I'm sure I've written before that Julia Ioffe's one of the very best --- if not the best --- analyst on Russian politics, but I nevertheless forgot about her when I was reading all the other crap at the top foreign policy journals I'm always reading (here's looking at you Kim Zisk).
Funny too, since I just tweeted an #FF for Ioffe on Friday. So WTF?
See her dead-on piece from yesterday, "Putin's War in Crimea Could Soon Spread to Eastern UkraineAnd nobody—not the U.S., not NATO—can stop him."
And here's the best passage (especially from the perspective of international relations theory):
To understand why #Russia declared war on #Ukraine, some things you need to understand: pessimism always wins: http://t.co/Nti1TuqNZo
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 1, 2014Pessimism always wins. One of the reasons I left my correspondent's post in Moscow was because Russia, despite all the foam on the water, is ultimately a very boring place. Unfortunately, all you really need to do to seem clairvoyant about the place is to be an utter pessimist. Will Vladimir Putin allow the ostensibly liberal Dmitry Medvedev to have a second term? Not a chance. There are protests in the streets of Moscow. Will Putin crackdown? Yup. There's rumbling in the Crimea, will Putin take advantage and take the Crimean peninsula? You betcha. And you know why being a pessimist is the best way to predict outcomes in Russia? Because Putin and those around him are, fundamentally, terminal pessimists. They truly believe that there is an American conspiracy afoot to topple Putin, that Russian liberals are traitors corrupted by and loyal to the West, they truly believe that, should free and fair elections be held in Russia, their countrymen would elect bloodthirsty fascists, rather than democratic liberals. To a large extent, Putin really believes that he is the one man standing between Russia and the yawning void. Putin's Kremlin is dark and scary, and, ultimately, very boring.
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