Author Topic: Russian and Chinese Leaders (Putin, Xi, Oligarchs, etc) other countries too  (Read 43838 times)


G M

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Some Russian Oligarchs are more equal than others
« Reply #51 on: May 02, 2022, 04:38:46 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Russian Leaders (Putin, Medvedev, Oligarchs, etc)
« Reply #52 on: May 02, 2022, 05:41:14 PM »
Please post in the Hunter thread as well.

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Nina Khrushcheva: How Putin Captured the Russian State
« Reply #53 on: May 13, 2022, 04:14:56 AM »
The Coup in the Kremlin
How Putin and the Security Services Captured the Russian State
By Nina Khrushcheva
May 10, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a military parade in Moscow, May 2021
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a military parade in Moscow, May 2021
Mikhail Metzel / Sputnik Photo Agency


https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-05-10/coup-kremlin

On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near Moscow’s Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the holiday honoring the Russian security services. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin quipped.

His former colleagues chuckled. But the joke was on Russia.

Putin became interim president less than two weeks later. From the start of his rule, he has worked to strengthen the state to counteract the chaos of post-Soviet capitalism and unsteady democratization. To achieve that end, he saw it necessary to elevate the country’s security services and put former security officials in charge of critical government organs.


In recent years, however, Putin’s approach has changed. More and more, bureaucracy has displaced the high-profile personalities that previously dominated. And as the Russian president has come to rely on these bureaucratic institutions to further his consolidation of control, their power has grown relative to other organs of the state. But it was not until February, when Putin gave the orders first to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and then, a few days later, to send Russian troops into Ukraine, that the complete takeover by the new security apparatus became apparent.

In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed blindsided by Putin’s determination to invade, and some prominent officials even seemed to question the wisdom of the decision, however timidly. But in the weeks since, government and society alike have lined up behind the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power—even if circumscribed—have found themselves hostages of institutions whose single-minded purpose is security and control. What has happened is, in effect, an FSB-on-FSB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now a faceless security bureaucracy has become the state, with Putin sitting on top.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE CHEKISTS

The modern FSB traces its beginnings to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, also known as the Cheka, hunted down enemies of the new Soviet state under the fierce leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its subsequent iterations, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB), evolved under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s rule and were led most notoriously by Genrikh Yagoda in the 1930s and Lavrenty Beria in the 1940s and 1950s. The KGB became the Soviet Union’s primary security agency in 1954 under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor. Over the following decade, Khrushchev expanded the Communist Party’s oversight of the Soviet state’s institutions of control, limiting their influence. But after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Yuri Andropov, the longtime head of the KGB, reclaimed the organization’s lost authority, bringing the security service to the height of its power in the 1970s.

Andropov went on to lead the Soviet Union as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984. He was merciless in imposing ideological control. Any “diversion”—such as covert disagreement with Soviet politics—was grounds for prosecution. Some dissenters were imprisoned or placed in psychiatric wards for “retraining,” while others were forced to emigrate. Living in Moscow at the time, I remember police raids to catch indolent citizens and plain-clothes KGB officers—operating like Orwellian “thought police”—surreptitiously roaming city streets, detaining people suspected of skipping work or having too much leisure time. It was an atmosphere of total control, with Andropov’s KGB fully in charge.

By the late 1980s, reforms introduced by Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the grip of the security forces. Perestroika was supposed to renew the Soviet Union—some scholars even allege Andropov had a hand in the program—but it ended up threatening the survival of the regime. The last Soviet leader turned against his KGB masters, exposing the crimes of Stalinism and proceeding with an opening to the West. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe left Moscow’s sphere of influence, the KGB turned on Gorbachev, two years later launching a failed coup that hastened the Soviet collapse.

The security apparatus was humiliated—but it was not disbanded. Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, considered communism, not the KGB, to be the greater evil. He thought that simply changing the name of the KGB to the FSB would change the organization, too, allowing it to become more benevolent and less controlling. This was wishful thinking. Russia’s security services trace their origins all the way back to Ivan the Terrible’s brutal bodyguard corps, the oprichniki, in the sixteenth century and Peter the Great’s Secret Chancellery in the eighteenth century. Yeltsin’s attempt at reform could not permanently suppress a system with such deep historical roots any more than Khrushchev’s could four decades earlier.

Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now the security bureaucracy has become the state.

In fact, KGB officers were relatively well equipped to endure the collapse of communism and the transition to capitalism. To the security services, the Soviet-era call for a classless society of proletarians had always been merely a slogan; ideology was a tool for controlling the public and strengthening the hand of the state. Former members applied that pragmatic approach as they rose to elite positions in post-Soviet Russia. As Leonid Shebarshin, a former high-level KGB operative, has explained, it was only natural that those who trained under Andropov for a secret war against external and internal enemies—NATO, the CIA, dissidents, and political opposition—should become the new Russian bourgeoisie. They could handle irregular working hours, succeed in hostile environments, and use interrogation and manipulation tactics when called for. They squeezed every last drop of labor out of their employees and subordinates.

One of their number, Putin, was himself lauded as a pragmatist by Western diplomats after he rose from obscurity to become president of Russia in 2000. Even then, he made no secret of his intention to establish Andropov-style absolute authority, quickly moving to limit the power of the capitalist barons who had flourished in the 1990s under Yeltsin’s frenzied presidency. In Putin’s mind, an independent oligarchy in control of strategic industries, such as oil and gas, threatened the stability of the state. He ensured that business decisions relevant to the national interest were made instead by a handful of trusted people—the so-called siloviki, or affiliates of the state’s military and security agencies. These individuals effectively became managers or guardians of state-controlled assets. Many were from Putin’s native Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) and most had served alongside him in the KGB. On the corporate side, their ranks include Igor Sechin (Rosneft), Sergey Chemezov (Rostec), and Alexey Miller (Gazprom), while matters of state protection are handled by Nikolai Patrushev (secretary of the Security Council), Alexander Bortnikov (director of the FSB), Sergei Naryshkin (director of the Foreign Intelligence Service), and Alexander Bastrykin (head of the Investigative Committee), among others.

Putin has been convinced that strengthening the state’s “extraordinary organs” would prevent upheaval of the kind that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Putting former KGB operatives in charge seemed to offer some economic and political stability. In an effort to maintain that stability, Putin acted in 2020 to extend his presidency, proposing constitutional amendments to circumvent the term limits that would remove him from office in 2024.

Since their ratification, the constitutional changes have given the state broad latitude to address problems ranging from COVID-19 to mass protests in Belarus to Russian opposition lawyer Alexei Navalny’s return to Moscow. As was the case in the Andropov era, all matters are now run through central regulatory bodies—federal organizations that oversee everything from taxation to science (the word nadzor, meaning “supervision,” in many of their Russian names makes them easy to recognize). Criminal prosecutions are an increasingly common tactic used against Russian citizens who complain about abuses of power, request better services, or express support for Navalny, who himself was convicted based on false accusations of fraud and other supposed crimes. A punitive apparatus of control has tightened its grip, led by the technocratic Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, a former tax official, and an assortment of midlevel managers inside the regime bureaucracy.

THE FSB COUP
Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and subsequently to launch a “special military operation” to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, followed a similar pattern of punishment for political deviation: he sought to penalize an entire country for what he deemed its “anti-Russian” choice to align with the West. But within Russia, the events leading up to and following the invasion also marked the completion of a political shift that has been years in the making. They exposed the waning power of the siloviki who dominated the early Putin era—and their replacement by a faceless security-and-control bureaucracy.

On February 21, during a nationally broadcast Security Council session, the president’s closest confidants seemed completely in the dark as to what the Donetsk and Luhansk recognition would entail. Naryshkin, of the Foreign Intelligence Service, stumbled over his words as Putin demanded an affirmation of support for the decision. By the end of this exchange, Naryshkin appeared to be trembling with fear. Even Patrushev, a hardcore conservative Chekist, wanted to inform the United States of Russia’s plans to send troops to Ukraine—a suggestion that went unanswered.

For a decision as consequential as the invasion of a neighboring country, it is remarkable how many organs of the state were out of the loop. Economic institutions were caught by surprise—when Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Russian central bank, tried to resign in early March, she was told to just buckle up and deal with the economic fallout. The military didn’t seem to be aware of the entire plan either, and spent months moving tens of thousands of troops around the border without knowing whether they would be asked to attack.


Putin’s clandestine operation was even hidden from other clandestine operatives. Leaders of the FSB department responsible for providing the Kremlin with intelligence about Ukraine’s political situation, for instance, didn’t fully believe that an invasion would happen. Many analysts had confidently argued it would be against Russia’s national interests. Comfortable in the assumption that a large-scale attack was off the table, officials kept feeding Putin the story he wanted to hear: Ukrainians were Slavic brothers ready to be liberated from Nazi-collaborating, Western-controlled stooges in Kyiv. A source in the Kremlin told me that many officials now envision a disaster akin to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which ended in a disgraceful withdrawal and helped precipitate the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But in a government that has become increasingly technocratic, institutionalized, and impersonal, such opinions are no longer permissible.

As the conflict continues into its third month and evidence of war crimes mounts, most officials and politicians continue to back Putin. Big business is largely silent. Economic elites, cut off from the West, have rallied around the flag. Even though some may be grumbling in private, very few are vocal in public. Rare exceptions include the billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska, who has repeatedly called for peace; the former Putin associate Anatoly Chubais, known for leading Russia’s privatization under Yeltsin, who has fled to Turkey; the oligarch and former Chelsea soccer club owner, Roman Abramovich, who has tried to facilitate a negotiated settlement; and the entrepreneur Oleg Tinkov, who was forced to sell his shares in his hugely successful online bank, Tinkoff, for kopeks after speaking out against the “operation.”

Putin has never made a secret of his intention to establish absolute authority.

The rest of Russia’s 145 million citizens—except for those tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands who have fled abroad—are similarly falling in line. Having lost access to foreign flights, brands, and payment systems, most are forced to accept that their lives are tethered to the Kremlin. In a sharp departure from the early days of the Ukrainian operation, when public shock was palpable and people took to the streets expressing antiwar sentiment, polling shows that around 80 percent now support the war. The actual number is likely lower—when the state exercises total control, people give the answers that the regime wants. Still, my own conversations with relatives and friends across Russia confirm that speaking against the war is increasingly unpopular. An acquaintance in the resort town of Kislovodsk in the Northern Caucasus, for instance, insisted that Putin needs to complete “the mission of ‘de-Nazification,’ take care of the Donbas, and show Americans not to mess with Russia.”

As the shock wears off, fear has taken its place. In a televised address in mid-March, Putin insisted that Western countries “will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” implying that all opponents of his “operation” are the unpatriotic enemies. The government’s security branches had previously announced a new law: spreading “fake information,” or any narrative that contradicts the Ministry of Defense’s official story, is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Independent media outlets were blocked or disbanded, including the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, liberal radio Ekho Moskvy, and Dozhd TV, all of which regularly criticized the government until two months ago. The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and other foreign media packed up and left the country. Since the end of February, more than 16,000 people have been detained, including 400 teenagers. People have been arrested for just being near a protest. For one Muscovite, merely showing up at Red Square holding a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace was enough to warrant detention.

In this atmosphere of complete repression, political figures who once seemed to offer alternative ideas now echo Putin’s uncompromising words. Former President Dmitry Medvedev has insisted that criticism of the operation amounts to treason. Even Naryshkin, a skeptic in February, has found his war footing and now faithfully parrots the government line. People no longer speak with their own voices; the shadow of Putinist Chekism now covers the entire country.

THE NEW SECURITY STATE

The journalist and writer Masha Gessen once dubbed Putin “the man without a face.” Today, however, his is the only face, sitting atop an anonymous security bureaucracy that does his bidding. Another coup, either in the Kremlin corridors or on the streets of Moscow, is not likely. The only group that could conceivably unseat the president is the FSB, which is still technically run by nationalist siloviki who understand that some foreign policy flexibility is necessary for internal development. But such officials are no longer the FSB’s future. The indistinct body of security technocrats now in charge is obsessed with total control, no matter the national or international consequences.

