Thread by @VladVexler

The REAL reason Putin is preparing for war in Ukraine.

MEGATHREAD.

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There's been much hysteria in the British & US press about what Putin is up to on the Ukrainian border.

We've got to calm down: to understand what's going on we have to look behind the walls of the Kremlin.

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The thing that everyone misses are the dynamics behind the scenes in Moscow:

What is counter intuitive for us in the West to understand is that what's playing out right now is the slow end of the Putin regime as we know it.

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Yes, Russia is slowly moving toward a Post-Putin future, and yes, we should be scared!

But Putin isn't leaving and is likely to stay for a long time - it's complex....

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We'll look at how this transitional crisis in the Kremlin plays into why there are troops on the Ukrainian border, and why such things may keep happening more and more....

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Let's think about what's going on. We've got this guy at top, Putin - we're going to talk about his reign changing & how this is producing the dynamics in Ukraine - but let's spend a moment on the man himself. What worries him? What drives him?

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Putin is obsessed with the speed of a nuclear strike. He talks about it . . . on ... and on... and on . . . What does that tell us about him and who is this man?

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Putin is increasingly prone to conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.

Putin sees Ukraine as a US puppet. He see US involvement everywhere - where it is present, and where there is no evidence of it.

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Putin has a sense of mission. He developed it circa 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.

To some extent, it seems to him that Putin is Russia. We really are in the territory of tying the destiny of a nation to the will of a single individual.

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Putin is not a pathological liar, but he lies all the time.

Unlike Trump, who has dispositional states more than steady beliefs, Putin nows the difference between truth and lies.
But, for him language is political technology.

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Putin is traumatised by NATO expansion and Western military interventions.

But the most traumatic thing for him is Yugoslavia and the Kosovo war. Yes, trauma is the right word here, however irrational it may seem to us.

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Putin is over-emotional. He never forgets favours or betrayals and is exercised by them a decades after. He is often indignant, furious, or sentimentally moved.

But, that never turn this into rash action.

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Putin mistrusts humans - in particular, he always looks for a personal motive, not a social or institutional motive, to explain people's behaviour. He reduces too much human behaviour to power or money.

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Putin mistrust the internet, in a kind of magical way. Yes, Putin is suspicious of the entire internet - and talks about it in wholistic terms.

He gets info about what's going on the internet in multicoloured folders.

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Putin doesn't believe in political opposition - he is not against it, he just doesn't believe there is such a thing.

He believes in (1) allies, (2) foes and (3) traitors.

Political opponents are either (2 ) or (3).

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Explaining political opposition to Putin is like explaining the rules of tennis to someone who turns up to a tennis match with a dagger and a shield.

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Putin is very pragmatic and very not pragmatic at once.

His big ideas are rigid, inflexible, sentimental, and conspiratorial. But he is patient, flexible and transactional about means he uses to achieve them.

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Putin is uncannily good at mimicry and taking on personas, which is hard to see for non-Russian speakers.

He mirrors people's way of being in the world in order to influence them. Even sophisticated people are sometimes thrown by this.

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Putin loves legalistic language and that's not for show.

If you had a tape of him (allegedly) approving the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, you would not hear any criminal language or instructions to kill anybody.

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Putin is less sentimental about Ukraine than we think.

He does believe that Ukrainians and Russians are 'one people' - something Ukrainian object to!

But in private, he refers to the Ukraine as territory . . .

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So that's Putin, but what's the Putin regime like and how does it work?

Two labels are often used to describe it -

It is said to be a HYBRID REGIME and an INFORMATIONAL AUTOCRACY.

Let's break this down!

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A 'Hybrid regime' sounds like it a bit authoritarian like China and a bit democratic like Denmark.

But that's not what we mean.

What we mean is that Russia is neither an authoritarian regime nor a democracy, but that it imitates both.

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As a hybrid regime, Russia imitates mass repression without instituting it, and imitates democracy without having any.

It pretends to be China 80% of the time, and Denmark 20% of the time.

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As an 'informational autocracy' the Putin regime doesn't use the information to justify its goals - it doesn't have goals beyond controlling the informational environment. Control over the informational environment is the regime's goal.

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What kind of wars does Putin like? Putin likes the kind of war whereby you look at it & you don't know if it's a war or not.

A war that's clearly a war is informationally harder to manage. You can't just declare victory or remove it from the news cycle.
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The regime is not aiming to persuade its citizens its views. The aim of the regime is NOT to convince the population of its ideology, as was the case with the USSR - its aim is to confuse the population, and the benefit of confusion is apathy.

