>To be honest, the Pandora's box is open - a real global horror will begin by the summer - global famine is inevitable (Russia and Ukraine were the main suppliers of grain in the world, this year's harvest will be smaller, and logistical problems will bring the catastrophe to a peak point).
they supply like 15% of wheat, 17% of barley, 17% of rye, etc, they are big but not main, and it's not like production will go to zero, and other countries could increase production to supplement them, sounds like larp
It is difficult to know what is true in this propaganda war. I posted a document and a link to an article that is one of many claiming it is true. We post things on HN for your consideration, not to control your thoughts. Hacker News is still part of a free country. Make up your own mind.
You said they’re looking for that officer but I don’t see anything in the article that backs up that assertion. Related maybe, but why do you think that is true?
The arrests were further corroborated by Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist who also added that the FSB officers had carried out searches at over 20 addresses in Moscow of colleagues suspected to be speaking with journalists
Ah yes, the return of the good old Soviet methods.
The positive side of this is that it's a strong indicator of the ruling dictator slipping into distrust fueled paranoia. One of the first steps towards the downfall.
This downfall is cyclic. Let me translate you some old but still delicious Russian copypasta:
"As soon as Lenin died, it turned out that the second person in the Party, comrade Trotsky, was a traitor. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin overthrew Trotsky and banished him from the USSR.
After a couple of years it turned out that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin were also enemies and traitors. Valorous comrade Heinrich Yagoda shot them.
A little later Yezhov shot Yagoda as an enemy agent. But after a couple of years it turned out that Yezhov was not a comrade, but simply a traitor and enemy agent. And Yezhov shot Beria.
After Stalin's death, everyone realized that Beria was also a traitor. So Zhukov overthrew and shot Beria.
Soon, Khrushchev learned that Zhukov was an enemy and a conspirator. And exiled Zhukov to the Urals.
A little later, it was revealed that Stalin was an enemy, a saboteur and a traitor. And with him, and most of the Politburo. Then Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, and the Politburo with Shepilov, who joined them, were disbanded by honest party members led by Khrushchev.
Several years passed and it turned out that Khrushchev was a voluntarist, a rogue, an venturer and a traitor. Brezhnev made Khrushchev retire.
Soon Brezhnev died, and it turned out that he was a senile, a saboteur and caused the Stagnation.
Then there were two more seniles which no one remembered because they died like flies.
Young, energetic Gorbachev came to power. And it turned out that the whole Party was a party of saboteurs and enemies, but he would fix everything now.
This is where the USSR collapsed. And Gorbachev turned out to be an enemy and a traitor."
right; it also kind of screams desperation and paranoia. If you have to tell people how strong you are by show of force, maybe they're going to see through your ruse ...
One of the first steps towards what could be an eventual civil war and Putin ending up like Ceaucescu or Mussolini, if things go very badly for them in Ukraine and economically.
> accusation of the embezzlement of funds earmarked for subversive activities in Ukraine
Everyone is embezzling all the time there. It's useful to keep an eye one everyone and then selectively punish them if they do something you don't like it.
> If claims of arrest are correct, this would indicate that Putin is seriously concerned about the FSB’s role in the military campaign
Well Putin is FSB (ex-KGB) so he likely relied on his FSB buddies to set up a number of false flag operations in order to provide a cover for the invasion. Those are have been exposed and failed. Now Putin is looking more "naked" than he planned when invading and ruthlessly bombing civilians.
Some trucks headed to Kiev had riot police gear in them. FSB likely thought people in Kiev would meet them with flowers, salt and bread, and it would be only some rowdy trouble-makers which the riot police would take care of. In other words it was supposed to be a 3 day blitzkrieg followed by police work later. They were wrong.
To expand this a bit, Putin is both ex-KGB (left in 1991 to go into politics) and ex-FSB (he was the head of FSB before he was appointed Prime Minister.)
Of course and he had also surrounded himself with ex-FSB/KGB associates as well: Patrushev, Bortnikov, Naryshkin. His body guards are all FSB too, I think.
In his eyes, both FSB and the Army could do no wrong. And I think he may be realizing the "yes" men he surrounded himself from both of those agencies have been lying to him for years about the state of readiness, capabilities, and ability of those agencies.
Now will some of them try to sprinkle some Polonium-210 in his tea? At first I thought it was plausible, but now I don't know. They've been there for so long kissing each others asses killing Putin would be the end of them as well. But, somehow, I see the GRU doing it. They've been more of a wildcard in the past. At some point their children won't be able to get the diabetes or other medicine and they might start thinking thoughts like that.
The parallels right now between Hitler as he attempted the invasion of the USSR and Putin's current isolated derangement just keep on growing. The latest series of Rise of the Nazis on the BBC is incredibly interesting to watch with the current situation in mind - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09jgldz/rise-of-the-n...
Hitler's army was a lot better than Russia's, but Russia has nukes. Imagine if hitler had nukes... he was already trying to destroy germany in a blaze of glory in the final days. Putin needs a way to back down and save at least some face so he doesn't go crazy.
> Putin needs a way to back down and save at least some face so he doesn't go crazy.
I think this neglects that:
(1) Putin has painted himself into a corner from which there is no way to back down and save face, period.
