Has Vladimir Putin gone totally Rogue ? (1)


ref(1) Yahoo News 2/27/2022 3:15pm....... AZtime

Listen carefully to what Rubio said about him. Something is... different. Clearly so.

To understand Putin, you need to understand how he got his job. The KGB was estimated to have almost half a million direct employees at its peak, about 22 times the size of the current CIA. The number of informers and other indirect employees is unknown, but has to have been in the many millions. This isn't even accounting for the other Soviet intelligence agencies, NKVD, GRU, etc, nor the satellite operations in puppet countries. The vast majority of those people became unemployed when the USSR dissolved.

So let's think for a moment. What happens when you unemploy hundreds of thousands of people who all know where the bodies are buried and all have connections everyplace in the former Eastern Bloc? Do you get unemployed spies?

Hardly. What you get is fully employed gangsters. That's the real Putin, head of a cleptocracy, basically the Godfather on info-steroids. HOWEVER (capital but), he also has the same problem as any Godfather. The job depends on respect, in Putin's case the respect and loyalty of the fellow cleptocrats beneath him. If you've seen any gangster movie, you know what will happen to him if the respect is lost, or if those subordinates think he has lost his edge. The result won't be retirement to a comfy dacha. While it's true that we'll only get a replacement gangster, we can hope for one who is less fixated and more susceptible to reason.

If you know anything about Russia, then you know this: Keeping order with poison is one of their oldest traditions. Right now, I think I'll settle for that.

Wow , I'm just glad that I have a comfy dacha ( when yahoo search dacha "dacha" 'beer garden' comes up )

................................................................NOT FUNNY macgiver !!!

Дача - В России и русскоязычных районах второе место жительства, особенно летом.

My little Angel on my right shoulder , who just scolded me .....DOES'T KNOW RUSHSKY !!!!!

Cause Natasha and Boris Badd-enough fled the U.S. , ran from Moose & Squirrel . can't help me.

Please translate for me ??

.........................................LOOKS LIKE GREEK TO ME

Try Google Translate.

Now your REALLY scaring me.....................wheres Marvin the "double defecating - triple agent " ???

p.s...................meant defecting ?? ya !

Marvin speaks only English, Martian, Venusian, and some pidgin Jovian. Он не говорит по-Pусски.

BUT...........................who's side is he REALLY on , eh ??????

Putin's ...or Ukraine ? ....and whata bout the Domnb-as region , ? huh?

p.s. "Try'in to get that right "

Well, since 'ol Vlad is threatening Earth-shattering kabooms, I'd say Marvin is probably on his side. But if he's anyplace near Donbas, I expect he'd be incognito.

That place is "Russians wanting to be Russia ? " , or like KIEV (Kee-ev )in my highschool history books was USSR (all russian) , but gone 'over' and now Kyiv , now pronounced Keev ,is pronounced differently "for EFFECT" ! ?

And I'm not quite 2 or three hundred years old , these history books I'm talk'in

Look, the real problem is that State Departments everywhere (not just ours) have a ridiculous knee-jerk reaction about altering "established" international borders. I agreed with very little that Bill Clinton did while in office, but he deserved a medal for his solution to Yugoslavia, albeit several years too late to preserve the beauty of places like Sarajevo. In the end he recognized that Yugoslavia had basically been assembled by British autocrats throwing darts at a map, and that it was only held together after WWII by Tito's strength as a dictator. It was untenable as a single country. So Bill brought in the UN, including Russia so Vlad could look good to the Serbs and his own countrymen, and held an election that let the people decide which piece of real estate they wanted to be part of. The Serbs got their patch, the Croats got theirs, and the Muslims got theirs. The area still has issues, but not like the civil war that Clinton ended by disposing with the notion of "established" borders. By and large, those people all have their own real estate and they're happy. Game over. Imagine for a moment what we would have today if W or Obama had been canny enough to employ the same solution in Iraq, a country that was similarly assembled by dart-throwing Brits. There would be a Kurdistan in the north and a Sunnistan in the west, both our allies, and both acting as buffers between Syria and all that Iranian mischief. The Shiistan in the east might well be part of Iran, but the Mideast and the world would nevertheless be a vastly safer place.

With that background, understand that Nikita Kruschev similarly assembled modern Ukraine with darts, and complicated it further by encouraging ethnic Russians to emigrate into -- you guessed it -- Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea. Like it or not, those areas are ethnically Russian and have been for decades. If you allowed a vote, they would undoubtedly vote to become part of Russia. The northeast of Ukraine is largely ethnic Poles and might well decide to become part of Poland. The rest of the country is very West-leaning and would vote for the status quo and their own liberty. Neither Obama nor Trump were clever enough to follow Wild Bill's good example, and now it's more than a little late. The Deep State is at its worst in the State Department, which is called "Foggy Bottom" by the rest of the government for good cause. Having only half a brain when it comes to borders is only one of many reasons, but IMO it's the worst one.

VStar , as usual , very well said , interesting summation of history .

