Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.
> So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?
They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.
It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Seems like the majority of people are uneducated to this extreme degree. Including the very highest leaders of the EU and the USA.
What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.
I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.
1. Russia's military is not independent. FSB is above them. This "cutting the balls of the military" has been a long-term strategy. This is not comparable at all with the USA, let alone Turkey.
2. Military, power, strength resources are purposefully divided between different players, military does not have a monopoly on power. There are also FSB (with their own forces, judges, prison, killing teams), National Guard (have tanks), Private Companies (decreased/fractured after the Wagner debacle). Heck, Kadyrov's thugs are part of that equation as well.
3. There really aren't examples of successful coups from the bottom only.
4. No, I do not suggest negotiations with Putin, quite the opposite. Way more should be done to get rid of him and his family personally, and not pussyfoot around it.
5. EU's problem was and still is anemic, slow and stupid action (lack of). Damn morons.
6. No, a significant portion of the population does not support the war. Do North Koreans truly support their regime as witnessed by the voting results and by the fact that people are not protesting and are not organizing a coup?
7. Russia had Oligarchs, but doesn't have anymore. Oligarchy means that rich people can influence politics. In Russia they can't. The typical western "money brings political influence/power" does not apply in Russia. In Russia the rule is "political position (given by Putin) brings money (as long as Putin allows)". Businessmen have no independence. Check what happened to Tinkov (Tinkov bank). And he is the lucky one.
> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.
Russian history offers an excellent counterexample in the downfall of the USSR when Gorbachev and others lost their legitimacy. Formally, they remained the top figures in the government; in practice, people gradually stopped following them over a period of a few years as everything was disintegrating (shortage of basic products, pointless war in Afghanistan, disasters like Chernobyl, etc). The people simply chose new leaders from among themselves and turned their backs to Moscow.
For example, a police station might've simply ignored orders from the ministry of internal affairs and instead followed the recommendations of a popular local figure (often a factory manager, uni professor, journalist, artist or writer). As districts increasingly acted this way, Moscow gradually lost control over the police force, which became decentralized and locally run. In the end, bosses in Moscow could yell all they wanted into a phone, but that did not move a single police officer on the ground.
Russian central government is currently nowhere near such loss of legitimacy. Tens of millions of people carry out the orders of their Führer every day. Some have stepped into a foreign country while carrying a gun. Others are milling artillery shells or programming cruise missiles. Some are sitting on HN trying to convince the world how their Führer has no other option than to murder Ukrainian children every night.
There is no pushback worth mentioning. Last year, out of 140 million people living in Russia, only 38 were arrested for anti-war protests. Add a few hundred more for anti-war posts on the social media. Completely insignificant numbers. Russians on HN will gladly explain how oppressive the climate in Russia has become and how difficult (gasp!) it is to protest, but they fail to recognize the downstream effects: that Ukrainians have to pay with their lives every single day for the cancer that the cowardice of Russians has unleashed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are in mortal danger right now on the frontline, trying to stop what Russians are too afraid to confront themselves.
It doesn't matter, just like it didn't matter to British citizenry who endured the blitz that the Nazis had self-couped, and Germans couldn't vote Hitler out. The only 2 choices available are to roll over and be occupied, or fight back against the aggressor state.
It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.
There is a (massive) difference between soldiers there to get a paycheck, and soldiers there to avenge their communities.
Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.
yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people? You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.
And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.
"The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."
As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?
So my fear is that Ukraine attacking Russian societal pillars will begin to manifest animosity.
Or they are anti-war but helpless to stop it, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is also good.
Either way if your country's existence is threatened and your people are being killed you don't sit back and do nothing because you are scared it'll make the attacker unhappy.
Sure, but there are many different ways of making your attacker unhappy, and some of them might decrease your chances of winning, so you might not want to do those.
Not saying that's the case here (I don't think it is), but the concept is sound.
The only value his coup provided to Ukraine was being a distraction. If they had succeeded, the war would have continued.
In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?
https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/spe...
Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.
Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.
After Nord Stream, we all know what those maniacs are capable of.
Or you're going to okay the card that every organization is in cahoots in the big American conspiracy to control the world?
Could it be that it's maybe you the victim of propaganda?
So, where this facts in YOUR honest Wikipedia?
Most like because they thought Ukraine was going to capitulate in few days, and they could hide the crimes of genocide, like it was done in the past.
That's how sickening this was, because Russia thought they were going to get away with it, they were just executing civilians for fun.
The whole world watched this in real time.
It's evil in at it's worst, for some sick illusion of ethnic superiority.
History will not forget this.
These are people going into a neighboring country that posed no threat to them, or to their way of living, to make money killing what many deem an inferior ethnic group.
Couldn't they choose not to go? Don't they have family members? Friends?
Just because some don't want to have anything to do with it, they're still paying taxes, funding the war, they're part of the economy that supports it.
Going about their lives with head down is being part of the problem.
All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
That's too late for that fear. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and "Russian Amazon's" warehouses have already changed the sentiment. That's a great gift from Zelensky to Putin.
I don't think that's the primary goal here anyway, it's to disrupt the Russian economy so that it becomes harder to recruit, provision and rearm their war effort.
Though, like the Wildberries attacks, it's likely that these datacentres are also being used by the military for data processing too. The Russian military certainly aren't as worried about US/Europeans about using civilian infrastructure for their military efforts.
It is the west waging war against them through Ukraine. This is not the first time in history it happens.
You are so brainwashed (and most of you are also simply ignorant) that this basic truth is interpreted by you as "fake news".
The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.
So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?