Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:10 on 3 March 2022

One of my theories is that Putin is doing this simply because he is a fascist. Like all fascist leaders, he wants to rebuild the nation he leads to some imagined past era or lost greatness, and he believes this is a task that he himself is uniquely qualified to perform.

He had a much more practical formula for rebuilding the Russian empire of old, and it was working: the play-it-slow approach. The world was letting him get away with whittling off chunks of neighbouring countries. This worked before, too: the Russian Empire of old was built incrementally, over centuries.

But there was a huge problem for Putin. He is 69 years old. Time was (and is) running out for him to complete what he sees as his historic mission. Circumstances left him no choice: either dramatically speed up the pace, or give up on a cherished goal. For the past 20 years, he has gotten basically everything he wanted, and he has increasingly become isolated from reality and surrounded by yes-men, so of course he chose the former option.

If true, this means two things.

1. Danger. He’s an old man with nothing to lose. (Who knows, he might even have recently been diagnosed with a terminal condition.) In his mind he has to complete his historic mission. He will risk a nuclear holocaust to do it. It will mean failure for him if it happens, but this would be no worse in his mind than dying without a nuclear holocaust and without having rebuilt a Russian empire. Either way, he will be dead and will have failed in his historic mission.
2. He won’t take any offramps. Again, only one thing is acceptable to him and he is running out of time to accomplish it. Offering Putin offramps is likely to be pointless.

Instead, focus on offering Russia offramps, not Putin. Do things that encourage Putin’s overthrow. Attacking the Russian economy and in particular the foreign assets of the oligarch class is one such thing.

Putin’s claim to fame, the source of his popularity, is that he may be a corrupt authoritarian but at least the economy has grown and been relatively stable under his rule. During the Tsarist era, Russia was a backward outpost of feudalism. The Soviet Era was characterized by significant economic progress, but also significant economic chaos (there were literal famines), followed by a long period of stagnation, shortages, and decline. The immediate post-Soviet era featured an economic crash. The Putin era has been the most prosperous time in all of Russian history.

It is often the case that people will put up with a dictator as long as the economy continues growing. Taking away this trump card of a dictator can lead to his downfall. It happened to Suharto in Indonesia. Make it happen to Putin in Russia.

Suppose all of the above is wrong. Suppose Putin isn’t that crazy. In that case, Putin will take the offramp we offer to Russia. He will realize the source of his power, and act to try to avoid the fate other dictators in his situation. He will declare Ukraine “de-Nazified” by a “successful” mission and withdraw his troops.

Either way, offering Russia (and not just Putin) an offramp is the way to move forward.

Published at 06:20 on 1 March 2022

Yes, there is a big, scary Russian convoy working its way to Kyiv.

No, NATO should not bomb it.

It’s sort of shocking I have to say it, but Twitter is full of idiots advocating just that, even though it is a direct violation of one of the unwritten rules of avoiding World War III: nuclear-armed powers should never directly fight each other.

The same goes for a no-fly zone. That also should be permanently off the table, for the same reason. Any NFZ would have to be enforced, and that would mean a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russian aircraft.

Also, Ukraine should not get express special-treatment entry into the EU just because they asked for it. Full EU membership is a long process (Turkey is still going through it, after decades.) It’s that way for a reason: it’s a very tight integrating of economies, and nations should be reluctant to do that unless all parties are certain they are compatible.

The EU is right now having no shortage of dealing with headaches involving Poland and Hungary, both of which have right-wing governments that are backsliding into authoritarianism and kleptocracy. Both were welcomed into the EU, and in hindsight this welcome seems to have been too hasty. Let’s not repeat that error.

Ukraine is not a first-world democracy. Its prewar GDP per capita is roughly ⅓ of Russia’s. That’s less than Bulgaria, currently the poorest EU member state. It’s Transparency International corruption perceptions index is 32, less than the Philippines and only one notch above Mexico. The Azov Battalion is not just Russian propaganda; Ukraine really does have a neo-Nazi regiment in its military. (Putin’s “de-Nazification” pretext was chosen for a reason; the best pretexts do generally have some truth to them.)

None of this means that Ukraine shouldn’t be helped. None of this means that Putin is not himself the worst fascist on the world stage, and that the problem he poses won’t only get worse if his regime is not made to pay for what it is doing in Ukraine. It just means that this must be done realistically.

Another place where we must be realistic is realizing, as I wrote earlier, that Russia (by virtue of multiple poor decisions on their part) is partly responsible for Ukraine’s success up to now, and that the Russians are almost certain to correct some of those errors and start faring better as a result. It still would be no big surprise if Russia ends up occupying Kyiv and most of the rest of Ukrainian territory.