The last time the Kremlin built such an all-controlling state, under Andropov’s leadership in the early 1980s, it unraveled when the security forces relaxed their grip and allowed reform. Putin knows that story well and is unlikely to risk the same outcome. And even without him, the system he built would remain in place, sustained by the new security cohort—unless a 1980s Afghanistan-style debacle in Ukraine destroys it all. With this bureaucracy holding tight to power, Moscow’s foreign adventurism might abate. But as long as the structure holds steady, Russia will remain oppressed, isolated, and unfree.

ccp

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was Putin poisoned with polonium ?
« Reply #54 on: May 14, 2022, 01:15:01 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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vlad assassinatioin?
« Reply #58 on: May 15, 2022, 07:54:02 AM »
vlad with blood cancer

perhaps a polonium hit

karma as they say





Crafty_Dog

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Fiona Hill: How did Putin get it so wrong?
« Reply #63 on: May 27, 2022, 04:24:08 PM »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9skW4Wvtxo

IIRC Fiona Hill was part of the Deep State cabal sabotaging President Trump's Ukraine policy.


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The Assassination of Daria Dugina
« Reply #67 on: August 23, 2022, 12:03:46 PM »
Bringing this over from the DBMA Assn forum:

============================
Might be too political for the general forum, but the situation has interested me because it's possibly the first time we've seen the daughter of an E-Celebrity/Political speaker killed. By a female assassin at that, coming through a war zone, being accepted in very close.

Information known so far:
>Natalya Vovk, a Ukrainian national / Member of AZOV Batallion (not sure on this one)
>Got Novorussian license plates and drove into Moscow out of Ukraine. In Moscow she used tags from Kazakstan. While leaving the city she used Ukranian tags and left into Estonia.
>She lived in the condominium that Daria lived in and brought her own daughter with her.
>She apparently lived there for some time
>Planted the bomb in Daria's car, NOT Dugins (which was assumed)
>This was an assassination aimed directly at his daughter
>Assassin tried to sell the car when in Ukraine under her daughters name
>Security camera in area had been disabled for 2 weeks

G M

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Re: The Assassination of Daria Dugina
« Reply #68 on: August 23, 2022, 12:07:15 PM »
This suggests someone with formal training.


Bringing this over from the DBMA Assn forum:

============================
Might be too political for the general forum, but the situation has interested me because it's possibly the first time we've seen the daughter of an E-Celebrity/Political speaker killed. By a female assassin at that, coming through a war zone, being accepted in very close.

Information known so far:
>Natalya Vovk, a Ukrainian national / Member of AZOV Batallion (not sure on this one)
>Got Novorussian license plates and drove into Moscow out of Ukraine. In Moscow she used tags from Kazakstan. While leaving the city she used Ukranian tags and left into Estonia.
>She lived in the condominium that Daria lived in and brought her own daughter with her.
>She apparently lived there for some time
>Planted the bomb in Daria's car, NOT Dugins (which was assumed)
>This was an assassination aimed directly at his daughter
>Assassin tried to sell the car when in Ukraine under her daughters name
>Security camera in area had been disabled for 2 weeks

Crafty_Dog

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WT: More on the Dugina hit
« Reply #69 on: August 23, 2022, 12:12:35 PM »
Killing of Putin supporter fuels fury; Ukraine salutes almost 9,000 ‘heroes’

BY MIKE GLENN THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded one of Russia’s highest decorations to a woman who was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow late Saturday that may have been intended for her father, an ultranationalist who has sometimes been called “Putin’s brain.”

On Monday, Mr. Putin harshly condemned the attack that killed 29-yearold Daria Dugina, a journalist and political scientist who was known as a strong backer of the Kremlin in her own right. In a statement published on the Kremlin’s website, Mr. Putin called the car bombing “a despicable, cruel crime” that ended the life of a “bright, talented person with a real Russian heart.”

“She honestly served the people [and] the Fatherland,” Mr. Putin said. “She proved by deed what it means to be a patriot of Russia.”

The gesture did nothing to quell questions in Moscow and Kyiv over who masterminded the attack, who was the target and how it will affect a war that will mark its grim six-month anniversary on Wednesday.

Like her father, hard-line ideologue Alexander Dugin, Ms. Dugina was an outspoken defender of Russian culture and power and supported Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Kyiv’s top Army general, disclosed Monday during a forum with military veterans that almost 9,000 “Ukrainian heroes” have been killed so far, according to Ukraine’s Interfax news agency.

Russian losses are estimated to be far higher, but it was the first update

on the cost of the war for Ukraine in months for the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Russian investigators said Ms. Dugina died when a bomb hidden in her Toyota Land Cruiser detonated on a highway outside Moscow. The explosive device was planted under the vehicle’s floorboard on the driver’s side, according to the state-owned Tass news agency.

Less than a full day after the bombing attack, Russian intelligence officials pointed the finger of responsibility at Ukraine. They said the culprit was a Ukrainian woman named Natalya Vovk who fled to Estonia after the assassination.

“One theory is that she could have planted an explosive device in Dugina’s car with the help of [her] child,” a Russian law enforcement source told Tass.

The Russian security service, the FSB, said in a statement that Ms. Vovk and her 12-year-old daughter were attending the “Tradition” literary and musical festival, where Ms. Dugina was an “honored guest.” Reports say her father, Mr. Dugin, was supposed to have been driving the Toyota that night but changed his mind at the last minute.

The FSB, the successor agency of the Soviet-era KGB, said Ms. Vovk, 43, and her daughter fled to Estonia shortly after the car bombing. Russian officials said Ms. Vovk was working for the Ukrainian “special services” and entered Russia in a car with license plates issued by the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, set up by the Kremlin in far eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Dugin also blamed Kyiv for his daughter’s death and used the moment to encourage Russian soldiers to continue their fight in Ukraine. “Our hearts yearn for more than just revenge or retribution. It’s too small — not in Russian,” he said in a statement published on the pro-Kremlin network Tsargrad TV. “My daughter laid her maiden life on her altar, so win, please! Let it inspire the sons of our Fatherland to the feat even now.”

Ukrainian officials denied any role in the car bombing and were quick to ridicule Moscow’s theory.

“I understand that hallucinogens of various genesis lead to a loss of connection with reality, but the representatives of Russia should understand: the world sees the war live and with it, your crimes,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelenskyy, said in a Twitter post. “Attempts to blame Ukraine for the terrorist attacks … or the car explosion in the Moscow suburbs have no chance.”

Daria Dugina and her father were leading figures within Russia’s ultranationalist community, promoting the concept of “Novorossiya” or “New Russia.” It sought to position Russia as a defender of traditional values and the natural sovereign over any Russian-speaking country or population. Each had been targeted for economic sanctions by the U.S. and British governments for their roles in promoting their hard-line views and attacking the West.

There are several possible explanations for the fatal car bombing. It could have been the result of an internal power struggle within the Kremlin or a strike from an unknown terrorist group.

Matthew Schmidt, a foreign affairs analyst and Russia expert at the University of New Haven, said Ukraine is the least likely culprit because Mr. Dugin and his daughter were merely propagandists.

“The problem with the Ukraine thesis is that they risk far more than they gain. They risk Western support,” he said in an interview with The Washington Times. “Neither of the Dugins have ever killed anybody or ordered anybody to be killed.”

Alexander Dugin may not have been a front-line soldier in the invasion of Ukraine, but he has pushed for Russia’s annexation of its smaller neighbor for decades. His book “The Foundations for Geopolitics” is required reading at Russian military academies and argues that “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning,” according to the Financial Times newspaper.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of Russia’s parliament called the State Duma who lives in Kyiv and is bitterly critical of Mr. Putin, said the National Republican Army — a mix of Russian activists, military personnel and politicians — claimed responsibility for the car bombing.

The group called Mr. Putin a “usurper of power and a war criminal” who has violated the Russian Constitution, unleashed a war among Slavic peoples and sent Russian soldiers to a “certain and senseless death.”

“We will overcome and destroy Putin,” the group said in a manifesto published by Ukraine’s Interfax news agency. “We declare all Russian government officials and regional administration officials to be accomplices to the usurper. We will kill every one of them who fails to resign.”

At this point, it’s impossible to know definitively who killed Ms. Dugina, Mr. Schmidt said. In addition to discounting Ukraine as the perpetrator, he doubts Moscow’s powerful oligarchs had a role to play in her death because they share Mr. Putin’s vision of a “Greater Russia.”

“And as long as Putin controls the security services, everybody knows that he’s capable of killing people and he’s done it,” the professor said.

Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: More on Dugina
« Reply #70 on: August 23, 2022, 01:14:43 PM »
second post

Russia, Ukraine: Daughter of Ultranationalist Killed in Car Bombing
3 MIN READAug 22, 2022 | 20:28 GMT





What Happened: Daria Dugina, the daughter of one of Russia's most prominent ultranationalist ideologues, Alexander Dugin, was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow, The Moscow Times reported Aug. 22. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) accused "Ukrainian special services" of the attack, which Ukrainian authorities dismissed, and a former Russian parliamentarian said an underground partisan group opposed to Putin's regime called the National Republican Army had claimed responsibility for the attack.

Why It Matters: Ukraine derives little evident benefit from the killing of Dugina or her father, who are relatively obscure in Ukraine, so it is doubtful that Kyiv targeted them. But the killing, no matter who is really responsible, reflects poorly on Russian security services, who either failed to stop both the killing and the alleged perpetrator's escape to Estonia, or, alternatively, deliberately allowed both in order to induce a certain political effect. Either way, the killing has emboldened Russian nationalists calling for an escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, and several notable Russian propagandists have called for mass strikes on Kyiv. These demands will challenge the Kremlin to live up to its rhetoric regarding the accomplishment of its ambitious war goals of regime change and the "demilitarization" of Ukraine. Despite being used to whip up patriotic fervor in Russia, the attack is unlikely to push a significant number of Russians to volunteer to fight.

Background: Ukrainian authorities said the killing is indicative of infighting between influence groups in Russia and is likely a false flag conducted by Russia's own security services intended to increase anti-Ukrainian sentiment ahead of the show trials of Ukrainian soldiers. Dugina was a far-right Russian journalist and political activist whose views were in line with her father's. In a statement expressing his condolences, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Dugina "proved by deed what it means to be a patriot of Russia" and posthumously awarded her the "Order of Courage." In a statement, Dugin said Russians "yearn for more than just revenge or retribution" and that they wanted only "victory," which, based on his previous statements, would likely involve the capture of Kyiv and most of Ukraine.

================================


https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-fsb-identifies-alleged-dugina-assassin?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=870


================================



« Last Edit: August 23, 2022, 01:23:26 PM by Crafty_Dog »


Crafty_Dog

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Dugin's daughter
« Reply #72 on: August 30, 2022, 12:52:03 AM »
Haven't watched this, but here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Zk7K9Un2U

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Valerick

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Case Study: The Assassination of Daria Dugina
« Reply #74 on: September 01, 2022, 12:19:13 PM »
Woof! Good to go at last.

Posting this here for the interested. A breakdown of how the daughter of a very popular philosopher/e-celebrity in Russia was assassinated by a female w/ her child.:

>A suspected female agent, Natalia Vovk, a supposed member of Azov (a volunteer militia that has been fighting in Donbass for the last 8 or so years), entered Russia via multiple side roads using multiple plates from different nations.
>Once inside, she secured lodging in the condominium that Daria lived in
>She lived there for some time with her daughter
>The security cameras were disabled for over a week (I assume to test if they would have a rapid response).
>During this time an unknown part planted a bomb into Daria's vehicle.
>During a visit with her father, the bomb was detonated and Daria was killed with her Father driving behind her, he forced to see the entire scene
>The supposed assassin fled with Ukrainian plates into Estonia with her daughter.
>She afterwords attempted to sell her car prior to being found/leaked
>Current whereabouts unknown.

Just an idea, if a security camera breaks around a high value person that seems to be a VERY BIG CLUE that in a week or so, someone's coming to kill them. Epstein/Daria and many others I suspect. Gut feeling: Just the spotter/PI. Someone else disconnected the cameras and planted the bomb. She was the surveillance.

Crafty_Dog

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FA on Xi:
« Reply #75 on: September 09, 2022, 02:22:40 AM »
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-china-weakness-hubris-paranoia-threaten-future?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=The%20Weakness%20of%20Xi%20Jinping&utm_content=20220909&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017

The Weakness of Xi Jinping
How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future
By Cai Xia
September/October 2022

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-china-weakness-hubris-paranoia-threaten-future
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Not long ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping was riding high. He had consolidated power within the Chinese Communist Party. He had elevated himself to the same official status as the CCP’s iconic leader, Mao Zedong, and done away with presidential term limits, freeing him to lead China for the rest of his life. At home, he boasted of having made huge strides in reducing poverty; abroad, he claimed to be raising his country’s international prestige to new heights. For many Chinese, Xi’s strongman tactics were the acceptable price of national revival.


