Putin has this eye on us all.
Putin’s war must go on if he is to achieve his long-term and widely misunderstood intentions.
Had Russia set out solely to seize Ukraine, destroying its infrastructure would have been an absurd and reckless policy costing decades and billions in reconstruction.
But the land battle is secondary to Putin’s goal to demoralise the west and re-establish Russia’s soviet-imperialist position on the world stage.
While we watch on our TV screens grand European cities being bombed to dust by Russian artillery, we are already suffering a sense of stress and impotence.
It is men on the front line and children in their beds who are dying, but the fog of war clouds the eyes of politicians in Europe and across the Atlantic in Washington.
While the western powers are unable to force open safe routes across the Black Sea, precious grain stocks rot on the dockside, bankrupting Ukraine and starving millions in Africa where the people may come to see their future better served at the bosom of Mother Russia than the European aid agencies with their quid pro quo philanthropy.
Self-Portrait
Putin’s war must go on long enough to divide Europeans thirsting for the cheap oil and gas needed to combat the rocketing prices driving their downtrodden citizenry into deeper levels of poverty and rebellion.
Should the west mediate for a quick settlement that ends sanctions and provides Russia with dignity and the Donbas? Or arm Zelenski to the teeth and push Russia back to its pre-24 February borders?
While there is no agreed strategy, the slaughter continues. In the first official announcement of casualties, Kiev puts the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat at 10,000. Russian losses are estimated at 32,000. Not that Putin acknowledges nor loses sleep over deaths on the battlefield. He is a born again Tsar painting a self-portrait in blood.
War Must Go On Forever
The Russian bombardment of the civilian population in Syria in 2015 caused the exodus of six million people; nearly four million remain in rat-infested refugee camps in Turkey.
Nigel Farage’s posters showing a snaking line of women in headscarves pressing at Europe’s borders terrified Brits in rundown communities often surviving on EU grants they didn’t know they had or would lose when they were duped by the propaganda into voting for Brexit.
The British people did not know, and the Conservative press owned by billionaires supporting the Leave Campaign didn’t inform them, that Brexit was solely and uniquely about the movement of Europeans, that migrants from Africa and Asia before Brexit would face the same labyrinthian routes into the UK after Brexit as they did before – legally with a visa or across the Channel in a rubber boat.
Cyber War
Brexit was an enormous success for Vladimir Putin who wants to break Europe up into small bite sized pieces he can gobble down whenever he’s peckish. The Syrian refugee crisis was one side of a two-pronged assault. The second was his cyber war attacking information systems KGB-style backing Leave and undermining Remain.
Georgia Meloni
Right-wing parties across Europe attract support by blaming the EU for all fiscal and social woes and pledging to leave the Union as their central policy. These parties have paid obeisance to and taken funds from Vladimir Putin. They include Marine le Pen in France, Hungary’s Prime Minister Víktor Orban, Heinz-Christian Strache from Austria’s Freedom Party, Matteo Salvini’s Lega Party in Italy and Giorgia Meloni, the homophobic, anti-immigrant leader of Brothers of Italy, who could after elections in 2023 become Italy’s first fascist prime minister since Mussolini.
Based on Electoral Commission information reported in the Guardian, it is estimated that Russia or Russians have given £1.93 million to both the Tory Party and constituency associations since Boris Johnson became prime minister. Johnson rewarded the oligarchs by making Evgeny Lebedev a member of the House of Lords. This son of a former KGB spy and intimate of Putin now has the rare privilege of voting on British laws.
What Russia gets in return for its financial largesse is political support at key moments. In 2017, French far-right MEPs supported the annexation of Crimea. In 2018, Salvini vetoed EU sanctions against Russia. In May 2022, NewsLines Magazine detailed how Kremlin operatives allegedly draft pro-Russian talking points and amendments for European neo-fascist MEPs to propose in the European Parliament.
Putin not only created a valuable ally in Trump, he was able to manipulate the naive new President into making anti-democratic policies that were advantageous to the Kremlin’s xenophobic and popularist view of the world. The Supreme Court voting to end the rights to abortion and the right to carry concealed weapons is essentially a Christian Fundamentalist show of power. We, the rich white minority, own and run this country and what rights you do and did not have are in our gift.
Putin’s war must go on in order to bolster Republicans in the mid-term elections in November 2022 when Joe Biden may well lose his majority as well as his ability to carry on sending arms to Ukraine.
Then, of course, the 2024 US Presidential election will rise over the horizon with Donald Trump or some isolationist Trump doppelgänger likely to seize the White House and abandon NATO and Europe once and for all.
Putin’s war must go on and will go on until Putin is dead.
