re: #156 BigPapa

[Putin] sees himself as emperor of the Slavic peoples returning the kingdom to glory. And he’ll risk the deaths of many Slavs in fratricide and potential nuclear armageddon to do it.

That has been my hobbyhorse for ages.

He could have just bitten off the two breakaway regions and gotten away with it, but his big gamble does not seem to be paying off. I really thought that he had Belarus in his pocket and that Ukraine would be a matter of days plus some mopping-up actions and that would have given him the Slavic core of nations ne needed to expand into the Baltics, Caucasus and Central Asia.

Now even Belarus is seems to be having second thoughts.