Joe Did What? Lake NATO

 

Erdogan 🇹🇷 à cours d’arguments, la Suède 🇸🇪 intègre l’OTAN et la Mer Baltique devient le Lac OTAN 👊🏻

Vladimir Poutine, génie militaire👊🏻 pic.twitter.com/6RzxrolXwP

— La Punchline de Yakovleff (@G_Yakovleff) July 10, 2023

Remember all those earnest realists explaining how the Russian Federation was literally forced!—forced, I tell you!—to march into Ukraine because of the increasingly threatening expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through the states of the former Warsaw Pact from the Balkans to the Baltic, as we kept hearing from Professor Mearsheimer and Messrs. Greenwald and Carlson and most recently Bob-Bob Kennedy. 

I wrote about it with some sympathy myself back at the beginning of February 2022, in the context of the argument I was making back then, that there wasn't going to be any invasion of Ukraine because Vladimir Vladimirovich couldn't possibly be that stupid.

It's not the fat lady singing, but the Orchestra is on the move

First Kadyrov's fighters already in Rostov pic.twitter.com/FYqbCbR5ye

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) June 24, 2023

Six weeks ago or so I wrote, with the strongest sense that what I was writing was completely insane,

I know it's absolutely improbable, but I can't shake the thought that so many irregular forces commanded from outside the Defense Ministry, unable to achieve their assigned objectives in Ukraine, and increasingly at odds with the Kremlin officials whose incompetence is getting them killed, are not a healthy phenomenon back in the motherland. Prigozhin has up till now been pretty careful about attacking Putin himself, but is that certain to last?

I'm really imagining a situation like that of China in the late 1920s, a warlord state, and the potential for real civil war, not necessarily ideological, but rather driven by the presence of too many armies, all struggling to feed themselves off the lands they occupied. Or even Russia during the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, torn among armies of the Polish-Lithuanian confederation, Swedish mercenaries backing one new tsar or another (the throne changed hands six times between 1598 and 1613), Crimean Tatars capturing civilians to sell as slaves, and forces loyal to one court faction or another.

Now we seem to have gotten there, with Yevgeny Prigozhin and 25,000 ex-convicts having left Ukraine, and, without a shot fired, apparently occupied the southwestern city of Rostov na Donu, Rostov-on-the-Don, which is the military post from which Russian forces have mostly run and supplied the Ukraine war. After (first) denouncing the defense minister for starting the war on a fake pretext to aggrandize himself