That matters less in the long run than most keyboard warriors might think, because an outgunned insurgency can (and has many times in history) worn down a militarily superior occupying force over time. But the same well-meaning but ignorant individuals talking about NATO bombing Russian convoys probably aren’t aware of that, either.

Being realistic is always the best policy.

Published at 07:33 on 28 February 2022

Probably not, but the possibility can’t be simply waved off, either.

A week ago, my answer would have been a solid NO, for the simple reason that to do so would be insane. Even by the warped weltanschauung of a kleptocratic fascist, it just doesn’t make sense. Kleptocrats can amass far more power and luxury in a pre-Armageddon world than they can in a post-Armageddon one. So that means giving up on a vision of a greater Russia that includes Ukraine? So what. You can’t always get what you want.

Now, I’m not so sure. First, there’s been Putin’s recent chilling statement. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the full-scale invasion of Ukraine itself. Remember, I predicted this wouldn’t happen, precisely because it would be likely to go poorly for Russia. That Putin chose to do it proves how detached from reality Putin is.

A Putin that could not see that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was highly unlikely to be the convenient little war he wanted, just might be a Putin that can no longer see there can be no winners in a nuclear war.

My hope is that if he tries it, the obvious insanity of the idea will prompt disobedience followed by a coup. But frighteningly, he may indeed try it, and if he does, a coup is not a certainty.

Published at 08:00 on 27 February 2022

Reports are starting to emerge that Russian troops have actually been pushed out of the city of Kharkiv. If proven accurate (warning: they might not be), this is truly remarkable and means the Ukrainian strategy is working beyond even the wildest expectations. Now this is a battle, and a battle is not a war, but nobody considered it a realistic goal for Ukraine to use military force to repel the Russians. The goal was to use persistent force to slow down the invaders then to eventually wear them out, as the Vietnamese and Afghans did when their countries were invaded. A significant ability to repel attacks and not merely bog them down would be, to reiterate, remarkable.

Based on my knowledge of the history of war, ever since the bullets started flying, Ukraine has done just about everything right. The rub is, Russia has done just about everything wrong. Therefore, Russia is partially responsible for Ukraine’s success. Such is always the case in warfare; the overall situation is always beyond the control of any one side. Anyone who thinks that war is a means of seizing control over a situation is seriously deluded. War is the ultimate loss of control.

Note I said ever since the bullets started flying above. Before active hostilities broke out, Ukraine’s government was seriously deluded. Up until the day of the invasion, state mouthpieces were insisting that an invasion was not imminent, despite virtually no major intelligence agency agreeing in this assessment. Ukraine only began organizing irregular troops on a significant level in the very final days of the lead-up to the invasion. They should have been doing this months ago (and they should have been loudly trumpeting it, advertising to Russia that any aggression on their part would have a high cost, in the hopes of prompting a recalculation on Putin’s part). This lost opportunity to organize and train the Territorial Defence Forces can only harm Ukraine.

But aside from that, Ukraine has done a great job so far. When all the dust settles, I would not be surprised to learn that there were Western military advisers quietly playing a role in all of this. Right now, there is a significant advantage to keeping any such role secret: it allows the Ukrainian government to put forth to the people the useful, morale-building myth that their successes have been theirs alone. Morale can be a huge force multiplier.

Russia’s choice to take the extremely dangerous measure of putting its nuclear forces on heightened alert is another indicator of how badly this is all going for Russia.

Finally, another warning: the tide can turn. Odds are, in fact, tilted towards things not always coming out as much in Ukraine’s favour as they have been so far. Remember the part above about Russia doing badly? No nation deliberately tries to do badly. The Russian forces are at this moment certainly trying to correct their mistakes. Not all of these measures will fail. Therefore, Russia is all but sure to, at least at times, start faring at least somewhat better than they have so far. Virtually every conflict has its advances and retreats; no side is immune to setbacks or missteps.

That would, of course, mean lost battles for Ukraine. But remember, battles are not wars. As things stand right now, it is increasingly looking like Russia is indeed going to get an Afghanistan 2.0 out of their military misadventure.

Published at 09:37 on 26 February 2022

Rather worse for Russia than Putin was hoping, it seems.

Now, before I continue, the standard word of caution about news reports from an active war zone applies: trust no source, even what are normally regarded as trustworthy sources. Russia’s invasion is very unpopular in the West, therefore even normally reliable outlets like the BBC are not to be simply taken at face value. The BBC is staffed by people, most of those people are upset by what Russia is doing, and therefore they have a motive to believe any bad news for Russia (and correspondingly any good news for Ukraine). This is the case even though they may be consciously struggling against bias; it can be very difficult to detach ourselves from our emotions.

