It is horrifying to think that the Russian regime has painted itself into such a bloody corner that all they can now do is wreak a kind of medieval siege warfare upon the people of Ukraine.
Beyond the crude absurdities of narrative symbolism and caricatured historical necessity with which they justify this growing litany of attrocity in Ukraine, and beyond the murderous havoc they now wreak upon their own hapless and serially abused military forces, the totalitarian imperative from Moscow fails at the very first hurdle of aptitude and competency. That is – to engage in wars of conquest and (subsequently, of) attrition are the least intelligent and most costly ways to assure security, to gain influence and to maintain power.
I am as uncertain of the future state and geopolitical configuration of a world post-Putin’s criminal war but I think that we should not be surprised to see some kind of slow (or fast) and potentially catastrophic dissolution of centralised power in Greater Russia. Their political system undergoes such oscillating periods of centralisation and conflict precisely because they seek to forcefully bind so many different regions, ethnicities and histories into one country. Their goal is to cultivate a continuity and order that is only possible through the inevitable production of immense disorder and offset or delayed entropy as systemic disassembly.
The critical failure of the Russian regime is to believe that they can maintain continuity by offsetting this structural entropy to other nations and political systems. They endlessly seek to make one hole look smaller by digging a larger hole around it. Finding they are still dissatisfied with the mess they have made, they just keep on excavating. It is pathological and it is stupid.
Russia, stop this bloody war. Go home and live in peace.
Daedelus Kite 