I think Russia will collapse after Putin dies. Chechnya and Tatarstan will be the first to break free, followed by Siberia. China is already financing separatist movements there.

@Waffle Evil Yeah Putin isn’t a paper tiger but his death with sever a lot of Russia’s power

Chechnya is already more or less separate it just needs recognition from what I gather

Putin's successor will be an ethnonationalist who will likely just trade Ciscaucasia away

most Russians don't like Caucasians, they view them similarly to how Americans view blacks: a violent, antagonistic minority that needs massive amounts of affirmative action and PC coddling to keep them satisfied

you can actually go to prison in Russia for "racism" against Caucasians

Yeah that’s what I heard

a post-Putin Russia will also likely see land grabs from Georgia, Moldova, possibly Ukraine

and Azerbaijan

Ukraine might want Crimea back but since Crimea was mostly ethnically Russian that’s a huge maybe

all the "frozen conflicts" in the ex-USSR are being sustained by Russia either indirectly (Nagorno-Karabakh, where the Azeris are kept from invading by the Russian military base at Gyumri) or directly (all the rest)

Ukraine will grab Donbass before they go after Crimea

the LPR and DPR are kept afloat by Russian subsidies

Moldova might end up annexed by Romania

The money is running out in Donbass tho, same in Transnistria

@Waffle Evil it will

Georgia will also retake Abkhazia and South Ossetia

Yeah

these small countries get crazy when you take their land

Also Chechens will get their hands on nuclear weapons 😂 fun times ahead

@Waffle Evil Yeah

public opinion of Russia has collapsed in Georgia and Ukraine. any military action they take will also be backed up by the U.S.

Azeris are on better terms with Russia but they're also backed by the U.S. and Israel

Yeah that goes without saying

Putin managed to turn the Ukrainians against Russians singlehandedly. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church already separated from The Russian Church and got their autocephalous status confirmed by the Orthodox Council

the Israelis want to use Azerbaijan as a wedge to weaken Iran, since northwestern Iran is ethnically Azeri

Does Russia still have bombers in VZ?

@Waffle Evil Anatoly Karlin had a post recently talking about how Putin's actions in Crimea were the best of a bunch of bad options

if he hadn't moved to annex Crimea, Ukraine would still be oriented towards the E.U. AND the Russians would have been evicted from Crimea by now

Crimea was too strategically valuable for Russia to give up

True. He also got his approval ratings back up in Russia by annexing Crimea

@mattforney Yeah Plus Again Crimea is predominantly Russian and from what I remember Ukraine in Kiev was more or less taken over by actual neo-Nazis

Then he used the backlash to clean house and get rid of dissidents

demographically, Russia is fucked. the Russian minorities in all the ex-Soviet states are shrinking, reducing the justification for seizing lebensraum

Russia is more Islamised than Sweden. Now Muslims make up 30% of Russians. almost 50% in the military.

Putin wouldn’t have that much resistance. The Russians in Ukraine were told to: “go back to Russia.” They asked Putin to and they went back

Ukraine has been Ukrainizing since the fall of the USSR: Western Ukraine has had higher birthrates and a stronger economy than Eastern Ukraine for years, meaning that Euromaidan was a demographic inevitability

@Waffle Evil Totally they also have a lot more autonomy

the Russian minority in Kazakhstan is also shrinking: the Kazakh SSR was something like 45 percent Russian and 40 percent Kazakh, now Russians are less than 20 percent of the population

Wow and Kazakhstan is a pretty big chunk right?

It’s one of the bigger stans