The article makes the case that Snowden was NOT a whistleblower:

“ "I want to emphasize this: my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying of documents, but with the reading of them. My initial intention was just to confirm the suspicions that I'd first had back in 2009 in Tokyo. Three years later I was determined to find out if an American system of mass surveillance existed and, if it did, how it functioned."

With this, Snowden basically admits that he isn't a whistleblower: he wasn't confronted with illegal activities or significant abuses and subsequently secured evidence of that, but acted the other way around, by first gathering as much information he could get and then look whether there was something incriminating in it.

In his memoir, Snowden doesn't come up with concrete misconducts or other things that could have triggered his decision to hand the files over to journalists. He even omits almost all the disclosures made by the press, which makes that Permanent Record contains hardly anything that justifies his unprecedented data theft.”

A lot of people refer to him as a whistleblower because he exposed what the NSA was doing. A lot of people consider this a public good.

Your definition of whisleblower seems to be closer to a government bureaucrat's definition.

I'm curious why you brought that up?

I think the parent is claiming that whistleblower protections don't apply to Snowden. A vigilante's actions can be both morally right and blatantly illegal. There are people that are glad he did what he did, but also believe in the rule of law, and feel his actions might have carried more weight if he turned himself in and accepted the legal repercussions.

Personally, if I were the judge I'd give him a light slap on the wrist because of how hard he worked to bring the information to light in a responsible manner so nobody got hurt. It's hard for me to imagine him not getting absolutely fucked in a real court of law however, and I'm certainly not going to judge him and say, "You should have been willing to throw your whole life away over this, or not done it at all."

He would have been executed.

What peacetime charge carries the death penalty for espionage or related?

Do any of the relevant laws specify needing to be at war? Both the treason clause of the Constitution and the Espionage Act specify helping "enemies," but I'm not sure they specify needing to be at war.

The Rosenberg's were executed despite the US never officially declaring war on the USSR or even North Korea.

> I'm curious why you brought that up?

It’s a direct quote from the article.

Right. I just didn't see the significance of his fitting a specific definition of whistleblower.

Most of the article was discussing the illegal secret data collection he exposed and the worldwide response to those revelations in the ten years since.

I wasn't sure what difference it made that the official government whistleblower processes didn't work for him. Someone else mentioned he therefore lost legal whistleblower protections. I don't think that the public worried about big brother, the tech companies like Google who promptly encrypted all their traffic, or allies like Angela Merkel that were spied on, cared that Snowden stepped outside the government's whistleblower process when it didn't work.

I didn't know if this is what you meant, or if you thought that what he did (double cross the government) was worse than what the NSA did (double cross the public), or if he should have kept his mouth shut when the official process wasn't working, or something else.

He argued the American people had a right to know what was occurring and make a decision as to whether it should be done.

That likely isn’t “by the book” whistle blowing since governments can and do make what they do in the shadows “legal enough” to avoid scrutiny.

Guess it’s weird it’s that much of a discussion but many people care more about laws than morality.

In all these years I'd never seen this. Ironic, but not surprising, that according to this account Snowden did exactly what he accused the US government of doing: mass collecting data with no authorization or purpose and then using it to accuse someone he disagreed with of crimes.

I think we should be holding governments to a higher standard than some random dude.

And we do. The difference is that Snowden did the crimes he is accused of. The US government, on the other hand, did not commit the crimes Snowden accused it of.

That seems to be the only way to subvert the very compartmentalization that normally keeps people from seeing such patterns or systemic abuses that he exposed - no?

Did you think to ask what suspicions Snowden had in 2009 in Tokyo? Or why he had them? He stated he read an unclassified report with evidence of illegal activities and significant abuses. The classified version confirmed his suspicions.

Indeed, this struck me as weird, and so I went and re-read the Japan chapter. In which he also explains why metadata is more important than data, which this article later also completely ignores.

