Wait, am I reading this right that the plane was shot down by russian air defence? If this is backed up at all by anything like a russian source, then this will just further enforce option that russia can not be trusted to do anything it says and that putin is weak and threatened (both are true but I thought the kremlin would at least try to say/show otherwise).
How does russia keep messing up this bad? I am constantly shocked and awed.
Yeah, a pointless one that makes them look like predictable idiots. Most will not be unhappy at his death and those that would be are on russia’s side of this conflict. This (if it is what it looks like now) is like making a martyr just for assholes.
Putin is killing people and the purpose of the window assassinations is meant to be clearly not an accident. The whole point is to send a message, not to try and fool people.
I don’t understand the logic here. When the putsch occured and then ignomously fizzled out, I saw Putin as weak for letting Pringles walk out with a (relative) slap on the wrist. Taking Prigo out of the picture was overdue. Obviously, anyone would feel threatened by an semi-autonomous mercenary army, so removing its leadership and breaking it up is just a rational course of action that probably should have been done sooner from that POV
Putin absolutely couldn’t let Prigozhin walk, nobody could have. It’s not just about the semi-autonomous mercenary army, if a government lets someone get away with an attempted coup d’état they’d effectively encourage others to give it their best shot as well because there was no effective punishment. Assassination is, well, a very Russian approach to the issue, but every government on this planet would have taken some form of action.
I’m not really surprised. They got more and more open about their assassination attempts for years. They’re not meant to covertly get rid of enemies, they’re very public warnings to other dissidents. It’s rule by fear.
Russian assassination are pretty clear. Anyone with half a brain can put the pieces together, but there is just enough plausible deniability that there cannot be direct retaliation legally or politically. It is a clear threat but just barely veiled enough to avoid legitimate retaliatory action via legal or international responses.
You are absolutely right. The US would have an armed coup leader strung up so fast. Maybe not assassination style, but there would most definitely be a quick trial and execution. If the US government couldn’t catch the person, I imagine that assassination would be on the table.
If they took him out before the deal was made sure, this soon after just shows weakness and a lack of credibility. They did the equivalent to getting into a bar fight, talking it out instead and then in front of every one sucker punching the other guy.
No, they were losing to tractors, and Moskva was sunk without a navy.
Now they’re getting real gear and training to play.
The only thing Russia ever wins are Darwin awards. Fucking being proud of almost hurting a country a fraction of your size right next door, like the US being proud of conquering Ottawa.
Losing multiple cities to a tiny domestic invading force of mercenaries after completely losing control of said force due to lack of command discipline, and finally only being able to force them to disband by threatening the families of the mercenaries involved isn’t exactly a sign of strength, though, is it? It’s not exactly what we’d expect of a professional modern military.
It would be like if Erik Prince took his Blackwater army and started marching on Washington, capturing towns along the way, and the US army was helpless to stop them until the American government threatened to hunt down and kill the family members of Blackwater mercenaries.
That would be considered unusual, and not really a sign of political or military strength.
If Erik Prince marched Blackwater through some American cities and – instead of sending the U.S. military to start a hot war on its own soil – American leadership pressured Prince and Blackwater to go home, would you be calling the president weak for not turning Virginia into a battlefield?
I would think American leadership completely dysfunctional if they allowed that situation to occur. If they did not have enough command authority to trust that the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force when ordered, the US would be a laughingstock. The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Russia. I was originally trained as a Sovietologist, when that was still a thing you could be an -ologist of. I could talk for hours about strategic weapons systems and Russian prep for NBC warfare and what the politics in the Kremlin were like under the troika approach and why the fascistic tendencies of Putin in rejecting Russian political history in favor of personal enrichment and plundering the nation have irrevocably broken Russian politics.
But that’s for another day. Putin responded the way dictators in developing nations do, not like someone who actually has command and control over their modern military forces. I mean, it’s a Russian tradition to threaten the families of people who publicly disagree with leadership. In the US, the forces brought to bear against Blackwater’s attempted putsch would have been so overwhelming that his own men would have arrested him. But as much as I hate Blackwater and think Prince should probably be in prison for war crimes, their cadre was recruited from a different class of people than Wagner.
the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force
You realize that’s the worst-case scenario of the incident we’re talking about, right? A sane leader would want to avoid starting a pitched battle in their backyard at all costs, and that’s entirely independent of speculation about control over the military.
The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.
We had a half-assed putsch of our own not even three years ago.