Outwardly, Xi still projects confidence. In a speech in January 2021, he declared China “invincible.” But behind the scenes, his power is being questioned as never before. By discarding China’s long tradition of collective rule and creating a cult of personality reminiscent of the one that surrounded Mao, Xi has rankled party insiders. A series of policy missteps, meanwhile, have disappointed even supporters. Xi’s reversal of economic reforms and his inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic have shattered his image as a hero of everyday people. In the shadows, resentment among CCP elites is rising.

I have long had a front-row seat to the CCP’s court intrigue. For 15 years, I was a professor in the Central Party School, where I helped train thousands of high-ranking CCP cadres who staff China’s bureaucracy. During my tenure at the school, I advised the CCP’s top leadership on building the party, and I continued to do so after retiring in 2012. In 2020, after I criticized Xi, I was expelled from the party, stripped of my retirement benefits, and warned that my safety was in danger. I now live in exile in the United States, but I stay in touch with many of my contacts in China.

At the CCP’s 20th National Party Congress this fall, Xi expects that he will be given a third five-year term. And even if the growing irritation among some party elites means that his bid will not go entirely uncontested, he will probably succeed. But that success will bring more turbulence down the road. Emboldened by the unprecedented additional term, Xi will likely tighten his grip even further domestically and raise his ambitions internationally. As Xi’s rule becomes more extreme, the infighting and resentment he has already triggered will only grow stronger. The competition between various factions within the party will get more intense, complicated, and brutal than ever before.

At that point, China may experience a vicious cycle in which Xi reacts to the perceived sense of threat by taking ever bolder actions that generate even more pushback. Trapped in an echo chamber and desperately seeking redemption, he may even do something catastrophically ill advised, such as attack Taiwan. Xi may well ruin something China has earned over the course of four decades: a reputation for steady, competent leadership. In fact, he already has.

THE CHINESE MAFIA

In many respects, the CCP has changed little since the party took power in 1949. Now, as then, the party exercises absolute control over China, ruling over its military, its administration, and its rubber-stamp legislature. The party hierarchy, in turn, answers to the Politburo Standing Committee, the top decision-making body in China. Composed of anywhere from five to nine members of the broader Politburo, the Standing Committee is headed by the party’s general secretary, China’s paramount leader. Since 2012, that has been Xi.

The details of how the Standing Committee operates are a closely guarded secret, but it is widely known that many decisions are made through the circulation of documents dealing with major policy questions, in the margins of which the committee’s members add comments. The papers are written by top leaders in ministries and other party organs, as well as experts from the best universities and think tanks, and to have one’s memo circulated among the Standing Committee members is considered a credit to the writer’s home institution. When I was a professor, the Central Party School set a quota for the production of such memos of about one a month. Authors whose memos were read by the Standing Committee were rewarded with the equivalent of roughly $1,500—more than a professor’s monthly salary.

Another feature of the party system has remained constant: the importance of personal connections. When it comes to one’s rise within the party hierarchy, individual relationships, including one’s family reputation and Communist pedigree, matter as much as competence and ideology.

The CCP is more of a mafia organization than a political party.
That was certainly the case with Xi’s career. Contrary to Chinese propaganda and the assessment of many Western analysts that he rose through his talent, the opposite is true. Xi benefited immensely from the connections of his father, Xi Zhongxun, a CCP leader with impeccable revolutionary credentials who served briefly as propaganda minister under Mao. When Xi Jinping was a county party chief in the northern province of Hebei in the early 1980s, his mother wrote a note to the province’s party chief asking him to take an interest in Xi’s advancement. But that official, Gao Yang, ended up disclosing the note’s content at a meeting of the province’s Politburo Standing Committee. The revelation was a great embarrassment to the family since it violated the CCP’s new campaign against seeking favors. (Xi would never forget the incident: in 2009, when Gao died, he pointedly declined to attend his funeral, a breach of custom given that both had served as president of the Central Party School.) Such a scandal would have ruined the average rising cadre’s career, but Xi’s connections came to the rescue: the father of Fujian’s party chief had been a close confidant of Xi’s father, and the families arranged a rare reassignment to that province.

Xi would continue to fail upward. In 1988, after losing his bid for deputy mayor in a local election, he was promoted to district party chief. Once there, however, Xi languished on account of his middling performance. In the CCP, moving from the district level to the provincial level is a major hurdle, and for years, he could not overcome it. But once again, family connections intervened. In 1992, after Xi’s mother wrote a plea to the new party leader in Fujian, Jia Qinglin, Xi was transferred to the provincial capital. At that point, his career took off.

As all lower-level cadres know, to climb the CCP ladder, one must find a higher-level boss. In Xi’s case, this proved easy enough, since many party leaders held his father in high esteem. His first and most important mentor was Geng Biao, a top diplomatic and military official who had once worked for Xi’s father. In 1979, he took on the younger Xi as a secretary. The need for such patrons early on has knock-on effects decades down the line. High-level officials each have their own “lineages,” as insiders call these groups of protégés, which amount to de facto factions within the CCP. Indeed, disputes that are framed as ideological and policy debates within the CCP are often something much less sophisticated: power struggles among various lineages. Such a system can also lead to tangled webs of personal loyalty. If one’s mentor falls out of favor, the effect is the professional equivalent of being orphaned.

Outsiders may find it helpful to think of the CCP as more of a mafia organization than a political party. The head of the party is the don, and below him sit the underbosses, or the Standing Committee. These men traditionally parcel out power, with each responsible for certain areas—foreign policy, the economy, personnel, anticorruption, and so on. They are also supposed to serve as the big boss’s consiglieres, advising him on their areas of responsibility. Outside the Standing Committee are the other 18 members of the Politburo, who are next in the line of succession for the Standing Committee. They can be thought of as the mafia’s capos, carrying out Xi’s orders to eliminate perceived threats in the hope of staying in the good graces of the don. As a perk of their position, they are allowed to enrich themselves as they see fit, seizing property and businesses without penalty. And like the mafia, the party uses blunt tools to get what it wants: bribery, extortion, even violence.

Although the power of personal connections and the flexibility of formal rules have remained constant since Communist China’s founding, one thing has shifted over time: the degree to which power is concentrated in a single man. From the mid-1960s onward, Mao had absolute control and the final say on all matters, even if he exercised his power episodically and was officially merely first among equals. But when Deng Xiaoping became China’s de facto leader in 1978, he chipped away at Mao’s one-man, lifelong dictatorship.

Deng restricted China’s presidency to two five-year terms and established a form of collective leadership, allowing other officials—first Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang—to serve as head of the party, even if he remained the power behind the throne. In 1987, the CCP decided to reform the process for selecting members of the Central Committee, the party’s nominal overseer and the body from which Politburo members are chosen. For the first time, the party proposed more candidates than there were seats—hardly a democratic election, but a step in the right direction. Even the endorsement of Deng could not guarantee success: for example, Deng Liqun, a Maoist ideologue whom Deng Xiaoping had promised to promote to the Politburo, failed to earn enough votes and was forced to retire from political life. (It is worth noting that when the Central Committee held an election in 1997, Xi barely squeaked by. He had the fewest votes of all those selected to join, reflecting a general distaste within the party for “princelings,” descendants of top CCP leaders who rose thanks to nepotism rather than merit.)

Seeking to avoid a repeat of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, when Maoist propaganda reached its apogee, Deng also sought to prevent any leader from forming a cult of personality. As early as 1978, a student from the Central Party School who was a close family friend noticed on a school trip to a pig farm in the Beijing suburbs that items that Hua Guofeng had used on an inspection visit—a hot water bottle, a teacup—were displayed in a glass cabinet, as if it were a religious shrine. My friend wrote to Hua criticizing the personal worship, and Hua had the display removed. In 1982, China’s leaders went so far as to write into the party constitution a ban on cults of personality, which they viewed as uniquely dangerous.

Family reputation and pedigree matter as much as competence and ideology to the Communist Party.
Deng was willing to go only so far in sharing power, and he forced out Hu and Zhao successively when each proved too politically liberal. But Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, deepened the political reforms. Jiang institutionalized his group of advisers to operate more as an executive office. He sought advice from all members of the Standing Committee, which now made decisions by majority vote, and he circulated draft speeches widely. Jiang also made the elections to the Central Committee slightly more competitive by increasing the ratio of candidates to seats. Even princelings, including one of Deng’s sons, lost their elections.

When Hu Jintao took over from Jiang in 2002, China moved even further toward collective leadership. Hu ruled with the consent of the nine members of the Standing Committee, a clique known as the “nine dragons controlling the water.” There were downsides to this egalitarian approach. A single member of the Standing Committee could veto any decision, driving the perception of Hu as a weak leader unable to overcome gridlock. For nearly a decade, the economic reforms that began under Deng stalled. But there were upsides, too, since the need for consensus prevented careless decisions. When SARS broke out in China during his first year in office, for instance, Hu acted prudently, firing China’s health minister for covering up the extent of the outbreak, and encouraging cadres to report infections truthfully.

Hu also sought to expand the use of term limits. Although he ran into resistance when he tried to institute term limits for members of the Politburo and its Standing Committee, he did manage to introduce them at the level of provincial ministers and below. More successfully, Hu established an unprecedented process by which the composition of the Politburo was first selected by a vote of senior party members.

Ironically, it was through this quasi-democratic system that Xi rose to the heights of power. In 2007, at an expanded meeting of the Central Committee, the CCP’s top 400 or so leaders gathered in Beijing to cast votes recommending which ministerial-level officials from a list of 200 should join the 25-member Politburo. Xi received the most. The deciding factor, I suspect, was not his record as party chief of Zhejiang or Shanghai but the respect voters held for his father, along with the endorsement of (and pressure from) some key party elders. In a similar advisory election five years later, Xi got the most votes and, by the consensus of the outgoing leaders, ascended to the top of the pyramid. He swiftly got to work undoing decades of progress on collective leadership.

PARTY OF ONE?

When Xi took the reins, many in the West hailed him as a Chinese Mikhail Gorbachev. Some imagined that, like the Soviet Union’s final leader, Xi would embrace radical reforms, releasing the state’s grip on the economy and democratizing the political system. That, of course, turned out to be a fantasy. Instead, Xi, a devoted student of Mao and just as eager to leave his mark on history, has worked to establish his absolute power. And because previous reforms failed to place real checks and balances on the party leader, he has succeeded. Now, as under Mao, China is a one-man show.

One part of Xi’s plot to consolidate power was to solve what he characterized as an ideological crisis. The Internet, he said, was an existential threat to the CCP, having caused the party to lose control of people’s minds. So Xi cracked down on bloggers and online activists, censored dissent, and strengthened China’s “great firewall” to restrict access to foreign websites. The effect was to strangle a nascent civil society and eliminate public opinion as a check on Xi.

Another step he took was to launch an anti­corruption campaign, framing it as a mission to save the party from self-destruction. Since corruption was endemic in China, with nearly every official a potential target, Xi was able to use the campaign as a political purge. Official data show that from December 2012 to June 2021, the CCP investigated 393 leading cadres above the provincial ministerial level, officials who are often being groomed for top positions, as well as 631,000 section-level cadres, foot soldiers who implement the CCP’s policies at the grassroots level. The purge has ensnared some of the most powerful officials whom Xi deemed threatening, including Zhou Yongkang, a former Standing Committee member and the head of China’s security apparatus, and Sun Zhengcai, a Politburo member whom many saw as a rival and potential successor to Xi.

Tellingly, those who helped Xi rise have been left untouched. Jia Qinglin, Fujian’s party chief in the 1990s and eventually a member of the Standing Committee, was instrumental in helping Xi climb the ranks of power. Although there is reason to believe that he and his family are exceedingly corrupt—the Panama Papers, the trove of leaked documents from a law firm, revealed that his granddaughter and son-in-law own several secret offshore companies—they have not been caught up in Xi’s anticorruption campaign.