Since this website otherwise seems to be well-done, has been repeatedly popping up on HN, and related HN discussions seem to have an influx of pro-NSA new accounts :

https://i.imgur.com/2aVZBIj.jpeg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37570407

I'm afraid that I must entertain the possibility that the website itself is owned by the NSA, and the best thing to do is to ignore information on it, however well it might be presented. (I do not think that I'm smart enough to prevent a NSA team from tricking me.)

> The fact that the government pursued Snowden

They had to. He broke the law. He would have had the chance to go to trial and defend himself and seek whistleblower protection status. Given the politically charged nature and public opinion at the time, he might have had a pretty fair shake and could have been living comfortably in the US working for the ACLU or something.

Instead he plotted an escape to an openly hostile country (not even a quasi-neutral country or a non-extradition country) and allowed all of his stolen material to fall into the hands of a foreign intelligence service.

He didn't go to a hostile country. He went to Ecuador, not a hostile country. The US government cancelled his passport while he was connecting in Russia, and then the Russian airport refused to let him leave.

The fact that he's now in Russia is 100% on the US.

Also, he didn't bring any stolen information to Russia. He says he was contacted by Russian intelligence but that they pretty quickly figured out he had nothing more to give them than what he gave to the journalists.

In 1997 during the handover ceremony for Hong Kong there was a part that involved the PLA marching into Hong Kong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4-Sr_t_kE4

To pretend that they weren't in control of the situation when he was there from a national security standpoint is a bit naive. Ultimately the decision to allow him to depart Hong Kong was made in Beijing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-...

"The Chinese government made the final decision to allow Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, to leave Hong Kong on Sunday, a move that Beijing believed resolved a tough diplomatic problem even as it reaped a publicity windfall from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, according to people familiar with the situation."

You're claiming this with no evidence and calling me naive. What's more, there is a good explanation for choosing Hong Kong - it's the only non-US aligned country in the area with a history of free speech (well it was, back then). New Zealand or Australia has free speech too, but if he had gone there he would have been black bagged and sent on a plane to USA, Guantanamo style.

Hong Kong is China and in 2013 the process to take over administrative control by the CCP was already well under way. But looking at it from a national security standpoint China was in control. Why would I look at it from a national security standpoint? Given who he was and what he was carrying it has to be viewed that way. Let's not forget that he was carrying information on NSA espionage on China when he landed in Hong Kong.

2014 - NYTimes: "N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat" https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-c...

> what he gave to the journalists.

We now know Glenn Greenwald was likely a Russian asset at the time he was given access to the Snowden files. For a member of the intelligence community, he sure did a piss poor job of vetting who he chose to whistleblow with.

https://thespectator.com/topic/why-glenn-greenwald-backs-put...

No, we do not know that.

Your own article concludes

>Greenwald is not, as many of his critics lazily allege, a Russian agent

> We now know ...

> ... was likely ...

That would be "suspect", not "know"

Glenn Greenwald advocating isolationism in 2022 is not evidence he was a Russian asset in 2013. Or 2022.

The conclusion of the article you referenced is the opposite:

"Greenwald is not, as many of his critics lazily allege, a Russian agent; that would imply that his motivation is pecuniary rather than heartfelt. Greenwald remains what he has always been: a sincere enemy of liberal democracy and a genuine lickspittle for tyrants."

Glenn Greenwald is a real liberal democrat and fights for free speech. He even left "The Intercept" when they suppressed inconvenient facts.

An agent is a very different thing to an asset.

So is a chip off the old block and a chip on one's shoulder.

I've noticed that most criticisms of Greenwald seem to be "he sticks to his principles and calls things out consistently, even when it's Our Team doing them. He must be an enemy agent!". At both a domestic and geo politics level

He went to China and leaked documents of what Chinese systems the NSA had compromised in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong. China kicked him out.

The fact that he's in Russia is 100% on Russia. If you think the Russians care about Snowden's travel documents, you don't know anything about Russia.

If you think that russia is not a beuerocratic hellhole that cares to an extreme amount about travel documents you have never had the pleasure of dealing with russian border security in a moscow airport.

Or you have more money and backing than an average person. I hear langely is quite hot this time of year?

