Putin the Cat.
Vlad, the cat, looked into the Ukrainian cookie jar and said to himself, “yum, yum. This is going to be a cakewalk, a delightful treat. Those NATO countries have been divided by the useful idiot and now I am going to eat all those delicious, buttery galettes. I’m going to eat them all while everyone is out to dinner, no need to take a bite at the edge. Lenin said, “thrust the bayonet, if you find steel, pull back. If you find soft flesh press forward.”
Hitler and Stalin divided Poland in two parts on the 23 of August 1939. This was known as the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact, which Hitler later trashed with his invasion of the Soviet Union, including a part of it--the Ukraine, in 1941, much to the surprise of Stalin, who had starved 3.9 million Ukrainians with his misbegotten plan to collectivize Ukrainian grain and agriculture in the 1930s. Children catching frogs and fish during the famine were dragged into a pit and suffocated. People hiding grain took a slow train to Siberia.
Ukraine, having been part of the USSR, was only subject to Stalin’s madness until the Germans arrived, in 1941, hoping to use it as a breadbasket, furnishing slave labor to fuel the German war effort. On the way, Hitler commenced his killing fields of Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and other untermenschen on his path tolebensraum in the east. Ukraine was the equivalent of a conqueror’s European Grand Central Station.
Now Ukraine is at the crossroads again of a power struggle between Putin’s Russian kleptocracy and Ukrainian nationalism, loosely supported by the West. The destruction has caused an economic nightmare for the Ukrainians and probably the west which will be yoked with the expenses of rebuilding it after Russia has destroyed its infrastructure. The idea of Russia paying reparations for their adventure is like having Jeffrey Epstein babysit your 16 year old granddaughter.
The Russian economy is in tatters, food is scarce in the Russian supermarkets, the oligarchs have lost most of their assets, the Russian people are facing a declining Ruble and nowhere to trade their oil and gas. But statistics say that sanctions only work 15-30% of the time to effect regime change, or a rogue state’s policies.
The Russian experiment with democracy started in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It did not last long. Putin considers the dissolution of the USSR as disastrous as the fall of Rome. Democracy in Russia never really took hold. The first years were like the Wild West. Oligarchs got insanely rich, while the rest of the people were left behind as vassals.
We thought we won the cold war, “the end of history,” scholars wrote. Authoritarianism has lasted in Russia in one form or another for over 1,000 years. It does not seem to be on the wane. The Czars, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsen, Putin? Who is next in line? Is Russian culture similar in a different shade than Islamic culture, needing generations to change? The contradiction in our minds is that Russian History is rich in cultural accomplishments. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, Tchaikovsky, giants In literature, art, music. So was Germany.
Americans should ask themselves how such leaders emerge from civilized societies? What are the causes of such aberrant historical turns? Economics? Cultural differences? Tribalism? Inequality?
The Ukraine war is a disaster for Putin; he thinks leveling a country of 40 million people who hate him will inure to his benefit. What is he going to do with Ukraine when he wins this war, if he does? Occupy? It is doomed to failure. Putin has neither the money nor the troops to oppress this population, a group of angry Slav brothers who will fight him to the death. This is their homeland, their families have been dispossessed, and their cities ruined. They hate the Russians. Estimates that it would necessitate 500,000 Russian troops to quell continuing insurgencies. The work Ukrainians have done to make their country a modern democracy in tatters, because of a kleptocratic manic.
This begs the question that this may be the part of the incipient cultural revolution—a war among Slavic brothers and cultures.
NATO is burdened about the question of escalation to World War III. Neville Chamberlain was obsessed with negotiating with Hitler to avoid a repeat of World War I where 42 million died. The fear of war as it resides in the minds of Western leaders may result in an even worse outcome than standing up to the likes of Vladimir Putin. If nuclear weapons have been a deterrent to war, now they seem to be a deterrent to stopping it.