Xi’s tactics are not subtle. As I learned from one party insider whom I cannot name for fear of getting him in trouble, around 2014, Xi’s men went to a high-ranking official who had openly criticized Xi and threatened him with a corruption investigation if he didn’t stop. (He shut up.) In pursuing their targets, Xi’s subordinates often pressure officials’ family members and assistants. Wang Min, the party chief of Liaoning Province, whom I knew well from our days as students at the Central Party School, was arrested in 2016 on the basis of statements from his chauffeur, who said that while in the car, Wang had complained to a fellow passenger about being passed over for promotion. Wang was sentenced to life in prison, with one of the charges being resistance to Xi’s leadership.

After ejecting his rivals from key positions, Xi installed his own people. Xi’s lineage within the party is known as the “New Zhijiang Army.” The group consists of his former subordinates during his time as governor of Fujian and Zhejiang Provinces and even university classmates and old friends going back to middle school. Since assuming power, Xi has quickly promoted his acolytes, often beyond their level of competence. His roommate from his days at Tsinghua University, Chen Xi, was named head of the CCP’s Organization Department, a position that comes with a seat on the Politburo and the power to decide who can move up the hierarchy. Yet Chen has no relevant qualifications: his five immediate predecessors had experience with local party affairs, whereas he spent nearly all his career at Tsinghua University.

Xi and his deputies have demanded a degree of loyalty not seen since Mao.

Xi undid another major reform: “the separation of party and state,” an effort to reduce the degree to which ideologically driven party cadres interfered with technical and managerial decisions in government agencies. In an attempt to professionalize the bureaucracy, Deng and his successors tried, with varying degrees of success, to insulate the administration from CCP interference. Xi has backtracked, introducing some 40 ad hoc party commissions that end up directing governmental agencies. Unlike his predecessors, for example, he has his own team to handle issues regarding the South China Sea, bypassing the Foreign Ministry and the State Oceanic Administration.

The effect of these commissions has been to take significant power away from the head of China’s government, Premier Li Keqiang, and turn what was once a position of co-captain into a sidekick. The change can be seen in the way Li comports himself in public appearances. Whereas Li’s two immediate predecessors, Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao, stood side by side with Jiang and Hu, respectively, Li knows to keep his distance from Xi, as if to emphasize the power differential. Moreover, in the past, official communications and state media referred to the “Jiang-Zhu system” and the “Hu-Wen system,” but almost no one today speaks of a “Xi-Li system.” There has long been a push and pull between the party and the government in China—what insiders call the struggle between the “South Courtyard” and the “North Courtyard” of Zhongnanhai, the imperial compound that hosts the headquarters of both institutions. But by insisting that everyone look up to him as the highest authority, Xi has exacerbated tensions.

Xi has also changed the dynamic within the Standing Committee. For the first time in CCP history, all Politburo members, even those on the Standing Committee, must report directly to the head of the party by submitting periodic reports to Xi, who personally reviews their performance. Gone is the camaraderie and near equality among Standing Committee members that once prevailed. As one former official in Beijing told me, one of the committee’s seven members—Wang Qi­shan, China’s vice president and a longtime ally of Xi—has grumbled to friends that the dynamic between Xi and the lesser members is that of an emperor and his ministers.

Xi is positioning himself not as merely a great party leader but as a modern-day emperor.
The most brazen change Xi has ushered in is to remove China’s presidential term limit. Like every paramount leader from Jiang onward, Xi holds three positions concurrently: president of China, leader of the party, and head of the military. Although the limit of two five-year terms applied only to the first of those three positions, beginning with Hu, there was an understanding that it must also apply to the other two to make it possible for the same person to hold all three posts.

But in 2018, at Xi’s behest, China’s legislature amended the constitution to do away with the presidential term limit. The justification was laughable. The professed goal was to make the presidency consistent with the party and military positions, even though the obvious reform would have been the reverse: to add term limits to those positions.

Then there is the cult of personality. Even though the ban on such cults remains in the party constitution, Xi and his deputies have demanded a degree of loyalty and admiration for the leader not seen since Mao. Ever since 2016, when Xi was declared the party’s “core leader” (a term never given to his predecessor, Hu), Xi has positioned himself in front of members of the Standing Committee in official portraits. His own portraits are hung everywhere, Mao style, in government offices, schools, religious sites, and homes. According to Radio France Internationale, Xi’s subordinates have proposed renaming Tsinghua University, his alma mater and China’s top school, Xi Jinping University. They have even argued for hanging his picture alongside Mao’s in Tiananmen Square. Although neither idea went anywhere, Xi did manage to get Xi Jinping Thought enshrined in the party’s constitution in 2017—joining Mao as the only other leader whose own ideology was added to the document while in office—and in the state constitution the next year. In one lengthy article published in Xinhua, the state media organ, in 2017, a propagandist crowned Xi with seven new North Korean–style titles that would have made his post-Mao predecessors blush: “groundbreaking leader,” “diligent worker for the people’s happiness,” “chief architect of modernization in the new era,” and so on.

Within the party, Xi’s lineage is carrying out a fierce campaign insisting that he be allowed to stay in power to finish what he started: namely, “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” As their efforts intensify, their message is being simplified. In April, party officials in Guangxi proposed a new slogan: “Always support the leader, defend the leader, and follow the leader.” In an echo of Mao’s “little red book,” they also issued a pocket-size collection of Xi quotations and invited citizens to memorize its contents. Xi seems to be positioning himself not as merely a great party leader but as a modern-day emperor.

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

The more a political system centers on a single leader, the more the flaws and peculiarities of that leader matter. And in the case of Xi, the leader is thin-skinned, stubborn, and dictatorial.

These qualities were in evidence even before he took office. In 2008, Xi became president of the Central Party School, where I taught. At a faculty meeting the next year, the number two official at the school conveyed Xi’s threat to teachers that he would “never allow them to eat from the party’s rice bowl while attempting to smash the party’s cooking pot”—meaning taking government pay while discreetly criticizing the system. Angry about Xi’s absurd notion that it was the party, not Chinese taxpayers, that bankrolled the state, I talked back from my seat. “Whose rice bowl does the Communist Party eat from?” I asked out loud. “The Communist Party eats from the people’s rice bowl but smashes their cooking pot every day.” No one reported me; my fellow professors agreed with me.

Xi acts as “chairman of everything.”

Once in office, Xi proved unwilling to brook criticism. Xi uses Standing Committee and Politburo meetings not as an opportunity to hash out policies but as a chance to deliver hours-long monologues. According to official data, between November 2012 and February 2022, he called for 80 “collective study sessions,” in which he spoke at length on a given topic before the Politburo. He rejects any suggestions from subordinates that he thinks will make him look bad. According to an old friend of Wang Qishan, who as a Standing Committee member during Xi’s first term was part of the inner circle, Wang once proposed that Xi’s “eight-point regulation,” a list of requirements for party members, be made an official party rule. But even this rather sycophantic suggestion was considered an affront by Xi because he had not come up with it himself, and he rebuked Wang on the spot.

Xi is also a micromanager. He acts as “chairman of everything,” as many analysts have noted. In 2014, for example, he issued instructions on environmental protection 17 times—a remarkable degree of meddling, given all that is on his plate. Deng, Jiang, and Hu recognized that administering a country as vast as China requires taking local complexities into account. They emphasized that cadres at all levels should take instructions from the CCP’s Central Committee but adapt them to specific situations as needed. Such flexibility was crucial for economic development, since it gave local officials room to innovate. But Xi insists that his instructions be obeyed to the letter. I know of a county party chief who in 2014 tried to create an exception to the central government’s new rules on banquets because his county needed to host delegations of foreign investors. When Xi learned of the attempted innovation, he grew furious, accusing the official of “speaking ill of the CCP Central Committee’s policy”—a serious charge that, as a result of this incident, was subsequently codified in the party’s disciplinary regulations and is punishable by expulsion.

The CCP used to have a long tradition, dating back to Mao, in which cadres could write to the top leader with suggestions and even criticisms, but those who dared try this with Xi early in his tenure learned their lesson. Around 2017, Liu Yazhou, a general in the People’s Liberation Army and a son-in-law of a former president, wrote to Xi recommending that China reverse its policy in Xinjiang and cease rounding up members of the Uyghur minority. He was warned not to speak ill of Xi’s policies. Xi’s refusal to accept such counsel removes an important method of self-correction.

Why, unlike his predecessors, is Xi so resistant to others’ advice? Part of the reason, I suspect, is that he suffers from an inferiority complex, knowing that he is poorly educated in comparison with other top CCP leaders. Even though he studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, Xi attended as a “worker-peasant-soldier,” a category of students admitted in the 1970s on the basis of political reliability and class background, not their academic merits. Jiang and Hu, by contrast, earned their spots in university through highly competitive exams. In 2002, when Xi was a provincial cadre, he received a doctoral degree in Marxist theory, also at Tsinghua, but as the British journalist Michael Sheridan has documented, Xi’s dissertation was riddled with instances of suspected plagiarism. As I know from my time at the Central Party School, high-ranking officials routinely farm out their schoolwork to assistants while their professors turn a blind eye. Indeed, at the time he supposedly completed his dissertation, Xi held the busy job of governor of Fujian.

MR. WRONG

In any political system, unchecked power is dangerous. Detached from reality and freed from the constraint of consensus, a leader can act rashly, implementing policies that are unwise, unpopular, or both. Not surprisingly, then, Xi’s know-it-all style of rule has led to a number of disastrous decisions. The common theme is an inability to grasp the practical effect of his directives.

Consider foreign policy. Breaking with Deng’s dictum that China “hide its strength and bide its time,” Xi has decided to directly challenge the United States and pursue a China-centric world order. That is why he has engaged in risky and aggressive behavior abroad, militarizing the South China Sea, threatening Taiwan, and encouraging his diplomats to engage in an abrasive style of foreign policy known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. Xi has formed a de facto alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin, further alienating China from the international community. His Belt and Road Initiative has generated growing resistance as countries tire of the associated debt and corruption.

Xi’s economic policies are similarly counterproductive. The introduction of market reforms was one of the CCP’s signature achievements, allowing hundreds of millions of Chinese to escape poverty. But when Xi came to power, he came to see the private sector as a threat to his rule and revived the planned economy of the Maoist era. He strengthened state-owned enterprises and established party organizations in the private sector that direct the way businesses are run. Under the guise of fighting corruption and enforcing antitrust law, he has plundered assets from private companies and entrepreneurs. Over the past few years, some of China’s most dynamic companies, including the Anbang Insurance Group and the conglomerate HNA Group, have effectively been forced to hand over control of their businesses to the state. Others, such as the conglomerate Tencent and the e-commerce giant Alibaba, have been brought to heel through a combination of new regulations, investigations, and fines. In 2020, Sun Dawu, the billionaire owner of an agricultural conglomerate who had publicly criticized Xi for his crackdown on human rights lawyers, was arrested on false charges and soon sentenced to 18 years in prison. His business was sold to a hastily formed state company in a sham auction for a fraction of its true value.

Nowhere has Xi’s desire for control been more disastrous than in his reaction to COVID-19.

Predictably, China has seen its economic growth slow, and most analysts believe it will slow even more in the coming years. Although several factors are at play—including U.S. sanctions against Chinese tech companies, the war in Ukraine, and the COVID-19 pandemic—the fundamental problem is the CCP’s interference in the economy. The government constantly meddles in the private sector to achieve political goals, a proven poison for productivity. Many Chinese entrepreneurs live in fear that their businesses will be seized or that they themselves will be detained, hardly the kind of mindset inclined to innovation. In April, as China’s growth prospects worsened, Xi hosted a meeting of the Politburo to unveil his remedy for the country’s economic woes: a combination of tax rebates, fee reductions, infrastructure investment, and monetary easing. But since none of these proposals solve the underlying problem of excessive state intervention in the economy, they are doomed to fail.

Nowhere has Xi’s desire for control been more disastrous than in his reaction to COVID-19. When the disease first spread in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, Xi withheld information about it from the public in an attempt to preserve the image of a flourishing China. Local officials, meanwhile, were paralyzed. As Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, admitted the next month on state television, without approval from above, he had been unable to publicly disclose the outbreak. When eight brave health professionals blew the whistle about it, the government detained and silenced them. One of the eight later revealed that he had been forced to sign a false confession.


