The Economist: Putin fears ending the war without victory. ‘They will hang me,’ he reportedly told his inner circle. — Meduza
meduza.io
Russian President Vladimir Putin fears for his own safety if the war ends without Russia achieving even its minimum goal, capturing all of Donbas, The Economist writes.

Interesting (if true) - Economist is in the major leagues in terms of reliability. There is a “They”, and it’s probably the intelligence services. And the actual method would probably be less dignified than a hanging.

Not only is there a “they”, but it says Putin is entirely self-aware about the situation, and that he understands that he is personally accountable for this war.

This isn’t an optimistic post - frankly the grim truth has always seemed that this industrial murder festival will go on as long as he does. Russia of the last hundred years has been essentially a crime syndicate. To say he’s a Tsar kind of misses the point - the REAL power is the intelligence servies, and the Tsar-proxy is kind of a figurehead.

If he said this, it’s very telling. He knows the war is going badly, he knows his life is personally depenent on the outcome, he fears “they”, he wants to live and he doesn’t know what to do. Seems highly likely he’ll conitnue to escalate until…? Russian history suggests that when things don’t go well, they purge the leader and put all the blame on him in retirement. Don’t think Putin will get the “Kruschev Dacha Retirement” package - he’s done WAY too much damage.

Hopefully “They” are paying attention too, and are getting tired of the lack of progress.

    • TwinkleToes@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      5·
      14 hours ago

      Agreed but I don’t think they’ll just pick more bodies with the same war aims. Getting 400k more troops gives him another 12 months or so of burn rate. And wars don’t end when the other side gets to zero troops - collapses hapen when enough people understand that defeat is inevitable and tomorrow’s planned assault isn’t worth dying for. They might be at or near that point already.

      Even at Russian standards of mobilization, it takes 2-6 months to get fresh bodies at scale into the line. Those new recruits who are right now working in tire shops, mines, IT offices and coffee shops will be less effective than the low-functioning grunts being blow into spaghetti-O’s in blasted puddles of rainwater and crushed concrete right now. They have less equipment, shit leadership, no experience - which means they’ll die faster. Much faster. And these are not volunteers - these will be conscripts that the Russians didn’t want to tap into before. Society’s sensitivity to their lives being pissed away so that a black hearted gangster ghoul doens’t have to say he was wrong is much higher than the in-it-for-the-money slobs that came before.

      If they announced mobilization today, they will endure several more months of crushing losses, oil and gas infrastructure and warehouse destruction, increased shortages and inflation way before the first reluctant mobik is blown out of his boots by ukrainian drones.

      Then what? Mobilization by itself doesn’t change the outcome of this war. They’re going to do something else wild and provocative. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Anything else is just buying a small slice of time.