Hump Day open thread: Bad day at the Kremlin

A $200 drone which evaded all of Russia's air defenses.

While most of the United States was asleep, there was a little hullabaloo going on in Russia. Dozens of kamikaze drones attacked the Russian capital. The drones didn't do much damage physically. However, psychologically this was a devastating blow.

As of the writing of this, Ukraine is cheekily denying responsibility. Its national security secretary sarcastically said that maybe artificial intelligence has gained sentience, and decided to attack Moscow rather than Kyiv. The attack could have come from Russian partisans, though I find this unlikely, simply because of the number of drones used, and the coordination required. I also don't think it was a false flag operation, as Russia immediately blamed Ukraine; by doing this, it admitted that its air defenses were unable to stop $200 drones from attacking Mother Russia. That's not a particularly good thing to admit to your populace.

In 1917, as catastrophic losses mounted at the front, the price of military failure was Emperor Nicholas II's head. This "special military operation" is becoming just as devastating for the current tsar, Vladimir Putin. The parallels are inescapable. While Russia isn't losing an entire generation on the battlefield, it is losing its future as a member of the global community. Millions of its most productive citizens have fled the country in order to not be called up for service. Its economy survives, barely, due to its oil and gas sales; but these are at a steep discount from market prices. And even that's not enough, as this report from the European Union shows:

Year-on-year, Russian oil exports have cratered. This is unsustainable for a country which doesn't have much else to offer the global market.

These are the kinds of political and economic forces which have triggered revolutions in Russia, from 1905 to 1917 to 1991. Russian leaders ignore this at their risk, and yet they always do seem to ignore the cycles of Russian history. Putin thinks himself to be Peter I; but Peter and Catherine the Great were aberrations. A society which produces absolute or near-absolute rulers is not a society which can grow and evolve when faced with new crises. And these rulers, seemingly secure in their positions, seek to maintain their own status, rather than think of the good of the nation. The eternal sense of Russian grievance is aimed in two directions: outward and inward. Directing it outward inevitably leads to disillusionment when promises aren't fulfilled. Then the grievance turns inward. Woe betide you if you're in the Kremlin when the pitchforks and torches come out.

Ukraine attacked Moscow. Moscow knows Ukraine attacked the capital, regardless of Ukraine's sly dissimulation. Putin's assertion that all is normal and Russian citizens need not fear retaliation has been shown as a lie. Today, cheap drones; tomorrow? Ballistic missiles? Russians are paying for Putin's megalomania. At some point one would hope they wake up and overthrow the regime. But, as others much smarter than I have said, Russians want to be lied to. It's hard to predict what will snap them out of their apathy. But the one thing we know from the country's history is this: they will be triggered to take violent action against the state. Then we will find out what happens when a nuclear power dissolves into anarchy. Fun times.

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