<nettime> Legit Brutality & Myth of Wealthy Russia

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

I came across two aspects that I hadn't read about 
before elsewhere:


* Myth of Wealthy Russia

To uphold his authoritarian leadership safely, Putin
needs all neighbouring countries to be poorer than
Russia. So far Ukraine has been fulfilling this
requisite, but its recent democratisation, start-up-
ification has been changing that.

As Romenia and Bulgaria have shown that mere member-
ship in the EU is enough to raise poor countries to
a level of wealth comparable to Russia's, and given
that Russia's own is on the decline, as it totally
depends on the demand of fossil fuels, the idea of
a culturally Russian nation rising to higher levels
of wealth than its own is a threat to Putin's grip
on power.

China has already experienced that: A little off-
shore China called Taiwan which reached much higher
levels of wealth than mainland. Putin wants no
Russian Taiwan to arise. And so he bombs *all*
Ukrainian infrastructure back into the middle ages.


* Legit Brutality

Possibly driven by his own experience as a young
Sovietic major in the revolting Dresden of 1989,
when he called for support by the Sovietic forces
and they showed up far too late to dismantle the
protests, Putin may be thinking in similar terms
as the Chinese leadership: Deng Xiaoping apparently
said "Two-hundred dead may bring 20 years of peace
to China" regarding the events on Tiananmen Square.

Putin was convinced, brutality would have helped
to save the Soviet Union, so the prospect of erec-
ting a Putin Union, a neo-Russian Empire that lasts
beyond his own lifespan, may in his eyes depend on
applying maximum brutality against the disobedient
democrats in Ukraine. Therefore, massive war crimes
may be intentional - and the ridiculous denials of
such crimes happening merely a legal strategy to
reduce annoying future pressure from Den Haag.


Rough summary of two German blog posts:

* https://germanpages.de/editor-s-blog/putins-furcht-vor-der-ukraine.html
* https://germanpages.de/politics/wie-die-ukraine-den-weg-zur-neuen-putin-union-versperrt.html

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