.jpeg) |
| Putin |
A mid-March report on Putin from Frontline strongly suggests that Putin, after a period of self-isolation, has reverted to character. He is a Stalinist ex-KGB agent who mourns the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, which once embraced in a liberty-snuffing stranglehold Ukraine, the Baltic States, East Germany, Poland and to a lesser extent Finland. Putin’s present character is quite in keeping with his unprovoked military attack upon the civilian population of Ukraine.
Did the Frontline documentary, “Putin's Road to War,” get it right?
It got an important part of it right. It is now impossible
for Putin to slough off his essential character. The mask has very dramatically
been tossed aside.
Frontline shows a horde of communist legislators and
administration officials trembling before Putin, precisely in the way the
Soviet Politburo quailed before Stalin, the “Breaker of Nations.”
Stalin, like Putin, was what President Joe Biden might have
called a “war criminal.” War criminals, as we have learned from the Nuremberg
trials of the Nazis by Allied nations following the successful prosecution of
World War ll, are supposed to be punished, and the sanctions levied by Biden against
Putin appear to be a non-judicial, economic punishment of sorts. It is not
likely, however, that this punishment, which comes very late in the day and can
be reversed, will deter Putin’s attack on Ukraine’s cities.
Only two important strategic questions are yet unanswered:
“Will Putin be successful in effectively moving the border of Russia further
westward touching upon Poland and the Baltic States – NATO territory?” And
“Will Western nations intervene to prevent Putin from closing retreat corridors
in Ukraine? The answer to this last question is very much up in the air (pun
intended). The only way to prevent the wholesale slaughter of innocent
Ukrainian civilians fleeing to other countries to escape criminal
annihilation is to assure that the Ukrainian resistance, which is formidable,
can regain control of its airspace.
Will Putin successfully subdue Ukraine? In the long run,
likely not. But then in the long run, we are all dead, and Ukrainian blood, as Albert Camus once said in
connection with the Soviets’ destruction of Hungary, is precious: “I am not one
of those who long for the Hungarian people to take up arms again in an uprising
doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society that will spare
neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like
football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There are already
too many dead in the stadium, and we can be generous only with our own blood.
Hungarian blood has proved to be so valuable to Europe and to freedom that we
must try to spare every drop of it.”
If the question is put this way – Should Putin be
successful? – the answer, from all involved and uninvolved parties, appears to
be a resounding “No!”
The West does have a way of pushing aside problems by
cloaking itself in forgetfulness. But World War ll still shines brightly in the
public memory, and not even Germany can forget that East Germany, following the
war, was a Soviet Union satrapy for forty years, from 1949-1990, before the
Berlin Wall came crashing down. This time period is not remote. To those
without historical amnesia, it was yesterday.
Of course, we understand that history, in the minds of
Pentagon generals, timid American politicians, and Putin, is a propaganda
bauble. In his virtual message to the
U.S. Congress, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalinskyy said that Russian markets
in the United States should be closed because they are “flooded with our
blood.” Pain and grief has made a poet of Zalinskyy. Blood will cast its veto
in the long run over the barren lies of ideological toughs and propagandists.
The long run, everyone knows, will be littered with the
rubble of Ukrainian cities, closed ports, unanswered Russian superiority in the
skies over Ukraine, blood drenched streets, the evisceration of liberty and
freedom, a future 40 mile column of Russian war material fronting Poland and
the Baltic States, a cowed Russian population and a wavering and confused
American strategic foreign policy.
Neither Biden nor leading members of his party in
Connecticut – U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy – have yet said
that sanctions against Putin must remain in effect until the last Russian
soldier has headed back to Moscow. Nor have they said that the sanctions should
remain in effect until Moscow has dumped Putin, highly unlikely as Putin’s
Stalinist grip closes around the necks of Russian citizens whose view of the
world has not yet been polluted by
For his part, Putin regards an internationally successful
sanctions program as – his words – “an act of war.” And he has let it be known
that nuclear weapons of one kind or another may play a significant part in his
expansionary war ventures. The Ukrainian assault, many people suppose, is but a
prelude to Putin’s larger vision of a reassembled Soviet Union.
Comments