With regard to the war between Russia and Ukraine :
1. This war has been started by an autocrat who runs a hierarchical system which is designed in such a way that it rewards his underlings for their obedience and, in case they disapprove, intimidates them so much that they rather commit war crimes and ignore their own morality than oppose the leader.
2. In such a system there will not be a palace revolution or a coup.
3. Putin is willing to out-escalate everybody in this conflict.
4. In regular wars that are not «wars of exhaustion and annihilation», i.e., wars with specific objectives, a situation can be reached in which all parties agree to cease fire.
5. In a war run by a state aligned to an autocrat, such states don’t stop conflicts according to cost-benefit analyses but keep the war efforts continuing due to the whims of the autocrat. It is no longer a rational cost-benefit enterprise but a psycho-pathological one, in which the mental survival of the autocrat becomes the main war objective.
6. Such wars and their escalations won’t stop until the autocrat is removed from power, i.e., dead. As the autocrat in Russia does not need to fear a coup from the inside (his entourage or the people of his country), this objective can only be reached from the outside. This was the insight Churchill had with regard to Hitler.
7. As Putin already sees Russia in a war with NATO («economic war» via sanctions to «obliterate Russia» as the West’s version of hybrid warfare), it is only a matter of time when a NATO–Russia conventional war will take place. (Although all western politicians seem to act franticly to avoid just that.)
8. As this war will only end when Putin is gone, there will not be any other way than to face the inevitability and, sadly, the necessity of a major war in Europe, if not transcontinental between the USA and Russia, fought with WMDs and nuclear weapons in particular.
9. Like Churchill understood that the war will only end when Hitler is gone, the West has to understand that this is a war – merely looking right now as one confined to Russia and Ukraine – that will not end by sitting apart but when military action defeated Russia and removed Putin. Everything else is illusory.
10. People still hope that this nightmare may pass them by, that the war between Russia and Ukraine can somehow be limited to this conflict. But either way, as long as Putin is not removed, the next escalation is only a matter of time.
(11. I am not happy with this post. In fact, I am desperate and terrified by what I see to come.)
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simsa04
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