PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXV: Putin's Surprise Attack on Ukraine, wiþ Special Guest Kamil Galeev

We Truly Did Not Have History Rhyming to the Spanish Civil War on Our 2022 Bingo Card!…

Key Insights:

1. Putin’s decision to invade came as a great surprise to everyone.

2. The information flow to Putin is very bad, very low quality.

3. Muscovy, St. Petersburg, Novgorod, Minsk, Kyiv are all ‘Rus.

4. But the cultural, political, and linguistic differences between Kyivan and Muscovite ‘Rus are surprisingly deep, historically speaking.

5. Economic sanctions can do a lot to degrade Russia’s war-fighting machine, and should be used to do so.

6. Bounties and rewards for defectors and for the neutralization of equipment might be very effective, and should be promoted.

7. Countries and régimes run on myth, and military defeat is the most effective way that a pernicious myth gets destroyed.

8. Be afraid, be very afraid: Putin’s survival—his personal political, the causes he has invested his life in, and perhaps his mortal—depend on his “winning” in some sense.

9. If appeasement of Putin could be made to work, it might well be worth trying.

10. But it is highly unlikely that appeasement of Putin could be made to work.

11. Really-existing Putinite petro-kleptocracy looks worse than really-existing Brezhnevite socialism.

---

References:

• ChinaTalk: Russia's Pivot to Asia From Czars to Putin

• Kamil Galeev: Why Russia Will Lose

  Kamil Galeev @kamilkazani

  Why Russia will lose this war? Much of the "realist" discourse is about accepting Putin's victory, cuz it's *guaranteed*. But how do we know it is? I'll argue that analysts 1) overrate Russian army 2) underrate Ukrainian one 3) misunderstand Russian strategy & political goals🧵

  

• Kamil Galeev: Twitter <https://twitter.com/kamilkazani>

• Wilson Center: Kamil Galeev <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/kamil-galeev>

+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

You can now read Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality in the new ‘Stack app for iPhone—but not (YET) Android.

The ‘Stack Communications Apparat says: “With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my ‘Stack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience. If you do not have an “Apple device”, you can join the Android waitlist here.”

I have been a beta tester for the iPhone ‘Stack app. The use case I have found for it is as a podcast player— using Apple's text-to-speech feature for ‘Stacks that do not have attached audio podcasts. It has, so far, been a very very good experience.