[the_grue]

That would be way too subtle for the common folk. Whatever GRU's plan was, in reality most Russian people just take it at face value: Russian spies got exposed, Putin's lie got exposed, the spies put on a miserable show on TV, and now even their true identities have been exposed (only one so far, but I expect the other one to be exposed soon, too). That's a failure.

I'm pretty sure you're reading way too much into it because you've been told Putin (and, by extension, his subordinates) was a great tactician one step ahead of everyone else. I never believed it and I don't believe it now.

[cuboidGoat]

>That would be way too subtle for the common folk.

Are you channeling H. L. Menken?

I think Putin is a comedian and two things I have noticed about Russian humour are firstly, always be deadpanning, and secondly, it isn't really funny unless someone ends up nearly dead.

I also think he is a good tactician but a lousy strategist and I don't think he is in charge of as much of the CCCP as is made out. He is the front man for a conglomerate of interests, many of which operate largely autonomously, and would cause him no end of internal problems should he try and reign them in.

This explains the sharp disconnect between the relative professionalism in the seizing of Crimea, while at the same time lending out SAM systems to idiots.

I'd also say there is a very good chance that Putin did not order this operation in the first place and is playing cleanup.

---

edit - I think there could also be a lot of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" going on.

It not being directly ordered is an alternative reason why someone so high up was doing this rather than a subordinate.

This could well have been showing off to curry favour, knowing that the target was in the regime's bad books already.

Being paraded on TV in the manner that they were after being uncovered, I think lends weight to this hypothesis.

[the_grue]

> Are you channeling H. L. Menken?

I don't know who that is. But if I am channeling anyone, that would be R.J. Hanlon, who said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

[cuboidGoat]

That does not work very well in politics, or indeed many other areas of life.

People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.

Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.

Malicious compliance, being one example of this behaviour, even has it's own popular group on reddit.

Edit - for anything that consists of an established bureaucracy, you would actually do better to invert Hanlon's razor in most cases.

Edit2 - also, the entire premise is logically inconsistent, as it places idiocy and maliciousness as being mutually exclusive options, which they clearly are not.

In the first place, Robert J. Hanlon submitted the aphorism for the joke book collection "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong". And, according to wikipedia, probably stole it from a Heinlein short story, so I suspect you might be taking it a little more seriously than Hanlon did.

[the_grue]

> People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.

That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?

> Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.

Hanlon's razor is related to Occam's razor: in case there are two competing theories about the world, one of which is complicated and the other simple, always prefer the simple one. Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics [1] intended to produce the most likely explanation. Can it be played? It can, but it's even more unlikely, as that would further increase the level of sophistication. You can't rely on Hanlon's razor in a game of chess between two grandmasters, but the real world has a few crucial differences from chess, for example the fact that no player can realistically contain every possible interaction of their actions with other forces' actions. Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

[cuboidGoat]

>That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?

If you don't think that they were actually putting forward a tale to be believed in the first place, but were signalling that they don't have to bother, then it just doesn't even apply.

>Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics

Occam's razor is a logical position to take in an absence of further information, although sometimes wrong, especially in biology. Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not. Nor was it ever meant to be taken as such.

>Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.

Putin has been exposing his own lies for years on TV, usually with a smile. This is the guy who goes on his third ever scuba dive on the news and brings back museum quality amphorae. Lying barefacedly, with the audience knowing it is all lies, is a large part of his public persona. It is meant to both be funny and set an example that he doesn't need to bother with little things such as truth.

>The PM put on a diving suit and dived deep into the Taman Bay where, to everyone’s utter surprise, he managed to find two ancient amphorae dating back to the 6th century AD.

>Putin also told journalists that the Taman dive was his third-ever attempt at scuba diving.

https://www.rt.com/news/putin-amphorae-dive-archeology/

[the_grue]

> then it just doesn't even apply

Then you don't seem to have an argument against Hanlon's razor?

> Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not

In this case, clearly, the two explanations are incompatible: either Putin planned the world to discover that he was lying about the assassination, etc., etc., or he did not.

> brings back museum quality amphorae

That's a completely different class of lies. That one is a bravado that shows the level of intelligence he assumes in his fans, nothing more. He certainly didn't risk getting himself into another cold war by fishing out those amphorae!