Putin, like the Soviets before him, is clouded by fear of invasion due to Russia’s vulnerable geography. Understanding that makes Russia’s strategy of expansion and occupation towards defensible borders clearer.
That’s the backbone of today’s conflict in Ukraine – Russia seeking a secure and manageable perimeter. While this war was inevitable, it is no way the end of the line. Should Russia win in Ukraine, it will push into NATO countries like Poland and the Baltics to “reclaim” the natural geographic barriers once held by the Soviets.
Capturing, occupying, and controlling non-Russian populations is no easy feat, but an extensive intelligence system allows the Russians to rule through fear and disinformation. This system not only keeps these captured people suppressed, but also shapes global politics through covert influence. Tomorrow we’ll discuss how they do this on a global scale.
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Okay, let’s look at the world through the Russian eyes. The Russians are from an area that was Moscow. Used to be known as Must Troy, which is in kind of the northwestern part of the Eurasian steppe. Very cold winters, short summers, generally shitty weather. Overall. Very prone to floods and droughts. They are not particularly secure ethnicity. And what they’ve discovered is there’s really nowhere to hide. The force of northern Russia, which could serve as barriers, do work. That’s how they hit out from the Mongols for a while. But, it’s all pine forest in the upper latitudes. And so basic agriculture is almost impossible. Everywhere else is flat.
It’s open. The rain is erratic. It’s very difficult to build the pillars of civilization. And most importantly, there’s no geographic barrier you can hunker behind. So at least one side is free. So you’re completely insecure from all sides in land that is decidedly subpar. The only way that the Russians have discovered that they can achieve any degree of security here is by conquering everyone around them, basically expanding.
They do that. They now have their inner core, which is protected, but they have an outer core that is now occupied hostile minorities. And around that outer core, there’s again no defensible barrier. So they do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, until they reach an area that they can block. And so they expand from tiny Muscovy away to something more akin to the territory of the Russian Federation today, or ideally, the Soviet Union.
I say ideally, because the really good barriers that actually do limit external attack are the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the deserts of Central Asia, and the tension mountains of Central Asia. If if the Russians can reach those zones, they shrink their outer perimeter. Give me an idea of just how extreme the differences.
Modern day Russia, which lost a fair amount of territory and half of its population compared to the Soviet Union, actually saw its external boundaries get longer. And the right now about 5000 miles in total. If they were able to re expand to where they were during Soviet times and actually plug the access points between those various barriers, that 5000 miles would shrink to about 500 miles.
That is ultimately what the Russians are fighting for because of the Eastern Hemisphere’s four big regions. The Russians are by far the weakest of the four. You’ve got Europe, which is densely populated. Much better climate can support much denser population patterns. You’ve got the East Asian rim, a very similar to Europe in that regard.
And so you get the Colossus that is China in whatever form it happens to be in. And then you’ve got the areas of the Middle East which combine kind of the best parts of the Russian space with something new. You got a lot of oasis cities. You get a little pockets like Mesopotamia that can support, like European style density populations and then surrounded by Arabs.
So what happens with political entities in the Middle East is they dominate a handful of these oasis communities or these bread baskets, and then they boil out across the deserts because they have mastered long range military, fighting. And so if they can get into the Russian space, they already have the transport technology built in.
So the Europeans can dominate on technology and capital and military force. The Asians can beat the Russians on numbers alone. And the Middle East senators can outmaneuver the Russians. And so the Russians have been invaded 50 odd times in their history. And the only way that they know to protect themselves is to conquer everyone in their neighborhood, and then set up a really dense shell around the outer perimeter.
The Ukraine war was always going to happen because Ukraine has two things going against it. Number one, it’s on the wrong side of that outer shell. And so the Russians see them as one of those internal ethnic groups that has to be oppressed and turned into cannon fodder. Second, the Ukrainians are up against parts of that outer shell, most notably the Arabian Gap, that is, goes into Romania and of course, the Polish gap of Poland.
So this war was always going to happen. The Russians were always going to try to take Ukraine, and Ukraine was never going to be the end of it, because once Ukraine is subjugated, if Ukraine is subjugated, the Russians then need to push to the next line of countries, which includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania, five of which are NATO countries.
So this was always going to go down.
But there’s another piece of this that is much more relevant to this overall series that we’re doing right now. And that’s how the Russians manage all of these restive occupied populations. It’s basically everyone who’s living in the Russian Federation who isn’t an ethnic Russian, is someone who’s been conquered because they were in the way or because they were perceived as a threat.
And so the Russians basically have this mélange of occupied populations that, based on whose numbers you’re using, are somewhere between 20 and 40% of Russian citizenry. And that’s before you consider the countries that are on the outside of today’s Russian Federation boundaries, like, you know, say, the Latvians, who used to be the someone of those internal oppressed minorities but have managed to slip away.
Ukraine, until recently was fully in that category. Now it’s a toss up. Well, the Russians can’t occupy them with their military because the military has to be at the frontier. The Russians do not have a good land. They do not have a lot of spare capital to throw around. They can’t go for the sort of fast and loose military forces that countries of the Middle East have done in the past.
They can’t do the technocratic stuff that the Europeans have done in the past. And they no longer have the numbers to do. The human waves, endless human waves that say, the Chinese can do. So their military is spoken for. It’s there to plug the gaps. And if the gaps fail, all that’s left is partizan warfare. So in order to keep their populations from doing the partizans in the wrong direction, the Russians maintain what is arguably the world’s most advanced and penetrating internal intelligence system.
Basically, they shoot through occupied populations with as many agents as they can possibly afford, to monitor the population, to spread disinformation, to keep the population turned against itself. And never, never, never allow them to agitate against Russian occupation in the first place. It makes Russia basically a state that is ruled by terror. And if the Russians happen to not like you for whatever reason, it means that they have this great tool, this Intel system that is great at passing unnoticed among populations, but finding the societal weak points about turning populations against one another.
And at the end of the day, sowing information that can shape policy. And it’s very much in use today. So tomorrow we’ll talk about how the Russians see their Intel system.
