"How do you out-will the singular authoritarian leader and/or his small group of oligarchs?"
If the Russian people are unhappy enough, regimes change from within. We can see that with some of the Russian soldiers surrendering.send me to Ukraine? OK, I'll just surrender so I don't have to fight and die for a bogus cause.
As of February 26-28, roughly 50% of the Russian population believed it to be a justified war, according to this poll (which is as independent as it gets in Russia):
I thought it was much more than 50%, had been lead to believe the majority of the Russian people supported this war. As the Russian economy tanks, mothers find out their sons died for a pointless war where civilians are getting killed, and the notion that Russia is being internationally shunned starts to sink in, this number should drop.
Hopefully that makes a difference. I do think it's smart to do everything we can to sanction Russia's rich. Those people have power. They're the ones backing Putin. If they start to feel the pinch, feel that the party is getting ruined because of Putin's mood and his thirst for power, they might do something about it.
I think a lot of Westerners are forgetting what "no free press" means. Your average Russian citizen - who does not have foreign bank accounts etc - may not even find out the details about the sanctions. Their quality of life will suffer, but their TV will feed it into resentment of the West.
In other comments, people are talking about how it's impossible for Russia to control all communication in Ukraine because there's always a way for the "resistance" to exchange information in a way the enemy cannot stop... yet, we also see comments like yours that assume Russians have no way to get information from non-state-sponsored actors, despite them being still mostly connected to the Internet (despite Ukrainian requests to remove them) and a simple VPN would give you full access to any website you may want to visit (and that a lot of international sources are still available in Russia - they just now cut off the BBC, for example, but it had been available the whole time before that).
Both are true. It's very hard to control information exchange to such a degree that determined persons cannot find a way to exchange information. But your average citizen doesn't have any reason to be determined - they consume information from mainstream media, and so long as it isn't obviously off, they aren't going to double-check every bit of it.
Thus, over time, you can gradually create a bubble, lie by lie. I remember the early 00s - freedom of press wasn't gone overnight, they went after the more popular stuff first, and then gradually it became more and more marginalized, with the last vestiges being swiped away only now. But with every independent TV channel or newspaper erased, more and more people ended up in the bubble.
>I do think it's smart to do everything we can to sanction Russia's rich. Those people have power. They're the ones backing Putin.
How? The oligarchs had a head's up regarding the start of the war and no doubt took measures to secure their wealth abroad and even get dual citizenship so the west can't touch them.
There was a TV show where one of such oligarchs came to tears for losing two mansions in Italy, apparently :D so I don't think they are very happy or had time to "fix" the issues, at least not all of them.
>There was a TV show where one of such oligarchs came to tears for losing two mansions in Italy, apparently
Well yes, sure, if we're talking about some dumb corrupt politician who blew his illicit gains frivolously on luxuries, out in the open, the second he landed on piles of cash, then yes, same how we have lottery winners who lose everything in a year and crypto speculators who also were left holding the bag, etc.
My point is that stupid and financially irresponsible people are easily parted with their money, especially if it's from illicit gains and have no knowledge how to launder it or invest it, but I can assure you that the smart money took enough timely precautions to keep their dirty wealth intact.
> If the Russian people are unhappy enough, regimes change from within.
Apart from when the US got the UK and France to kneel and kiss the ring in 1956 with Suez when hav sanctions worked? Grenada? North Korea and Iran have been under crippling sanctions for a long time. It leads to plenty of civilian suffering but there’s not much record of success in forcing governments to do what the sanctioners want.
[Edit] Also, I don't think the Russian people have the power to overthrow their rulers. Russia is quite good at repressing dissent. My guess would be that any leadership change in Russia would come about because military leadership decided it had to happen.
Sanctions got Iran to sign the nuclear deal which was a huge accomplishment (unfortunately later torpedoed by Trump for no reason, but that’s not relevant to the point).
They don’t have to topple the government to be effective.
That said, I do think there’s not enough public recognition of how hostile and damaging sanctions are to innocent normal people.
> unfortunately later torpedoed by Trump for no reason
Not just Trump, but the entire Republican Party and its voter base. And not for no reason: the reason is that it's easier to keep Iran as a public punching bag than try to deal with real and far more difficult strategic problems like North Korea, Russia, or China, all three of which seized the opportunity to pursue their strategic goals while the U.S. was distracted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran took that opportunity, too--the wars provided both the impetus and the time to pursue a nuclear program.
Eh, this isn't exactly true. The three main reasons were that the deal did not have permanent enforcement, Iran is still pursuing ballistic missile development (not covered by the deal), and they provide support to the Hezbollah terrorist group (although this is declining and technically done through a non-government group).
I'm curious, what strategic goals did North Korea, Russia, and China achieve during that time that the US should have dealt with, and what could be have done that we haven't already?
This is exactly the short-sighted mindset that torpedoed the deal. It was explicitly designed to deal with nukes not make Iran behave in general. I think the hawks want to keep the dream of regime change alive. It was a win thrown away for ideological reasons.
"It was a win thrown away for ideological reasons."
That's one opinion.
I think people on both sides are calling the others shortsighted.
For example, what enforcement is there after the 10 year period expires? They weren't forced to forfeit or destroy their Arak facility. This means they could just start using it again.