If you think the bureaucracy's dealings with average citizens applies to Snowden's inability to leave Russia, you have no idea how it works. https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-ecuado...

> He would have had the chance to go to trial and defend himself and seek whistleblower protection status.

Is this what you would've done in Snowdon's shoes?

Absolutely. When you make the choice to become a whistleblower, you are making the decision that the information you have is more important than your personal freedoms.

Any major US news publication or the EFF would have put their legal team to work protecting him. He could have fled to a friendly country like France that has strong civil liberty protections. He could have gone to a neutral country like Switzerland. Instead of trying any of these things, he went right to Russia and horse traded information for protection - which plays a lot more like an asset coming home than a legitimate whistleblower.

> When you make the choice to become a whistleblower, you are making the decision that the information you have is more important than your personal freedoms.

So it's wrong to expose a corrupt government without becoming a martyr? It's better to let the public to be fooled?

Not everyone thinks this way. Sometimes it matters, and sometimes it doesn't.

> he went right to Russia and horse traded information for protection

Do you have a source for the above statement?

It's my understanding that the U.S. revoked his passport while he was en-route to Ecuador, trapping him in Russia. I haven't heard that he gave the Russians any intelligence.

Poking a rights-violating government in the eye by exposing their rights violations, and then asking that government to protect your rights, isn't such a genius move.

Running away and getting protection from a different rights-violating government that you haven't poked in the eye sounds quite a bit less masochist.

It's also common knowledge he didn't go directly to Russia but had his passport canceled by the US, leading to the Russian airport he was transferring through not letting him leave.

You have no idea how whisleblowers are treated in even the most democratic and rich countries. There are numerous examples of people becoming the enemy of the state and a fair trial never ever happened. The legal system does not apply for those.

> He could have fled to a friendly country like France that has strong civil liberty protections. He could have gone to a neutral country like Switzerland

he could not [1]

> Instead of trying any of these things

he did try [1]

> horse traded information for protection

when he was in russia, he had nothing more to give them [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37401495

Of course not. GP would happily accept and participate in illegal mass surveillance, not blow the whistle on it.

The espionage act famously does not allow for whistleblowing as a defense. Tulsi Gabbard [1], Rashida Tlaib [2], Ron Wyden and Ro Khanna [3] (and perhaps others) have tried to introduce legislation to change this. For example, Reality Winner was unable to make any public interest arguments in her defense [4]. Ed Snowden has repeatedly said he would happily return to the US to face trial if he were allowed to make a public interest defense. For example, in a 2019 NPR interview [5]:

> My ultimate goal will always be to return to the United States. And I've actually had conversations with the government, last in the Obama administration, about what that would look like, and they said, "You should come and face trial." I said, "Sure. Sign me up. Under one condition: I have to be able to tell the jury why I did what I did, and the jury has to decide: Was this justified or unjustified." This is called a public interest defense and is allowed under pretty much every crime someone can be charged for. Even murder, for example, has defenses. It can be self-defense and so on so forth, it could be manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. But in the case of telling a journalist the truth about how the government was breaking the law, the government says there can be no defense. There can be no justification for why you did it. The only thing the jury gets to consider is did you tell the journalists something you were not allowed to tell them. If yes, it doesn't matter why you did it. You go to jail. And I have said, as soon as you guys say for whistleblowers it is the jury who decides if it was right or wrong to expose the government's own lawbreaking, I'll be in court the next day.

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/crsj-fe... [2] https://theintercept.com/2022/07/12/whistleblower-espionage-... [3] https://www.rcfp.org/espionage-act-reform/ [4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reality-winner-espionage-act-60... [5] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/761918152/exiled-nsa-contract...

James Clapper broke the law. The government did not pursue him.

> He would have had the chance to go to trial and defend himself and seek whistleblower protection status...

In what universe would the US Gov't not just ship him off to some blacksite on a remote island somewhere and disappear him forever?

Now I'm not going to say the sentence Chelsea Manning received was fair or that I'd be down for going through what she did, or pretend that her life will ever go back to normal, but can we not act like we don't have multiple, recent whistleblower/leakers who have served their time and been released from jail?

