None of the letters explain how an army of ~190k ended up doing exercises on the borders of Ukraine. You mobilise so much and no one in the Duma raised a question!
There is something fundamental WTF missing here! You gather 190k army together for an exercise, declare a ‘special military operation’ that becomes an invasion that is now leading to primeval sieges of some ancient Russian speaking cities.
As interesting as these letters are, they do not explain the failures in the build-up. All that kit heading west and no questions asked by anyone. This was planned for a long time and no one knew?
I hope the author can take us back to the initial orders to gather this army together and explain at what point the penny dropped. If this happened what else is lurking in the system? How stable is the control of nuclear weapons? The authors perspective on MH17 and the polonium poisonings in the UK would be weclome. The authors perspective on Londongrad and the cheap purchase of the Conservatives, Johnson and Brexit would also be interesting.

Backup for “Putin was never a spy”

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/stanton-vladimir-putin-was-never-a-spy

“What we consider secret agents, the Russians call razvedchik, an approximation of the word “scout” — working behind enemy lines, providing early warnings. This highly revered intelligence collection was the responsibility of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (FCD), today’s Foreign Intelligence Service…..

Putin was assigned to the Leningrad office of the Second Chief Directorate, which was responsible for internal security. Former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin claimed that all the Leningrad office did was “harass dissidents and ordinary citizens.”

In 1995, this directorate would become the FSB: Russia’s security service.

In 1985, Putin was transferred to Dresden, East Germany. Technically, Putin had landed in the FCD, but more precisely, he stepped into a KGB backwater. East Germany may have been a foreign state, but it was a satellite of the USSR — with 380,000 Red Army soldiers stationed there for those who did not see the memo. Putin is described as appearing to be content, able to provide a better quality of life for his family. He settled down like a housing estate squire in a genuinely communist land, bleaker and more oppressive than his beloved USSR. Putting the counter-subversion skills he acquired in Leningrad to practical use, he became liaison officer to the Stasi. In sharing best practices, we will never know who learned more from whom.”

As to Letter 2: Add “rapist,” “dumb as a post,” and “highly manipulatable” and the writer could easily be describing Trump.

So if these are the rumblings and musings of ennobled Russian “insiders”, and they are this despondent about options to realign Putin’s thinking, I’m thinking we should be deciding which movie scene best fits. I’ve been leaning predominantly not to any Tom Clancy bit, but rather to the “Radiek removal” opening of Air Force One. Maybe coupled with the “massive demagnetizer” scene from Oceans Eleven. But there doesn’t seem to be a large contingent of Putin Groupies anxious to take his place and continue his jihad should he definitively be removed, and I wouldn’t think that depositing him in The Hague while things are sorted out in Ukraine would result in an immediate further escalation in that theater, more likely a return to sides to take a breath and assess the situation with new Russian Leadership still trying to make an ATM work or get to their yachts.

Meanwhile, out in Ukraine, are additional airplanes really needed to disarm the Russian military? It’s been over two weeks, and only in the last couple of days have I seen any references to Hellfire missiles dropped from helicopters (or drones) in massive numbers capable of identifying, targeting and destroying every metal object Russia has taken there (after all, even as far back as Failsafe in the early Sixties our satellites have been able to read license plates from space). Being non-military-tech trained, it seems to me that unless each and every such missile requires its own designated Operator at Langley in front of a screen to pilot, that could work out well for Ukraine. And if individual operators are required, I rather presume that’s a function that a bunch of able and willing Ukrainian tekkies with configured laptops could try to replicate with good success. If we have to go the more mundane route of “laser painting” targets with a hand-held device (like the fate of the yellow truck in “Clear and Present Danger”), there might well be plenty of able and willing Ukrainian heroes ready to do that for the laser-guided munitions dropped from any number of existing Ukrainian platforms.

Emphasizing (and who could miss it) that I don’t know what’s real and what’s possible, but certainly the “maybe he’ll change his mind” strategy is wearing a bit thinner by the moment. This morning I see Russians have fired on trains evacuating Ukrainian civilians from the country, we’re kind of beyond the “maybe they’ll be nicer” point, aren’t we? Since I don’t envision Tucker Carlson going on camera to say “enough is enough” any time soon (though I’d be happy to deport him so he could cut a new deal to broadcast from the Kremlin), maybe other options for bringing Vladimir Putin to justice while removing Vladimir Putin from singularly micromanaging the collapse of western civilization is not entirely crazy.

In the Fortune 100 (and 500) companies I’ve worked for the senior executives were typically surrounded by Yes Men (and women), but the number of true believers was so small that its members were outliers. The Yes Men to whom I reported were all opportunists, who always calculated their moves in terms of self-interests, whereas the true believers might have stepped off the roof if so instructed. True believers frighten me.

Hopefully, if and when it comes to Russia using WMD’s in Ukraine, opportunists will be in the critical path leading to the carrying out of orders.
If so, we may later learn that the Command & Control systems needed to launch were inexplicably non-functional at the time.

Overgeneralization follows – sorry.

I’ve been talking with my daughter about the difference between communist “true believers”, from something like 1905 to probably 1965-1975, and the Soviets who didn’t really believer that they would, or could, conquer capitalism, ever, and just started living it up until the Soviet Union collapsed.

The cool thing, if you were Stalin, is that the Soviet government was FULL of committed communists who believed in Stalin, but now, the oligarchs believe in capitalism, no one else thinks that capitalism will ever benefit them, and it’s difficult to understand why anyone would fight for Putin.

From the Cheka to the KGB, the intelligence services worked for the party, but even the FSB is sort of floating – the writer seems to long for the good old days when few people could force the intelligence service to lie for them, and sees that now, that’s ALL the intelligence service can do, is to tell happy lies for anyone nearer to Putin.

Ukraine can’t win, but Putin can loose this war. According to the weatherforecast within a few days the winter will disappear in Ukraine. With rising temperatures the swampy earth will return and from then on tanks and other vehicles can follow only the roads. If by that moment the Russians have not conquered or completely isolated some big cities in the south or the north, their goal to squeeze Zelensky from power quickly and divide Ukraine in two parts with the river Dnepr as border, evaporates. That would make Putin’s position vulnerable: logistical problems, high costs, ongoing loss of lives and no return on investment. The big question is: what will happen then?

Incredible if true, and on 99% of it, I have no way of knowing, though it is consistent with my other tea-leaf reading. But when Russia has to ask China for weapons and other support, at week three, then this becomes more credible.

As for the 1% that I do know about, there is no Venezuelan light crude. That I have ever hear about. Venezuelan crude is the thickest around, so much so they have to drill far more wells than anywhere else to maintain production. The very first Venezuelan oil production was actually done with shovels and wheelbarrows. And nearly all of it is refined in the US, so there is something to the idea that the US could buy all their production, if they ever get it going again. They have under-invested in drilling since the days of Hugo Chavez, and I have no idea how long it would take them to scale up to useful levels.