Professor @KingsRussia. Political sociologist. Progressive. Opinions my own. 🇬🇧/🇺🇸
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For the avoidance of doubt: The opinions and analysis I express on this platform are my own and do not reflect the positions of any particular institution.
Just in case:
bsky.app/profile/samagreene.…
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tldrussia.substack.com
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Vladimir Putin is increasingly fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and one at home.
A week in, neither is going terribly well.
(A 🧵, in case that wasn't obvious.)
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My main thought, as Prigozhin sends his men back to base, is that this isn’t over yet.
I’m not suggesting that Prigozhin will try again. But my strong sense is that Putin’s challenges are only beginning.
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Ok folks, deep breaths.
There is very real reason to worry about the dynamic emerging between Washington and Moscow when it comes to Ukraine. But there is also very real reason to believe that Ukraine and Europe can create a better outcome.
(A rather long 🧵, obviously)
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Note to journalists and pundits: Whatever Putin might like you to believe, it was the Soviet Union that defeated Nazi Germany, not Russia.
So please stop saying that 9 May commemorates Russia's victory in WWII.
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Time for a reminder that there's about 50 years of research showing a clear correlation between a background in engineering and support for authoritarianism.
To independent-minded voters:
Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.
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So, I'm increasingly seeing stories like this one, together with takes from foreign policy analysts along the lines of "the West lacks a strategy for deterring Russia." (You know who you are.)
And it's going to make my head explode.
(An annoyed 🧵)
economist.com/finance-and-ec…
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Ukraine's counter-offensive in the northeast – liberating in a day territory that took Russia a month or more to conquer – is breathtaking. Inspiring, even.
But it should also be sobering. Apart from anything else, it reveals just how much we struggle to analyze this war.
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Putin's Donbas address is unbelievably dark and aggressive.
I've watched a lot of Putin speeches, and I don't think I've ever seen one quite like this.
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Does Vladimir Putin want negotiations? Almost certainly yes.
Does Putin want to negotiate? Almost certainly not.
The difference is not semantic.
(A long-ish 🧵)
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One more thread today, and then I'm going to take a break and decompress for a while. This one's about protests and Russian public opinion.
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As Russia's military commissariats begin rounding up reservists for the front, we're seeing fairly clear -- if inevitably anecdotal -- evidence that the call-up is falling hardest on the communities already hardest hit by the war, particularly ethnic minorities.
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So, I wrote last week that Putin is fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and another against his own public.
Scratch that: he's fighting four. The other two are a political battle with his own elite, and a geo-economic war on some of Russia’s closest allies.
(Another 🧵)
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Let me explain how this works: If Shoigu is preparing a coup, we will find out about it when Putin is in a box or in a cage, and not a moment sooner.
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If you're looking for the TL;DR on Xi's visit with Putin, it is this: China's domination of Russia is complete.
(a 🧵)
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As things stand, Ukraine and Europe are on the verge of being confronted with exactly the kind of Faustian deal they feared would emerge back in February. The fact that Europe hasn’t moved to block such a deal in the past six months is a failure of leadership and diplomacy.
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First of all, Russia's economy is NOT back on its feet. The ruble is back on its feet, yes. But the ruble isn't the economy -- and the ruble is only back on its feet because it's being propped up by massive capital controls and $50.1 billion of reserves spent since the war began.
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I’d go one step further, as a scholar of authoritarianism: When companies or institutions cave despite the law being on their side, they are the ones who are making the law irrelevant.
Law only works if you make it work. It has no agency of its own. We are all its agents.
I'll say it again:
In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law; they are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won't matter.
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The problem is this: For the West, negotiations are a means of ending the war. For Russia, they are a means of winning it.
Putin recognizes this mismatch and is eager to exploit it. I'm not sure all Western policymakers understand it, however.
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So, the damage to the Russian economy is real, even if it's not immediately preventing Muscovites from sitting in cafés. Putin has spent 20+ years building sound fiscal and monetary policies. It will take more than a couple of months to undo that. Venezuela wasn't built in a day.
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Indeed, that idea -- that Putin has just robbed Russia of its future -- is one of the most common refrains I'm seeing in anti-war posts on social media.
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Because this is Twitter, and nothing here ever really goes without saying:
Evgeny Prigozhin is not a hero. Even if he ends up bringing down Putin. Please don't treat him like one.
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"To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history. All relevant decisions have been taken. I hope you hear me."
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“Never before has the Russian dictatorship met such resistance. And never again will Russia be able to destroy another nation.”
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Now, here's what my research suggests about protest in general, and in Russian in particular: People are most likely to turn against the state when it presents an immediate and unavoidable threat to their ability to imagine a future better than the present.