Xi’s tendency to micromanage also inhibited his response to the pandemic. Instead of leaving the details of policy to the government’s health team, Xi insisted that he himself coordinate China’s efforts. Later, Xi would boast that he “personally commanded, planned the response, oversaw the general situation, acted decisively, and pointed the way forward.” To the extent that this was true, it was not for the better. In fact, his interference led to confusion and inaction, with local health officials receiving mixed messages from Beijing and refusing to act. As I learned from a source on the State Council (China’s chief administrative authority), Premier Li Keqiang proposed activating an emergency-response protocol in early January 2020, but Xi refused to approve it for fear of spoiling the ongoing Chinese New Year celebrations.

When the Omicron variant of the virus surged in Shanghai in February 2022, Xi yet again chose a baffling way to respond. The details of the decision-making process were relayed to me by a contact who works at the State Council. In an online gathering of about 60 pandemic experts held shortly after the outbreak began, everyone agreed that if Shanghai simply followed the latest official guidelines, which relaxed the quarantine requirements, then life in the city could go on more or less as usual. Many of the city’s party and health officials were on board with this approach. But when Xi heard about it, he became furious. Refusing to listen to the experts, he insisted on enforcing his “zero COVID” policy. Shanghai’s tens of millions of residents were forbidden from going outside, even to get groceries or receive life-saving health care. Some died at the gates of hospitals; others leaped to their deaths from their apartment buildings.

Just like that, a modern, prosperous city was turned into the site of a humanitarian disaster, with people starving and babies separated from their parents. A leader more open to influence or subject to greater checks would not likely have implemented such a draconian policy, or at least would have corrected course once its costs and unpopularity became evident. But for Xi, backtracking would have been an unthinkable admission of error.

ACTION, REACTION

The CCP’s leadership has never been a monolith. As Mao once said, “There are parties outside our party, and there are factions within our party, and this has always been the case.” The main organizing principle of these factions is personal ties, but these groups tend to array themselves on a left-to-right continuum. Put differently, although Chinese politics are largely personalistic, there are real differences over the direction of national policy, and each lineage tends to associate itself with the ideas of its progenitor.

On the left are those who remain committed to orthodox Marxism. This faction dominated the party before the Deng era, and it advocates the continuation of class struggle and violent revolution. It includes subfactions named for Mao, Chen Yun (who was the second most powerful official under Deng), Bo Xilai (a former Politburo member who was sidelined and imprisoned before Xi took power), and Xi himself. At the grassroots level, the left also includes a small, politically powerless contingent of Marxist university students, as well as workers who were laid off as a result of Deng’s reforms.

The center consists mainly of Deng’s political descendants. Because most of today’s cadres were trained under him, this is the faction that dominates the CCP bureaucracy. Centrists support full-throated economic reforms and limited political reforms, all with the goal of ensuring the party’s permanent rule. Also in the center is a group descended from two retired top officials, Jiang and Zeng Qinghong (a former vice president), as well as a group called the Youth League Faction, consisting of supporters of former party leader Hu Jintao and the current premier Li.

Last are the subfactions on the right, which in the Chinese context means liberals who advocate a market economy and a softer form of authoritarianism (or even, in some cases, constitutional democracy). This camp, which I belong to, is the least powerful of the three. It includes followers of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, party leaders under Deng. It also arguably includes Wen Jiabao, who was China’s premier from 2003 to 2013 and still wields influence. When asked about his push for political reform in a 2010 interview, Wen responded, “I will not yield until the last day of my life.”

Within the CCP elite, many resent Xi’s disruption of the traditional power distribution.
Xi faces growing opposition from all three factions. The left, while initially supportive of his policies, now thinks he has not gone far enough in reviving Mao’s policies, with some having become disenchanted after he cracked down on the labor movement. The center resents Xi’s undoing of economic reforms. And the right has been completely silenced by Xi’s elimination of even the slightest political debate.

Glimpses of these divides can be seen in the Standing Committee. One member, Han Zheng, is widely perceived as a member of Jiang’s faction. Li in particular seems to diverge from Xi, and a row between the officials is breaking out into public view. Li has long quietly opposed Xi’s zero-COVID policy, stressing the need to reopen businesses and protect the economy. In May, after Li told 100,000 party cadres at an online conference that the economy was in worse shape than expected, Xi’s allies launched a counterattack. In Xinhua, they defended him by arguing, “China’s economic development prospects will definitely be brighter.” As a symbol of their resistance to Xi’s COVID policy, Li and his entourage refuse to wear masks. In April, during a speech in the city of Nanchang, Li’s aides could be seen asking attendees to remove their masks. So far, Li has taken Xi’s imperiousness sitting down, always acquiescing out of necessity. But he may soon reach a breaking point.

Indignation at the elite level is replicating itself further down the bureaucracy. Early in Xi’s tenure, as he began to shuffle power, many in the bureaucracy grew disgruntled and disillusioned. But their resistance was passive, expressed through inaction. Local cadres took sick leave en masse or came up with excuses to stall Xi’s anticorruption initiatives. At the end of 2021, the CCP’s disciplinary commission announced that in the first ten months of that year, it had found 247,000 cases of “ineffective implementation of Xi Jinping’s and the Central Committee’s important instructions.” During the Shanghai lockdown, however, resistance became more overt. On social media, local officials openly criticized the zero-COVID policy. In April, members of the residents’ committee of Sanlin Town, a neighborhood in Shanghai, collectively resigned, complaining in an open letter that they had been sealed in their offices for 24 days with no access to their families.

China’s leader is facing not only internal dissent but also an intense popular backlash.
Even more troubling for Xi, elite dissatisfaction is now spreading to the general public. In an authoritarian state, it is impossible to accurately measure public opinion, but Xi’s harsh COVID measures may well have lost him the affection of most Chinese. An early note of dissent came in February 2020, when the real estate tycoon Ren Zhiqiang called him a “clown” for bungling the response to the pandemic. (After a one-day trial, Ren was sentenced to 18 years in prison.) Chinese social media platforms are awash in videos in which ordinary people beg Xi to end his zero-COVID policy. In May, a group calling itself the “Shanghai Self-Saving Autonomous Committee” released a manifesto online titled, “Don’t be a slave—save yourself.” The document called on the city’s residents to fight the lockdown and form self-governing bodies to help one another. On social media, some Chinese have sarcastically proposed that the most effective plan for fighting the pandemic would be to convene the 20th National Congress as soon as possible to prevent Xi from staying in power.

Meanwhile, despite Xi’s claims of having vanquished poverty, most Chinese continue to struggle to make ends meet. As Li revealed in 2020, 600 million people in China—some 40 percent of its population—barely earned $140 a month. According to data obtained by the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, some 4.4 million small businesses closed between January and November 2021, more than three times the number of newly registered companies in the same period. Facing a financial crisis, local governments have been forced to slash government salaries—sometimes by as much as 50 percent, including pay for teachers. They will likely resort to finding new ways of plundering wealth from the private sector and ordinary citizens, in turn generating even more economic misery. After four decades of opening up, most Chinese don’t want to go back to the days of Mao. Within the CCP elite, many resent Xi’s disruption of the traditional power distribution and think his reckless policies are jeopardizing the future of the party. The result is that for the first time since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, China’s leader is facing not only internal dissent but also an intense popular backlash and a real risk of social unrest.

FIVE MORE YEARS?

Harboring resentment is one thing, but acting on it is another. Members of the party’s upper echelons know that they can always be charged with corruption, so they have little incentive to maneuver against Xi. High-tech surveillance is presumed to be so pervasive that party elites, including retired national leaders, do not dare communicate with one another outside official events, even about mundane matters. The public, for its part, stays silent, held back by censorship, surveillance, and the fear of arrest. That is why opponents of Xi are focused on the one legal avenue for removing him: denying him a third presidential term at the upcoming National Congress.

Perhaps sensing the growing disappointment, Xi has done everything he can to tilt the playing field in his favor. The most important constituency, of course, is his fellow Standing Committee members, who ultimately have the greatest say over whether he stays in office, in part because of their control over members of China’s legislature. Xi has likely done what he can to ensure the support of Standing Committee members, from promising that they will stay in power to pledging not to investigate their families.

Nearly as important is the military, since denying Xi a third term would likely require the support of the generals. Propagandists routinely remind Chinese that “the party commands the gun,” but China’s leaders realize that in truth the gun is always pointed at the party’s head. Although Xi has steadily replaced China’s generals with his own men over the years, military officials’ rhetoric still wavers between emphasizing personal loyalty to Xi and institutional loyalty to the Central Military Commission, the body, headed by Xi, that oversees them.

In one potential sign of lingering opposition within the ranks, I learned last December from several of my contacts in China that Liu, the military official whom Xi had rebuked for criticizing policy on the Uyghurs—had disappeared along with his younger brother, also a general. Both brothers’ houses were raided. The news sent shock waves through the military, since as the son-in-law of a former president, Liu would normally have been considered untouchable. But by detaining him and his brother, Xi had issued his strongest warning yet to princelings and the top brass of the People’s Liberation Army that they should get in line.


Xi has also ramped up his ostensible anticorruption drive. In the first half of 2022, the government has punished 21 cadres at or above the provincial ministerial level and 1,237 cadres at the district and departmental level. There has been a distinct focus on the security and intelligence agencies. In January, Chinese state television aired a confession by Sun Lijun, once a high-ranking security official, who had been charged with corruption and now faces the prospect of execution. His sin, according to the party’s top disciplinary body, was that he had “formed a cabal to take control over several key departments,” “harbored hugely inflated political ambitions,” and had “evil political qualities.” In March, Fu Zhenghua, who as deputy minister of public security had been Sun’s boss, was also charged with corruption, removed from office, and expelled from the CCP. The message was clear: obey or risk downfall.

Adding extra layers of insurance to his quest for a third term, Xi has issued a veiled threat to retired party cadres. Party elders have long wielded enormous clout in Chinese politics; it was retired elites who forced out Zhao in 1989, for example. In January, Xi took direct aim at this group, announcing that the government would “clean up systemic corruption and eliminate hidden risks” by retroactively investigating the past 20 years of cadres’ lives. And in May, the party tightened the guidelines for retired cadres, warning them “not to discuss the general policies of the party Central Committee in an open manner, not to spread politically negative remarks, not to participate in the activities of illegal social organizations, and not to use their former authority or position influence to seek benefits for themselves and others, and to resolutely oppose and resist all kinds of wrong thinking.”

Xi has also sought to guarantee the backing of the 2,300 CCP delegates invited to attend the National Congress, two-thirds of whom are high-level officials from across the country and one-third of whom are ordinary members who work at the grassroots level. The delegates have been carefully screened for their loyalty to Xi. And to prevent any surprises at the congress, a ban on “nonorganizational activities” forbids them from mingling outside of formal small-group meetings of their provincial delegations, limiting their ability to or­­ganize against a particular policy or leader.

In the months leading up to the congress, the CCP’s stealth infighting will probably intensify. Xi could order more arrests and more trials of high-ranking officials, and his critics could leak more information and spread more rumors. Contrary to the conventional wisdom among Western analysts, he may not have locked up a third term. Xi’s proliferating opponents could succeed in ushering him out of office, provided they either convince enough Standing Committee members that he has lost the support of the CCP’s rank and file or persuade party elders to intervene. And there is always a chance that an economic crisis or widespread social unrest could turn even stalwart allies against him. Despite all this, the most likely outcome this fall is that Xi, having so rigged the process and intimidated his rivals, will get his third presidential term and, with it, the right to continue as head of the party and the military for another term. And just like that, the only meaningful political reform made since Deng’s rule will go up in smoke.

XI UNBOUND

What then? Xi will no doubt see his victory as a mandate to do whatever he wants to achieve the party’s stated goal of rejuvenating China. His ambitions will rise to new heights. In a futile attempt to invigorate the economy without empowering the private sector, Xi will double down on his statist economic policies. To maintain his grip on power, he will continue to preemptively eliminate any potential rivals and tighten social control, making China look increasingly like North Korea. Xi might even try to stay in power well beyond a third term. An emboldened Xi may well accelerate his militarization of disputed areas of the South China Sea and try to forcibly take over Taiwan. As he continues China’s quest for dominance, he will further its isolation from the rest of the world.

