Estonian prime minister says Putin is "afraid" of war with Nato
www.bbc.com
Kaja Kallas says Putin is "afraid" of a war with Nato in an interview with the BBC.

Estonia’s Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, has told the BBC that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is “afraid” of a war with Nato.

The leader of Estonia, which borders Russia, warned that while Putin is good at “sowing fear”, his threats must also be taken seriously.

Ms Kallas added that Nato countries do not want to go to war with Russia either.

She has previously called on European countries to bolster support for Ukraine, warning that war could expand “very fast in Europe, so no country is left untouched” if Vladimir Putin wins.

  • SamsonSeinfelder@feddit.de
    10·
    8 months ago

    Transscript:

    We have heard from Vladimir Putin if there is this continued strength in the war in Ukraine if the U.S. and all the countries continue to contribute, he has continued to raise the possibility of a nuclear threat. Is that one that you take seriously or worried about?

    [Kallas] Of course, we have to take everything seriously, what he says. He has been threatening with the nuclear war for quite some time, but it has been only words. He’s very good in sowing fear within our societies and really listening what we are afraid of and giving you the fears that you have, [ okay, you are afraid of the nuclear war, so I’m giving out this kind of signals and the public goes, oh wow, we can’t do that. It is a trap, a trap of self deterrence, ] because if we are afraid, then we start to self-deter, and that is what Putin wants. [ So we also have to think what Putin is afraid of, and he is actually afraid of going to war with NATO. So he doesn’t want that, and we of course don’t want that either, but it is to understand the messages that he’s giving out ] so that we would be afraid and refrain from the decisions that we would otherwise make.

    Emphasis mine.

    Putin is such a psycho. If he were just a citizen, he would need therapy. But as a despot of a country, Vladimir will kill half- to one-million people before therapy comes finally to him. Either by age or by the blade. There is no concept of peaceful transfer of powers in a dictatorship. In a Monarchy he could at least make one of his children with his affairs be a prince, but he never groomed one of his children into a successor like his Friend Kim did. Vladimir was always a loner on a horse without a shirt. I guess he will also die like that.

    • 0x815@feddit.deOP
      41·
      8 months ago

      Yes, there is much evidence of fear as the principal response to threat with direct impact on decision making. There’s vast amount of literature about it, one thing I quickly found is a piece written by political scientist George Marcus, emeritus professor of political science at Williams College:

      … increasing fear reduces the influence of otherwise salient political dispositions, and that fearful citizens will be less influenced by their partisan attachments or their ideological convictions.

      There is a rich empirical literature that seems to confirm the conventional account that fear causes people to seek strong conservative leaders and to endorse authoritarian policies and parties.

      An important piece of communication here is the creation of an enemy - the migrants, the refugees, the West, the Nato, … It works (and has been working) in all human societies.

      • SamsonSeinfelder@feddit.de
        5·
        8 months ago

        Dude, that was just an example she made. There are so many fears he controlled in the last 10 years. How many microtargeted messages over facebook did putins trollfactories and Cambridge Analytica transmissioned? You have to understand that it goes down to the fears of single persons. Someone is afraid of foreigners and immigrants, there was a playbook and memes for these people. You have the fear of economical outlook, there was a folder with images to post for that. Your fear is democrats in the white house? Fear of black people looting cities? Caravans at the border? Socialists in the Government? President takes away your guns? Homosexuals? Nuclear War? There was a playbook do target all these people to cook a vast part of the society crazy and made them afraid of their own fears coming true - even if reality was not like that and they were concerted fed confirmation bias by anecdotal evidence, but amplified.