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To regain his mojo, Putin needed more than a speech: he needed to dispatch Prigozhin quickly and decisively. He did not do that.
The fact that this was moderated by Lukashenka strikes me as embarrassing in the extreme. Putin needs someone else to solve his problems?
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Clearly, Putin will have thought about this. This was a risk everyone knew about going into this war -- that's why he had the riot police ready to go. Putin will have calculated that he'll survive. He may well be right. He often is.
But not always.
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And if we're honest, then we have to acknowledge that these sanctions were meant to cause significant medium and long-term pain, and they're doing that. Calling them a failure because Muscovites can still go out for coffee is just dumb.
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CBR Chief Nabiullina believes the sh*t will begin to hit the fan towards the third quarter of 2022, and I'm inclined to believe her.
kommersant.ru/doc/5315472
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I will admit that I don’t know what Prigozhin is playing at. Honestly. And I won’t guess.
None of the available explanations stand up to the evidence.
(A quick 🧵)
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Per Russia's own border guards, 3.8 million people have left the country since the war began. Now, that's down to Putin as much as it is to sanctions, but that's a hit to productivity right now and growth potential down the line.
themoscowtimes.com/2022/05/0…
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And no, I have nothing better to do on a Friday evening than to tweet about ostensibly smart people being dumb. (Again, you know who you are.)
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Second of all, no Western policymaker or serious analyst expected a massive immediate impact on the economy. We knew that they had reserves (even if we could freeze half of them) and that those reserves would last them some time.
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Indeed, it’s hard to see how anyone wakes up in Moscow tomorrow and pretends that this didn’t just happen. Something will have to give.
/TO BE CONTINUED
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More than anything else, I’m struck in this video by Putin’s reference to ideology.
“They don’t have their own industrial base or their own ideology, and so they don’t have a future — but we do.”
It sounds like a throwaway line, but it isn’t.
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Putin doesn’t sound like a man who’s interested in a negotiated peace in Ukraine:
“They’re running out [of weapons]… They don’t have anything, they have no future. But we do have a future.”
(This is a newly released clip from his Kremlin awards ceremony for troops on Friday)
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Putin tells his people he's fighting for Russia's sovereignty. In truth, he's mortgaged the Kremlin to Beijing.
The question now is one for Xi: What will he do with his newest acquisition?
/END
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So, Putin laid the rhetorical groundwork for war, but didn't declare it.
He laid the foundations for a formal military presence in DPR/LPR, but didn't define the borders.
The practiced strategic ambiguity continues. We still don't know where this is going, and that's the point.
Putin's Donbas address is unbelievably dark and aggressive.
I've watched a lot of Putin speeches, and I don't think I've ever seen one quite like this.
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From the first hours, Prigozhin’s uprising made Putin look weak, unable to control his own hinterland and the forces fighting his war. As Wagner troops got closer to Moscow, that only deepened.
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By turning around “to avoid bloodshed”, Prigozhin somehow managed to make himself look like the cooler head — and, in fact, the only decisive person on the stage, given Putin’s conspicuous absence.
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Given the level of ambient repression, the fact that anyone is coming out at all is striking.
Striking as well is the fact that the riot police came out before the protesters did -- especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but not only, according to reports.
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Punishment, by contrast, was meant to help Russia lose the war it had chosen to fight, but sapping it of money and morale, but starving the war machine and the economy that feeds that machine. That was always going to be a gradual endeavor, and the verdict is still out.
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Ukrainians could be forgiven for wondering why, if the US and UK are happy to shoot down missiles headed towards Israel, they won’t do the same for Ukraine. Or give Ukraine the means to do it itself.
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Why was punishment the goal, rather than deterrence? Because if Putin was working with any logical cost-benefit framework, this war would never have happened. Ergo, you're not going to get him to back off by increasing the costs.
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Third, there have been anti-war protests in dozens of Russian cities every day since this war began. We don’t and can’t know how many people have participated, but we do know that more than 7,600 have been arrested since February 24th.
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We also know that protests are driven by moral shock -- when the state begins to do something that not only offends a person's sense of right and wrong, but that alters their sense of what the state might do in the future. This can cause a panic and a 'now-or-never' response.
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The question is, what does Putin do next? Unless Prigozhin is arrested and tried, what people will remember is that he could have stormed the capital but thought better of it; the futility of the whole thing will likely be forgotten.
But if he is arrested, he’ll be a martyr.
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Racism and classism are absolutely part of this process. Wars are almost always fought by the disenfranchised, marginalized and the poor on behalf of the powerful -- and Russia is no exception in that regard.
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Tens of millions of Russians have Ukrainian heritage or, indeed, were born there. They have family and friends there. The cities they are bombing are cities many of them have visited.