If this is backed up at all by anything like a russian source
The Guardian is reporting this:
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would give ample motive to the Russian state for revenge. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane.
then this will just further enforce option that russia can not be trusted to do anything it says and that putin is weak and threatened
If they let him live, they’re weak. If they kill him, they’re weak.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
The USSR is not the russian federation and the later is an oligarchy. Why do you think such cold war arguments (that over simplify) have some sort of play in this conflict?
I also noticed you skated right on by the “can not be trusted” part of my quoted text.
Your entire argument was about the soviet union and its cold war relationship with the US.
I have had it up to my nipples here on how fixated you all are on the US, I am not from the US, I don’t like the US, I am sick of somehow having to explain to people who apparently think the US is evil but simultaneously think the world revolves around it.
WE GET IT YOU ARE AMERICAN AND YOU ARE DIFFERENT BUT LIKE MOST AMERICANS CAN NOT STAND WHEN SOMETHING IS NOT ABOUT YOU.
The quote is from “inventing reality by michael parenti”. the cold war is an EXAMPLE, the authors POINT is that media will interpret literally ANY EVENT in a bad way to make enemies look morally inferior and bad.
But I am not media, the post I made is my honest take, and in this case the media stating this news is wagner and the russian state.
How does this wall of text help me understand the apparent flaw in my statement?
The implication is that both events were ineffective at achieving anything meaningful, other than tasing one’s balls to death and getting shot by an anti aircraft missile
One side uses its legal system to deal with an institutional threat, while the other performatively offers an olive branch and then stabs them on the back. Not quite the same. One side smells a lot like a mafia
The USA has always been a fascist country (just ask Native Americans and descendants of slaves). If you think slapping a few leaders on the wrist is going to stop fascism here, I would invite you to have a look at the history of Weimar Germany.
I think the implied argument is that if Putin is untrustworthy and if you’re implying that means that he can’t be trusted to comply with agreements made with Ukraine, then we need to look at historic agreements between Russia and Ukraine. Two recent agreements between them include Minsk I and II. Ukraine, not Russia, violated both.
Both sides might have violated the first Minsk agreement. As to who violated it first? My understanding was that Ukraine did. Eventually it broke down. As for the second, it depends whether you consider an omission as bad as an action. Ukraine violated Minsk II by ignoring it, which led to the SMO: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/frustrated-refusals-give-russia-security-guarantees-implement-minsk-2-putin-recognizes-pseudo. Interestingly, France and Germany were part of these talks and officials have stated that they only ever intended to delay a war to better arm Ukraine; i.e. the NATO/Ukrainian side never intended to honour the agreement from the beginning.
What did Ukraine do to violate the agreement? From all I can read there is not much short of re arming with nukes that Ukraine could even do to break the agreement (Minsk I). And what do you mean ignoring the second one?
Oh I am sure he is just fine with it, but it does not really give any confidence to anyone entering into any agreement with russia with a 3rd nation brokering (say a ceasefire).
I am lost and this is a reply to my own statement. May I ask you to expand on what a “lib” is, how I erred to be labelled as one, and finally how it is you think I care about aesthetics?
Can’t speak for anyone else but I may be able to answer this.
A lib is a liberal, someone who is pro-capital, not an anti-capitalist (very little overlap with how liberal tends to be defined in ordinary language in the US). Optics, relating to how people see the event, is idealism not materialism. Liberalism is idealist, unlike Marxism, which is materialist.
The dig at liberalism and aesthetics is likely a critique of the implication that what this looks like has much to do with the material reality. That’s an aesthetic argument. It doesn’t matter what this looks like because the optics don’t affect the material relations. Someone who elevates the optics at the expense of the material relations is making an idealist, likely a liberal argument.
Hence the comment embodying an aesthetic argument of the kind that liberals often make.
You’re welcome. I’m glad you’re taking this in the spirit in which it’s intended. When Marxists criticise idealism, the target is the liberal world outlook, not the individual.
By implication, really. Focusing on what people think of Russia’s/Putin’s trustworthiness rather than on it’s record or the factors that would keep it honest, so to speak. It’s Ukraine that violated Minsk, apparently prompted by France, Germany, and ‘NATO’. Looking at the optics, that seems a little more duplicitous than assassinating someone who attempted a coup (if this was an assassination and if what happened before can be called a coup).
