The one thing Putin forgot
It’s becoming more clear that the Russian military is disorganized, poorly trained, improperly equipped, and largely depleted. By extension it’s not difficult to figure out that Vladimir Putin, famous for stealing nearly all Russia’s resources for himself and his oligarchs, must have been skimming pretty heavily from the military budget in recent years. In such case Putin would know that he’s depleted his own military, and accordingly he would be careful not to engage his military in strenuous conflict.
Yet somehow Putin appears to have… forgotten that he’s depleted his own military? How could Putin possibly have thought that after he crippled the Russian military this severely, it could just waltz into Ukraine and instantly win? It’s yet another way in which Putin is no longer merely being his evil self, and is now instead being a stupid evil version of himself.
Perhaps Putin is so far gone, he truly can’t remember what he’s done, can’t keep his lies straight, and has somehow come to believe his own lie about the Russian military being formidable. It would be the rough equivalent of how Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, for instance, went from strategically making up phony Hillary Clinton scandals so they could benefit from them, to eventually coming to believe the lies they’d made up. Once you believe your own lies, and you’ve tapped into your own stash so to speak, you’re no longer in a position to use those lies in any sort of strategic fashion. Instead your actions become dictated by the lies you now believe.
Call it losing touch with reality, a decline in cognitive ability, senility, cracking under the pressure, call it what you want. But we keep seeing a pattern in which aging villains reach a point where they forget that their own strategic lies are indeed lies, and instead start making moves under the belief that their own lies are true. Somewhere along the way Putin appears to have forgotten that he depleted his own military, and instead came to believe the lies he told the world about his military might. Now he’s exposed himself accordingly.
