re: #112 Decatur Deb
Still having a hard time envisioning the end-game they are shooting for. It doesn’t seem ideological, nationalist, or even corporatist. Basically we might be looking at a couple emergent Mafia families with nukes.
That’s about it. I think what Putin wants is a new Russian empire, encompassing not just the old Soviet Union but all the unrealized ambitions of the original Czarist empire. These would be things like warm-water access on the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and economic dominance of African and Middle Eastern resources. His empire would be an island of stability in a world of chaos. His job is to create the chaos, with his internal thuggery to maintain the stability.