The attached video explains that a contributing element to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was his perception that, due to the advancement of LGBT rights, the west has grown feebleminded. Since this is purely a matter of speculation that cannot be properly analysed on a material basis, I wanted to ask what is yours opinion on this. Is he making the same mistake that countless leaders have done over the years, including the prime example that was Hitler himself? For sure, there are material reasons why invading Ukraine is something he would want to do, but when it came to the decision alone, it is this fact that supposedly played a major role, i.e. predicting the enemy’s response based on the state of their sexual culture. It also seems to be the reason why so many western rightists seem to be siding with him, since they perceive him as more macho than the imperial core. Are there any texts that attempt to analyze this phenomenon from a materialist viewpoint, and also, how similar is this to actual fascism?
Because an all out Ukrainian assault on Donbass was imminent, they were massing a huge amount of troops and equipment on the contact line and had already started to massively escalate shelling in the days prior to Russia recognizing the DPR and LPR. They also have documents proving that such an operation had already been approved and scheduled to begin mere days later. Russia beat them to the punch.
If they had allowed the invasion of Donbass to happen it would have been a bloodbath and would have resulted in a mass ethnic cleansing like what happened 1995 in Croatia with NATO help where as a result of just such an operation 500,000 Serbs were pushed out of Krajna.
This is the imminent reason why it had to happen before the end of February. The broader reason for why such an intervention was necessary regardless of the Donbass situation is because if they waited any longer NATO would have become impossible to dislodge from Ukraine.
Arguably Russia should have acted in 2014, and they did to a degree, they annexed Crimea to keep the Sevastopol port from falling into NATO hands. But they were not yet prepared for the all out economic war that the west has now unleashed on them, so they could not undertake any larger scale intervention yet.
Russia spent the past had 8 years making themselves more or less sanctions-proof and getting close to China. And the US has also declined quite a bit since then.
Anywhere I can read more about this? The news are moving very fast now, so it’s difficult to search for stuff like that.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/ and https://thesaker.is/ post regular updates and news, in particular the latter’s “Sitrep” articles are quite good (the site as a whole is a bit sus but on this conflict their takes are spot on). There are various telegram channels that do extremely frequent live updates (i don’t follow them but i believe Intel Slava Z are often the first primary source on any given military news), and i’m not sure if ASBMilitary still posts about this conflict but in the initial weeks they used to be quite good before they were banned off Twitter. Also definitely follow Pepe Escobar (also kicked off Twitter now but you can find him on VK) and read all his articles on The Cradle too. On Youtube you have Brian Berletic: https://youtube.com/c/TheNewAtlas/ and Richard Medhurst: https://youtube.com/c/RichardMedhurst/ And finally there is The Duran, who though they are coming at this from a very different ideological direction than we are usually have reliably solid analysis and are up to date with the news: https://odysee.com/@AlexanderMercouris:a (i’m posting the Odysee link here though they are also on Youtube because i expect more and more Youtube will crack down on dissenting voices in the future).