The editors of the Washington Post wonder what a post-Putin Russia would look like. They offer multiple, contrasting views. For example, this dystopian view is probably the closest to what will actually happen:
One dark scenario is that Mr. Putin’s anti-Western, authoritarian kleptocracy, mixing crony capitalism and despotism, will endure with or without him. A significant part of Russia’s population remains enamored with him, angry and inchoate, making it a ready constituency for a demagogue. As analyst Nikolai Petrov noted before the invasion, Mr. Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric “has taken a firm hold in the hearts and minds of many Russian citizens,†who are in a “state of deep resentment towards the West†and believe that it has prevented Russia from regaining great-power status.
Also reinforcing continuity are the powerful security and military structures that Mr. Putin has exploited and expanded for more than two decades. But key questions, impossible to answer now, surround the fallout a defeat in Ukraine would have: Would the military, humiliated and resentful, turn against the Kremlin power structure? Would the population at large?
There is something they rather clearly do not understand. The United States does not have a foreign policy worthy of the name and never has had one. Due to the nature of our society and our government we have an emergent foreign policy which is not really a policy as such.
But that’s not true in Russia. Russia has a foreign policy and it has been largely unchanged over the last 200 years. Just to take one aspect of that foreign policy, preserving access to a warm water port is considered a vital Russian national interest. That’s the problem with the Ukrainians’ pledge to recapture Crimea. The Russians invaded in 2014 and annexed it to preserve their access to the port at Sevastopol. The impetus was the putsch that replaced the legitimately-elected pro-Russian government with, roughly the present anti-Russian government. The Russians understood that meant that their access to Sevastopol was threatened and, predictably, they acted to preserve it.
As usual keep in mind that I’m not justifying the Russian view. I’m just explaining it.
And while people weren’t happy about Crimea, it was largely accepted. There was no valid reason to invade the rest of Ukraine. Russia was not threatened except maybe they might have been hurt economically with one more country leaving their economic sphere. If Ukraine did well after leaving like the others had done that could have been devastating, maybe leading to everyone else leaving.
Steve
The ultimate cause of the Russo-Ukrainian war is the same as the Cuban missile crisis. The US was planning on deploying missiles with nuclear warheads in Ukraine. The proximate cause was 8 years of artillery attacks by the neo-nazi junta we put in power on the CIVILIANS of the Donbas.
Wake up. We are the bad guys. We have started nearly every war since the fall of the USSR. Us, not Russia, not China, not Iran. Us. And in every case, the war we started was a war of aggression against states at peace with us. Hillary Clinton’s utterly depraved comments about the torture/murder of Kaddafi and the destruction of Libya shows just how evil our Ruling Class is.
The US is the Evil Empire. We are an aggressive, expansionist empire with vassal states all over the world, especially in Europe and East Asia. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only effective restraint on our Masters, they have gone berserker, and they threaten the world with nuclear holocaust.
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