Russia begins moving troops into eastern Ukraine

[Bengalzona]

(02-28-2022, 12:41 PM)Dill Wrote: Yes, he does NOT believe his own lies.  At least deliberate propaganda, such as that "Nazism" is rife in the Ukraine.

There are several surprising features about the current information/propaganda war:

1. The poor quality of Russian disinformation. Way below their usual standards.

2. The effective preemption of Russian propaganda, first by the US in the lead up to the invasion, and then afterwards by the Ukrainians themselves (LOL "Mom, I've been captured" ), and Western Europe.

3. The weakness of Russian military morale, the confusion of Russian troops regarding their own unit objectives, geographical location, and rationale for fighting.

HOWEVER, Putin DOES appear to have believed a range of faulty assessments regarding how the Ukraine, the US, Europe, his own citizens, and the rest of the world. I cannot emphasize enough what it means that militarily and politically dependent Kazakhstan has refused to aid in the invasion, an Orban in Hungary has condemned it. Are the rats jumping ship or refusing to even get on now? 

Commentators who have known Putin over the past two decades have remarked on how isolated he has become from Russian society, increasingly distant even from his own advisors/supporters. If you've been following his speeches and writing since Munich, then you know he has moved away from locating Russia in the international system as an equal player in a multipolar word based on shared legal norms to speaking of Empire, of restoring "greatness" through territorial acquisition and re-integration into a supposedly greater "historical Russia." Especially since last year's "On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian People" (July 2021)  http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181, his reasoning has become convoluted, emotional, and error riddled.

I think it likely that he has gone the path of so many dictators--as their paranoia increases, they weed out advisors who speak truth to power and advance those who tell them what they want to hear. A year or two of such prefered "advice" often leads such leaders to overestimate their own powers and underestimate their adversaries. (There is actually quite a bit of research on this subject.)

So in a roundabout way, Putin does believe his own lies, in the sense he has constructed around him an information environment filled with information/intel he WANTS to believe. He just doesn't yet grasp the dis-intel he acted on were his own lies, constructed in detour through his own advisors, which led him to accept them as fact coming from outside sources.   Call that a "hypothesis," at least. 

Like all of the worst narcissists, he really believes he can throw out whatever he wants and will it into reality. In his view, everyone else's job is just to believe him, regardless of facts, logic or research. I have little doubt that he is on the far end of the psychopathy spectrum, like most despots and narcissists.

There are three things that I know he has a pathological hate of:
1) (what he views as) traitors
2) Germans
3) Americans