Since even quintiple-posting is now allowed in this thread, this was a good analysis about recent drone strikes on Russia:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/on-ukraine-trump-now-buys-the-tide-turning-narrative/Quote
One assumption is that fuel shortages caused by drone strikes could make the war untenable for Putin by raising domestic political pressure. This line of thought derives from imagining modern Russians, or at least the Russian establishment, as snowflakes who will turn against Putin as soon as they have to wait a whopping 20 minutes to get their car fueled. The same kind of magical thinking fueled Western excitement during the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in 2023 and Ukraine’s Kursk incursion in 2024.
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Finally, Russians largely do buy into the Kremlin’s narrative about the war. They see it as existential and themselves as underdogs fighting for their sovereignty against the enormous Western military and economic machine. What Trump has been doing to Iran over the last several months has bolstered their impression of malign Western intentions (and confirmed for them the importance of having a huge nuclear arsenal).
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Moreover, Russians are being flooded with rabidly xenophobic, even genocidal, anti-Russian propaganda on social networks, thanks to government-linked online mobs like NAFO and, sometimes, high-ranking officials in Kiev and elsewhere. In a recent tweet, Sergiy Kyslytsya—Zelensky’s first deputy chief of staff and formerly a UN ambassador—wrote about the “exceptional degeneracy” of Russian society, comparing the Russian world to “mold” that must be “wiped out” rather than bleached. The tweet was promoted by America’s former Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, one of the architects of NATO expansion into the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine.
This post was edited by Malopox on Jul 18 2026 11:26am