[CIB-173RDABN]

I am not not sure what Putin hope to accomplished with the war but I do know it would have been cheaper to bribe the Ukraine leadership (making sure the Big Guy got his 10%) then this war is costing Russia to accomplish what he wanted.

If Putin “wins” he may find it to be a Pyrrhic Victory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

[WMarshal]

Welcome back CIB-173RDABN. Your account has been on FR since 2001 yet your comment history totals only 2 pages. This account was probably created by some creep in the Bush Crime Family during the 2000 election and has been mostly dormant ever since - a total sleeper propaganda account. Your account is just a lazy and shoddy attempt at subversion.

[Right_Wing_Madman]

I am not not sure what Putin hope to accomplished with the war

Initially, (1) liberate Donetsk and Luhansk and (2) seize Zaporozha and Kherson in order to complete the land bridge from the Russia to Crimea.

Now I think it's the unconditional surrender of Ukraine.

[Zhang Fei]

[I am not not sure what Putin hope to accomplished with the war but I do know it would have been cheaper to bribe the Ukraine leadership (making sure the Big Guy got his 10%) then this war is costing Russia to accomplish what he wanted.

If Putin “wins” he may find it to be a Pyrrhic Victory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory]

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Bribery is complicated, and not black and white. For the recipient, it’s fee for service rather selling yourself into slavery. When Hunter took money from Russia through Burisma (whose owner fled Ukraine after Yanukovich, his boss, fled to Russia) and the mayor of Moscow, he was selling Joe’s services as a facilitator, someone who would grease the skids if Putin needed some sticky and troublesome but uncontroversial bureaucratic problem fixed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykola_Zlochevsky

Joe wasn’t signing up to let Russia conquer Ukraine. When the CIA bribed Saddam, it wasn’t paying for local CIA operatives to run a train on the women of the Saddam clan. It paid for a very specific service. The nature of the service and whether or not Saddam delivered - people not directly involved will find out decades later, when this is declassified, and some historian is curious enough to dig up the material under FOIA.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is said to have budgeted huge amounts of money to buy high level people in Ukraine. But even bribery operations involve some amount of friction and waste.

Some of Putin’s men to whom this task was delegated may have assumed that a 3-day victory was a foregone conclusion, so why waste the money on the hohols? People in Ukraine who were targeted may have figured the surrender is gonna happen anyway, so why not take the money? Heck - why not take the money and fight anyway, since Putin is handing it out? It’s not as if there’s any great stigma to taking money from an enemy of your homeland and then not betraying your people as that enemy expected. Some might say that’s almost a patriotic duty.

Bottom line is that Putin miscalculated the costs and timeline. But this project is ultimately the same quest for personal glory that has motivated conquerors since time immemorial. Shelley does the whole “sic transit gloria mundi” thing with his poem on Ramses III:

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[I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”]

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Thing is - it’s been 3,000 years, and Ramses II is probably the only Egyptian ruler other than Cleopatra (who was Greek and derived her fame from another conquering hero, Mark Antony) that anyone today has ever heard of. So that “gloria” has proved anything but fleeting.

[AdmSmith]

I do know it would have been cheaper to bribe the Ukraine leadership

Yes, they worked on that, but it seems that the FSB took a big part of the money themselves. Putin fired several generals for giving him bad intelligence.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-russia-saboteurs/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10598315/Ukraine-war-Putin-fires-eight-generals-rages-FSB-battlefield-failures.html