For all conspiracy theorists like to talk about it, there is remarkably little disappearing going on in the US, even when intelligence agencies are involved.

He hadn't started cross-dressing yet when he committed his act of treason, so:

> Chelsea Manning

Bradley Manning

> she

he

>He would have had the chance to go to trial and defend himself and seek whistleblower protection status

No, he wouldn't. Google "snowden fair trial". He has always said that he is perfectly willing to come to the US and do exactly as you describe, if the government is willing to guarantee a fair trial. It isn't.

Go on, Google "snowden fair trial". Go do it. It's a key part of the story you're apparently unaware of. It'll take 5 seconds.

Sibling comment pointing out same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37401553

Trump makes the same claims every time he is caught doing something.

Implying there is some sort of kangaroo court cabal out to get you is a deflection tactic that you seem to have fallen for.

If the American system is so corrupt that we ignore our own rules, why didn't the CIA just black bag him and bring him back? Or kill him outright? Both would be easier and more effective than a show trial.

I recently noticed how the public perception of Snowden changed on reddit. Years ago it was I think very positive. But with the war going on now when I see him come up, usually there are many users saying that he is a naive Russian asset and so on.

Makes me a bit sad to see.

You think Russian intelligence just let him have asylum (and be granted citizenship) without finding everything he knows about how the NSA operates? That'd be extremely naive to believe. Witting, willing, or not, Snowden has been extremely useful to Russia.

Then perhaps the US shouldn't have forced him to stay in Russia?

According to what I am reading on Wikipedia about the specific timeline, the US revoked his passport before he left Hong Kong. He claims he was planning to fly to Ecuador and was just going to pass through Moscow. And yet there are direct flights from Hong Kong to Ecuador.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the...

The US government is not responsible for him flying to or staying in Russia.

The US government is responsible for its track record of completely failing to provide constitutional rights as part of its justice system to people in snowdens position, and Snowden has every right to not subject himself to a broken and corrupt system

The Wikipedia article claimed Snowden's passport was revoked 2 days before he left Hong Kong. But the source it cited said the same day.

I found no direct flights from Hong Kong to Ecuador. And a direct flight path would enter the country he fled.

Which part is sad? The one that he and greenwalt stopped to pretend that they are not russian assets. Or that people noticed.

If you choose the path of martyr you ought to follow it. "I did it for your freedom and that's why am now with your sworn enemy" can only work for so long.

The guy was regurgitating Russian propaganda talking points on twitter just days before the invasion and then accepted Russian citizenship after the fact. At this point considering him a Russian asset seems reasonable IMO.

Isn't the big threat the US government's illegal and omnipresent spying on its own and other countries citizens, rather than what Snowden been up to lately?

I'm Ukrainian, so possible Russian assets like Snowden and Greenwald, or (senile) useful idiots like Chomsky and Waters are obviously much bigger threat to me than some dude in Maryland reading my emails.

Can you explain how?

Sure. Ukraine at the moment is completely dependent on its allies to support the war effort. Without their help Ukraine wouldn't hold on for long.

Recent Russian disinformation campaigns seem to be concentrated on eroding public support for Ukraine in western countries through various means and they had some success among the whole Greenwald-Taibbi-Snowden-Peterson crowd specifically and MAGA-people in general. Losing US support would put Ukraine in dire straits since I'm not sure EU/UK can provide all necessary equipment and ammunition by themselves.

Does reading taibbi or thinking the snowden revelations were a good thing make someone a MAGA person? Is Taibbi running Russian disinformation campaigns?

I don't fault you for your position one bit, but this stuff seems a little conspiratorial to me. And what Peterson are you talking about?

> Does reading taibbi or thinking the snowden revelations were a good thing make someone a MAGA person?

I never said that. In fact I consider Snowden's revelations a good thing and I'm not a "MAGA person".

> Is Taibbi running Russian disinformation campaigns?

Never said that either.

> I don't fault you for your position one bit, but this stuff seems a little conspiratorial to me.

Yes, that would indeed sound a little conspiratorial.

