Ask HN: Why did Putin start the war?

The plan was to use an opportunity presented by extremely week United States president.

It was based on the calculation that Ukraine will not resist and US will back off.

To test the theory, Russia used multiple threats to verify this theory and got expected response each time.

What they miscalculated was the strength of Ukrainian army and their own coordination and logistical capability.

So now we all are in the situation none of us really wants to be.

Why Germany has painted itself into corner? Because they were really really stupid. They closed their nuclear plants and made themselves very dependent from Russian gas. They were arrogant to think that they know Russia better than Baltics do.

Political reasons from a dictatorship are mainly the priorities of the dictator himself. Putin's been attacking neighbors for a long time. There's been a miscalculation that it would have been an easy military operation, but we all know flash war is always a fantasy of the attacker. The reason, Putin has said it plainly many times: he wants to be responsible for the reunification of what he thinks he's Russia, because he feels getting old but still strong enough. He cannot take (and therefore Russia, not viceversa) NATO, EU, and democracies getting closer, and making "green" plans that would relegate his Country to the "regional power" state. So he wants the world to know that he will fight for a comeback, doesn't matter how many lives will be taken - because he wants to "make Russia great again". Then he proceeds with making friends with other dictatorships in the world to fight the "West". The problem he's not facing, is that apart from gas oil and tanks, his people rely on import for everything else, and sees the relative wealth going away again. And when you suddenly have no money and freedom, you can lie to yourself much, but at a certain point, resentment grows against the government.

Germany didn't build LNG Terminals and pushed for a second pipeline because of the "Wandel durch Handel" doctrine they wanted to interlink Russia and Asia so deep into the western trade hemisphere that it would be impossible for both sides to go out of it. Of course, Germany will have a hard few years ahead but it is nothing compared to what is coming for Russia in terms of economic hardship. There is a lot of talk about 80% of the Russian people won't be really affected by the sanctions and it's true but the people that are affected by it are the people that are in the realm of power and can force change. No, matter if you are left or right wing people don't want change if worsening your daily lifes and if a modern country can cope with the brain drain of their middle class. Most of the countries that are depended on their natural resources never invested in their capabilities in science or construiction. In the end it all depends on the stance of China and if the Western countries can switch their cheap labor force to South America and Africa or if there is enough public endurance to do it in about 5-10 years. Interesting times.

You’ll have to try harder with conspiracy theories.

Putin is a strategic thinker and smart guy like George W. Bush was. There is no master plan. He’s on a crusade to rebuild the world of his imagination and it’s a cultural, religious (in a moral standards sense) and emotional thing. This has nothing to do with NATO. An EU Ukraine however could be economically bigger than Russia in a generation and that is just completely untenable.

German leaders think they can change Russia, profit from it and Putin is just a blip. IDK what they have been smoking.

He's impressed by power, and believes that displays of impressive power differentials grant legitimacy to leadership ex post facto.

So, he's got to keep ramping up the power moves, by the nature of his own rule system. Those moves took him from Chechnya to Georgia to Eastern Ukraine and now the perception fed to him (captured intel) was that he could finally submit all of Ukraine in 3 days. The FSB leader who fed him that information, Beseda, is now in deep trouble and under arrest.

A huge problem for him is that you should perceive the opponent's power before planning your moves. There's a lot that goes into the perception of power. It's an art form by itself. FSB have (according to leaks) direct access to these arts. They have models, disciplines, etc. But according to them they are forbidden in their use by politics. Putin's internal power system blocks this work.

So this was a huge setup for the issues we see now--Putin doesn't really understand the value of intelligence as "new things that must be constantly perceived, ordered, presented, and understood"; he understands power at a superficial level of "effects yielded by moves," like in Judo, chess, etc. For this reason he has to start the game in order to learn it, again and again. He can't predict very well by nature of his psychology and the system he has created around him.

He's allowed himself to be perceptually blinded, while being a strong tactician.

Therefore you get these moves that make people ask..."why?" Because he sees a different situation due to his broken perceptual system.

Still, he does understand the game once it's gone wrong and the sides have had their first moves. He learns from losses, that's a huge lesson from the arts he has studied himself. So now he's got a chance to show off his next-phase tactics.

The best way for his opponents to take advantage of his newly-alerted status would be to open a united front with pseudo-random tactics (you can't play his game, or any known game--you must invent multiple new games that are foreign to him) combined with a hyper-tactical, hyper-executive mindset. Frequent direct and somewhat strange requests must be made of him. This will overpower his personal perceptive system on an ongoing basis so that his own tactics seem nonsensical to even him. He'll become exhausted and withdraw.

Unfortunately Europe and the west struggle with this style of thinking, so the situation will be awkward for some time longer IMO. In the meantime it is a phenomenal opportunity to make new and lasting HUMINT contacts in any country east of Poland.

megalomania

John Joseph Mearsheimer (an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer) wrote: " THE WAR in Ukraine is the most dangerous international conflict since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Understanding its root causes is essential if we are to prevent it from getting worse and, instead, to find a way to bring it to a close. There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO..." (https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mear...) You can also check this documental by Oliver Stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxau6qeWZ4w More references: "Russia's Ukraine invasion may have been preventable" https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine... "Putin’s Criminal Invasion of Ukraine Highlights Some Ugly Truths About U.S. and NATO" https://theintercept.com/2022/03/07/ukraine-russia-nato-koso... "Russian hostility 'partly caused by west', claims former US defence head" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/russian-hostil...