But none of these moves would make discontent within the party magically disappear. The feat of gaining a third term would not mollify those within the CCP who resent his accumulation of power and reject his cult of personality, nor would it solve his growing legitimacy problem among the people. In fact, the moves he would likely make in a third term would raise the odds of war, social unrest, and economic crisis, exacerbating existing grievances. Even in China, it takes more than sheer force and intimidation to stay in power; performance still matters. Mao and Deng earned their authority through accomplishments—Mao by liberating China from the Nationalists, and Deng by opening it up and unleashing an economic boom. But Xi can point to no such concrete triumphs. He has less margin for error.

The only viable way of changing course, so far as I can see, is also the scariest and deadliest: a humiliating defeat in a war. If Xi were to attack Taiwan, his likeliest target, there is a good chance that the war would not go as planned, and Taiwan, with American help, would be able to resist invasion and inflict grave damage on mainland China. In that event, the elites and the masses would abandon Xi, paving the way for not only his personal downfall but perhaps even the collapse of the CCP as we know it. For precedent, one would have to go back to the nineteenth century, when Emperor Qianlong failed in his quest to expand China’s realm to Central Asia, Burma, and Vietnam. Predictably, China suffered a mortifying loss in the First Sino-Japanese War, setting the stage for the downfall of the Qing dynasty and kicking off a long period of political upheaval. Emperors are not always forever
« Last Edit: September 09, 2022, 02:26:35 AM by Crafty_Dog »






Crafty_Dog

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Re: Russian and Chinese Leaders (Putin, Xi, Oligarchs, etc)
« Reply #81 on: September 15, 2022, 06:26:59 AM »
Why the eye roll?

DougMacG

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Re: It would appear that the long knives are out
« Reply #82 on: September 15, 2022, 08:22:22 AM »
quote author=Crafty_Dog
"if true, this takes away Putin's justification for invading , , ,"

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/exclusive-war-began-putin-rejected-ukraine-peace-deal-recommended-by-his-aide-2022-09-14/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily-briefing&utm_term=09-14-2022
---------------------------------

Interesting post. [If true] it takes away his justification but not his reason for invading which I assume was to take territory, infrastructure, resources and ports from his weaker neighbor by force.  Also to send a message of compliance and surrender to his other 'backyard' neighbors.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Russian and Chinese Leaders (Putin, Xi, Oligarchs, etc)
« Reply #83 on: September 15, 2022, 08:27:44 AM »
Exactly.

G M

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Re: Russian and Chinese Leaders (Putin, Xi, Oligarchs, etc)
« Reply #84 on: September 15, 2022, 10:05:16 AM »
Why the eye roll?

Obvious Operation Mockingbird propaganda.







Crafty_Dog

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ET: Rumors around Xi's absence
« Reply #90 on: September 25, 2022, 11:56:53 AM »
Xi’s Absence From Public Eye Ahead of Third Term Bid Sets Rumors Flying
By Eva Fu September 24, 2022 Updated: September 25, 2022biggersmaller Print
Just over a week ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping embarked on a three-day trip to Central Asia to mark his sphere of influence. He has since been out of the public eye, skipping a high-level military meeting and the annual United Nations assembly.

With China only weeks away from the 20th National Congress, where Xi is set to pursue an unprecedented third term, his absence has been long enough to attract attention from keen political watchers, with some even speculating that he has been placed under house arrest.

By Sept. 24, Xi Jinping had become one of the top trending topics on Twitter. His name appeared on hashtags more than 42,000 times and the term “China coup” circulated 9,300 rounds on the platform.

“New rumour to be checked out: Is Xi jingping [sic] under house arrest in Beijing?” wrote Subramanian Swamy, a former Indian cabinet minister and parliamentary member until April.

Such speculation also came as Chinese nationals noted mass flight cancellations across the country. Nearly 10,000 flights—almost two-thirds of those scheduled for the day—were called off on Saturday, the same day a key conference on national defense and military reform was convened in Beijing. Weibo, China’s top social media platform, swiftly censored discussions around the flight cancellations, declaring them to be “rumors.”

Xi, who arrived back in China’s capital on Sept. 16 after meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin at a regional summit in Central Asia, didn’t appear at the Beijing meeting but relayed instructions that the armed forces should focus on preparing for war. Similarly missing was Wei Fenghe, his handpicked Chinese military general currently serving as the country’s national defense minister.

Epoch Times Photo
China’s Defence Minister Wei Fenghe (front L) attends the Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore on June 12, 2022. (Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images)
His public activities since then have chiefly consisted of a greeting letter to mark the Chinese Farmers’ Harvest Festival on Sept. 22 and another on the following day to the Chinese state media China News Service, congratulating the outlet on its 70th year anniversary.

No major Chinese outlets nor officials have come out to refute the rumors floating around, but the reach of the theory, however unsubstantiated, reflects a certain degree of anger inside the country, some analysts said.

“It’s a show of discontent,” Wang He, a U.S.-based commentator on China’s current affairs, told The Epoch Times. “It seems that people are counting to the day for him to fall from power.”

Although Xi has all but secured his third term, many people have not reconciled with his continued stay in power, he added.

China analyst Gordon Chang deemed a coup unlikely, pointing to the lack of supporting evidence on the ground.

“I don’t think there was a coup,” he told The Epoch Times. “Because if there were a coup, we would see, for instance, a lot of military vehicles in the center of Beijing. There have been no reports of that. Also, there probably would be a declaration of martial law that has not occurred.”

“So it seems that something is happening, but we don’t know exactly what,” he said, adding that the only thing that can dispel some of the speculations is if Xi comes out to speak in public.

Zhang Tianliang, a writer and author of the Chinese language book “China’s Path to Peaceful Transition,” similarly dismissed the house arrest theory as not conforming to common sense.

During the past week, six senior Chinese officials, including two former cabinet-level officials, were handed heavy sentences for corruption-related offenses, adding to a string of officials purged in Xi’s anti-graft campaign he launched after taking office in late 2012.

How would Xi have the capacity to punish them if he has lost his grip on power, Zhang argued in his show on Sept. 22.

Whether or not Xi makes a public appearance, though, holds little significance, Wang said, noting that such an extended absence from public attention hasn’t been unique for Xi.

To Wang, Xi’s overseas trip ahead of the Party congress was a projection of confidence.

“Without absolute assurance, this man will not take risks easily,” he said of Xi.



DougMacG

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Putin,Oligarchs, Freezing Order, Bill Browder book
« Reply #93 on: September 27, 2022, 11:18:01 AM »
Just read this book.  Detailed account that goes from investigating fraud in Russia, to murders, to passing the Magnitski Act to freeze international assets of these thugs, to freezing 20 million here and there, to discovering a perhaps a trillion Putin stole from the Russian people held in the names of others such as the world's richest cello player, no not Yo yo ma, Putin's best childhood friend, to all the arrests and murders needed to cover it all up.  True story and it's not over.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Freezing-Order/Bill-Browder/9781982153281


Crafty_Dog

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FA: The Sources of Russian Misconduct
« Reply #95 on: October 21, 2022, 03:47:44 PM »
The Sources of Russian Misconduct
A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin
By Boris Bondarev
November/December 2022
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/sources-russia-misconduct-boris-bondarev

For three years, my workdays began the same way. At 7:30 a.m., I woke up, checked the news, and drove to work at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva. The routine was easy and predictable, two of the hallmarks of life as a Russian diplomat.


February 24 was different. When I checked my phone, I saw startling and mortifying news: the Russian air force was bombing Ukraine. Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odessa were under attack. Russian troops were surging out of Crimea and toward the southern city of Kherson. Russian missiles had reduced buildings to rubble and sent residents fleeing. I watched videos of the blasts, complete with air-raid sirens, and saw people run around in panic.


As someone born in the Soviet Union, I found the attack almost unimaginable, even though I had heard Western news reports that an invasion might be imminent. Ukrainians were supposed to be our close friends, and we had much in common, including a history of fighting Germany as part of the same country. I thought about the lyrics of a famous patriotic song from World War II, one that many residents of the former Soviet Union know well: “On June 22, exactly at 4:00 a.m., Kyiv was bombed, and we were told that the war had started.” Russian President Vladimir Putin described the invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” intended to “de-Nazify” Russia’s neighbor. But in Ukraine, it was Russia that had taken the Nazis’ place.

“That is the beginning of the end,” I told my wife. We decided I had to quit.

Resigning meant throwing away a twenty-year career as a Russian diplomat and, with it, many of my friendships. But the decision was a long time coming. When I joined the ministry in 2002, it was during a period of relative openness, when we diplomats could work cordially with our counterparts from other countries. Still, it was apparent from my earliest days that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was deeply flawed. Even then, it discouraged critical thinking, and over the course of my tenure, it became increasingly belligerent. I stayed on anyway, managing the cognitive dissonance by hoping that I could use whatever power I had to moderate my country’s international behavior. But certain events can make a person accept things they didn’t dare to before.

The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become. It was an unspeakable act of cruelty, designed to subjugate a neighbor and erase its ethnic identity. It gave Moscow an excuse to crush any domestic opposition. Now, the government is sending thousands upon thousands of drafted men to go kill Ukrainians. The war shows that Russia is no longer just dictatorial and aggressive; it has become a fascist state.

But for me, one of the invasion’s central lessons had to do with something I had witnessed over the preceding two decades: what happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda. For years, Russian diplomats were made to confront Washington and defend the country’s meddling abroad with lies and non sequiturs. We were taught to embrace bombastic rhetoric and to uncritically parrot to other states what the Kremlin said to us. But eventually, the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries; it was our own leadership. In cables and statements, we were made to tell the Kremlin that we had sold the world on Russian greatness and demolished the West’s arguments. We had to withhold any criticism about the president’s dangerous plans. This performance took place even at the ministry’s highest levels. My colleagues in the Kremlin repeatedly told me that Putin likes his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, because he is “comfortable” to work with, always saying yes to the president and telling him what he wants to hear. Small wonder, then, that Putin thought he would have no trouble defeating Kyiv.


The war shows that decisions made in echo chambers can backfire.

The war is a stark demonstration of how decisions made in echo chambers can backfire. Putin has failed in his bid to conquer Ukraine, an initiative that he might have understood would be impossible if his government had been designed to give honest assessments. For those of us who worked on military issues, it was plain that the Russian armed forces were not as mighty as the West feared—in part thanks to economic restrictions the West implemented after Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea that were more effective than policymakers seemed to realize.

The Kremlin’s invasion has strengthened NATO, an entity it was designed to humiliate, and resulted in sanctions strong enough to make Russia’s economy contract. But fascist regimes legitimize themselves more by exercising power than by delivering economic gains, and Putin is so aggressive and detached from reality that a recession is unlikely to stop him. To justify his rule, Putin wants the great victory he promised and believes he can obtain. If he agrees to a cease-fire, it will only be to give Russian troops a rest before continuing to fight. And if he wins in Ukraine, Putin will likely move to attack another post-Soviet state, such as Moldova, where Moscow already props up a breakaway region.

There is, then, only one way to stop Russia’s dictator, and that is to do what U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin suggested in April: weaken the country “to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” This may seem like a tall order. But Russia’s military has been substantially weakened, and the country has lost many of its best soldiers. With broad support from NATO, Ukraine is capable of eventually beating Russia in the east and south, just as it has done in the north.

If defeated, Putin will face a perilous situation at home. He will have to explain to the elite and the masses why he betrayed their expectations. He will have to tell the families of dead soldiers why they perished for nothing. And thanks to the mounting pressure from sanctions, he will have to do all of this at a time when Russians are even worse off than they are today. He could fail at this task, face widespread backlash, and be shunted aside. He could look for scapegoats and be overthrown by the advisers and deputies he threatens to purge. Either way, should Putin go, Russia will have a chance to truly rebuild—and finally abandon its delusions of grandeur.

PIPE DREAMS
I was born in 1980 to parents in the middle strata of the Soviet intelligentsia. My father was an economist at the foreign trade ministry, and my mother taught English at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations. She was the daughter of a general who commanded a rifle division during World War II and was recognized as a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”

We lived in a large Moscow apartment assigned by the state to my grandfather after the war, and we had opportunities that most Soviet residents did not. My father was appointed to a position at a joint Soviet-Swiss venture, which allowed us to live in Switzerland in 1984 and 1985. For my parents, this time was transformative. They experienced what it was like to reside in a wealthy country, with amenities—grocery carts, quality dental care—that the Soviet Union lacked.