However, what sticks out this morning is what Russia Today is saying about the conflict, or rather what Russia Today is not saying. There are no boasts of great territorial gains by Russian forces there. Instead, we see a story professing that this was never about territorial gains for Russia. If Russia was doing well on the ground, you had damn well better believe that the Russian state media would be loudly trumpeting as much evidence for this as they could.

Therefore, the stories from Western and Ukranian stories about fierce resistance making this go worse than expected for Putin are totally believable and consistent with the overall emerging picture. Fierce resistance is also totally compatible with the official line coming from top officials in Kyiv.

At this early stage, it is hard to make any speculations about where this ugly thing is going to end up, but the picture so far is compatible with this turning into an Afghanistan 2.0 for Russia. This is crucially important for the rest of Europe, because the worse this goes for Russia, the less likely Putin is to think about encore performances, and the more likely the Putin regime is to fall. (Note that the latter may well take years to transpire.)

In the shorter term, the lack of progress is likely to make Putin press his commanders to be even more thuggish in their orders than they already have been. Expect tales of atrocious war crimes. Some of these will be poorly-documented. Some of them will be false. But some will be both true and well-documented, and serve to motivate the West to impose drastic sanctions like evicting Russia from the SWIFT network and expropriating property and assets within their borders whose ownership has connections to the Putin regime. Such sanctions will cause genuine hardship in the West as well as Russia, but their effects will of course be more severe in Russia.

Now, sanctions are not the tool that many imagine them to be; their track record has not exactly been the best. But the harshest sanctions possible, plus a bloody quagmire in Ukraine, could indeed prompt the end of the Putin regime. The Afghanistan misadventure, plus a declining economy, sank the USSR, after all.

The final bit of good news is the more widespread than expected outbreak of antiwar protests inside Russia itself. Protest in Russia is rare; it is an authoritarian fascist state where protest of any sort is an extremely risky thing to do (as witness to this fact, thousands of protesters have already been arrested). Yet there are well-documented reports of protests in many dozens of Russian cities (not just the few biggest ones). In order for this to happen, the war must be very unpopular amongst the Russian people. This, more than anything else, could cause an unexpectedly sudden end to the conflict (as well as to the Putin regime itself).

Published at 20:52 on 24 February 2022

It really depends on what the reaction of the West and the Ukrainians is.

First, sanctions are mostly a spent force. The West is about to sanction the Putin regime up the wazoo. It almost certainly won’t work, assuming “work” is defined as “prompt a quick recalculation on Putin’s part.” Putin has no doubt priced such sanctions into the expected cost of invading and occupying Ukraine, and has decided they are worth it.

What he hasn’t necessarily done correctly is price the military cost of an indefinite occupation. In doing so, he might be repeating the error made by Leonid Brezhnev when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. When that happened, the West immediately and accurately realized the possibility of giving the USSR its own Vietnam experience.

At that point, it was only a matter of time: how long would it take the USSR to get worn down by an unwinnable situation and slink back across the border in defeat?

Invasions have a fundamental asymmetry. In order for the invader to win, the invaded nation must be thoroughly subdued and subjugated. It is not enough to merely install a puppet regime in the invaded nation’s capital; that puppet regime must be able to stand on its own and control the people subject to it.

In order for the invaded to win, all that must be done is to deny the former to the invader. The invader can still invade. The invader can still install and recognize a puppet regime. But that regime won’t be able to defend itself against a hostile population. Such a population will resist conscription; if conscripted, they will fight poorly and divert materiel to the resistance. That resistance will keep popping up, destabilizing the regime. The population will be sympathetic to the resistance, which will further frustrate efforts to stamp it out. So the puppet regime will require a continual military presence of the invader’s forces to prop it up. Eventually, the invader gives up. Victory for the resistance.

It all makes occupying and subjugating a nation a tall order, one that has often seen powerful armies bested by ragtag groups of resistance fighters.

So it ultimately comes down to the West and the Ukranians. How much are the latter willing to fight, and how much are the former willing and able to furnish military aid to them? It may take years, and it will take a terrible price, but it is possible to drive Russia out of Ukraine.

And no, I don’t mean direct military assistance. That’s off the table, anyhow. Nobody wants to instigate a direct conflict between two nuclear-armed powers. I’m talking about providing weapons, intelligence, training, and diplomatic support to the resistance within Ukraine, post-invasion.