Would I trust a single person, e.g. Putin to uphold an international agreement? It doesn’t matter. It’s not a one-man show. War is expensive and the longer it goes on for the more expensive it becomes, in support as well as the cost of arms, soldiers, etc.
Nobody has to trust Putin. An agreement would be maintained because material factors require it to be maintained. What westerners think it’s by-the-by. (I’m assuming you’re not Russian as you were asking about Russian sources—I’m not asking you to confirm or deny as I don’t want you to dox yourself; I’m just trying to give an answer that makes sense from the available evidence.)
Wait, am I reading this right that the plane was shot down by russian air defence? If this is backed up at all by anything like a russian source, then this will just further enforce option that russia can not be trusted to do anything it says and that putin is weak and threatened (both are true but I thought the kremlin would at least try to say/show otherwise).
How does russia keep messing up this bad? I am constantly shocked and awed.
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Yeah, a pointless one that makes them look like predictable idiots. Most will not be unhappy at his death and those that would be are on russia’s side of this conflict. This (if it is what it looks like now) is like making a martyr just for assholes.
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Putin is killing people and the purpose of the window assassinations is meant to be clearly not an accident. The whole point is to send a message, not to try and fool people.
I don’t understand the logic here. When the putsch occured and then ignomously fizzled out, I saw Putin as weak for letting Pringles walk out with a (relative) slap on the wrist. Taking Prigo out of the picture was overdue. Obviously, anyone would feel threatened by an semi-autonomous mercenary army, so removing its leadership and breaking it up is just a rational course of action that probably should have been done sooner from that POV
Putin absolutely couldn’t let Prigozhin walk, nobody could have. It’s not just about the semi-autonomous mercenary army, if a government lets someone get away with an attempted coup d’état they’d effectively encourage others to give it their best shot as well because there was no effective punishment. Assassination is, well, a very Russian approach to the issue, but every government on this planet would have taken some form of action.
It is the method used that has me baffled, if this happened as reported then they did not even try for any sort of plausible deniability.
I’m not really surprised. They got more and more open about their assassination attempts for years. They’re not meant to covertly get rid of enemies, they’re very public warnings to other dissidents. It’s rule by fear.
Russian assassination are pretty clear. Anyone with half a brain can put the pieces together, but there is just enough plausible deniability that there cannot be direct retaliation legally or politically. It is a clear threat but just barely veiled enough to avoid legitimate retaliatory action via legal or international responses.
You are absolutely right. The US would have an armed coup leader strung up so fast. Maybe not assassination style, but there would most definitely be a quick trial and execution. If the US government couldn’t catch the person, I imagine that assassination would be on the table.
I can’t tell if this has turned into satire yet or if it needs one more reply to get there
If they took him out before the deal was made sure, this soon after just shows weakness and a lack of credibility. They did the equivalent to getting into a bar fight, talking it out instead and then in front of every one sucker punching the other guy.
you know you don’t have to forcibly try to interpret every event as a sign of Russian weakness
Truly. The mental gymnastics are impressive sometimes.
They were losing a war to a bunch of tractors and their flagship was sunk by a country without a navy.
It’s not Russian weakness, it’s Russian stupidity.
Didn’t realize those billions in aid were for tractors.
They stopped Russia with tractors.
Now they’re pushing them back with real gear.
Jokerfication: when you kind of pity someone for being this propagandized, but laugh at them because it’s pretty funny
Yes… I am the propagandized one.
Not the rural poor being marched off to die for half the price of a lada they’ll never receive for an oligarch’s pride.
All I can say is: Please, PLEASE! Make sure they keep marching.
pushin em back 15 miles is good for you?
Do you know how many people pointlessly died for nothing?
were? so you admit that Russia is winning?
besides, this is not what this thread is about, go cope to someone who cares
No, they were losing to tractors, and Moskva was sunk without a navy.
Now they’re getting real gear and training to play.
The only thing Russia ever wins are Darwin awards. Fucking being proud of almost hurting a country a fraction of your size right next door, like the US being proud of conquering Ottawa.
Say hi to those F-16s for me.
I’m sure they’ll be just as effective as the Leopards, the ghost of kieyiev will destroy the entire Russian army
They don’t need a ghost of Kyiv, they know the ultimate weakness of all Russians:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/13hcf63/ukrainians_allegedly_dropped_bottles_of_vodka_at/
You guys are going to suffer, and I would feel bad if you hadn’t started this whole nightmare.
We’re literally dumping decades old hardware on them just so we can keep justify buying more F-35s.
I agree.