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As Russia's propagandist-in-chief Margarita Simonyan broaches the idea of ending the war, ostensibly because Ukraine is getting too strong to counter without an attack on the West itself, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on how Russian propaganda works.
(A 🧵)
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In other words, Russia is sustaining itself by impoverishing its closest allies. How sustainable is that?
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And fifth of all -- and this is the part that really bugs me -- these sanctions were never designed to deter Russia. They were designed to punish Russia, but not to deter it.
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The recognition that this war would be unpopular was the key factor determining Russia’s opening gambit. The only way to mitigate that risk was to win the war as cleanly and quickly as possible. That is now no longer an option.
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Third of all, the long-term damage is even greater. And it's not just about the lack of investment and the fact that Russian companies will have to work with subpar resources at inflated prices.
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This will also be the conversation topic around tens of millions of kitchen tables, and people will debate whether Putin was right or wrong. Previously unimaginable things, like a change of leadership, may become more plausible.
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Assuming Putin somehow manages to square that circle, this whole episode may have punctured the air of inevitability that has kept him aloft for the past 23 years. Elites will wonder whether he can hold things together, and they may look more urgently for an alternative.
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Second, sanctions were an inevitable result of this invasion. Putin knew that, and in this case, we don’t have to read his mind: he talked about it in his speeches leading up to the war. Russia, with its vaunted $640 billion in reserves, was prepared, Putin said. He was wrong.
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The real problem for Putin is that the people who are out on the streets protesting against the war are the usual suspects. It will get worse if — when — the people queueing at the ATM turn the (metaphorical) corner and join the protests.
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More to the point, there have been no pro-war rallies, despite the Kremlin’s usual penchant for astroturf.
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Because the world clearly needs yet another 🧵 about whether Russians really support the war - and because I'm probably the only one left who hasn't commented on that @levada_ru poll showing 81% support - here's my take: Yes, but.
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Fourth of all, one thing we're not paying attention to is the degree to which Russia has outsourced its pain -- at least in the short-ish run -- to Belarus and Kazakhstan, its two key trading partners in the Eurasian Economic Union.
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Or there's the IMF, which is projecting an 8.5% drop in Russian GDP this year.
imf.org/en/Countries/RUS
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Per @OvdInfo, there have been ~1700 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia today. Given the propensity of these numbers to lag, the actual number is probably higher.
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When Putin announced the mobilization of 300k reservists — and maybe 1.2 mln — many began asking how long it would take for Russians to rise up in resistance. What Twitter and the commentariat want to know now is why that resistance hasn't come.
A very, very long 🧵.
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Folks, we played this game with the post-Crimea sanctions, the post-MH17 sanctions, the post-Skripal sanctions: they were imposed for specific reasons, about which pundits and others quickly forgot, and then started measuring effectiveness by totally different yardsticks.
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While the Russian ruble is up 12% vs the dollar since the start of the war, the Belarusian ruble is down 24% vs USD and an even more massive 32% vs the Russian currency. The IMF is projecting the Belarusian economy to contract by 6.4% this year.
imf.org/en/Countries/BLR
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While Russia has been to war before, Russians are mostly accustomed (like Americans or Brits) to seeing their bombs fall on far off places of which they know little (a category that includes, for most Russians, Chechnya). Ukraine, on the other hand, is both close and familiar.
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When threats are diffuse, people find individualized ways of coping. When they are concentrated, they have no choice but to come together to seek a solution that helps everyone.
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Now, I'm not here to say that sanctions are always or even often effective. They most often aren't, even if there isn't often a better alternative -- and doing nothing is usually worse. I'm just here to call for honest analysis and a bit or memory (or at least Googling).
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None of this is to say that the war will not eventually end with negotiations. As has been said ad nauseam, all wars end with negotiations -- even when those negotiations are preceded by a resounding military victory. This much is true.
But not all negotiations end wars.
/END
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This ad — promoted on @X by a blue-check perfume salesman with zero follows and zero followers — links to an “article” dressed up to look like @BBCNews but hosted at the URL meannice.store.
And 3/4 of the ads I’m seeing on X these days are of this ilk.
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Bear in mind that the Russian protest scene has been dormant since riot police more or less wiped the streets with Navalny supporters in the early months of 2021. After that, the opposition called off protests, out of concern for the physical welfare of their supporters.
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It is early days yet, but it doesn’t feel to me that Putin’s war with Russia is going much better than his war with Ukraine.
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Do Russians support the war?
Short answer: We don't know.
Longer answer: What you think you know is probably wrong.
(A quick 🧵)
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First, let's start with the bad news: The Trump administration is handling the start of this process just about as badly as it is possible to do. There is no way to sugar coat that, nor should anyone try.
I'll focus on three low-lights.
