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| Ukrainian victim |
Ukraine may soon cease to be a problem for both NATO and
Western countries, especially incautious energy thirsty Germany, because it may
at some point in the near future cease to be a country.
Vladimir “Son of Stalin” Putin and his communist praetorian
guard do not consider Ukraine a country at all. While 200,000 Russian troops were encircling the
country, plodding methodically to invade it, Putin told us, “Ukraine is not
even a country.”
Not so. Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the west,
Ukraine, known as Kievan Rus -- a loose federation of East Slavic, Baltic and
Finnic peoples in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th
century -- became a rich and prosperous land of traders and farmers at a time
when Moscow even in the 13th century was little more than a small
town fortified with a timber fence and a moat. Historical details such as
this did not appear in Putin’s KGB breviary. Ukraine is and has been a country
separate from Russia since its emergence as a tribal confederation of states that
formed the basis of Ukrainian identity.
After Stalin in 1932-33 starved Ukraine, known since Roman times as
“the bread basket of Europe,” into submission, it had been an unwilling vassal
state of Russia. Robert Conquest was among the first western writers to put a
figure to the death toll in Ukraine and the Caucasus, 8-10 million.
Following the conspicuous failure of the Soviet project,
Ukraine, like other vassal states, many of which now form parts of NATO, shook off
its captive chains. The Soviets had controlled Poland, parts of Finland and
East Germany, as well as the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
–by means of puppet governments that had pledged their fealty to Stalinist
Russia.
Big lies, as we all know, are an accumulation of small lies.
Putin and his Moscow cronies are adept at lying, here defined as knowingly
saying or suggesting the thing that is not.
The power of the lie rests in the ability of the liar to
tailor “the thing that is not” to the dispositions of those to whom the lie is
presented. You lie effectively by telling John Jones a narrative he is predisposed
to accept as true.
If U.S. intelligence services did not know, prior to the
invasion of Ukraine by 200,000 Russian military troops that had encircled the
country, that the troops were from the very first moment ordered to annex
separatist Russian territories, we do not need intelligence services.
If American politicians did not know that force majeure
unvaryingly trumps diplomacy, they should be put back in school, there to study
Victor Davis Hanson’s luminous account of the Peloponnesian War. Or they might
revisit Hitler’s diplomatic entente with Prime Minister Chamberlain before Hitler, much to the surprise of blinkered western
diplomats, swallowed up the whole of Czechoslovakia. One of the important
takeaways from Putin’s ambitious attempt to reconstruct the soviet template in
the post- soviet era is – diplomacy is successful only for military victors.
All the Democrats just now are, as they say in Hollywood, “on
script.”
On the Thursday following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,
Democrat Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi stepped before a bank of
microphones and condemned, according to an Associated Press report that had
appeared in a Hartford paper, Russian aggression towards Ukraine as “an attack
on democracy.”
“Actually,” said a waitress peeking over my shoulder at a
headline in the Hartford paper, “Pelosi calls Putin’s action an ‘attack on
democracy” – where had we heard that expressing before? – “it’s an attack
on people, right?”
Right. One of the people shown in a different newspaper
account was female victim whose face had been battered, her head wrapped in a
gauze bandage. The lady appeared shell
shocked at Putin’s lack of respect for democratic norms.
Here in Connecticut, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, no stranger to
television cameras, did not stray far from script. He said, aping Pelosi, “My thoughts are with the people of Ukraine as
Putin launches this premeditated, unprovoked attack. The USA stands with the
Ukrainian people as they fight for their freedom from Russian tyranny.”
Blumenthal, rushing from one tragedy, Putin's expected invasion
of Ukraine, to another, “Blumenthal: $200M needed to expand
pediatric care”, either was not asked or did not pause to answer the
most obvious question. We know that the 200,000 Russian troops armed with tanks
and missiles were not waiting on Ukraine’s border to play tiddlywinks. We know
that Biden’s diplomatic measures did not deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Putin is operating on the assumption that the Russian people,
who generally have a low boiling point, will tolerate a temporary inconvenience
of empty shelves. They will not tolerate full body bags. The obvious question
for western politicians, who appear to have tears rather than blood
flowing in their veins, is: How much spilt blood can they tolerate in defense
of NATO?
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