Putin will of course label this as “supporting terrorism,” and in a way he will be correct. Terrorism is merely a pejorative label for set of tactics; one man’s terrorist is quite often another man’s freedom fighter. Such it has always been. If Putin didn’t want to have so much trouble with so-called “terrorism,” he shouldn’t have picked the fight he just did. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

But, to reiterate, there is a way to punish Putin for what he has done. It won’t be quick, it won’t be pretty, but there is a way. The question is: is there the will?

Published at 21:19 on 22 February 2022

That is what happened today, and that is basically what I predicted would happen a month ago. The bit about it being peacekeeping to stabilize some new republics is merely the propaganda messaging for selling the whole exercise, nothing more. Those “new republics” are part of Ukraine, and their separatist movements have been bankrolled by Russia.

The question now is, will Russia try to do more? The prediction above says: probably not. The fact that the US has completely moved its embassy out of Ukraine says: probably so (the embassy is nowhere near the whittled-off chunks).

Time will tell. One big determiner will be how strongly NATO is willing to sanction the Putin regime. As I also wrote earlier, it won’t be more than sanctions; no NATO country considers this worth the lives of their soldiers, plus a direct conflict between NATO and Russia would invite nuclear war.

Published at 11:30 on 18 February 2022

The crackdown is in process, and perhaps “crackdown” is something of an exaggeration, since so far I haven’t heard any stories of heads being cracked. Arrests, yes, but they were only to be expected.

It was, after all, a protest that chose to use illegal tactics. Camping on a public street is not allowed in most all cities. And pretty much every place has parking regulations that do not let you store a vehicle on a downtown street indefinitely. Not to mention that parking your vehicle in the middle of a traffic lane and blocking traffic is unlawful even on the most minor of side streets.

Now, protesters commonly choose to use illegal tactics. The reason is rather simple: such tactics are an effective way of attracting attention, and attracting attention is the chief motive for any protest. I have myself been part of such protests, and helped in the planning of them, including the choice of illegal tactics.

The rub is that illegal tactics are still illegal and as such those who choose to use such tactics should expect legal repercussions. It is up to you as a protest participant, and particularly as an organizer, to decide whether or not the likely consequences of the repercussions are a price worth paying for the increased attention. Perhaps more importantly, it is also your responsibility to reflect on how your chosen tactics adversely impact others, and whether it is reasonable for you to exact such an impact on others. And, guess what, the protest planning I have participated in did quite openly ponder all these issues.

When the crackdown comes, it makes for good propaganda as an organizer to then adopt a “those jack-booted thugs are oppressing us” line when the inevitable repercussions materialize, but that’s just propaganda. It is not actual fascism if a deliberately illegal protest gets dismantled by the authorities. As much as you might passionately agree with the cause of the protesters, it is important to keep this in mind.

All that said, never was I part of a protest where the plans were to occupy a downtown core and to expect to be allowed to do so for weeks on end. All of the illegal protests I helped plan got broken up within six hours of their onset. There has definitely been a different standard applied for these protests.

What sticks out, therefore, is not the use of force on the part of the authorities to end the protest, but how reluctant the authorities were to use such force in the first place.

This is, in fact, part of the reason behind the national state of emergency. It would not have been necessary if action had been taken earlier, before the occupations had gotten so large and so entrenched. (None of the protests I helped organize resulted in even a local emergency declaration.) This, and not the mere use of the police to disband an unlawful protest, is the real scandal behind the invocation of the Emergencies Act.

But I have digressed from my original point. So far, so good. I have heard no reports of violence. I hope it stays that way as the rest of the protest is ended. Whether or not it will is an open question, as so far the police have merely nibbled at the edges of the occupation. Things may well change if they encounter a core of more passionate and committed occupiers.

Published at 22:00 on 17 February 2022

All the warnings, that is. Not to mention the open announcement to the media that an operation is “imminent” and that things will be different by this weekend. The authorities don’t seem too keen on creating and exploiting the advantage of surprise. Maybe that will work, but I fear it will just cause more digging in and resistance, which will just make violence more likely.

Published at 08:56 on 14 February 2022

Is This Just for Show?

If so, if the state of emergency is just more “go away or else, I really, really mean it this time,” is is but a prelude to tragedy, because it just digs an already deep hole deeper, further constraining the immediate future to capitulation to the occupation or using violence to end it.

Will Trudeau Abuse His Powers?

If so, the result will be a tragedy for the principles of an open and democratic society, and not just in the immediate term, for it will create a source of lasting division by giving the political right a legitimate narrative of having been oppressed.