Kun kaikki menee pieleen.
Kommenteissa hyvä nosto, tarkoitus oli tehdä pieni ja voitokas sota ja kerätä siitä nostetta taas vähäksi aikaa. Mutta tässä sitä nyt ollaan.
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jacobin.com -artikkeli on erinomainen. Haastateltavana Moskovalaisen yliopiston sosiologian professori Boris Kagarlitsky, jolla on jalat maassa ja järki päässä.
Tärkeimmät poimittuna:
Boris Kagarlitsky:
Russian people are neither for the war nor against it. They do not react to the war.
most people don’t watch political programs on TV, nor do they watch oppositional media on the Internet. They are not interested in any kind of politics whatsoever
The whole spectrum of political opinion represents maybe 15 to 20 percent of the population, probably less than 10 percent. The rest are totally apolitical.
On the one hand, that’s a great advantage for the regime, but it’s also its biggest problem. Nobody moves against the government, but nobody moves in favor of it, either. That’s why the COVID vaccination campaign failed, and why Putin can’t announce a general mobilization. Volodymyr Zelensky announced the other day that he wants to mobilize a million people. Russia can’t mobilize two hundred thousand because everybody runs away.
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The economic situation is deteriorating and we will begin feeling that seriously by late August or September. It’s a gradual process. One company closes, people have to look for new jobs, then another closes, and so on. Certain goods are disappearing, but not everything.
The war is going to affect your family, your work, and even your pets. And once it begins affecting people’s private lives, things can change immediately. I think resistance could start mounting very fast once the government does something that affects the lives of families. That’s why they haven’t openly declared war.
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How long do you think the Russian economy can hold out?
Boris Kagarlitsky
It can continue for another two or maybe three months, depending on the particular industry. The important thing, however, is that the guys who really own everything start taking losses. Nobody cares about industries or people, everybody cares about profits.
What’s their plan? Is the goal an eventual settlement and reintegration with the West from a position of increased strength, or are we seeing the beginning of a long-term pivot toward Asia?
Boris Kagarlitsky
That’s exactly the problem: there is no plan. They know they made a terrible mistake and that it may be fatal, and that’s about it. The fact that there was a mistake is unacceptable for Putin and his team. The government never recognizes a failure publicly or even informally, but without recognizing there was a mistake you can’t move forward. No strategy can be developed.
Western analyses assume we are dealing with rational people making rational choices, or at least with people making choices. But there is no choice, nobody’s making choices! Even if there are proposals, no proposal works because none is accepted by enough people within the elite to make it real.
If there is no plan, what pushed Putin to cross the Rubicon and invade Ukraine, after eight years of stalemate in the Donbass?
Boris Kagarlitsky
That’s another common, but understandable mistake in Western analysis: thinking that the war is rooted in geopolitics. I think that international politics played a very secondary role, if any, in the decision. It was mostly preconditioned by the domestic situation, which explains why it happened so suddenly and failed so miserably. It was not prepared, there was no diplomacy behind it, because it was not about foreign policy, it was about domestic policies.
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The idea was to have a short fight, proclaim victory, and then manage the transition the way they wanted. They were 100 percent sure that everything in Ukraine would collapse within twenty-four hours. They failed.
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I think the army is running out of steam. The deliveries of Western equipment are changing the military situation very seriously. If you speak to people close to the Russian military establishment, they’re extremely worried and sometimes even panicking.
I think if there are more defeats in Ukraine, then, well, something will happen. I don’t know what, but some dramatic events are going to take place. I’m not saying they’re going to launch a coup, because that’s very much outside the Russian military tradition, but they can intervene in one way or another.
If they try to launch a general mobilization, or they expand the draft to new categories, then we’ll get a rebellion. We don’t know what the exact reaction will be, but it will be extremely negative.