If Russian support for Venezuela is more symbolic than substantial, as this article rightly suggests, why did the Trump administration make it sound like the Kremlin effectively blocked Maduro’s ouster? @AKurmanaevnytimes.com/2019/06/17/wor…
Here's Pompeo on May 1 talking about how Maduro "had an airplane on the tarmac, he was ready to leave this morning as we understand it and the Russians indicated he should stay. He was headed for Havana." cnn.com/2019/04/30/pol…
Trump later walked that story about the plane on the tarmac back and called it a "rumor."
But Pompeo/Bolton kept playing up Russia's role: "The coup here has been by the Cubans & the Russians...The main point is we're not going to see the Russians take over a country in the Western Hemisphere. Not directly or by their surrogates, the Cubans." video.foxnews.com/v/603181652400…
The Russians are, of course, masters at getting under the skin of US officials. But it sure looks in retrospect that the Trump WH's suggestion that the Kremlin were the puppet-masters in Venezuela was a convenient way of sloughing off any blame for US mishandling of the crisis.
Carnegie's Return of #GlobalRussia project looks at how the Kremlin is taking advantage of vacuums created by US retrenchment under Trump. But it's a big mistake to portray the Russians as being 10 feet tall in Latin America & Africa let alone the Mideast carnegieendowment.org/publications/i…
It's worth re-reading this very fine paper by Julia Gurganus about how the Kremlin's moves in Latin America are classic opportunism/geopolitics w a strong overlay of payback for US activities in Russia's own neighborhood END carnegieendowment.org/2018/05/03/rus…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
1/ My colleague @eugene_rumer and I have published a new essay in @WSJ calling for Western leaders to abandon magical thinking about Russia and to develop a credible, long-term strategy for supporting Ukraine and containing an emboldened, revisionist Russia.
2/ All too often, policymakers have clung to the belief that “something”—a Ukrainian breakthrough on the battlefield, a Russian financial meltdown, fractures within the Russian elite, etc—will upend Putin’s strategic calculus about the war.
3/ Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen.
It’s precisely this kind of magical thinking that has left the US and Europe dangerously ill-prepared for the long-term challenge that we face from the Kremlin.
🧵So much breathless commentary about how Putin has been badly damaged by the #Prigozhin "coup, not coup."
I am reminded of something he said in 2010 about whether it's possible to micro-manage a country like Russia. 1/x
Kremlin PR has long portrayed Putin as a larger than life figure, latter-day incarnation of Stalin etc. But even before 🇺🇦 war, there were plenty of indications that the heavily personalistic regime and formal state institutions that he presides over are rickety as hell 2/x
Putin's inadvertent moment of candor in 2010 says a lot about how he actually rules Russia. It's hardly a secret. I wrote about it in my graphic novel.
Unfortunately, all that is being overshadowed by the perverse spectacle of the past few days 3/x
1/2 This masterful May 2022 essay by Chris Bort "Why the Kremlin Treats its Own Citizens with Contempt" is the perfect companion piece to Kotkin's interview with David Remnick.
2/3 Nearly every single day since this criminal war began, I've thought about what Zhukov told Eisenhower when explaining how the Red Army forced infantry soldiers to walk across minefields:
"Women will give birth to more."
3/4 Here's the Eisenhower quote: “I had a vivid picture of what would happen to any American or British commander if he pursued such tactics, and I had an even more vivid picture of what the men in any one of our divisions would have had to say about the matter ..."
1/ So many good insights into Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group in this piece by @Bershidsky. His analysis is, thankfully, free of the endless hype and self-promotion that analysis Prigozhin's role in 🇺🇦 normally centers on. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/ I'm especially impressed by the comparison that Bershidsky draws between Putin's current dealings with Prigozhin and his 1990s-era connections to famed Leningrad Vladimir Kumarin who @CatherineBelton chronicled in her book "Putin's People."
3/ Acc to Bershidsky, the Prigozhin phenomenon is both a manifestation of the degradation of the Putin system as it deals with severe stress & under-performance in 🇺🇦 AND a reminder that (this is key, to my mind) thugs for hire like Prigozhin are still on the outside looking in.
2/x Uncannily, Gen. Zaluzhny echoes a senior US military officer: "We are talking about the scale of WW1 [in which the British Army fired a million shells...I was told, “We will lose Europe. We will have nothing to live on if you fire that many shells.” defense.gov/News/Transcrip…
3/x Zaluzhny says the brutal Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy grid and critical infrastructure are working and could have a major impact on his soldiers' will to fight.
.@nickschifrin and I covered several key themes from the book, including Putin’s frequent embellishment of his life story (which was perfectly interesting already!) and self-serving portrayal of Russia’s convulsive history to justify his own actions. 2/
For example, Putin’s older brother Viktor was among the nearly million people who perished during the unspeakably horrible, 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad. Viktor Putin was only one years old.