Putin - A Tippling Philosopher

A Tippling Philosopher

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Putin

A collection of 22 posts

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Stoking division: How Putin is helping the rise of the right

The rise of the far right in Russia is deeply concerning for the global community. Is it organic, or is it covered with the dirty fingerprints of Vladimir Putin?

The bothsidesism of Trump's CNN town hall

CNN hosted what has been seen by many as a disastrous television appearance of the Presidential nominee-to-be in an hour of lies and playing to a partisan crowd. And my, the crowd was partisan. The Guardian summed up many analysts' exasperation in their piece "‘What was CNN thinking?

The many dilemmas of the war in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is a deadly game of chess, and a series of dilemmas is distracting the players from making clear and decisive moves.

How do a conservative Christian and a liberal atheist agree on Ukraine?

A conservative Christian and a liberal atheist walk into a...YouTube interview and discuss their agreement on Ukraine. You could be forgiven for thinking there is little scope for agreement, but you would be wrong. How have they both arrived at the same destination—hosting YouTube channels giving daily geopolitical

He shouted too early: The impotence of Putin

The war in Ukraine is just about to have its terrible ten-month anniversary with no immediate end in sight. But even though it is not going to end in the coming weeks (absent a "black swan" event of Putin dying suddenly), there is still no chance of the

Brittney Griner and the comparative worth of humans

What we value and how much we value any given thing is a subjective affair. We might look at price tags on things, but they are for guidance only. If you aren't prepared to pay that much for a widget, you won't buy one. You can

Editorial Use: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock

Belarus Foreign Minister suddenly dies

Belarus has been inextricably linked to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And although Putin has used the country and its land as a springboard to conduct offensives against its neighbor, extracting a huge proportion of its physical hardware in terms of tanks and military vehicles, the Belarusian armed forces

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What we can learn from the Kerch Bridge explosion

When it was built in 2018, the Kerch Bridge was the pride of Russian imperialism, much to the chagrin of the Ukrainians. The construction spans the Kerch Strait that separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov, connecting mainland Russia to the illegally annexed region of Crimea. Crimea is

Via Shutterstock

Biden: We are facing the 'prospect of Armageddon'

The world has been perilously close to an apocalypse on a number of occasions. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is one of the most famous. It actually involved several examples, with the closest being when the Soviet submarine B-59 surfaced after a US warship had been dropping practice depth

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Can Putin, locked in a bubble of bad intel, spin his way out of disaster?

Colonel General Gennady Zhidko is being reappointed to command Russia's Eastern Military District. One pro-Russian Telegram user has claimed that the general and others have created "a wall of lies...a sea of blood and a swamp of corpses." That wall of lies has for many

Via Shutterstock

Russia to illegally annex four more areas in Ukraine

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and essentially occupied parts of two regions (oblasts) in Ukraine, incurring the impotent "wrath" of much of the rest of the world. The lack of meaningful pushback from the West at that time was part of what emboldened Putin to invade the sovereign

Will Putin go nuclear?

Vladimir Putin has a well-earned reputation for saber-rattling that in the end amounts to nothing. But when the saber is the most destructive weapon known to humanity—nuclear weapons some seven hundred times more powerful than those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it is dangerous to be dismissive. When the

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Putin escalates Ukraine conflict with mobilization of reserves, nuclear blackmail

In a highly-anticipated yet repeatedly delayed speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Wednesday morning (Sept 21) that the country is to embark on a large-scale mobilization of military reserves. This is in response to successive failures in the ongoing war in Ukraine, most recently resulting in a lightning-quick counteroffensive in

The Kharkiv offensive: A turning point in the war

Quite often, nothing really happens in wars where there are deadly stalemates for weeks on end. And then, everything happens all at once. This last week, everything has been happening all at once in the Russia-Ukraine War. To understand what has taken place and how a lightning counteroffensive was planned

Ukraine war fatigue: Keep your eyes open

Six months have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Putin still can't really win, no matter what his endgame might be. The campaign has been catastrophic from the very start. Even Russians are feeling the fatigue as they are turning their televisions off, bored of the non-stop propaganda.

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Lithuania and Russia: De-escalation is not the answer

Russia—and more pertinently Putin—is threatening Lithuania with non-diplomatic retaliation in reply to the Baltic state's sanctioning of goods from Russia to its exclave Kaliningrad. As if things weren't precarious enough to Europe's east, the situation is on the brink of some frightening

Via Twitter user @MARIDJE17

Does Putin have Parkinson's disease?

There is definitely something going on with the health of Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin. This was, it seems, particularly evident in a stage-managed appearance with his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu put on for the cameras yesterday in the Kremlin. Watch the video below to see for yourself. Putin&

Where to now, Putin? Because there is no way you can win.

Over the last few months, I've been keeping close tabs on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and sharing my analysis both editorially and in conversation on my YouTube channel. This is, after all, what appears to be the most public war in history, with as many armchair generals as there

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Even I knew more than the Russian intelligence services: Assessing Putin's plans

Who knows what's in the mind of a narcissistic conspiracy theorist military dictator? In the case of Vladimir Putin, we actually can get a decent idea of what he originally wanted and how they have had to necessarily change. When Putin amassed his troops on the Russian and

There's no nice and neat moral solution to the Ukraine conflict

Although people will be approaching the present war from different angles, looking to load their evaluations with differing amounts of blame for the various players—Putin, NATO, the EU, Ukraine, the West, the IMF etc.—we all desire a nice and neat moral solution. It doesn't matter who

earthquake of perspective

Putin meant to destroy Ukraine's identity. Instead, he's massively enhanced it

Though it's hard to know all of Vladimir Putin's intentions in the invasion of Ukraine, one thing is for sure: he intended to destroy Ukraine's independent identity as he subsumed the sovereign nation into a rose-tinted reformulation of the Soviet Union. But of the

Foreign Affairs

The Ukraine-Russia conflict: Let's talk about Putin's endgame

Beyond exclamations of shock and horror, what we need to be talking about as Russia invades Ukraine this morning is Putin's endgame. Putin claims that he is de-Nazifying Ukraine, and that it is not, despite what the West says, a sovereign nation. I listened to one of his