Wagner mercenaries were on Thursday reported to be trying to head back into Russia after threatening retaliation over the suspected killing of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on the orders of Vladimir Putin. “The convoys are likely heading towards the border with Russia,” the centre said. “There’s a lot talk right now about what the Wagner Group will do,” he said.
Does Putin seem reasonable to you? I think it’s pretty possible that he will be willing to take the whole world to the grave with him.
Absolutelly - so far he seems to be rational.
Not necessarily wise, certainly not morally upright (quite the opposite), but yeah, absolutelly rational.
He started a war to conquer territory and resources, likely based on certain expectations of capability of the Russian Military which were far from realistic as well as expectations on the Ukranian Military and Society which were also far fromrealistic. He went for a decapitation attack expecting Zelenskyy to be killed, captured or flee but none of that happenned and thus the “easy way” failed. From there onwards, as a dictator who has anchored his authority on an image of “strong man”, we couldnt simply back down so everything that has been happenning since has been him trying to ideally gain something out of a bad situation or at least not to lose face.
All pretty rational. Not exactly strategically intelligent but certainly rational.
As for the use of nukes, notice how the ever increasing talk about using it from the russian authorities maybe a year ago suddenly stopped (except for fringe types and well known powerless russian muppets) when China made it very clear they would have to do something about it if Russia used those…
Even a strategically inept but rational actor can’t miss the implications of China turning against Russia.
What was rational in this war?
He wanted territory, mineral resources and even human resources (lots of industrial production in the territories Russia took) and expected the mighty Russian Army would crush the Ukranian Army (just like when they took Crimea) and the rest of the World wouldn’t do much more than bitching & moaning (again, just like when Russia took Crimea). Apparently he was even expecting his men would be welcomed by the ukranians with open arms (remember how the head of Russian Intelligence was fire not long after the war started because of that?!) and that the rest of Europe could be controlled via Economic Pressure because of its dependency on Russian Gas.
It makes all sense that having overestimated the Russian Army and underestimated the Ukranian people and its Army as well as the will of the West to genuinelly help Ukraine (and looking at all the pussyfooting around providing modern jets and long range missiles to Ukraines, I would say that at least partially that’s true), it looked like a good idea to begin with.
Once commited, given the style of leader he portrays himself as and the overreliance on nationalism to control the russian people, he was stuck with the Ukranians pushing back with western help and unwilling to give up and being politically unable to just conced the War as that would be almost literaly putting his neck on the block.