So let me get this straight. Since you are Ukrainian, Chomsky, Snowden, Greenwald, and others are threatening you by expressing views on the Ukraine war that diverge from the mainstream? Doesn't that sound awfully similar to George W Bush who claimed that everyone who isn't with us (the US) in the "war on terror" is against us?

You asked how I'm _threatened_ by those people trying to shape the narrative and I explained. Not sure what does whataboutims about George Bush have to do with it.

As the article you're commenting on makes clear, there is no illegal and omnipresent spying on its own from Snowden's documents. The phone metadata collection program was the only possibly illegal US program in the leaks, and that was shut down years ago.

Most of comments you read on reddit are written and/or upvoted by bots. No wonder they are trying to shift the narrative to be more pro-US. Eglin Military base was some time ago biggest source of traffic on Reddit. It’s up to you what you make of that

> Most of comments you read on reddit are written and/or upvoted by bots

I don't think that's true yet. At least regarding the portion of comments written; I have no idea about the votes.

There’s an important distinction here. Most of the comments you read. You being the general you. Most people will read a few dozen comments at most. These comments are overwhelmingly written by bots or inauthentic participants in subreddits like r politics. And they’re the most visible because these same groups also upvote them inauthentically

I just don't think that's the case yet, but we probably have no evidence one way or the other.

I don't know about /r/politics since I don't read it, but say in /r/worldnews, /r/europe, /r/ukrainewarvideoreport, /r/noncredibledefence, when I open a thread and pick ten comments at random and then take a look at their user histories I believe most are human.

I think /r/worldnews is 90% bots, judging by the repeating content and style of writing in comment section. And yes it looks like human would write.

>judging by the repeating content and style of writing in comment section

This is how reddit always has been.

Two things happen here:

1. bot farms buy stolen/sold accounts that have human comment history

2. bot farms re-post human content and then repost human comments on that content in a huge cycle to mimic the appearance of being human

>Eglin Military base was some time ago biggest source of traffic on Reddit.

lol this lie has been repeated since at least 2013.

I really doubt an overwhelmingly progressive website that hates billionaires is a psyop by the US establishment.

However it's convenient to claim they're bots because they don't love Russia as much as you.

It's not exactly a lie it comes from this 2013 Reddit blogpost http://redditblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-...

>Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL Oak Brook, IL South St. Paul, MN

So it is a total lie that it was "the biggest source of traffic".

>pro-US

*pro-illegal-spying

I am on the side of the US citizens, Snowden's side.

It's one of those rhetorical tricks being used to manipulate public opinion, where any criticism of the status quo is branded as "un-American" and "un-patriotic". But in fact it's the other way around, we criticize and are angry because we care about the country and the values it stands for.

The sleight of hand, the sneakiness of how everything gets turned upside-down is impressive though, how quickly a hero becomes a villain, and the villains openly continue with their villainy as if it were heroic.

And the villains are responsible for propping up your 401k and cheap electric bills. Almost enough intrigue to make you giggle.

It's super small subset of humanity that have both of those.

Snowden was behaving like a Russian propagandist in late 2021 and early 2022. He was repeating Russian lies that they were totally not going to invade etc.

It is funny how all comments (including mine) pointing out that fact are heavily down-voted without any counterarguments. I know the rules, so I won't insinuate any kind of "shilling", but that really makes you think...

Snowden claimed in 2014 that the 2012 Internet shutdown in Syria was actually done by the NSA and not Assad. The totalitarian dictator apparently cared too much about the free flow of information to do such a thing.

https://time.com/3107684/snowden-nsa-syria-cybersecurity/

He didn't provide any proof for this and anyone who questioned Assad's dedication to a free and unfiltered Internet was apparently an NSA shill.

That was when the world should have learned that he had been turned by Russian intelligence.

I downvote it because it’s been repeated a dozen times and there’s a lack of intellectual honesty to say that a prediction that Russia wouldn’t invade is the same as spreading Russian propaganda for deliberate and malicious reasons. I can’t be bothered to explain it more than this because any ability to not see this means I’m wasting my time explaining it further

> I downvote it because it’s been repeated a dozen times and there’s a lack of intellectual honesty to say that a prediction that Russia wouldn’t invade is the same as spreading Russian propaganda for deliberate and malicious reasons.