In my view, the deal could be beneficial, but could also end poorly. The deal doesn't seem to embrace a systems thinking mindset of how all the pieces fit together. The downside is that if we allow the economy to expand and for Iran to accumulate resources during a 10 year period, then reimposing the sanctions will be less impactful (we can only hope that the people would be upset enough to pressure them goverment). In theory, the deal will benefit Iran in the power dynamics, and only benefit us if they decide to follow through in the long term. So the outcome is almost completely at the discretion of Iran, and provides them guaranteed benefit, with no guarantee to the others.
In my general experience, focusing on a single issue, or component of an issue, is the way we come to short sighted solutions. This doesn't mean that we can't do things in an iterative fashion, but we need to have a plan and vision for how that policy will work long term in relation to a variety of other policies and potential events. I don't see that type of strategic thinking with this agreement, and that's even ignoring the terrorist ties.
> If the Russian people are unhappy enough, regimes change from within.
We all hope that, but it's not been effective for north korea and basically everywhere else. Waiting 70 years as for the Soviet does not seem an ideal outcome.
True, but what escalations would be preferable? Nuclear war, protracted ground war with near-peer adversaries, WW3, etc are not ideal courses of action either. Assassinations could be an option, but would likely have to come internally to have the desired affect.
Unfortunately, it seems that Putin is fairly popular in Russia.
Anecdotally, there's been an HN commenter around who claims to be Russian and who buys Putin's line that something had to be done about NATO. Apparently they are not alone:
> But Arina's mother sees it completely differently: "My mom believes everything she sees on TV," Arina says.
> "She believes that it was a necessary measure by Putin because there are weapons surrounding the country...there's a threat from the West, which is why Putin is doing this."
Sanctions may be indiscriminate, but not as indiscriminate nor as final as shelling apartment buildings. There seems to be a significant slice of the Russian population who are entirely too content with the current state of affairs, and who need to be woken up to the ungodly horror being unleashed in their name.
So long as the people with guns have their bellies full, not much will happen in Russia. Just like as much as the world wants North Korea to change and become more free, most of the people enforcing the law can’t imagine living any other way and they’re happy to maintain the status quo.
Maybe a rapid decline in quality of life will be enough to turn things around in Russia. Or maybe just enough people are so used to struggles there that nothing will change. North Koreans went through decades of wars and invasions—the people there haven’t known that life can be better, so they don’t feel a reason to revolt. People in Russia who were alive during pre-Putin era struggles most likely do really see him as lifting the country to a higher level. The possibility for Russia becoming a new NK-style state isn’t completely impossible.
The USSR collapsed over 30 years ago. There's a lot of people who were born after that, or who saw their quality of life improve after it happened. I bet you not many of them want to go back to those days.
The death rate in Russia went way up after the fall of the USSR.[1]
Democracy and a free market did not deliver a better life for the average Russian. It's important to understand this, because it's part of why Russia ended up with an autocrat.
Note that the Russian economy was still organised around a Sovjet planned economy. Just because you change the legal system doesn’t mean you have fixed the economy instantly. For example there were still monotowns, where the whole town was centred around a single factory. These towns are extremely fragile in a market economy.
> who saw their quality of life improve after it happened.
The end of the USSR is widely considered a humanitarian catastrophe because after the economy colapsed, people had no food, no medicines, no order, it was a wild west for several years (my wife was there, she tells me all about it)... where the hell did you "learn" that people's lives improved after the USSR fell??
Access to many viewpoints and sources of information does not mean much, as we see here in the U.S. The idea that we just need to shower Russia with the "right" information to get them to turn against Putin is simply a fantasy. However, it's still worth doing as it will help some.
I don't expect plain rhetoric to change the minds of Putin supporters.
Unfortunately, we have to resort to economic pain, which is quite grim even if it's not having your leg blown off and your home reduced to rubble: businesses ruined, working class populations impoverished, massive uncertainty...
It's also not guaranteed to work, as aggressors and oppressors are adept at wallowing in self-pity and inventing victimization narratives.
What's changed for me is that I've come to believe that the Russian population is a bit more at fault here for buying Putin's bullshit.
Whatever the truth of that ('she believes it was a necessary measure ...'), as someone remarked "Putin has done more for European Defence in three days than anyone's done in 30 years". The reaction of the European countries has been astounding.
Personally, I don't understand this point of view.
Most despotic leaders are not well liked by the people. There are so few examples of the people rising up to depose a despot. I actually can't even think of one that would apply in this situation.
He is probably insulated with layers of old Soviet/KGB true believers/cronies.
Somehow the common person is going to penetrate that? I just don't see it.
We thought that about Belarus, and Syria. All that happens is the regime becomes as brutal and oppressive as necessary to stay in power. The USSR broke up because it was held together by an ideology and political structure which fragmented. Putin doesn’t have or need an ideology, any more than Assad or Lukashenko do.
i've seen this sentiment echoed lately and it seems patently absurd, US presence in iraq and afghanistan was massively unpopular by the middle of the bush administration; it took another 14 years for us to leave.
it seems like foreign policy is still trapped within the fallacies of Giulio Douhet and Curtis Lemay, simply replacing firebombing with starvation.
not to mention that the economic devastation and looting of the 90s was how we ended up with Putin today.
If the Russian people are unhappy enough, regimes change from within. We can see that with some of the Russian soldiers surrendering.send me to Ukraine? OK, I'll just surrender so I don't have to fight and die for a bogus cause.