And I’m fine with this.
We built those to fight evil Russians, they should get their chance.
Look up the US attack on Grenada
Or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham
The US could never conquer Ottowa
No, because unlike Russia, Canadians have balls.
You are right, I don’t have to.
Losing multiple cities to a tiny domestic invading force of mercenaries after completely losing control of said force due to lack of command discipline, and finally only being able to force them to disband by threatening the families of the mercenaries involved isn’t exactly a sign of strength, though, is it? It’s not exactly what we’d expect of a professional modern military.
It would be like if Erik Prince took his Blackwater army and started marching on Washington, capturing towns along the way, and the US army was helpless to stop them until the American government threatened to hunt down and kill the family members of Blackwater mercenaries.
That would be considered unusual, and not really a sign of political or military strength.
If Erik Prince marched Blackwater through some American cities and – instead of sending the U.S. military to start a hot war on its own soil – American leadership pressured Prince and Blackwater to go home, would you be calling the president weak for not turning Virginia into a battlefield?
hexbear emojis
I would think American leadership completely dysfunctional if they allowed that situation to occur. If they did not have enough command authority to trust that the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force when ordered, the US would be a laughingstock. The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Russia. I was originally trained as a Sovietologist, when that was still a thing you could be an -ologist of. I could talk for hours about strategic weapons systems and Russian prep for NBC warfare and what the politics in the Kremlin were like under the troika approach and why the fascistic tendencies of Putin in rejecting Russian political history in favor of personal enrichment and plundering the nation have irrevocably broken Russian politics.
But that’s for another day. Putin responded the way dictators in developing nations do, not like someone who actually has command and control over their modern military forces. I mean, it’s a Russian tradition to threaten the families of people who publicly disagree with leadership. In the US, the forces brought to bear against Blackwater’s attempted putsch would have been so overwhelming that his own men would have arrested him. But as much as I hate Blackwater and think Prince should probably be in prison for war crimes, their cadre was recruited from a different class of people than Wagner.
You realize that’s the worst-case scenario of the incident we’re talking about, right? A sane leader would want to avoid starting a pitched battle in their backyard at all costs, and that’s entirely independent of speculation about control over the military.
We had a half-assed putsch of our own not even three years ago.
It’s more like taking it outside then shooting them and their buddies in the face. Message sent
The Guardian is reporting this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/aug/23/russia-ukraine-war-live-updates-drones-downed-moscow#top-of-blog
Yes, I am hoping we get more info from anyone else then Wagner group soon.
If they let him live, they’re weak. If they kill him, they’re weak.
The USSR is not the russian federation and the later is an oligarchy. Why do you think such cold war arguments (that over simplify) have some sort of play in this conflict?
I also noticed you skated right on by the “can not be trusted” part of my quoted text.
Do you think I’m talking about the USSR, or about how American propaganda cultivates the mentality of “they are wrong no matter what they do”?
Your entire argument was about the soviet union and its cold war relationship with the US. I have had it up to my nipples here on how fixated you all are on the US, I am not from the US, I don’t like the US, I am sick of somehow having to explain to people who apparently think the US is evil but simultaneously think the world revolves around it.
WE GET IT YOU ARE AMERICAN AND YOU ARE DIFFERENT BUT LIKE MOST AMERICANS CAN NOT STAND WHEN SOMETHING IS NOT ABOUT YOU.
The quote is from “inventing reality by michael parenti”. the cold war is an EXAMPLE, the authors POINT is that media will interpret literally ANY EVENT in a bad way to make enemies look morally inferior and bad.
Are socialist states immune from this fallacy?
But I am not media, the post I made is my honest take, and in this case the media stating this news is wagner and the russian state. How does this wall of text help me understand the apparent flaw in my statement?
They are suggesting that you have learned to reason backwards from certain conclusions.
Nah connect the dots by yourself, you cant be this unironically oblivious.
I can and very much am. Please put some effort into this.
Do you know what an example is? What about an analogy?
Why do you ask? I think you replied to the wrong post
The capitol riot was a threat to our precious democracy! / prigozhin’s coup attempt shows how weak putler is!
Tbf both were a sign of a troubled state but the Wagner mutiny was waaaaaaaaayyy more serious than Jan 6.
What? I am lost. Are you making some sort of US connection here?
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No, but when they actually try to say something I do like to engage.
