Until today the Kremlin was doing a semi-decent job of keeping its distance from #BLM protests and not setting itself on fire. I guess Trump and the folks at WH/Sputnik/OAN didn’t get the memo. 🤦
The main thing I'm struck by regarding today's Trump/OAN/BLM uproar is how shockingly easy it has been for the Kremlin's low-fi intelligence/information/influence activities to reach all the way into the Trump inner sanctum and oftentimes to Trump himself.
Time and again, people like Don Jr/Jared Kushner (Veselnitskaya), Giuliani (Firtash/Fruman/Parnas), & Erik Prince (Kirill Dmitriev) simply stroll into the arms of Russian state-connected operatives and get led by the nose.🤔#coincidence#ThisIsNotNormal
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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.