It wasn't just a good-faith prediction, he was quite cocky and arrogant about that[0], including, ironically, accusing others of amplifying disinformation campaign:

"So... if nobody shows up for the invasion Biden scheduled for tomorrow morning at 3AM, I'm not saying your journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns you like to write about, but you should at least consider the possibility."

At the same time he didn't appear too fazed by the invasion after it had begun, just casually accused others of concern-trolling[1] and "happily and thankfully" accepted Russian citizenship[2].

> I can’t be bothered to explain it more than this because any ability to not see this means I’m wasting my time explaining it further

I'm engaging in this discussion constructively and provide links to support my position. You preemptively accuse me of willful ignorance, but after re-reading his tweets I still stand by my words.

[0]: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1493641714363478016

[1]: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1498049577131208705

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/02/edward-snowd...

I'll be charitable by assuming that people here are getting defensive by their hero not living up to expectations. Snowden is (justifiably) angry about the US treatment of him and happily amplifies Russian propaganda as some sort of badly considered revenge.

It's a shame that he uses his platform for this, especially as the current propaganda is in support of Russia rolling their tanks across the border and killing thousands of people in Ukraine.

Also worth noting that it is strongly in his interest to craft and filter his public dialogue with the interests of the Russian state in mind. It is a basic fact of his existence, whether it is something he thinks about explicitly and often or not. Of course Russia isn't going to execute him or throw in in a gulag, since he is more valuable to them as a political set-piece that somewhat undermines America's moral high ground. However, that doesn't mean they can't lean on him considerably and make his life severely unpleasant in myriad subtle ways. There is no way he isn't acutely aware of Russia's reputation for brutal coercive tactics regarding their political enemies and targets, especially domestic ones.

He is completely at their mercy and he knows it. What is he going to do, cry out to the world that Russia is hounding and harassing him, or otherwise making his already beleaguered situation even less tenable? First of all, who is going to care that can do anything about it, second, it will delight people he almost certainly views as his enemy for him to make any such pleas and thirdly, it starts down a path of no return to start calling out Russia for abuses while you are stuck there with no allies and no way out.

Being on reasonably amicable terms with the power-elite in Russia is pretty much the last, best hope he has in this world. Whether consciously or not, the severe ramifications of burning that bridge are going to weigh on every decision and proclamation he makes. Of course he may always consider this effect and choose actions that upset Russia/Putin without regard for personal consequences. But it becomes increasingly easy to justify the path that doesn't lead to the complete crushing of your spirit the longer you have lived your life staring down the barrel of 5 or 10 different shotguns trained right between your eyes.

And of course it gets easier still when you feel wronged and martyred by the enemy of your friend, even if that friend is born purely out of necessity and circumstance. Anyway, all that is to say, thought I am grateful for his attempt to protect American citizens' constitutional rights and hold the government that professes to fight always for freedom to a higher standard... I have to take anything he has said in recent years as extremely biased and a product of "soft" but very serious coercion (from multiple fronts).

Arrogance does not disprove earnest belief. Snowden's comments before the invasion disappointed me. But many others said similar things. And I don't believe he owes Ukraine effective statelessness. Did he say anything about the war in 18 months?

> Arrogance does not disprove earnest belief.

I'm not saying I'm absolutely positively 100% sure that he intentionally shills for Russia, but consider that he has been in Russia for quite some time now but only got the passport after he started tweeting from pro-Russian angle.

> But many others said similar things.

Yeah, but I kinda expected more from him than "US bad, then Russia must be good".

> Did he say anything about the war in 18 months?

I'm not aware of anything after his initial "okay, I won't talk about it anymore since you ghouls are concern-trolling me after I got this one wrong", but I'm not really tracking his hot takes on social media anymore. I think he recently switched to well-articulated and insightful commentaries on US preparing to attack China or something...

