More weekend wisdom: understanding Russia

A favourite endeavour of mine.  And this video is really worth watching.  Periodically, we have visitors around here who side with the pro-Russia narrative to a really striking degree.  Well, watch and learn, from someone – Serhii Plokhy – who is genuinely expert.  (Yeah yeah, he lived in Ukraine as a boy.  So what?  Check out what he says, & then read it up for yourself.)  And finish it off with the block quotation at the end of this post.

We might all note, in particular, Plokhy’s comments on how Russia can, at the same time, be performing really badly in Ukraine (see this blog passim since 2023) but also be a genuine threat to Europe.  So often we get – from Aaron Bastani in this vid, and from some of our trolls BTL commentators here – “well, they can’t be both“.  Well, maybe they can: see what he has to say.  And the corollary is both chilling, and food for serious thought for our lamentably substandard political leaders.

Note also how the good Bastani keeps learning things he should maybe have already known, and is consequently amazed by – in this vid, and in others of his excellent interviews.  You might wonder why I regularly cite and link to Bastani’s Novara Media, a bunch of supposedly irredeemable progressive lefties, as they would see themselves.  Well, the highly articulate** leadership triumvirate of this bunch are, on their better days, definitely open to argument; and their slow, inchingly slow march to the right since 2017 has been amusing and instructive to watch.  They might even, somewhat reluctantly, admit it.  Bastani in particular is quite clearly a social conservative, and more so with each passing year (marriage, a family, home ownership, and moving out of London can have that effect …)

[Their problem is, they have so much empty space in their heads where some genuine knowledge of the real world should be, that they - particularly AB again - are inclined to swallow almost anything they are told by people who seem to know.  Their suckering by Gary Stevenson, "once the no.1 [self-styled] trader in the world” (my arse) is highly amusing: and AB has also been well taken in by, e.g., Brett Christophers and that old hippy-rogue Dale Vince: he laps up their stuff in a culpably uncritical way, because it’s all so new to him & he has no relevant frame of reference or ability to reality-check it.  All that said, they present some really thought-provoking stuff and, as I said, some of it clearly rubs off on them.]

Ho hum.  Just watch the video when you have 90 mins to spare.  And for good measure, let’s add the following, from the remarkable commentator Kamil Galeev, which fits very neatly: 

The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper.  If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk … you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person. The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast

You would understand the course of this war much better, if you consider that on February 23, 2022, Putin considered Ukrainians as Russians. Perfectly integratable, assimilatable and draftable.   Take control over Ukraine, and increase your Russian population by over 1/3.   Now the next generation of Russian leaders will not see Ukrainians as Russians anymore. The integration of Ukrainians into Russia proper will not be seen as either possible, or even desirable. It will be seen as a hostile foreign country, and a hostile foreign population.   So, this may be the most important final result of this war. The unity of Soviet world, only partially affected by 1991, is now firmly and irreversibly shattered. Too much blood spilled, too much mutual hatred & suspicion arisen. Return to how it used to be is no longer possible

That said, recall Plokhy’s salutary point above:  all this can be true, and yet Russia can also still be a threat to Europe.  Make that ‘is‘.

ND

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** Again, on their better days