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>He's lashing out like a toddler who can't have something he wants It can be tempting to cast one's enemies as irrational actors, but one should be careful to
by dTal 4y ago
>He's lashing out like a toddler who can't have something he wants
It can be tempting to cast one's enemies as irrational actors, but one should be careful to entertain the possibility that they are behaving rationally within constraints you don't fully understand. Indeed, anger itself is a game theoretical adaptation.
In this instance, my view is that Ukraine and its massive untapped gas reserves represented a serious threat to Russia's business model. Annexation would have been preferable, but as that is proving impossible, the next best thing is to destroy Ukraine as thoroughly as possible to prevent Europe from gaining access to an independent supply.
- dijonman2 4y agoThe most level headed and logical response I’ve seen regarding this conflict. It always comes down to money.
- puffoflogic 4y agoIt can be tempting to cast irrational actors as coldly logical, but if one does so one should be careful to infer actually logical motives. Attacking Kyiv doesn't really make a difference to whether the West can access Ukraine's natural resources. Even attacking infrastructure, whole far more logical, would really only have a temporary impact. Insofar as the west actually needs those resources, then it will deploy its own immense infrastructure to get at them. So, Putin's actions are only logical if he is also successfully attacking power structures of the west, to convince them that it is better to buy from Russia than deploy the capability to get at those resources. We could argue whether such attacks are happening but they don't appear to be working.
- mcv 4y agoAlso, the fact that Russia is refusing to sell gas to the EU because of its support for Ukraine rather undermines this point. (I think it's the EU that should be refusing to buy gas from Russia in order to stop funding the Russian war machine, but it's interesting that both sides don't want to trade right now.) If Russia really wanted to prevent Ukraine or the EU from having access to resources in Donbas or Crimea, shouldn't they be using their current control over those areas to ruin/destroy those resources or make them harder to access?
- Max-Ganz-II 4y agoI coud be utterly wrong, but I do not think the motives are so rational. I think the motives are cultural : this is what Russia has done over the course of its entire existence, and it continues to this day. There is simply a culture of territorial expansionism, with whatever justifications are handy at the time; that old saying - there's a good reason, and then there's the real reason.