For what it's worth almost everyone but US government predicted the Russians won't invade. Zelensky himself predicted there is no imminent invasion and complained that the west creates panic which is harmful to UA economy.

This is true; and I find it hard to understand.

I mean, I can understand Zelensky talking it down; as the public face of Ukraine's government, I assume everything he says is propaganda of some kind (whether or not it's true).

But back in December, the satellite photos were showing the huge build-up of troops and armour on Ukraine's border. I didn't believe it was just an "exercise", nor did I believe it was sabre-rattling. I was convinced that an invasion was imminent.

I paid no attention to Snowden's opinion; he was a guest of the Russian government, and couldn't easily flee Russia.

> This is true; and I find it hard to understand.

Russia actually invading Ukraine full-on was the most irrational and self-destructive thing Putin could've done. By all measures it was and still is a terrible idea. Only if you thought Putin was a madman you could've predicted it but before the invasion that wasn't his reputation at all IMO. I think he was seen as relatively pragmatic and rational (for a thug).

I agree that it looked like a crazy thing to do. But I'm not one of those who reaches for the word "madman" when someone does something that seems to me to be irrational.

With the benefit of hindsight, it doesn't seem so irrational to me now.

* Russia was under sanctions for the invasion of Crimea; the central bank had built up a huge stock of foreign currency, but it was only going to diminish with time.

* The Russian economy was at best stagnant, and largely powered by resource extraction.

* Ukraine was an impediment to land-traffic to Crimea (hence the need to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait), and also controlled the water supply.

* Ukraine was tooling-up.

For those reasons, delaying the invasion would have resulted in worse outcomes, the longer the delay.

As far as the justification for invading at all, you can take your pick from Russian fear of having a full NATO member on his Western border, or dreams of a restored Russian empire. I think both justifications are crazy, but dreams of a restored imperial glory are common among Russian nationalists. They can't all be madmen.

I think it is astute to look at things in these terms, and avoid the lazy but quite common exercise of labeling motivations and actions you don't understand as "not understandable."

George Kennan, who came up in a recent HN post [0], has a fair bit to say on the subject. Namely, that throughout its history, Russia has been obsessed with expanding and securing its border for perfectly understandable strategic reasons. Especially regarding Ukraine and Crimea. Something along the lines of their western borders being completely open and strategically terrible to defend, thus the desire to push them out to more defensible locations. Of course you also have key routes for shipping, military bases, and oil flow in Ukraine that make it an incredibly appealing strategic objective. Kennan actually defined this mentality of western territorial expansion as an essential part of the Russian character, that it should be used as a backdrop to inform analysis of Russia 's motivations and contextualize strategic decisions (this was a key part of his analysis that ultimately lead to the whole "containment" strategy in the cold war).

It seems as though Western expansion has become completely ingrained basically to the point of a cultural imperative for any aspiring politician or political operator in Russia. Kind of like the requirement that any US politician must publicly proclaim their love of freedom and God in more or less equal measure (from what I can gather we've had exactly two openly atheist congress members, out of >11,000 members throughout history). In this way, it doesn't necessarily have to be rational in any absolute sense, it is rational in terms of national politics, beyond the point of expediency and into the territory of a binary whether or not you fit the hard requirements.

In 1992, Kennan wrote that NATO expansion towards former Soviet states in Western Europe including Ukraine, “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era... Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

He seems to have been largely ignored, not for the first in his career, up until Putin lead Russia to the annexation of Crimea. An act which seems to have taken heads of state and the international relations people by surprise, and perhaps undermined their optimistic beliefs about Putin having been coaxed into political/military partnership with the Western world (through economic incentives, international relations norms, etc). There was a lot of stock put on this idea that through economic incentives, trade agreements, and such, both Russia and China could be "brought into the fold" of neoliberalism and Western democratic principles. People were quite shocked to find out it didn't play out like a Disney movie with regards to Putin, and it's looking more and more like China isn't going to continue playing along with the tune set by the West when it is no longer in their strategic interest to do so.

