Putin the Pious's threats grow more shrill

Moscow exports White Christian Nationalism in a return to its pendulum swinging past

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Russian history is one big pendulum swing between Orthodox pan-Slavism and abject Westernization. In the former, Russia seeks to unify the Christian world against the non-Christian borders (the Soviet phase was just a secular messianic variant). In the latter, Russia wakes up from one of its manic phases and decides it needs to modernize and westernize and stop being such an ideological nutcase (see Peter the Great).

It’s not hard to recognize which sort of Russia we face today.

Putin now threatens nuclear war over a development that will not happen: NATO troops actively defending Ukraine by attacking Russian forces. This after the US Congress freaked out over intelligence suggesting that Russia has the capacity to put a nuclear, satellite-killing weapon in space (we, of course, have never considered — much less built — any such capacity). In sum, we’ve been treated to a lot of Putin’s “super weapons” threats since he launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What to make of them?

The simplest answer is that Putin is compensating like crazy (like a Saddam or the Kims before him). Every Western expert, including all his advisers, expected the Russians to roll over the Ukrainians back in 2022. The Russians, masters of grey-zone wars, were going to dazzle us all with their immense trickery plus firepower.

Except it didn’t happen. The trickery wasn’t all that effective. The military performed about as incompetently as could be, and after Ukraine got its act together with NATO’s help, this thing settled into a static, WWI-like, trench-defined, artillery-driven conflict — the only development of note being the widespread and highly effective use of drones for attacks (completed expected based on all trends leading up).