Well do concider yourself more than welcome to stop by our news megathread and join us in rolling in the muck like the filthy geopolitical news hogs we are
The implication is that both events were ineffective at achieving anything meaningful, other than tasing one’s balls to death and getting shot by an anti aircraft missile
Sorry, how are ether events ineffective or not meaningful? You are still talking about one and we are all here talking about the other.
One side uses its legal system to deal with an institutional threat, while the other performatively offers an olive branch and then stabs them on the back. Not quite the same. One side smells a lot like a mafia
The USA has always been a fascist country (just ask Native Americans and descendants of slaves). If you think slapping a few leaders on the wrist is going to stop fascism here, I would invite you to have a look at the history of Weimar Germany.
Russia decapitation their own PMC org that tried to coup them does not mean they cannot be negotiated with
No but the agreement being broken that was created though Belarus does.
Minsk I and II
Sorry I do want to talk about the other broken treaties but I think you replied to the wrong comment.
I think the implied argument is that if Putin is untrustworthy and if you’re implying that means that he can’t be trusted to comply with agreements made with Ukraine, then we need to look at historic agreements between Russia and Ukraine. Two recent agreements between them include Minsk I and II. Ukraine, not Russia, violated both.
Oh I was not under that impression, both in my memory russia violated.
Both sides might have violated the first Minsk agreement. As to who violated it first? My understanding was that Ukraine did. Eventually it broke down. As for the second, it depends whether you consider an omission as bad as an action. Ukraine violated Minsk II by ignoring it, which led to the SMO: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/frustrated-refusals-give-russia-security-guarantees-implement-minsk-2-putin-recognizes-pseudo. Interestingly, France and Germany were part of these talks and officials have stated that they only ever intended to delay a war to better arm Ukraine; i.e. the NATO/Ukrainian side never intended to honour the agreement from the beginning.
What did Ukraine do to violate the agreement? From all I can read there is not much short of re arming with nukes that Ukraine could even do to break the agreement (Minsk I). And what do you mean ignoring the second one?
I feel like Lukashenko will probably understand
Oh I am sure he is just fine with it, but it does not really give any confidence to anyone entering into any agreement with russia with a 3rd nation brokering (say a ceasefire).
This take perfectly embodies how libs only care about aesthetics.
These large perfectly monolithic groups of scary people that you don’t like.
I am lost and this is a reply to my own statement. May I ask you to expand on what a “lib” is, how I erred to be labelled as one, and finally how it is you think I care about aesthetics?
Can’t speak for anyone else but I may be able to answer this.
A lib is a liberal, someone who is pro-capital, not an anti-capitalist (very little overlap with how liberal tends to be defined in ordinary language in the US). Optics, relating to how people see the event, is idealism not materialism. Liberalism is idealist, unlike Marxism, which is materialist.
The dig at liberalism and aesthetics is likely a critique of the implication that what this looks like has much to do with the material reality. That’s an aesthetic argument. It doesn’t matter what this looks like because the optics don’t affect the material relations. Someone who elevates the optics at the expense of the material relations is making an idealist, likely a liberal argument.
Hence the comment embodying an aesthetic argument of the kind that liberals often make.
Ok, thank you, but what in my comment was at the expense of the material relations?
You’re welcome. I’m glad you’re taking this in the spirit in which it’s intended. When Marxists criticise idealism, the target is the liberal world outlook, not the individual.
By implication, really. Focusing on what people think of Russia’s/Putin’s trustworthiness rather than on it’s record or the factors that would keep it honest, so to speak. It’s Ukraine that violated Minsk, apparently prompted by France, Germany, and ‘NATO’. Looking at the optics, that seems a little more duplicitous than assassinating someone who attempted a coup (if this was an assassination and if what happened before can be called a coup).
Would I trust a single person, e.g. Putin to uphold an international agreement? It doesn’t matter. It’s not a one-man show. War is expensive and the longer it goes on for the more expensive it becomes, in support as well as the cost of arms, soldiers, etc.
Nobody has to trust Putin. An agreement would be maintained because material factors require it to be maintained. What westerners think it’s by-the-by. (I’m assuming you’re not Russian as you were asking about Russian sources—I’m not asking you to confirm or deny as I don’t want you to dox yourself; I’m just trying to give an answer that makes sense from the available evidence.)
Tank(ie) you for the detailed explanation!
Time for some self-reflection.
Please guide me on this, other wise these are just vague statements that make us both look silly.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1694397010680361239?s=20
Wings generally don’t just fall off without some kind of help.