Just got out of Viet Nam , yesterday got out of Afganistan , all the past sribblings on maps , NATO,Brits, having at it , TIMES HAVE CHANGED 2022 , ya ?

Who tinks US gotta " Have at this SH11TT again ??? "

SURVEY SAYS........?......................CAN'T HEEEEEEEAR YOOOOOOOOOOU !!!!!!!!

Nope, but we do, umm... gotta ship a lot of sh1tt. A great part of the reason the Ukrainians are succeeding in holding the Russians off is that our sh1tt works and the Russki sh1tt doesn't. Saadam found that out the hard way too, twice. Even if we can't get stuff directly into Kyiv, getting stuff into the country at all will eventually result in the Russian encirclement taking fire from two sides. If their tanks are getting Javelined and they can't substitute choppers because of a hail of Stingers, fixed wing stuff and missiles won't save them. Their mobility will be gone. Very like what befell the German general Paulus at Stalingrad. You'd think ol' Vlad would know about that...

I might add, Vlad's whole game plan seems to be making the same mistake as Hitler made in splitting Paulus off to the south instead of keeping a concentrated German fist rolling toward Moscow. The Russian attack is suffering from its own complexity and diffusion. Had Vlad amassed all his forces in Belarus and smashed in with a 1940-like blitzkrieg, his generals would probably be sipping cognac in downtown Kyiv right now. I can't believe the plan was even based on real generalship, unless perhaps Vlad convinced his whole general staff that the Ukrainians would roll over dead. Now the Russians are paying the price of a failed attack with spread-out forces.

Here we go, looks like 'ol Vlad is about to repeat a different mistake. Overnight they started an indiscriminate shelling of Kharkiv with artillery and multiple-launch rockets, looking like they're trying to level a path for their armor. Montgomery tried that in 1944 when he couldn't take Caen after D-Day, he called in B-17's to level the place. Trouble was, all he accomplished was creating a warren of hiding places for German snipers who ended up panzerfausting his tanks and devastating his infantry. I'd say the whole Russian military is lapsing into a "try anything but try something" mode. That's a very bad place for a general to be, and needless to say, even worse for a footsoldier.

Very informative historical background , thank you VStar for filling in these blanks , you seem to be "On it "

macgiver wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 28, 2022 1:15 pm

Very informative historical background , thank you VStar for filling in these blanks , you seem to be "On it "

You're most welcome. Frankly, I feel like I'm just doing what somebody desperately needs to do. My Dad was in the Army in 1951~52, guess what f#%ked up little war that was. My Mom's brother was aboard the USS Wisconsin at the same time, shelling North Korean railroad trains and coastal transport. My Dad's father built heavy cruisers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, two of which still adorn the ocean bottom off Guadalcanal. His wife, my grandmother, built impeller assemblies at Curtiss-Wright, for the B-29's that eventually bombed Japan into submission. My mother's second husband was on Guadalcanal, bless his soul. He suffered horrendous kidney problems till the end of his life, token of the malaria that was rampant there. Guilt is seldom the only thing survivors carry around.

So I've been a student of WWII and Korea, and war in general, just about my whole life. You can't really understand any war without also delving into the geopolitics, personalities, and circumstances that made it happen. In the words of the best history teacher I ever had, "History is people. To truly understand it, live in their shoes for a moment and see how the world looks. It will often make you blink."

To watch Vladimir Putin repeating the mistakes of Hitler and Napoleon is joyful. To watch our government repeating the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson and Neville Chamberlain was painful, but maybe, just maybe, Putin's horrendous behavior has shaken us free of it. The Ukrainians have the advantage of the video age, unlike the poor Czechs and Poles in 1939. Look at those images, I ask you. Not merely the heroic people, but the burned out Russian tanks and crashed Russian aircraft littering those scenes. Our stuff did that, our stuff works. Call your congressman, your senators, make sure those poor bastards get more of it, and quickly. Because the fact is, Russians aren't 10 feet tall, and poor bastards or not, those brave people can win.

I appreciate your family involvement in that past time where the ordinary John Q. Public & Jane Q. Public ALL contributed , voluntarily and humble to protect this Great U.S.A.

We thank them and the rest like them for their sacrifices

macgiver wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 28, 2022 4:49 pm

I appreciate your family involvement in that past time where the ordinary John Q. Public & Jane Q. Public ALL contributed , voluntarily and humble to protect this Great U.S.A.

Question of the day, ask yourself: What's different now?

macgiver wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 28, 2022 4:49 pm

We thank them and the rest like them for their sacrifices

Amen.

Keep in mind, barring the possibility of poison, we've just seen the start of Cold War II. That's the reality. Like it or not, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Yup .
I got open heart surgery wed , 90th/Shea , so I'll be " down for servicing " ,an intake & exhaust valve(Mitral/Aortic) got best surgeon in AZZ , ...........good time to sign -off VStar , thanks.

You're very welcome, and good luck with the surgery! Get well quick, we'll miss you!