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Russia to Seize Hundreds of Leased Airliners
According to Joe Blogs, Russia has just passed a law allowing Russian airline operators to simply declare themselves the owners of commercial aircraft leased from western companies. Ireland likely hardest hit, IIRC. These are Airbus and Boeing aircraft owned by leasing companies, but the deals are off, and the planes are due to be repossessed. How? Aye, there’s the rub.
Over 500 aircraft worth over $10 Billion may simply be swiped from the western owners. This is another destruction of wealth, not just a transfer. The aircraft are no longer supported with parts and inspections from manufacturers and owners. And a great number of the planes are grounded anyway — Russian airlines don’t have as many destinations to go to these days.
This may be an expensive way to find out what can and cannot be done. We shall see.
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Agree. Putin decides if it is WWIII. And he can fabricate any justification he wants.
It is WWIII but since we will not fight then we have lost. It just may take a bit for it to happen.
It is impossible to say what truly motivates Putin, but the above is the stuff of pride that motivates the masses for whom oil and other resources aren’t on offer.
How about power, perceived weakness, territory and pride? Not to mention long-range NATO cruise missiles on Russia’s border. And with Biden in office, a once in a lifetime opportunity. This war has been loosely forecast for nearly two decades.
But more to the point, if the US’s greatest psychological experts can ever be put to good use, I’m sure they have a powerful and deep psych profile of Putin. Whether the movers and shakers in the US avail themselves of it, or care one way or the other, is a different matter.
They were wrong about Russia before. For decades. Why should they have good intel now?
You are quite right. What I should have said was that it is impossible to know exactly what motivates Putin.
Good psych profiles are not the same as good intel. Maybe there’s no such thing as a good psych profile anyway. But the US government spends billions on it. Anyway, if the FBI can form a functional, predictive profile of a serial killer whom no one’s ever seen, you’d think they could do a better job with Putin.
There’s a lot more information available on how past serial killers have been, than there is on how past Putins have been.
I don’t think so. Generalizations about past killers and forming a conceptual framework of their type are not the same things as watching a man’s words and actions for most of his lifetime. But even if they are, this generalization can be applied equally to one well-known and well-documented man such as Putin.
In other words, if psychology means anything at all, has anything to predict of people’s personalities, motivations, and actions, Putin’s personality has been dissected by the US — just as Biden’s has been by Russia.
This should give everyone pause, I think.