AI-generated videos promoting Poland’s exit from the European Union have appeared on Polish-language social media, featuring non-existent, attractive young women advocating for “Polexit”.
One TikTok account called “Prawilne Polki” published content showing women dressed in T-shirts bearing Polish flags and patriotic symbols, European analytics collective Res Futura said. The content targeted audiences aged 15 to 25.
The videos featured statements including: “I want Polexit because I want freedom of choice, even if it will be more expensive. I don’t remember Poland before the European Union, but I feel it was more Polish then.”
That sounds too much like a story in which everything just happens to happen as needed. It’s still possible and I am grateful for the insights but I cannot imagine that much ignorance.
To mention one thing, the USSR must have insisted on controlling the Suwałki gap because they knew that the Capitalists were out to get them. But why conquer the gap now if that triggers the war that the gap is supposed to prevent?
Putin suggested the economic union from Atlantic to Pacific. He must know that it will lead to a dissolution of the nations so he can’t be that hung up on Russia.
Dissolution of what nations?
Russia, or rather the Russian Federation and its members, like EU member states are losing significance, e.g. by having to implement EU regulations.
The economic union suggested by Putin would have the same kind of power dynamics that USSR did. In EU independent member states lose their significance as the significance of EU grows.
When it comes to an economic union from Atlantic to Pacific, it would be strongly led by the Russia. It would have compulsory Russian in schools for those who don’t speak Russian as their mother tongue. Any increase in significance of an economic union led by the Russia would translate to increase in significance of Moscow. Dissolving the nations into something led by an autocrat in Moscow would not mean dissolving the Russian nation, but rather more assimilating them into the Russian nation. Just like nobody talks about the Mari and the Komi and the Sakha now, even though those are nations of their own, in a future Atlantic-Pacific economical union nobody would talk about Finns or Lithuanians. Those nations would be seen the same way as the Komis are seen now.
Suwałki gap did not exist when Soviet Union did.
Suwałki gap is the border area between Poland and Lithuania. It’s a narrow stretch of land with the Kaliningrad enclave of the Russia on one side and Russia-controlled Belarus on the other side.
During the Soviet times Lithuania was a part of USSR, meaning that it was not a gap between two parts of USSR, just a short and insignificant part of the long Soviet-Polish border.
How is the Suwałki gap supposed to prevent a war? A war between Belarus and the Russia?
I thought that there were not only political but also topological reasons for the significance of the gap but I can’t find anything besides that some historic battles happened there.
So the question is why he would be conquering the Baltics. For Russia’s glory seems to be the preferred answer. But strategically it doesn’t make sense to conquer more land for Russia, without, as it seems, any security improvements at all.
There are three security improvements to this:
Firstly, a flat land is difficult to defend. The Russia would want to bring their western borders to seashores and mountain chains. The Russia used to have pretty much those borders until 1917. I’m attaching a map of what would give the Russia the least amount of flatland to defend in case that the EU ever wanted to attack it.
(Of course there’s the wee question of why would we want to attack them, but a Russian mind would want to attack others if it can do so without getting into too much trouble and therefore assumes others are the same)
Secondly, Baltic countries and Finland are simply very close to St. Petersburg and even to Moscow. It would be easy to bombard especially SPb with missiles from Finnish and Estonian territory. Or even Moscow from Latvian territory.
And thirdly,
if there lots of Russian speakers in an area and it still manages to be democratic and prosper, it shows that Russians are capable of living under democracy. Putin has put a big effort into painting an image of Russians not being capable as a nation to live in a democracy. If anyone people in the Russia identify as “Russian” prospers outside the rule of the Czar, that someone is a threat to the Czar.
The thing is, Putin has made a decision to never use Internet for anything. He has never done anything in it, because for him it’s a tool full of propaganda. His first contact with Internet was that his underlings were able to shape opinions across the globe extremely efficiently using Internet. He doesn’t want his brain to rot like that, so he absolutely refuses to use Internet.
Now, what sources exist for him, then? He doesn’t know what he is missing, so he is unaware of how pervasively all information exchange takes place over Internet.
Putin gets his information from TV-news, newspapers and from assistants that he has meticulously hand-picked, personally. He knows his own TV and newspapers are full of propaganda and therefore not very useful as sources. And he seems to honestly assume the same applies, to the same high extent, even, to foreign media as well. That means, he is basically left at his most trusted assistants for all information. He vets new recruits against the earlier ones: If the new one is telling things that are in agreement with what the older assistants, he can be trusted. If not, he has been compromised by American propaganda.
Also, it’s good to keep in mind where Putin comes from. He was the second child of a single-mother. The first child died, largely of hunger, during the siege of Leningrad. They had no food there, which meant that cannibalism was very common. You can figure out what happened to a child that died at a young age in that city. It’s either: He gets buried and another child starves. Or the other child is given food that will keep it alive. A single mother traumatized by such an experience, in post-war USSR in devastated northwestern USSR. No time for the child, really. The guy grew on the streets. And there’s nobody who doesn’t get traumatized by that kind of an experience.
Because of this personal history, Putin really believes deeply in the concept of thugs being able to trust other thugs. Because of his early development, where he has had to play the role of an adult at an age when he should still have been an innocent child for many more years, his brain is wired differently than that of an adult without a traumatic background. He truly does not understand that the people around him who lie to everyone else, also lie to him. And because of his vetting system, he has ended up hiring only assistants that coördinate their lies with the other assistants. If anyone steps away from the line and starts saying something different, Putin knows that the assistant has been compromised by CIA and fires him. And when Putin fires an assistant, that also means that the assistant’s children will lose their study places, etc. The family’s life will be derailed completely. That’s a type of a punishment for betrayal.
So, Putin seriously is entirely disconnected from real world actions. He gets information from his assistants, but has personally made sure that they all lie. And that they lie all the time. At the same time, Putin is giving orders that must be implemented verbatim. He gets information that there are 1000 soldiers in the centre of Pokrovsk and then he gives an order for 150 of them do some specific thing. And in reality there are 30 soldiers, and they are at the outskirts of Pokrovsk. Yet the command will be relayed and implemented verbatim. And then those 30 soldiers die for nothing.
I do not think “ignorance” is really the correct word for this phenomenon, though. So, in the end I do agree with you, in a way.
What’s your source? I could only find that Putin doesn’t use a smartphone which is very rational in his position.
The German Wiki states that his parents gave him a car. So he is not the child of a single-mother. He is also the third child, not the second.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
What are your sources for Putin’s self-isolation?
Making an internet search for putin doesn’t use internet brings a lot of results from 2023, but I did read about it around the mid-to-late 2022. It was told by a person I do trust, but I cannot find the precise source now, over 3 years afterwards.
Still, if you read through the various articles you find with that search, they together give a reasonable good image of what’s going on. (Beware, of course, that many of the sites are more than just fishy!)
Sorry for not taking time to dig through them more precisely!
Thanks, that’s good enough for me.