Two historical myths. 

The first is that autocrats by their nature desire conquest and the expansion of their empires. “We have also seen many times in history,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO said, “where if a dictator is not stopped, or an authoritarian leader, they keep going.”

Inconveniently, this axiom is not borne out by history. Nor does the U.S. apply it to several of its contemporary friends; Washington does not assume that the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia or Egypt are bent on conquering the Middle East or Africa.

The second is that Putin has said as much. Putin is often quoted as saying that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” The second part of his statement is quoted less often: “And those that do regret it have no brain.” The historical record shows that, in his over two decades in power, Putin has not “kept going.” When Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease. If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it makes little sense that he would use the war in Ukraine as a means to start a war with NATO. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-putin-bent-on-conquering-europe/

Ukraine has battled endemic corruption since the first days of its independence in 1991, and government officials and independent campaigners alike say that fight is key to winning the existential war it is fighting with Russia.

They have had some success. Anti-corruption organisation Transparency International ranks Ukraine at its highest level since 2006: currently 104th out of 180 countries in its Corruption Perceptions Index.

26 points out of 100

MAY 9, 2024 3:52 PM CET

BY NOAH KEATE

LONDON — Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings launched a sweary attack on Western support for Ukraine Thursday.

“This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he said.

“This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence. We are getting f**ked now right?”

In a follow-up tweet, Cummings later branded Zelenskyy a “potemkin” leader — but denied he’d called him a “pumpkin” as originally quoted in the interview.

He argued that war would only strengthen the relationship between Russia and China, saying Western nations “pushed [Russia] into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power.”

Cummings has long been critical of support for Ukraine, a stance that puts him sharply at odds with his old boss Johnson, a vocal supporter of Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s war effort.

He told the paper the West had failed to send Russian President Vladimir Putin a worthwhile signal which would deter him from invading another country.

https://www.politico.eu/article/dominic-cummings-volodymyr-zelenskyy-ukraine-war-corruption/

Here is how Cristopher Miller describes the “operation” in his book “The War Came to Us”. If you disregard some gloating over the Russian mistakes, on the whole the picture of the war is accurate:

“By mid-March it became clear that Russia’s invasion was for the Kremlin, in fact, a fuck-up of historic proportions.

As the troops rolled into Ukraine, relaxed, sitting on top their armored vehicles, they had been told that they’d meet little or no resistance and would be welcomed as liberators by the Ukrainians. The Russians had no maps to help guide them to Kiev or they used old maps of the city from 1989, which showed them roads that were no longer there, terrain that had long been altered with new towns and infrastructure. They carried little food and no spare clothing items except parade uniforms they believed they’d be wearing as they marched victoriously down Khreshchatyk Street in a few days’ time. And they over-extended their supply lines.

Putin’s troops never adapted to the situation, and instead repeated the same failing tactics over and over, with the same devastating results. They took wrong turns; they tried to punch-throw Ukrainian defenses with huge armored columns, including one more than 40 miles long; and they ran themselves into traps, where Ukrainian troops and volunteer fighters armed with Javelins and NLAWs easily picked them off.’

[Miller, 2023: 297]

The special military operation showed what Russian commentators, philosophers, literary figures and philologists call key concepts of Russian life and culture: irresponsibility and slovenly work at all the levels.

It is only with a passage of time that the Russians regained their victorious spirit that came down on Ukrainians with a vengeance.

swashbuckler The term "swashbuckler" originates from boisterous fighters who carried a sword and buckler (a small shield). "Swashbuckler" was a putdown, used to indicate a poor swordsman who covered his lack of skill with noise, bragging, and clamour. Novels, and then Hollywood, altered the word's connotation to make the swashbuckler the hero of the plotline.

6 May 2024

“Russia cannot afford to lose, so we need a kind of a victory”: Sergey Karaganov on what Putin wants

The Kremlin adviser explains how Russia views the war in Ukraine and the fate of liberalism.

By Bruno Maçães

A former presidential adviser to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, Sergey Karaganov is honorary chair of the Moscow think tank the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy. He is associated with a number of key ideas in Russian foreign policy, from the so-called Karaganov doctrine on the rights of ethnic Russians living abroad to the principle of “constructive destruction”, also known as the “Putin doctrine”. Karaganov is close to both Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and he formulated many of the ideas that led to the war in Ukraine – though he has also expressed disagreement with the idea of a long-term occupation of the country.

In 2021, Russia’s foreign policy seems to have entered a new stage. Let us call it the “constructive destruction” of the previous model of relations with the West. Elements of this policy kept piling up for some fifteen years, approximately since Vladimir Putin’s well-known speech in Munich in 2007. But residual attempts to fit into the Western system with a defensive approach still prevailed in politics and rhetoric.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2024/05/russia-cannot-afford-lose-need-victory-sergey-karaganov-what-putin-wants

Operation Hummingbird (German: Unternehmen Kolibri)   

                     The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer), also called the Röhm purge (German: Der Röhm-Putsch) or Operation Hummingbird (German: Unternehmen Kolibri), was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization, known colloquially as "Brownshirts". Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm – the so-called Röhm Putsch.

Moscow and Kyiv has each accused the other of committing war crimes in the same episode — the Russians accusing Ukraine’s forces of “mercilessly shooting unarmed Russian P.O.W.s,” and Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, saying Russian soldiers had opened fire during the act of surrendering.
“We are aware of the videos, and we are looking into them,” Marta Hurtado, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Human Rights Office, told Reuters on Friday. “Allegations of summary executions of people hors de combat should be promptly, fully and effectively investigated, and any perpetrators held to account.” Under international law, the French term “hors de combat” refers to people who are “outside of combat” because of their surrender, being unarmed, unconscious or otherwise unable to defend themselves.
 

Putin: What else is done with those who allow themselves to wipe their feet?
"Как еще поступают с теми, кто позволяет вытирать о себя ноги?"
The right translation: 
“Today, the EU’s main partner, the US, is pursuing policies leading directly to the de-industrialization of Europe. They even try to complain about that to their American overlord. Sometimes even with resentment they ask ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ I want to ask: ‘What did you expect?’ What else happens to those who allow feet to be wiped on them?” Putin said.

Schlaraffenland (German) is a fictional land in German fairy tales inhabited by lazy people, literally the land of lazy monkeys, from (Middle Upper German) sluraff – lazy, Affe – monkey and Land – earth.
It is described as a country where everything is in abundance – a land with milky rivers and jelly banks, in which animals run and fly fried, houses are made of gingerbread, instead of stones there is cheese everywhere. Pleasure is the virtue of the inhabitants of the country, and hard work - a drawback.