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The Soviet regime wanted persuaded, ideologically straightened up, engaged citizens. The Putin regime wants citizens without clear views, citizens who are informationally confused, and consequently apathetic.

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Here is a visual analogy for the regime. Imagine board of a corporation that's amalgamated with a mafia organisation.

Let's break this down a bit.

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So first, unlike a normal board of a corporation, you don't really have designated roles and definite positions - but hierarchies of rank.

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Second, the CEO is there illegally (in 2020 Putin organised an illegal constitutional coup). Moreover, the CEO got junior staff in the corporation to find the no 1 candidate for the CEO position, and poison him.

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The third point about this corporation/mafia board takes us into the realm of the transition of power away from Putin.

At this point we need an analogy within an analogy.

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Imagine a ship that is called Putin. And then imagine that the captain of the ship is Putin. And he has the formal powers of the captain, but he no longer is able to exercise many of them.

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The people milling around the captain are making many of the decisions the captain would normally make, and the captain acts as a kind of referee int he conflicts arising in these clans around him.

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But, it is crucial that the ship is called Putin.

That's because, even though Putin's power is declining and the conflictive clans around him are becoming even more powerful, the symbolic significance of the office of president in Russia remains crucial.
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Putin is the only political institution that is regarded as legitimate by the population. The people who are taking power away from Putin are doing so in a way that maximally preserves the symbolism of a Russia ruled by Putin.

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The fourth point about this corporation-mafia-boat structure is not just that Putin is losing power relative to the people around him - it's that the people around Putin are consciously and strategically planning for his departure!

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The actions they are taking and the plans they are making are being made in preparation for a world when Putin is effectively gone.

But what does that mean? I could mean (1) that Putin is no longer alive (2) that Putin is in enforced retirement.

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But more likely, it could mean (3) that Putin remains in the role of the presidency with much reduced power or (4) that Putin is shifted into some other role with emaciated powers and responsibilities. To stretch this a bit too far - Putin as the Queen!

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So.

It is in this condition that the regime has sent 100K troops to the Ukrainian border.

And, it is BECAUSE the regime is in this condition that it has sent all these troops to the Ukrainian border.

Let's break this down.

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If we had to frame the KEY GOAL, it's this (see pic):

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Here is Gleb Pavlovsky, who was a leading Putin strategist from the late 1990s till 2012.

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But if the Kremlin believes that current principles of security are unacceptable to it, would it abide by new principles of security of they could be negotiated?

No! Because the ideology of the Kremlin is disruption!

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So, is the Kremlin saying: we want to negotiate new principles of the international order so we can violate them?!

Yes that is exactly what they are saying. Here's Gleb Pavlovsky again -

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Now, what is the method the Russians are using to pursue this goal?

The method is clear: it's threat of war.

Here's Russian historian Nikolai Svanidze -

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But now, why have the Russians acted out a stalemate?

They created this giant build up of troops on the Ukrainian border, it was their turn to act, and they passed (so far!).

Here is former US ambassador to Russia @McFaul -

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But, where are the Russian people in this?

After all, we've said the Kremlin is keen on not going radically against what the population wants.

Here they are - only 4% of the population blame the Kremlin for the escalation!!!!

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But there is a huge BUT here.

Russians support escalation but not war. They are not going to want the economic impact of a full scale war. Moreover, 1/4 Russians either have relatives in the Ukraine or are from the Ukraine!

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And what is the regime's thinking about next steps?

They know what what Boris Yeltsin used to call a Zagagulina - a kind of adventure that distracts citizens' attention from their daily worries they are worried about it - won't work.

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Moreover, there is this.

Many people in the regime remember the Afghanistan. They were adults in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

They remember that Afghan war smashed the legitimacy of the Soviet order.

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But, what are the considerations for war that the Kremlin might resort to? There are 2.

The very act of persistently threatening and enacting imminent invasion without going through push the Kremlin to go further.

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The second reasons is more important: Putin's sense of mission. He does have a track record of overruling warnings about economic impact form military adventures.

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In 2014, his economic advisors said: catastrophic economic impact, don't do it.

He said: OK, now go and minimise the economic impact of what I am about to do.

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WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The fissures and conflict between the different clans around Putin will become more overt.

It will become clear that many of them are more radical than Putin - here he is appeasing them in a shocking way... WATCH THIS

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Russia will continue it's policy of interference in Western democracies and it's enterprise of distabilising any county engaged in the sanctions regime against Russia

But the main consequence for the future is this -

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Threats of war will become normalised for Russia as a means of doing diplomacy

In fact, threats of war may become Russia's only meaningful diplomatic tool over the decade to come!

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Want to watch this in video form? - Check out my YouTube channel.

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