Kwozyman

Putin needs a defeat from NATO, not from Ukraine alone. If he loses to the biggest military alliance of the world, he might be able to somewhat sell it to the public on the home front. It would also play right into the propaganda they’ve been spewing that Russia is fighting the collective West.

Without the paywall:

https://archive.is/20260816192620/https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/08/13/might-moldova-merge-with-romania

I feel exactly like that. I started in tech some 10+ years ago simply because I liked computers and what you could do with them and since then I changed jobs, got promoted several times but i never truly lost the passion. That is, until a couple of years ago, after I was once again promoted in a very senior technical position. Something happened after that, the amount of bullshit I had to endure was just immense. Day in and day out, it was more and more about the perception of doing work, the politics, the positioning against strategic direction, the revenue. BUT, I was still happy every now and then when I managed to do what I loved and what I was good at. And then LLMs happened and it’s been downhill ever since. No joy, no purpose, nothing that I can cling to for my own sanity. Almost every day I dream about being a bartender or a mailman or simply not doing anything. Of course, I probably will never actually do it, the amount of money I earn now simply doesn’t exist in other jobs and I’m not sure one can live off of “gratitude of a job that’s actually useful” and I’m getting older and that’s that. No happy ending here.

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Makes for a more believable lie and muddies the waters. Or, again, they might simply be completely insane.

One theory is that he is seeking escalation with a NATO country. Reasoning being that some small scale clash with NATO would feed into the narrative at home that Russia has been fighting against NATO all this time and, counterintuitively this would be a convenient off ramp. He didn’t lose against Ukraine, he stalemated against the whole NATO. Or he is simply insane.