(2) The most likely reason for this is that his entire regime is dysfunctional because he has already gone crazy, specifically in a way repeatedly seen in authoritarian rulers where paranoia over disloyalty results in punishing unwelcome news harshly as disloyalty, punishing welcome news that turns out to be inaccurate later harshly as disloyalty, punishing excessive visible success which leads to others achieving a personal following as disloyalty, an punishing failure as disloyalty.
You literally posted a source on the level of “trust me bro”.
It’s absolutely in no interest of Russia to do that, that’s why they let civilians out from all the cities. And they do leave, except from a city which is held by Azov, what a coincidence.
Russia isn't going to win the hearts and minds here, that battle is already lost. I'm sure killing civilians isn't what soldiers want to do, so they probably aren't doing it purposely but from Putin's POV being as generally destructive as possible, including on the civilian population, is a way to get Ukrainian leaders to agree to whatever ends the war ASAP. Since it doesn't look like military victory and occupation is that feasible now for Russia, being as brutal as possible is an alternative way to get favorable terms.
I've been seeing a pretty big wave of Nazi apologists on the left lately. It feels like now that everyone knows we've been arming Nazis in Ukraine they moved from denying it to saying Nazis weren't all that bad.
Imo, Putin is more analogous to GW Bush with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you make a claim for how Putin is worse than even Bush in this regard?
This is what I'm saying. People saying Nazis are okay as long as they're killing people I'm told to hate. I've spent lots of time in Ukraine and Ukrainian is my 3rd language. I have many friends there, but unfortunately I couldn't take my ex there to visit because she's black and it would be an issue. Their former president Yushchenko declared a famous Nazi as a national hero. It's most certainly an issue there.
This is not to mention C14 or the свобода (Svoboda) political party aside from the Azov battalion. They have an outsized influence in Ukrainian politics. This is one of the main reasons why they won't concede on NATO membership to end the war, US interests aside.
He surrounds himself with people that are too stupid to question him. This is called inverse hiring. It works great during peacetime, but falls very short when he needs competent people in wartime.
He's one of the richest people on the planet, well trained, and paranoid as hell. He's logistically one of the hardest people to kill, and he also has (rumored but probable) crazy layers of leverage, along with punitive killings arranged in the event of his murder or suspicious death.
It would be nice to see someone get rid of Putin for high-minded ideals like peace, justice, democracy, or the welfare of Russians & Ukrainians. But I'm not too optimistic on it happening that way.
I worry that anyone w/ the will & the means to assassinate Putin would likely be a power hungry would-be dictator making an aggressive play to replace him. Things could shake out better in the chaos, but they could just as likely go worse
That’s possible too, but in the short timescale it would make the crisis within Russia worse, which is enough of an objective in itself: we are not trying to turn Russia into a proper country, we are trying to 1. Force it to stop murdering Ukrainians, and 2. Prevent it from building more weapons in the future.
The french revolution started a chain of events leading to democracies across europe. For some reason, Russian tsars were able to hold on to more power than other monarchs, though they did concede some power.
By the time their revolution came, it wasn't democracy that was trendy, but communism. This was bad luck for Russia, and partially happened due to Germany helping the communists prior to the revolt. The communist leadership took things in a pretty wretched direction and Russia was stuck with it for a while. To make sure further revolutions would not happen, Stalin did his famous purge of russian leadership, which crippled them prior to world war 2.
Post soviet russia wasn't very good at democracy, the nation had been run by crooks and murderers for decades. Naturally, a soviet figure was able to take advantage of things. This was bad luck in part, but also not terribly unlikely.
It's not exactly a tendency so much as that it's really hard to get to democracy from a non-democracy, and russia's handful of chances were characterized by some crazy autocrats being at hand to take things over at the right time
Stephen Kotkin has a good talk on this. TLDR is the Russian culture has a tendency towards supporting strong autocratic rulers, especially those “in defiance of” something (capitalism, the west, etc)
Curiously one can thus be grateful for, e.g., Sci-Hub (defiance of the western copyright regime), and the wellbeing of Snowden.
I’m kidding?
I guess you might say that Russians are kind of collective anarchists. Principled— I mean fairly not based on ethnohistorical pride like say the occasional defiance of the Chinese.
Life is not cheap, only too willing to pay the price. Vodka loosens up the psychic joints..
Here, to the defiance of the soi disant curious of the orange site )
Apparently this tendency comes all the way back from the Mongols era. This lecture goes through over 800 years of Russian history (it’s in Finnish but you can turn on English subtitles): https://youtu.be/CvonRMSuFpw
Yup. A lot of people are short sighted when they think Russian history begins with the October Revolution. As you show, it is a pattern of Russia that extends well before the October Revolution. I read Gary Kasparov's Winter is Coming and as he says, the best way to understand Putin is to understand Russian history in its entirety.
The first sentence makes sense, though. On the Maslow’s pyramid, democracy is quite high compared to… “basic quality of life”, for lack of a better word. You can’t develop a proper social mechanics when you’re starving.
Russians are peace-loving democratic modern people that have a well developed civilization based on equal rights, laws, accountability, and intertwined checks and balances. They know no such thing as corruption and their leaders are justly elected representatives of the thriving Russian population, who contribute to peace and stability in the world. It's so great to be their neighbor and, generally speaking, in their sphere of influence as that alone guarantees you prosperity and safety from purges, famines, slavery in cold and remote concentration camps, war, death and destruction.
