Putin The Great

Bucha

The diplomatist’s credo in Voltaire’s Candide: “Well, my dear Pangloss,” Candide said to them, “when you were hanged, dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, did you continue to think that everything in this world happens for the best?”

“I have always abided by my first opinion,” answered Panglos, “for after all, I am a philosopher, and it would not become me to retract my sentiments.”

“Brutal” is one way to describe President of Russia Vladimir Putin’s continuing efforts to occupy Ukraine.

This from a recent AP report: “On March 15, a friend of the dead man was approached by Russians demanding his documents. They’re at home, he said. On the way there, they passed the grave. He pointed it out. The next moment, witness Iryna Kolysnik says, the soldiers shot him.”

Apparently, Russian soldiers do not appreciate the black humor that has found its dark seat in the hearts of war ravaged Ukrainians.

“’He was talking too much,’ one said, adding an expletive.”

The British Sun reports: “Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, said thousands of people had been at the station at the time the rockets struck.

“The Rashists (Russian fascists) knew very well where they were aiming and what they wanted: they wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible,’ he said.”

President Joe Biden has described Putin’s brutalization of the Ukrainian civilian population as “war crimes.” But even now it is doubtful whether Biden, committed to a “diplomatic” solution concerning Putin’s “war crimes” activity in Ukraine, is willing to maintain his sanctions until the last Russian soldier has left the bomb cratered country and the borders of Ukraine have been restored to its condition before “Putin The Great” had invaded the country.

“Russia has already failed in its initial war,” Biden said recently, and added, “We’re going to stifle Russia’s ability to grow in years to come [emphasis mine],” which  seems to suggest that sanctions will perhaps remain beyond the point when, God and the U.S. Congress willing, Ukraine has been supplied with sufficient deterrent power to drive the last Russian soldier from the country.

Sufficient deterrent power, Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal said both before and after his trip to Poland, should include a supply of planes to Ukraine, so that the country might better defend itself from a Russian military that controls the skies over Ukrainian air space.

Those favoring a diplomatic solution to the war on Ukraine – prepositions are important -- by a military unchallenged in the air have been primed by diplomats to leave a face-saving escape corridor for Putin, the butcher of Bucha, so that he will not, as he and Moscow have repeatedly imitated, reign nuclear weapons on those presumptuous enough to intervene successfully and militarily to compromise his conquest plans.

At this point even the diplomats are no longer pretending they can hardly guess what Putin’s plans are. Western states no longer have the luxury of doubt. Putin plans to occupy permanently the Donbas region of Ukraine, a military strategy that will provide him with a land bridge connecting Russia with Crimea, earlier annexed by the Moscow military geniuses that so far have failed in occupying Kyiv, arresting President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and carting off his tortured carcass to Moscow where it can be displayed triumphantly by Putin in Red Square.

Putin has reacted to the West’s diplomatic entente with undisguised contempt. Proof of his contempt is evident in his propagandistic lies and the utter destruction of major cities in Ukraine. Putin claims that Ukraine is “not even a country,” but rather an appendage of Russia – like Crimea. And his war crimes are prosecutable.

Even CNN has jumped aboard the “war crimes” float: “The evidence of apparent atrocities in Bucha came as Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced it had documented allegations of war crimes in the occupied areas of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Kharkiv regions…  ‘The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians,’ Hugh Williamson, HRW's Europe and Central Asia director, said in the statement. ‘Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces' custody should be investigated as war crimes.’"

Putin The Great -- now looking East towards China rather than West towards diplomatists in Washington DC – knows, as every Czar and tin pot dictator the world over has always known, that force majeure will always trump diplomacy in the short run. And “in the long run,” as economist John Maynard Keynes has said gloomily “we are all dead.”

The dead dotting the streets in Bucha will not protest the indignities of a Russian occupation. And in the long run outrage will disappear; the diplomacy of Russian victors will triumph; Germany and the United States once again will be able to power its long term indifference to “war crimes” with Russian oil; sanctions will disappear; Russian troops will occupy the Donetsk region of Ukraine, as earlier they had occupied and annexed Crimea; the blood of Ukrainians will continue to purchase Western timidity, and life will go on, the West ever believing, along with Voltaire’s  Dr. Pangloss, that all difficulties can be diplomatically surmounted in this “the best of all possible worlds.”