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| Re-Evaluating Russia's Special Operation In Light Of The Valdai Club's Startling Insight |
| 2025-10-05 |
| [ZeroHedge] The Valdai Club, which is Russia’s premier think tank and elite networking platform at whose annual meetings Putin participates, shared some startling insight into “the changing purpose of wars”. It was included in the eponymous section of their report titled “Dr. Chaos or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Disorder”, which was written by Oleg Barabanov, Anton Bespalov, Timofei Bordachev, Fyodor Lukyanov, Andrey Sushentsov, and Ivan Timofeev. They’re all regarded as Russia’s top policy influencers. They wrote on page 25 that “Russia would not risk its own socioeconomic stability for a decisive victory in a military conflict. One exception is direct full-scale aggression, but the probability of such an action against a nuclear superpower is close to zero…Perhaps the purpose of wars has changed. The contemporary objective may no longer lie in victories – wherein one party achieves all its goals – but rather in maintaining a balance necessary for a period of relative peaceful development.” This startling insight prompts a re-evaluation of the special operation, which has been going on for over 3,5 years, in no small part due to Putin’s restraint in not waging a US-inspired “shock-and-awe” campaign at the cost of Iraqi-like civilian casualties among what he believes to be the fraternal Ukrainian people. In light of what Russia’s top policy influencers just revealed, however, a complementary reason might be his trusted policy advisors’ reluctance to risk their country’s “socioeconomic stability for a decisive victory”. It can only be speculated what form this could take if Putin abandoned his restraint by ordering the bombing of bridges across the Dnieper, the total destruction of all major Ukrainian power plants, and/or targeting political sites like the Rada. Nevertheless, the salience rests in the Valdai Club’s implied assessment that pursuing “a decisive victory in a military conflict” presumably like the present one could lead to such risks, thus further contextualizing why this hasn’t yet happened and might never will. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |