The next logical step for Russia is to send an incursion of the Wagner troops from Belarus into Lithuania, a NATO state. Russia can repeat the 2014 trick and pretend that these are rogue troops it doesn’t control. The NATO will eagerly pretend to believe this.
This will be the first time when a NATO country will be hit with complete impunity.
Then Poland will be attacked. Again, complete impunity.
The culminating moment of this process will be a Russian hit on a target in the US that will not receive a response. An explosion, something. And America swallowing it and inventing some self-blaming conspiracy theory like “the CIA did it” or “we brought this on ourselves by being evil”.
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My prognosis is that Poland would respond by killing all of the Wagners.
There were a few Wagners in Mozambique, but they were beheaded by jihadis. Deniability doesn’t help you if you pick fights you can’t win.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bloodshed-and-retreat-from-mozambique-for-putin-s-private-army-the-wagner-group-696tnpzqh
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That will be great but the goal here is not to conquer Poland. The goal is to show that the NATO will do absolutely nothing. Nobody cares about Poland, with all due respect to Poland. It’s the humiliation of the US that Russia seeks.
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The US has been selling lots of weapons to Poland. I assume they would be used against any Wagners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/22/poland-us-weapons-ukraine-russia/
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I always suspected that T in NATO stood for “trade”. 🙂
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” goal is to show that the NATO will do absolutely nothing”
In this case I’m not that sure…. for good or ill the US military is heavily…. embedded in the Polish military now. The military base in the middle of town here has an American flag flying next to the Polish flag now, not sure if there’s a NATO flag or not….
Lukashenka mentioned Rzeszów a major hub for transporting…. things to Ukraine.
There’s no way to hit Rzeszów without hitting US forces…
Never say never (esp regarding russia) but I don’t see it now… esp since it’s only chance of success was the idea of surprise which Lukashenka ruined.
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Yes. And the US forces will be ordered to pretend nothing happened and not to retaliate.
More than anything, I want to be wrong about every part of this prognosis. Let’s hope I’m completely wrong. But at this point, I’m afraid that the only thing standing between us and this scenario is Putin weaseling out.
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” I want to be wrong about every part of this prognosis”
I think it would have been much more likely in 2021… at that point he was on a direct path of escalation and an attack on a NATO country was pretty much guaranteed (my money had been on Latvia or Estonia both with non-integrating russian minorities he could ‘rescue’) with Lithuania being an outlier (demanding a corridor to Królowiec and taking military action when they failed to comply).
I think (after reading/listening to a bunch of analyses) that this talk was mainly meant as a distraction, an attempt to keep conversation away from Odesa and the Black Sea.
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“The next logical step for Russia is to send an incursion of the Wagner troops from Belarus into Lithuania, a NATO state. Russia can repeat the 2014 trick and pretend that these are rogue troops it doesn’t control.”
This is pure fantasy. Poland’s military is quickly becoming one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful in all of Europe. They’d wipe out Wagner and Belarus in a week.
This is just sabre rattling for domestic consumption. Not Russia, nor Belarus have the capacity to open up another front.
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“They’d wipe out Wagner and Belarus in a week.”
Guys, I love you, but who cares? Putin clearly showed he doesn’t care about the lives of the soldiers, either mercenary or regular. He seeks to demonstrate that NATO will remain passive. As it absolutely will. I’m really surprised he hasn’t clocked on to it until now but nobody said he’s smart.
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” a NATO country will be hit”
For a long time now I can’t shake the idea that russia wants to get some minimal amount of overt NATO action so they can save face since losing against NATO isn’t as bad as losing to the hohols (which is what they’re doing and desperate to not say publicly).
A recurring theme on Julia Davis’s highlights (if you want to call them that) of russian state tv is that russia is fighting ‘the whole west’ or ‘all of NATO’….
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” next logical step for Russia”
Whatever they’ve been using for tactics so far…. logic has clearly not been any kind of guiding principle so I’m not that worried about this scenario (unless a completely insane and disassociated reason can be thought up…).
Nothing russia has been doing makes any kind of strategic sense… it’s just lashing out and visiting destruction because that’s all it has left…. and the West has no experience in dealing with this kind of insane actions….
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I keep reading this take, but I don’t think it’s right. Subjugating Ukraine makes a lot of sense for Russia. A free, successful, and Western aligned Ukraine throws their whole existence into question, not to mention geopolitically it’s very dangerous.
Had Russia successfully achieved victory last year, like everybody expected, we’d all be talking things differently. Heck , had Putin not been an idiot and instead thrown their whole forces to take southern Ukraine, that probably would have succeeded and probably even gotten away with it like they did with Crimea.
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“subjugating Ukraine makes a lot of sense for Russia”
Within the bounds lof imperial russian logic, yes. But nothing they’ve done makes any logical sense for someone not suffering from severe disassociation.
They fully expected to be welcomed with open arms… which is why they had no logistical infrastructure at the beginning — they didn’t think they’d need any.
Of course no one with any knowledge of Ukrainian norms or values would have expected that. But putain (and many western supporters) expected just that.
And mostly I was referring to recent actions… there is no strategic goal behind anything they’re doing because there are no strategic goals they can achieve… it’s lashing out at the spur of the moment… this anti-war russian (who gets it) puts it well
Similarly Vlad Vexler says very similar things about Girkin and putain in that neither can really articulate any reason for the war that isn’t based in time travelling fantasy.
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why is it that the British understood in 1945 , that their time of empire was over and the Russians still cannot grasp that their time ended with the Soviet Union.Will they risk suicide to hang on to their delusions? A thing to keep in mind is that all the flaws and weaknesses of democracies are in full view, their strengths are often hidden. The reverse is true of autocracies.
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From what I’ve seen and learned about Russians, they by and large have little to no ability of introspection so it’s difficult for them to correct their mistakes or take a different route, because things are never their fault and they’re always the victim.
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The British had other achievements, other sources of pride, other reasons to exist beyond controlling large territories. Russia doesn’t. It’sa gigantic country with extremely power standard of living. The Russian people search for an explanation but the only thing they find is that the rest of the world is sabotaging them. So they lash out.
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” to send an incursion of the Wagner troops from Belarus into Lithuania”
Now I’m wondering if Lukashenka just sabotaged putain again by leaking his plans (like the map he displayed early on).
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This plan makes absolute sense for Putin. Destroying Mariupol or Odessa is small potatoes. The real pleasure point is humiliating the US.
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Once upon a time in Syria, Wagnerites attacked a Kurdish/US controlled oil field. The Americans called some sort of conflict-prevention hotline they have there with the Russians, and the Russians said the attackers are not theirs. Then all kinds of weapons were fired on the Wagnerites, resulting in between 100 and 200 casualties…
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Americans swallowed it in Syria, swallowed it in Africa, swallowed it in Eastern Europe. Now it’s time to swallow it in a NATO country, and then the sky is the limit.
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