As an economist, my father was already aware of the Soviet Union’s structural problems. But living in western Europe led him and my mother to question the system more deeply, and they were excited when Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika in 1985. So, it seemed, were most Soviet residents. One didn’t have to live in western Europe to realize that the Soviet Union’s shops offered a narrow range of low-quality products, such as shoes that were painful to wear. Soviet residents knew the government was lying when it claimed to be leading “progressive mankind.”


Russia’s bureaucracy discourages independent thought.

Many Soviet citizens believed that the West would help their country as it transitioned to a market economy. But such hopes proved naive. The West did not provide Russia with the amount of aid that many of its residents—and some prominent U.S. economists—thought necessary to address the country’s tremendous economic challenges. Instead, the West encouraged the Kremlin as it quickly lifted price controls and rapidly privatized state resources. A small group of people grew extremely rich from this process by snapping up public assets. But for most Russians, the so-called shock therapy led to impoverishment. Hyperinflation hit, and average life expectancy went down. The country did experience a period of democratization, but much of the public equated the new freedoms with destitution. As a result, the West’s status in Russia seriously suffered.

It took another major hit after NATO’s 1999 campaign against Serbia. To Russia, the bombings looked less like an operation to protect the country’s Albanian minority than like aggression by a large power against a tiny victim. I vividly remember walking by the U.S. embassy in Moscow the day after a mob attacked it and noticing marks left by paint that had been splattered against its walls.

As the child of middle-class parents—my father left the civil service in 1991 and started a successful small business—I experienced this decade of turbulence mostly secondhand. My teenage years were stable, and my future seemed fairly predictable. I became a student at the same university where my mother taught and set my sights on working in international affairs as my father had. I benefited from studying at a time when Russian discourse was open. Our professors encouraged us to read a variety of sources, including some that were previously banned. We held debates in class. In the summer of 2000, I excitedly walked into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for an internship, ready to embark on a career I hoped would teach me about the world.


My experience proved disheartening. Rather than working with skilled elites in stylish suits—the stereotype of diplomats in Soviet films—I was led by a collection of tired, middle-aged bosses who idly performed unglamorous tasks, such as drafting talking points for higher-level officials. Most of the time, they didn’t appear to be working at all. They sat around smoking, reading newspapers, and talking about their weekend plans. My internship mostly consisted of getting their newspapers and buying them snacks.

I decided to join the ministry anyway. I was eager to earn my own money, and I still hoped to learn more about other places by traveling far from Moscow. When I was hired in 2002 to be an assistant attaché at the Russian embassy in Cambodia, I was happy. I would have a chance to use my Khmer language skills and studies of Southeast Asia.

Since Cambodia is on the periphery of Russia’s interests, I had little work to do. But living abroad was an upgrade over living in Moscow. Diplomats stationed outside Russia made much more money than those placed domestically. The embassy’s second-in-command, Viacheslav Loukianov, appreciated open discussion and encouraged me to defend my opinions. And our attitude to the West was fairly congenial. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs always had an anti-American bent—one inherited from its Soviet predecessor—but the bias was not overpowering. My colleagues and I did not think much about NATO, and when we did, we usually viewed the organization as a partner. One evening, I went out for beers with a fellow embassy employee at an underground bar. There, we ran into an American official who invited us to drink with him. Today, such an encounter would be fraught with tension, but at the time, it was an opportunity for friendship.

Yet even then, it was clear that the Russian government had a culture that discouraged independent thought—despite Loukianov’s impulses to the contrary. One day, I was called to meet with the embassy’s number three official, a quiet, middle-aged diplomat who had joined the foreign ministry during the Soviet era. He handed me text from a cable from Moscow, which I was told to incorporate into a document we would deliver to Cambodian authorities. Noticing several typos, I told him that I would correct them. “Don’t do that!” he shot back. “We got the text straight from Moscow. They know better. Even if there are errors, it’s not up to us to correct the center.” It was emblematic of what would become a growing trend in the ministry: unquestioned deference to leaders.

YES MEN

In Russia, the first decade of the twenty-first century was initially hopeful. The country’s average income level was increasing, as were its living standards. Putin, who assumed the presidency at the start of the millennium, promised an end to the chaos of the 1990s.

And yet plenty of Russians grew tired of Putin during the aughts. Most intellectuals regarded his strongman image as an unwelcome artifact of the past, and there were many cases of corruption among senior government officials. Putin responded to investigations into his administration by cracking down on free speech. By the end of his first term in office, he had effectively taken control of all three of Russia’s main television networks.

Within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, Putin’s early moves raised few alarms. He appointed Lavrov to be foreign minister in 2004, a decision that we applauded. Lavrov was known to be highly intelligent and have deep diplomatic experience, with a track record of forging lasting relationships with foreign officials. Both Putin and Lavrov were becoming increasingly confrontational toward NATO, but the behavioral changes were subtle. Many diplomats didn’t notice, including me.


Even limited displays of opposition make Moscow nervous.

In retrospect, however, it’s clear that Moscow was laying the groundwork for Putin’s imperial project—especially in Ukraine. The Kremlin developed an obsession with the country after its Orange Revolution of 2004–5, when hundreds of thousands of protesters prevented Russia’s preferred candidate from becoming president after what was widely considered to be a rigged election. This obsession was reflected in the major Russian political shows, which started dedicating their primetime coverage to Ukraine, droning on about the country’s supposedly Russophobic authorities. For the next 16 years, right up to the invasion, Russians heard newscasters describe Ukraine as an evil country, controlled by the United States, that oppressed its Russian-speaking population. (Putin is seemingly incapable of believing that countries can genuinely cooperate, and he believes that most of Washington’s closest partners are really just its puppets—including other members of NATO.)

Putin, meanwhile, continued working to consolidate power at home. The country’s constitution limited presidents to two consecutive terms, but in 2008, Putin crafted a scheme to preserve his control: he would support his ally Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential candidacy if Medvedev promised to make Putin prime minister. Both men followed through, and for the first few weeks of Medvedev’s presidency, those of us at the foreign ministry were uncertain which of the two men we should address our reports to. As president, Medvedev was constitutionally charged with directing foreign policy, but everybody understood that Putin was the power behind the throne.

We eventually reported to Medvedev. The decision was one of several developments that made me think that Russia’s new president might be more than a mere caretaker. Medvedev established warm ties with U.S. President Barack Obama, met with American business leaders, and cooperated with the West even when it seemed to contradict Russian interests. When rebels tried to topple the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, for example, the Russian military and foreign ministry opposed NATO efforts to establish a no-fly zone over the country. Qaddafi historically had good relations with Moscow, and our country had investments in Libya’s oil sector, so our ministry didn’t want to help the rebels win. Yet when France, Lebanon, and the United Kingdom—backed by the United States—brought a motion before the UN Security Council that would have authorized a no-fly zone, Medvedev had us abstain rather than veto it. (There is evidence that Putin may have disagreed with this decision.)



But in 2011, Putin announced plans to run for president again. Medvedev—reluctantly, it appeared—stepped aside and accepted the position of prime minister. Liberals were outraged, and many called for boycotts or argued that Russians should deliberately spoil their ballots. These protesters made up only a small part of Russia’s population, so their dissent didn’t seriously threaten Putin’s plans. But even the limited display of opposition seemed to make Moscow nervous. Putin thus worked to bolster turnout in the 2011 parliamentary elections to make the results of the contest seem legitimate—one of his earlier efforts to narrow the political space separating the people from his rule. This effort extended to the foreign ministry. The Kremlin gave my embassy, and all the others, the task of getting overseas Russians to vote.

I worked at the time in Mongolia. When the election came, I voted for a non-Putin party, worrying that if I didn’t vote at all, my ballot would be cast on my behalf for Putin’s United Russia. But my wife, who worked at the embassy as chief office manager, boycotted. She was one of just three embassy employees who did not participate.

A few days later, embassy leaders looked through the list of staff who cast ballots in the elections. On being named, the other two nonvoters said they were not aware that they needed to participate and promised to do so in the upcoming presidential elections. My wife, however, said that she did not want to vote, noting that it was her constitutional right not to participate. In response, the embassy’s second-in-command organized a campaign against her. He shouted at her, accused her of breaking discipline, and said that she would be labeled “politically unreliable.” He described her as an “accomplice” of Alexei Navalny, a prominent opposition leader. After my wife didn’t vote in the presidential contest either, the ambassador didn’t talk to her for a week. His deputy didn’t speak to her for over a month.

BREAKING BAD

My next position was in the ministry’s Department for Nonproliferation and Arms Control. In addition to issues related to weapons of mass destruction, I was assigned to focus on export controls—regulations governing the international transfer of goods and technology that can be used for defense and civilian purposes. It was a job that would give me a clear view of Russia’s military, just as it became newly relevant.

In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and began fueling an insurgency in the Donbas. When news of the annexation was announced, I was at the International Export Control Conference in Dubai. During a lunch break, I was approached by colleagues from post-Soviet republics, all of whom wanted to know what was happening. I told them the truth: “Guys, I know as much as you do.” It was not the last time that Moscow made major foreign policy decisions while leaving its diplomats in the dark.

Among my colleagues, reactions to the annexation of Crimea ranged from mixed to positive. Ukraine was drifting Westward, but the province was one of the few places where Putin’s mangled view of history had some basis: the Crimean Peninsula, transferred within the Soviet Union from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, was culturally closer to Moscow than to Kyiv. (Over 75 percent of its population speaks Russian as their first language.) The swift and bloodless takeover elicited little protest among us and was extremely popular at home. Lavrov used it as an opportunity to grandstand, giving a speech blaming “radical nationalists” in Ukraine for Russia’s behavior. I and many colleagues thought that it would have been more strategic for Putin to turn Crimea into an independent state, an action we could have tried to sell as less aggressive. Subtlety, however, is not in Putin’s toolbox. An independent Crimea would not have given him the glory of gathering “traditional” Russian lands.

Creating a separatist movement in and occupying the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, was more of a head-scratcher. The moves, which largely took place in the first third of 2014, didn’t generate the same outpouring of support in Russia as did annexing Crimea, and they invited another wave of international opprobrium. Many ministry employees were uneasy about Russia’s operation, but no one dared convey this discomfort to the Kremlin. My colleagues and I decided that Putin had seized the Donbas to keep Ukraine distracted, to prevent the country from creating a serious military threat to Russia, and to stop it from cooperating with NATO. Yet few diplomats, if any, told Putin that by fueling the separatists, he had in fact pushed Kyiv closer to his nemesis.


The West’s 2014 sanctions substantially weakened the Russian military.

My diplomatic work with Western delegations continued after the Crimean annexation and the Donbas operation. At times, it felt unchanged. I still had positive relations with my colleagues from the United States and Europe as we worked productively on arms control issues. Russia was hit with sanctions, but they had a limited impact on Russia’s economy. “Sanctions are a sign of irritation,” Lavrov said in a 2014 interview. “They are not the instrument of serious policies.”

But as an export official, I could see that the West’s economic restrictions had serious repercussions for the country. The Russian military industry was heavily dependent on Western-made components and products. It used U.S. and European tools to service drone engines and motors. It relied on Western producers to build gear for radiation-proof electronics, which are critical for the satellites Russian officials use to gather intelligence, communicate, and carry out precision strikes. Russian manufacturers worked with French companies to get the sensors needed for our airplanes. Even some of the cloth used in light aircraft, such as weather balloons, was made by Western businesses. The sanctions suddenly cut off our access to these products and left our military weaker than the West understood. But although it was clear to my team how these losses undermined Russia’s strength, the foreign ministry’s propaganda helped keep the Kremlin from finding out. The consequences of this ignorance are now on full display in Ukraine: the sanctions are one reason Russia has had so much trouble with its invasion.

The diminishing military capacity did not prevent the foreign ministry from becoming increasingly belligerent. At summits or in meetings with other states, Russian diplomats spent more and more time attacking the United States and its allies. My export team held many bilateral meetings with, for instance, Japan, focused on how our countries could cooperate, and almost every one of them served as an opportunity to say to Japan, “Don’t forget who nuked you.”

I attempted some damage control. When my bosses drafted belligerent remarks or reports, I tried persuading them to soften the tone, and I warned against warlike language and constantly appealing to our victory over the Nazis. But the tenor of our statements—internal and external—grew more antagonistic as our bosses edited in aggression. Soviet-style propaganda had fully returned to Russian diplomacy.