Everyone from Obama to John Kerry to Angela Merkel were so perplexed over Russia's move in 2014 that their only explanations (including to each other in private, apparently) revolved around Putin being divorced from reality. However, as Henry Kissinger noted, the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis when there is nothing better at hand to guide us. So perhaps it is our lack of understanding of his real situation and objectives rather than his (of what is in both his and Russia's strategic interest) that is driving this urge to paint him as a irrational lunatic.

It seems likely that, as Kennan predicted, NATO expansion and general American/European policy caused a return of cold-war thinking and relations.. but only in the mind of Putin and Russian politicians. The rest of the world was out of step, and apparently wouldn't realize their error and catch up to reality until after that key moment in 2022, when just about everyone except US intelligence agencies didn't really believe the invasion was going to happen.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374013

Situations change, I can see how in the 70s and 80s this may have been an argument to keep the cold war "cold". But as the Russians have shown, there is no longer any need to handle them with care. Their armed forces are diminished to the point they can't successfully roll tanks over their own border and get a strategic win.

All they have left is the nuclear threat, which only protects existing borders (even for Putin holding Ukrainian territory is not worth having Moscow turned to glass by the return strike).

There is nothing to be gained by acknowledging the Russian expansionist "cultural imperative" in policy making now. Ensure the ex-Soviet states that want to join NATO and the world will be a safer place.

> the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis

We tend to personalize nations, to the extent that we refer to the nation using the name of its leader. So, for example, "Putin invaded Ukraine". In fact the first time Putin even visited Ukraine was more than a year after the invasion.

What we generally mean by "Putin" is what during the Cold War was referred to as "The Kremlin", roughly Soviet/Russian central government. "Kremlinologist" was a term that referred to people whose job was figuring out what was going on in the Kremlin; civilians like me were encouraged to regard Kremlinology as impossible in principle, like Astrology, or reading tea-leaves.

I don't pretend to know what's going on in the Kremlin. But generals get pushed aside, and then re-hired somewhere else; officials get publicly humiliated on TV. I think it's faily clear that Putin is not in any sense an absolute dictator. He's the leader of a very authoritarian, militaristic government, in a country that is traditionally very authoritarian and militaristic.

I mean, I do think Putin's bonkers. But not based on his actions; I suppose his government's actions are the actions of the leadership clique, the "siloviki", i.e. the former KGB/GRU colonel-generals, turned oligarchs and government officials. I don't think Putin could have ordered this invasion without consensus of some kind in his clique. If his power were that concentrated, he would by now have ordered full mobilization, but it isn't, and he can't.

The handling of the Prigozhin Mutiny is evidence of that (Prigozhin is not siloviki, and was never KGB/GRU). If Putin were an absolute dictator, Prigozhin would have died the day after the mutiny, either shot somewhere very public, or poisoned using chemicals only made by the Russian government.

> This is true; and I find it hard to understand.

It's actually not that complicated. The US intelligence services relied on high-level sources, essentially the military's plans for invasion, to come to its conclusions. European intelligence services tended to rely on low-level sources (the status of the units in question) instead. It turns out that the units were, even on the eve of the invasion, simply not ready for an invasion, and the European intelligence had sussed that out. In effect, when the US reported to the Europeans that Russia was preparing for war, the Europeans went "With what army? This one clearly ain't ready for war."

Combine those contradictory signals with the preconceptions that people had. The US intelligence had badly misfired during the Iraq War. There is a (not entirely undeserved) tendency to view the US as excessively warmongering. Putin had a (mostly undeserved) reputation of being a skillful and crafty manipulator. And Russia engaging in naked territorial aggression would require painful reassessments of 30 years of Russia policy (not least of which is the degree to which Europe depended on Russian gas). With all of that weighing against believing the US intelligence, it should be no surprise that Europeans did so.

I am no expert, but I too thought that they wouldn't do a full scale invasion. It seemed like a dumb move and I didn't think they would do dumb moves.

I have since learned to listen to what Pentagon has to say in this conflict, because their intelligence (and what they decide to share with the public) has proved to be on point.