Do you think Russian plutocrats realize just how badly they have fucked up?

[sfwriter]

I was thinking about this today, and amongst my circle of friends, I think we, at most, thought of Russia as a criminally corrupt country three years ago. It was crooked, but hey, it could be dealt with. Some of my friends were VERY pro engagement with them. Today, not so much.

I feel like we are IN a war with Russia at the moment, A war of their choosing, but one which is spiraling out of their control. Most of what they have done digitally, strategically, militarily, has relied on surprise to happen successfully. An in-depth coordination between propaganda (RT, Sputnik, Trolls, Etc.), statecraft (Denials, accusations, etc.), Spycraft (assassination, kompromot, etc.), Cyberwar (Hacking, DOS attacks, data theft, etc), and covert military action (little green men) has been self reinforcing, but it relies of routine lack of vigilance. We just aren't there anymore. The US is on alert in almost all of these areas despite Donald Trump. The western alliance seems firmly resolute and ready to react. Nobody is buying their bullshit but Republicans.

I wonder how many Russians understand the long-term cost of being a Western adversary? The CIA restrained the Mujahideenn (See the writing of Steve Coll) and kept them from carrying war to the Soviet soil. I'm not sure I see where that restraint would come from today. The CIA seems to be looking for payback.Are they ready for NATO to expand to Ukraine? I'd be hard pressed to say why we shouldn't any more. Not wanting to antagonize our FRIENDS the Russians is very different than stopping a belligerent Putin. The calculus looks different now. I think they misinterpreted our restraint as weakness.

I feel like we are going through the realignment of public thought that happened after World War II. Liberals, many of which who had supported the Soviets as they fought fascism, found themselves souring on Russia as the excesses of Stalin came to light. That political shift fueled the cold war and led to a forceful renunciation of the Kremlin and opposition to its openly draconian policies. We seem to be in a similar place now.

When Democrats regain power, Russia is getting the stick, and I don't see any carrots in sight. They deserve the stick.

[thbobby]

1. It always happens

Good people and just nations want to pursue peace. We are kind and just, believing others to be the same. But the sleeping giant has been awoken before. I hope you are correct. And I fear that you are. Russia is weak, but they do have nuclear weapons. As does North Korea. And the more trump fucks up, the chance of Iran obtaining them increases. Being just and righteous may not be enough to prevent the nuclear holocaust.

[Squinch]

10. "We" as a nation at this moment are NOT kind and just. We are also just as weak

at this moment as Russia. We weren't under Obama, but we are now. That is Putin's great success. He has leveled the playing field. Soon, I suspect, we will learn why he felt he needed a leveled playing field. Hopefully it is just because he has small appendages and an inferiority complex. But it could be something much more dire to us. We just don't know.

[DFW]

2. I don't know any Russian plutocrats, but I do have Russian colleagues I work with regularly

Just ordinary guys I have known for many years. At this point, both they and I are sick and tired of our respective "leaders" taking our respective countries down the drain. Half the time we speak Russian, half the time we speak English, there is no misunderstanding: none of us thinks we deserve what we have.

[Hekate]

5. I believe you

[Rhiannon12866]

7. I visited the USSR before it fell

I went with my grandmother as part of her peace group. And we met with other peace groups, talked with ordinary Russians and visited our "sister town" high up in the Caucasus Mountains. I wasn't aware of all that much before I went, but what I came away with was how much the Russian people had suffered during previous World Wars and how much they wanted to avoid it happening again. There were statues and memorials everywhere and even the little school we visited had a special room dedicated to the wars where children were expected to study. There were memorials on the walls of that school to the boys who had gone there that were killed in the war. And back then there were older people who still remembered. I particularly remember one older lady who had been a nurse in WWII saying "please, when you go back, tell your president that we want peace," chokes me up whenever I think of her. So I think it's unlikely that they've forgotten, and I feel for ordinary Russian people, too.

[sfwriter]

14. I fear these regular Russians have very little actual say.

I'm hoping the Plutocrats will see a way out, and see that it is in their interest to see a way out, because this chaos serves Putin well.

[regnaD kciN]

3. If we're in a war with Russia, theyre winning...

[Hekate]

4. Do you think they care? The point, iirc, is destabilization of Western democracies, in addition to

...making obscene amounts of money. They seem to be achieving those ends so far.

[TomVilmer]

6. WhatWhatWhat?

Besides everything else - "The CIA restrained the Mujahideenn and kept them from carrying war to the Soviet soil"???

CIA did not restrain the Mujahideen, they used them, enforced them and armed them with the help of Pakistan. And if the CIA had seen a purpose, and if the Mujahideenn had been strong enough, CIA would happily have helped them to carry war to the "Soviet soil". Remember that Afghanistan in those years in fact were very unhappily integrated in the Soviets, even for some time under the red flag.

BTW I have many good Russian friends, but I do not have to like Soviet or Putin for that. My Russian friends do understand the long-term cost of Putin etc, but they would never long for a change to a Western puppet regime. Unchained capitalism has benefited only the few.

