Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin – the Russian mercenary leader whose plane crashed weeks after he led a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership – shows what happens when people make deals with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
As Ukraine’s counteroffensive moves into a fourth month, with only modest gains to show so far, Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria he rejected suggestions it was time to negotiate peace with the Kremlin.
“When you want to have a compromise or a dialogue with somebody, you cannot do it with a liar,” Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Ukraine itself is not a “genuinely pluralistic democracy” despite appearances, it’s almost as corrupt and authoritarian as Russia.
It’s not the case where only Russia has to become more democratic cause democracies usually don’t fight each other.
But for Russia to stop being a threat it’s sufficient to just lose this war finally. It won’t recover its ability to attack anyone anytime soon, and when it will, the process of recovery itself is going to naturally ensure that it’s not interested in attacking Ukraine.
So yes, you are right about oligarchs and the general structure of the societies.
Essential assets you are talking about are what exactly? If you mean factories and plants, then actual equipment in most of them was obsolete even in 1991, and through the 90s and 00s has mostly been scrapped.
There are some remaining and even functioning, yes, but whether state ownership is going to prevent those from slowly crumbling due to growing obsolescence, irrelevance and lack of expertise, I’m not sure.
Basically industrial capacities are something to be created from scratch mostly.
What would be the definition of “losing” in this case? Countries tend use all the weapons at their disposal in order not to “lose”, in the case of Russia that would include its nuclear arsenal.
Sounds like a better outcome for everyone would be for Russia to get a civil war, and just “forget” about Ukraine.
All weapons which make sense for Russia’s leadership. Nukes are not that, they want to still rule over something when this ends.
Chemical weapons are possible, I think.
If we go far enough up the command chain, there are fallout shelters and
slavessubordinates to rule over.But you’re right, chemical and biological are likely lower on the “let’s fuck every treaty” scale.
I suspect they are getting second thoughts there about those fallout shelters and how different they are from wow hypersonic missiles and wow radioelectronic warfare and other kinds of wow they considered real.