I think most would like to see him fucked over........or worse, but he's got such a tight grip on the country, it's not going to happen.
There will never be any accountability for war crimes committed and no reparations paid for the damage caused.
If, and it would be a big if, he was displaced, who knows whether his replacement would be better or far worse.
Once this is all over, you're going to see the likes of Germany, France and Italy etc all sucking up to Russia for trade and energy. Give it 10 or 15 years and Russia will be at it again, albeit a lot wiser and not so complacent.
I think you grossly underestimate the impact this has had on relations between Russia and Western Europe, both on a geopolitical and micro level.
I think it is incumbent upon those of us who see the logic and potential existential nature of our resistance to Russian aggression to not allow an appeasement mindset to take root. I think Russia’s SM influence has waned considerably in the last twelve months, which will help in that regard.
I can’t see Russia having the same energy hold over Western Europe ever again. I would say the prospects of that within the next generation are virtually nil.
Russians as individuals will be singled out going forward, both in terms of restrictions around how they allocate and spend their wealth, and how they are treated when they are tourists. I think they will receive a much more hostile reception when they holiday elsewhere, for example.
You also assume Russia can sustain severe losses indefinitely but this is wrong. There will come a point, just like the US in Vietnam, where those losses come at too high a political cost. They cannot keep losing 1,000 a day indefinitely and simply shrug it off. The maths don’t lie.
Words like ‘never’ in terms of reparations are easy to throw around, but I don’t see how you can discount that possibility in its entirety. Russia should and will pay one way or another. I consider using the seized assets of the money stolen by the Oligarchs on Ukrainian infrastructure is a form of reparation.
I think there is a tendency for some to assume that certain things are immutable, and your recent posts on this thread suggest you are one of them, but history teaches us again and again that things can change on a fundamental level when events take over. This principle is the reason the Romanovs were shot in a basement and why the US is no longer a colony of the UK, or even in the Commonwealth.
It’s the same attitude that gave Putin the confidence and conviction to invade a year ago. The notion that things would just carry on in the same vein and Western Europe would just take it on the chin as they had done previously. He was wrong because things don’t always stay the same, irrespective - sometimes the camel’s back gets broken, just like with the Romanovs or the Declaration of Independence. It’s the same attitude that most football journalists displayed in the run in to 2012, assuming United would finish the job off because that just they way things were and because they always had previously.
Things can and do change, because some events cause a seismic shift in the landscape.
Assuming things will simply revert to broadly how they were before ignores the chaotic nature of the universe we live in. I believe this war has fundamentally changed the geopolitical landscape and assuming Russia will be allowed to exploit and wield the same amount of power over Western Europe in a decade is overly simplistic wholly wrong.
Things don’t always go back to what they were and in this instance too much disruption has occurred for that to happen. I think the nature of the relationship between Russia (and its people) and the rest of Europe has fundamentally changed for the next generation (at least) as a result of this invasion and how the subsequent conflict has been prosecuted - and the assumptions you make around Russian tentacles reasserting themselves will not happen.
You say Russia will be wiser, but appear to assume Western Europe will not, but nothing in the course of the last twelve months would suggest the Russian state was capable of displaying any form of wisdom. Quite the opposite.
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