[sfwriter]

11. Nope, we encouraged every attack within afghanistan, but pulled the plug on attacks into the USSR.

Bill Casey may have carried out that war, but he wast stopped. The ISI had other ideas. They still do. See the best history of the US actions in Afghanistan I know of, Ghost Wars, Steve Coll p 32-35

"But Gates’s account appears unambiguous, and Yousaf’s recollections are precise. It would hardly have been unusual for Casey to pursue covert action outside the boundaries of presidential authority. ISI was the perfect cutout for operations on Soviet territory, providing the CIA with a layer of deniability. And as Gates reflected later, referring more generally to his sense of mission, Casey had not come to the CIA “with the purpose of making it better, managing it more effectively, reforming it, or improving the quality of intelligence. . . . Bill Casey came to the CIA primarily to wage war against the Soviet Union.”
34

In any event, the CIA’s analysts and case officers knew what their Pakistani partners were doing across the Soviet border. Yousaf would pass along requests to the Islamabad station for such equipment as silent outboard motors, which he said he needed for river crossings on the Amu Darya. Piekney, the new station chief, lived in fear that one of these Afghan teams would be captured or killed in Soviet territory and that equipment in their possession would be traced to the CIA, creating an international incident on the scale of the 1960 U-2 shootdown.

Fear of such a public relations catastrophe, or worse, persuaded many analysts at Langley and at the State Department that ISI’s guerrilla attacks on Soviet soil were reckless. Morton Abramowitz, then chief of intelligence at the State Department, saw classified reports about the mujahedin crossing over and urged that ISI be told such assaults were unacceptable. Piekney delivered the message in informal meetings with General Akhtar. The CIA station chief insisted that ISI “not authorize or encourage the Afghans to take the battle into Soviet territory,” as Piekney recalled it. “We all understood, however, that the Afghans would exploit opportunities that arose and do pretty much what they wanted to do,” Piekney remembered. Pakistani intelligence “privately felt it would not be a bad thing” if the Afghan rebels hit targets inside Soviet territory from time to time. “Our only real option was to withhold official U.S. endorsement of that kind of activity and discourage it, which we did.”
35

[TomVilmer]

17. That answer is nicely sliding away from the first statememnt...

... since the so called restraint of the Mujahideenn first came after years of help and training of them on how to move onto Soviet soil. Officially just stealth visits there to enrage Muslims there to join the fight, but nobody believed the Mujahideen would go no further. To claim this was in any way helping the Russians from the war spreading is just BS. CIA has so effectively been planting bad seed, that they have effectively encouraged the persistent fighting in Afghanistan today.

[sfwriter]

18. No, that answer is what I meant. If my first statement was misunderstood then the fault is mine.

I stated it badly. My point being we stopped a holy war from pouring across the Soviet border after Afghanistan. After Putin's record of sowing discord around him, I'm not sure we would again.

[modrepub]

8. Who Takes Over?

In reality, Russia has to fight an asymmetric "war". Their lone aircraft carrier had to be towed when they tried to move it towards Syria. Not much of a statement. They got pasted when the engaged American troops in Syria. At best they can spread chaos at a few selected moments (and they still get caught when they do that).

The bigger question and danger in my mind is what happens when Putin's term runs out or he dies. If there is a real power struggle to take over for Putin we risk a civil war with a nuclear armed and possibly desperate and demoralized military.

[sfwriter]

12. Yup. The more they consolidate power to Putin and Putins selected few, the more brittle they become.

I'm trying to imagine a process by which sanctions, mostly on these oligarchs, are reversed. I'm not sure there is one under Putin. The stronger the sanctions become, the more power seems to run through Putin. He has a convenient enemy, he rallies Russian nationalism, he controls more of the economy. When he dies, that all falls to chaos as his henchmen fight over the spoils, which will be blamed on the west, which makes a reactionary government more likely. Rinse, repeat...

It is really worrisome.

[oberliner]

9. It has been a massive success for them

Never has there been more chaos and confusion in the US than now (hyperbolically speaking).

[sfwriter]

13. The chances that sanctions will be reversed or that we will be less vigilant seem low, don't they?

Their success is a high water mark.

From here on out, it seems we know their game. Despite Trump, sanctions have moved forward. Democrats I could never have imagined supporting a renewed cold war seem to be fine with it and more.

I think we should respond in kind at this point. Increase defensive troop deployments, engage in cyberwarfare and aggressive counterintelligence aimed at their digital assets, continue sanctions and expand them oligarch by oligarch, etc. I would never have thought such things before Crimea, Brexit, Trump and the ongoing cyberwarfare from the Soviet Union. (see: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-074A)

[Cosmocat]

16. right?

They are winning ...

I mean, this country in all of its never ending indulgence of right wing fuck wittery has just turned the cold war trophy back to them ...

[DemocratSinceBirth]

15. I'm not sure Russia has messed up.

They have exposed liberal democracy.

[sfwriter]

19. Exposed to what or as what?

They seem to have engaged in a one-time subversion of our open institutions. I'm betting that will not go so well next time. It's a tactic of diminishing returns.