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The problem is that there is a total lack of actual evidence in this arena and that opens the door to dangerous conjecture based on the opinions of others with their own agendas or outcome bias. I don’t think debating things opinion against opinion is likely to achieve anything productive. I can’t deny your argument with evidence because there simply isn’t any. But that doesn’t mean your assertion is correct. I have an opinion on it, but I accept that is worth diddly squat without evidence, just like everyone else’s.
The only facts we have seem to be:
1. Ukraine have been bombing Russian speaking Ukrainians.
2. Ukraine has a Nazi problem.
3. Ukraine has cosied up to the UN with a view to contradicting the Minsk accord.
4. Putin has seen the above as justification for an invasion.
Beyond that…?
Putin has advisers whispering in his ear that his assault on Europe must only stop when Russian tanks reach Dublin. Whilst fanciful, more people should be aware that Putin has 7000 troops in Libya (Wagner group), troops in Syria and more Wagner group mercenaries actively destabilising sub Saharan Africa. He can now control the movement of refugees from these areas and will be directing them to southern Europe. This will lead to the destabilising of the EU and the advent of populist governments in the EU with strong links to the Kremlin.
In response to Lee Nixon, the seeming facts you produce are just those, seeming. Ukraine has been bombing Russian speakers in the east but that is in response to Russia fomenting dissent and arming dissidents, together with sending in “patriots on leave” from the Russian armies. By no means all Russian speakers in the East are supporters of either the dissidents or Russia. Many if not most Ukrainians speak Russian, is Ukraine bombing them?
All countries have a neo-Nazi problem, just look at France, Italy, the UK, the US and, indeed, even Russia. That’s a bit like saying a country has a race problem. Similarly, as a sovereign state, Ukraine has every right to “cozy up” to whoever they like.
The single, incontrovertible fact that we can rely on is Putin’s reasoning. He has said that he considers that Russia and Ukraine are one people, one country, that should be conjoined. That and his paranoia about everything the “West” does, is at the heart of this. I don’t agree with the article as much is conjecture but what I do believe that the biggest threats to European security are:
1. Putin; and
2. A second Trump presidency.
I agree totally with your last two points that the biggest threats to European security are:
1. Putin; and
2. A second Trump presidency.
Fake news Clifford. This is a US v Russia proxy war being fought on Ukrainian soil. America’s interference in Ukraine has caused this.
PS… For NATO, read USA.
Lee Nixon is on the money
I understand that it has been an ambition since the Soviet times that they would like a united Europe which extended from Lisbon to Vladivostok and Putin repeated this at a press conference a few years ago. The Soviet empire died but their dreams did not die with it. So Putin is not to be trusted at all, he has the persona of a bully in the school playground who uses threats to frighten others into giving over their dinner money. He cares little for human life, not even his own troops and if he wins Ukraine, that will not satisfy him, he will want more and continue to issue threats, including the nuclear option to get what he wants. Like a bully, he may well be a coward at heart and may capitulate if others stand up to him. It leaves us with only one option, he has to be stopped. I think his support is diminishing and if you think of his senior army officers, he hardly going out of his way to make friends and influence people, then think of their recent mortality rate and the sackings, it is likely that a number will be thinking, ‘is all this worth it for one man’, and unlike the Russian public they will not be fooled the same way, having more access to what is really happening. Putin has built a steel ring of protection about himself but to stay protected, he will need to be lucky all the time, whereas any opponents will just have to be lucky once. So hopefully those close to him may solve the problem, but if not, then God help us all.
Yes, our main hope is that insiders / his opponents get lucky that once and finish him off. People say that he sits at a great distance from visiting dignitaries because he is scared of contracting covid. If so, then why was he happy to sit close to the President of Belarus? I think this maintaining a distance is more to do with fear that someone will stab him or find some other means to kill him. If that is the case, then the logic of him sitting close to Lugashenko is that he’s one of the very few people he trusts.
I think not enough is being said about how weak the Russian economy is overall, despite all the income from oil and gas. Putin needs diversionary tactics at home that (- with tight control of the media) distract the populace from the grim realities of everyday life for most who don’t live in the main cities. Putin wants to be seen as their saviour, protecting them from this terrible threat from beyond Russia’s borders so they will focus less on their lives in poverty.
You can infer from this that I question the assertion that Putin is another Hitler. His motivations are surely largely different.
And yes, I agree that Zelensky bears a huge amount of the responsibility for provoking the war which I think was originally mainly about the issues of the Donbas. I find it nauseating to see the MSM (- in the UK at least) as some kind of saint. But he is a crafty operator, for sure.