HIGH ON ITS OWN SUPPLY

On March 4, 2018, former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned, almost fatally, at their home in the United Kingdom. It took just ten days for British investigators to identify Russia as the culprit. Initially, I didn’t believe the finding. Skripal, a former Russian spy, had been convicted for divulging state secrets to the British government and sent to prison for several years before being freed in a spy swap. It was difficult for me to understand why he could still be of interest to us. If Moscow had wanted him dead, it could have had him killed while he was still in Russia.

My disbelief came in handy. My department was responsible for issues related to chemical weapons, so we spent a good deal of time arguing that Russia was not responsible for the poisoning—something I could do with conviction. Yet the more the foreign ministry denied responsibility, the less convinced I became. The poisoning, we claimed, was carried out not by Russia but by supposedly Russophobic British authorities bent on spoiling our sterling international reputation. The United Kingdom, of course, had absolutely no reason to want Skripal dead, so Moscow’s claims seemed less like real arguments than a shoddy attempt to divert attention away from Russia and onto the West—a common aim of Kremlin propaganda. Eventually, I had to accept the truth: the poisonings were a crime perpetrated by Russian authorities.

Many Russians still deny that Moscow was responsible. I know it can be hard to process that your country is run by criminals who will kill for revenge. But Russia’s lies were not persuasive to other countries, which decisively voted down a Russian resolution before the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons meant to derail the prominent intergovernmental organization’s investigation into the attack. Only Algeria, Azerbaijan, China, Iran, and Sudan took Moscow’s side. Sure enough, the investigation concluded that the Skripals had been poisoned by Novichok: a Russian-made nerve agent.


Moscow wanted to be told what it hoped to be true—not what was actually happening.

Russia’s delegates could have honestly conveyed this loss to their superiors. Instead, they effectively did the opposite. Back in Moscow, I read long cables from Russia’s OPCW delegation about how they had defeated the numerous “anti-Russian,” “nonsensical,” and “groundless” moves made by Western states. The fact that Russia’s resolution had been defeated was often reduced to a sentence.

At first, I simply rolled my eyes at these reports. But soon, I noticed that they were taken seriously at the ministry’s highest levels. Diplomats who wrote such fiction received applause from their bosses and saw their career fortunes rise. Moscow wanted to be told what it hoped to be true—not what was actually happening. Ambassadors everywhere got the message, and they competed to send the most over-the-top cables.

The propaganda grew even more outlandish after Navalny was poisoned with Novichok in August 2020. The cables left me astonished. One referred to Western diplomats as “hunted beasts of prey.” Another waxed on about “the gravity and incontestability of our arguments.” A third spoke about how Russian diplomats had “easily nipped in the bud” Westerners’ “pitiful attempts to raise their voices.”



Such behavior was both unprofessional and dangerous. A healthy foreign ministry is designed to provide leaders with an unvarnished view of the world so they can make informed decisions. Yet although Russian diplomats would include inconvenient facts in their reports, lest their supervisors discover an omission, they would bury these nuggets of truth in mountains of propaganda. A 2021 cable might have had a line explaining, for instance, that the Ukrainian military was stronger than it was in 2014. But that admission would have come only after a lengthy paean to the mighty Russian armed forces.

The disconnect from reality became even more extreme in January 2022, when U.S. and Russian diplomats met at the U.S. mission in Geneva to discuss a Moscow-proposed treaty to rework NATO. The foreign ministry was increasingly focused on the supposed dangers of the Western security bloc, and Russian troops were massing on the Ukrainian border. I served as a liaison officer for the meeting—on call to provide assistance if our delegation needed anything from Russia’s local mission—and received a copy of our proposal. It was bewildering, filled with provisions that would clearly be unacceptable to the West, such as a demand that NATO withdraw all troops and weapons from states that joined after 1997, which would include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic states. I assumed its author was either laying the groundwork for war or had no idea how the United States or Europe worked—or both. I chatted with our delegates during coffee breaks, and they seemed perplexed as well. I asked my supervisor about it, and he, too, was bewildered. No one could understand how we would go to the United States with a document that demanded, among other things, that NATO permanently close its door to new members. Eventually, we learned the document’s origin: it came straight from the Kremlin. It was therefore not to be questioned.

I kept hoping that my colleagues would privately express concern, rather than just confusion, about what we were doing. But many told me that they were perfectly content to embrace the Kremlin’s lies. For some, this was a way to evade responsibility for Russia’s actions; they could explain their behavior by telling themselves and others that they were merely following orders. That I understood. What was more troubling was that many took pride in our increasingly bellicose behavior. Several times, when I cautioned colleagues that their actions were too abrasive to help Russia, they gestured at our nuclear force. “We are a great power,” one person said to me. Other countries, he continued, “must do what we say.”

CRAZY TRAIN

Even after the January summit, I didn’t believe that Putin would launch a full-fledged war. Ukraine in 2022 was plainly more united and pro-Western than it had been in 2014. Nobody would greet Russians with flowers. The West’s highly combative statements about a potential Russian invasion made clear that the United States and Europe would react strongly. My time working in arms and exports had taught me that the Russian military did not have the capability to overrun its biggest European neighbor and that, aside from Belarus, no outside state would offer us meaningful support. Putin, I figured, must have known this, too—despite all the yes men who shielded him from the truth.

The invasion made my decision to leave ethically straightforward. But the logistics were still hard. My wife was visiting me in Geneva when the war broke out—she had recently quit her job at a Moscow-based industrial association—but resigning publicly meant that neither she nor I would be safe in Russia. We therefore agreed that she would travel back to Moscow to get our kitten before I handed in my papers. It proved to be a complex, three-month process. The cat, a young stray, needed to be neutered and vaccinated before we could take him to Switzerland, and the European Union quickly banned Russian planes. To get from Moscow back to Geneva, my wife had to take three flights, two cab rides, and cross the Lithuanian border twice—both times on foot.

In the meantime, I watched as my colleagues surrendered to Putin’s aims. In the early days of the war, most were beaming with pride. “At last!” one exclaimed. “Now we will show the Americans! Now they know who the boss is.” In a few weeks, when it became clear that the blitzkrieg against Kyiv had failed, the rhetoric grew gloomier but no less belligerent. One official, a respected expert on ballistic missiles, told me that Russia needed to “send a nuclear warhead to a suburb of Washington.” He added, “Americans will shit their pants and rush to beg us for peace.” He appeared to be partially joking. But Russians tend to think that Americans are too pampered to risk their lives for anything, so when I pointed out that a nuclear attack would invite catastrophic retaliation, he scoffed: “No it wouldn’t.”


The only thing that can stop Putin is a comprehensive rout.

Perhaps a few dozen diplomats quietly left the ministry. (So far, I am the only one who has publicly broken with Moscow.) But most of the colleagues whom I regarded as sensible and smart stuck around. “What can we do?” one asked. “We are small people.” He gave up on reasoning for himself. “Those in Moscow know better,” he said. Others acknowledged the insanity of the situation in private conversations. But it wasn’t reflected in their work. They continued to spew lies about Ukrainian aggression. I saw daily reports that mentioned Ukraine’s nonexistent biological weapons. I walked around our building—effectively a long corridor with private offices for each diplomat—and noticed that even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day. It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves.

The nature of all our jobs inevitably changed. For one thing, relations with Western diplomats collapsed. We stopped discussing almost everything with them; some of my colleagues from Europe even stopped saying hello when we crossed paths at the United Nations’ Geneva campus. Instead, we focused on our contacts with China, who expressed their “understanding” about Russia’s security concerns but were careful not to comment on the war. We also spent more time working with the other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization—Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—a fractured bloc of states that my bosses loved to trot out as Russia’s own NATO. After the invasion, my team held rounds and rounds of consultations with these countries that were focused on biological and nuclear weapons, but we didn’t speak about the war. When I talked with a Central Asian diplomat about supposed biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine, he dismissed the notion as ridiculous. I agreed.

A few weeks later, I handed in my resignation. At last, I was no longer complicit in a system that believed it had a divine right to subjugate its neighbor.

SHOCK AND AWE

Over the course of the war, Western leaders have become acutely aware of Russia’s military’s failings. But they do not seem to grasp that Russian foreign policy is equally broken. Multiple European officials have spoken about the need for a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, and if their countries grow tired of bearing the energy and economic costs associated with supporting Kyiv, they could press Ukraine to make a deal. The West may be especially tempted to push Kyiv to sue for peace if Putin aggressively threatens to use nuclear weapons.

But as long as Putin is in power, Ukraine will have no one in Moscow with whom to genuinely negotiate. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will not be a reliable interlocutor, nor will any other Russian government apparatus. They are all extensions of Putin and his imperial agenda. Any cease-fire will just give Russia a chance to rearm before attacking again.

There’s only one thing that can really stop Putin, and that is a comprehensive rout. The Kremlin can lie to Russians all it wants, and it can order its diplomats to lie to everyone else. But Ukrainian soldiers pay no attention to Russian state television. And it became apparent that Russia’s defeats cannot always be shielded from the Russian public when, in the course of a few days in September, Ukrainians managed to retake almost all of Kharkiv Province. In response, Russian TV panelists bemoaned the losses. Online, hawkish Russian commentators directly criticized the president. “You’re throwing a billion-ruble party,” one wrote in a widely circulated online post, mocking Putin for presiding over the opening of a Ferris wheel as Russian forces retreated. “What is wrong with you?”

Putin responded to the loss—and to his critics—by drafting enormous numbers of people into the military. (Moscow says it is conscripting 300,000 men, yet the actual figure may be higher.) But in the long run, conscription won’t solve his problems. The Russian armed forces suffer from low morale and shoddy equipment, problems that mobilization cannot fix. With large-scale Western support, the Ukrainian military can inflict more serious defeats on Russian troops, forcing them to retreat from other territories. It’s possible that Ukraine could eventually best Russia’s soldiers in the parts of the Donbas where both sides have been fighting since 2014.




Should that happen, Putin would find himself in a corner. He could respond to defeat with a nuclear attack. But Russia’s president likes his luxurious life and should recognize that using nuclear weapons could start a war that would kill even him. (If he doesn’t know this, his subordinates would, one hopes, avoid following such a suicidal command.) Putin could order a full-on general mobilization—conscripting almost all of Russia’s young men—but that is unlikely to offer more than a temporary respite, and the more Russian deaths from the fighting, the more domestic discontent he will face. Putin may eventually withdraw and have Russian propagandists fault those around him for the embarrassing defeat, as some did after the losses in Kharkiv. But that could push Putin to purge his associates, making it dangerous for his closest allies to keep supporting him. The result might be Moscow’s first palace coup since Nikita Khrushchev was toppled in 1964.

If Putin is kicked out office, Russia’s future will be deeply uncertain. It’s entirely possible that his successor will try to carry on the war, especially given that Putin’s main advisers hail from the security services. But no one in Russia commands his stature, so the country would likely enter a period of political turbulence. It could even descend into chaos.

Outside analysts might enjoy watching Russia undergo a major domestic crisis. But they should think twice about rooting for the country’s implosion—and not only because it would leave Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal in uncertain hands. Most Russians are in a tricky mental space, brought about by poverty and huge doses of propaganda that sow hatred, fear, and a simultaneous sense of superiority and helplessness. If the country breaks apart or experiences an economic and political cataclysm, it would push them over the edge. Russians might unify behind an even more belligerent leader than Putin, provoking a civil war, more outside aggression, or both.

If Ukraine wins and Putin falls, the best thing the West can do isn’t to inflict humiliation. Instead, it’s the opposite: provide support. This might seem counterintuitive or distasteful, and any aid would have to be heavily conditioned on political reform. But Russia will need financial help after losing, and by offering substantial funding, the United States and Europe could gain leverage in a post-Putin power struggle. They could, for example, help one of Russia’s respected economic technocrats become the interim leader, and they could help the country’s democratic forces build power. Providing aid would also allow the West to avoid repeating its behavior from the 1990s, when Russians felt scammed by the United States, and would make it easier for the population to finally accept the loss of their empire. Russia could then create a new foreign policy, carried out by a class of truly professional diplomats. They could finally do what the current generation of diplomats has been unable to—make Russia a responsible and honest global partner.

ya

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Re: Russian and Chinese Leaders (Putin, Xi, Oligarchs, etc)
« Reply #99 on: October 24, 2022, 04:59:08 AM »
"will he ever be seen again ?"

If so,
only AFTER his lobotomy and brain washing