as a Great Power. His already infamous “there is no such thing as Ukraine” speech, in which he condemned Lenin (!) for giving his neighbor what Putin considers a false sense of national identity, made it clear that his aims go beyond recreating the Soviet Union — he apparently wants to recreate the czarist empire. And he apparently thought that he could take a big step toward that goal with a short, victorious war.
So far, it hasn’t worked out as planned. Ukrainian resistance has been fierce; Russia’s military has been less effective than advertised. I’ve been especially struck by reports that the early days of the invasion were hampered by severe logistical problems — that is, the invaders had a hard time providing their forces with the essentials of modern war, above all fuel. It’s true that supply problems are common in war; still, logistics is one thing advanced nations are supposed to be really good at.
But Russia is looking less and less like an advanced nation.
The truth is that I was being generous in describing Russia as even a medium-size power. Britain and France are medium-size powers; Russia’s gross domestic product is only a bit more than half as large as either’s. It seemed remarkable that such an economically underweight state could support a world-class, highly sophisticated military — and maybe it couldn’t.
That’s not to deny that the force ravaging Ukraine has immense firepower, and it may well take Kyiv. But I wouldn’t be surprised if post-mortems on the Ukraine war eventually show that there was a lot more rot at the heart of Putin’s military than anyone realized.
And Russia is starting to look even weaker economically than it did before it went to war.
Putin isn’t the first brutal dictator to make himself an international pariah. As far as I can tell, however, he’s the first to do so while presiding over an economy deeply dependent on international commerce — and with a political elite accustomed, more or less literally, to treating Western democracies as their playground.
For Putin’s Russia isn’t a hermetic tyranny like North Korea or, for that matter, the old Soviet Union. Its standard of living is sustained by large imports of manufactured goods, mostly paid for via exports of oil and natural gas.
This leaves Russia’s economy highly vulnerable to sanctions that might disrupt this trade, a reality reflected in Monday’s sharp plunge in the value of the ruble despite a huge increase in domestic interest rates and draconian attempts to limit capital flight.
Before the invasion it was common to talk about how Putin had created “fortress Russia,” an economy immune to economic sanctions, by accumulating a huge war chest of foreign currency reserves. Now, however, such talk seems naive. What, after all, are foreign reserves? They aren’t bags of cash. For the most part they consist of deposits in overseas banks and holdings of other governments’ debt — that is, assets that can be frozen if most of the world is united in revulsion against a rogue government’s military aggression.
True, Russia also has a substantial amount of physical gold held within the country. But how useful is this gold as a way to pay for things the Putin regime needs? Can you really conduct large-scale modern business with ingots?
Finally, as I noted last week, Russia’s oligarchs have sta
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Ukraine, economy to take center stage in Biden's State of the Union address
https://www.aol.com/news/ukraine-economy-center-stage-bidens-101142703
.html
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