Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[OUTLAW 09]

Dayuhan---he can---Russian internal power is built on four legs, 1) the military, 2) the security services, 3) oligarchs, and 4) the Russian mob and over all of this the Russian Orthodox Church---so it really it just a balancing game for Putin.

Dayuhan---a solid article concerning the internal debate now among the four pillars of Russia power that I just wrote about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/wo...-tactics.html?

Dayuhan--this is the core piece of the article and it goes to the information war comments I have been making here--it was focused at the EU, the Ukrainians, but more importantly the Russian themselves.

Putin was able via info war messaging to increase his popularity, influence the mood of the Russian population to support him and his actions, and in fact was able to hold the EU up from further hard stage three sanctions-successfully by the way in holding the EU especially Germany in place-----that info war crashed the day the airliner crashed and they have not recovered to the previous successes of that info war. And the EU has gone to stage three sanctions with promises of more to come if he does not throttle back.

Actually they have lost their own information war and you can sense that in their various press releases which are all over the map especially on the reasons for the crash which was up to 15 different theories.

Putin's most serious mistake was that he had seen how the EU/US responded to Georgia and Moldavia and honesty had assumed the same in the Ukraine--meaning a lot of yelling, teeth grinding and a lot of words flying around and then it would be over and back to business as usual.

His second serious mistake was believing the myth of the power of gas and oil--meaning the EU would stop on anything to avoid less gas but in fact it appears now that Russia is so tied to the needed sales income from the two raw resources he cannot cut gas and oil off without truly destroying his economy for the next 20 years. He simply did not or wanted to not see the economic interdependence.

From the INT article:
More frequent and prominent critics are saying that Mr. Putin and the hard-line leaders in the Kremlin overreached by suggesting that Russia, far more dependent than the old Soviet Union on international trade and financial markets, could thrive without the West.

“They were not anticipating the West to make radical moves, costly moves,” said Nikolai Petrov, an independent political analyst. “What is happening is different from what they wanted and what they expected.”

He and others pointed to the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 over embattled southeastern Ukraine on July 17 as upsetting the balancing act that Mr. Putin had managed to pull off to maintain support from the public, hard-line nationalists, the security services, the oligarchs and the more liberal business community.

“Until this catastrophe, Putin’s calculations were pretty good in terms of being able to win any tactical battle,” Mr. Petrov said.

The Kremlin had been counting on its ability to maintain just enough instability in Ukraine to keep the country dependent on Russian good will, while making Europe and the United States cautious about intervening too assertively there.

Dayuhan--this is where the information warfare fit into his strategy.

Right after this weekend, when the likelihood of more serious European sanctions materialized, Mr. Putin met with advisers to say that Russia needed to become self-reliant. He was referring to arms production previously done in Ukraine, but the sentiment echoed in other fields.