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We also know that this war may cause a moral shock. Anecdotal evidence -- and a bit of survey evidence -- suggests that most Russians didn't take the prospect of war seriously, and have thus been caught off guard.
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This is just ... dumb. There may be good reasons to avoid extending an explicit Article 5 guarantee to NATO-member forces operating in Ukraine. But communicating to Putin the absolute absence of any such guarantee gives away the game before talks even start.
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"I'm a citizen of the Russian Federation," says the woman in the red hat. "I lived in Leningrad during the siege. My father died on the front lines. My mother died, and I lay with my dead mother. My older brothers died. What do you want from me?"
Пожилая женщина в Москве обращается к полицейскому: «Я гражданка Российской Федерации. Я житель блокадного Ленинграда. Мой отец погиб на фронте. Мать умерла, я с мертвой матерью лежала. Братья умерли старшие. Что вы хотите от меня?»
Видео: читатель DOXA
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We know that this war presents a concentrated threat, in the form of the damage it will do to ordinary Russians' livelihoods for decades to come. So it is possible that some protesters are mobilizing to prevent their futures and those of their children from being foreclosed.
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For my friends who care but don’t read Russian: the country’s three best newspapers are running with the same front page tomorrow, in solidarity with Ivan Golunov, the investigative journalist (who works for neither of the three) arrested on fabricated narcotics charges.
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The problem begins in Russia. The Kremlin does not want peace for the simple reason that peace would undermine the Kremlin's domestic power. This war has reshaped every aspect of Russian political life, and much of Russian social and economic life, to the benefit of Putin.
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Fox News live now: "We may be seeing a red mirage" -- explaining to viewers that PA, MI and others count in-person votes first, mail-in votes second. "The voting has stopped. The counting goes on." This is important.
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First, as @LawDavF has explained, Russia's invasion isn't going according to plan, and while Russia can still achieve its military objectives, it will come at an increasing cost.
samf.substack.com/p/russias-…
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And the police didn't exactly behave themselves. At least one of my friends in Moscow was delivered to a police station unconscious, with a fractured skull.
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The violence in Ukraine coupled with the violence in the streets at home may -- and I emphasize _may_ -- make many Russians very uncomfortable. It may suggest the potential of both sites of violence to escalate. That, too, may be a future many Russians will want to avoid.
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EU sanctions to include a block on Russian sovereign debt and NS2 among other things. Assume US will do the same.
This is stronger — much stronger — than I expected.
The focus on Belarus and Russia’s mil presence there is also sharp.
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I'll follow up on various aspects of this in future TL;DRussia posts and threads, but here's the key point for now: Putin is fighting a rear-guard action to prevent the economy and the war from spilling over into the minds of too many ordinary Russians.
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Ok. Time for a bit of political analysis.
What happens if Prigozhin’s adventure ends up bringing down Putin? Without trying to predict the future, it is possible to map out some plausible scenarios.
(A 🧵, duh)
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Ukraine "and its western backers no longer have a convincing theory of victory," we are told.
What the West needs is not a theory of victory, but a sober understanding that this is not a war of choice -- and thus not a war they can choose to avoid.
ft.com/content/75da21e8-8209…
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As recently as yesterday, the consensus in Western policy circles – among US, UK & EU experts & officials – was that while Russia was not winning this war, neither was Ukraine. It was hard to find anyone who believed that Ukraine could make significant territorial advances.
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As @LawDavF has written again and again, war is inherently unpredictable. It is not linear, it's not the arithmetic outcome of an equation involving bullets and bombs. It's an emotional thing, and it's highly contingent.
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Low-light 1: After Waltz and Kellogg spent weeks talking up a strategy of "maximum pressure" on Russia and building trust in Europe and Kyiv, POTUS threw that out the window by announcing unconditional bilateral talks with Putin.
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A summary of key points follow below. For the full story in a less cacophonous setting, see the latest TL;DRussia, which dropped yesterday. (And subscribe -- it's free!)
tldrussia.substack.com/p/hom…
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In case anyone forgot: Russia went to war in 2014 to prevent Ukraine from signing a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU.
Putin: We have always opposed Ukraine becoming a NATO member, but we have never objected to its membership in the EU.
Every country has the right to choose its own security system, this also applies to Ukraine, but not at the expense of another country’s security. 1/
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I might be wrong, but 26-year incumbents who genuinely got 79.7% in hotly contested elections with massive turnout don't generally need to fill the capital with riot police and block their country's two largest independent news websites right after polls close. #Belarus
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The Kazakh tenge, meanwhile, is down 3% vs the dollar and 13% vs the Russian ruble -- though the IMF is projecting growth there of 2.3% (anemic given where oil prices are right now).
imf.org/en/Countries/KAZ
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