The short answer to the question presented above in the title is – Putin wants Ukraine -- for now -- and a return to the vanished glory years of Joseph Stalin, known during the pre-World II years as “the breaker of nations.” Ukraine was among the nations broken by Stalin. Others were the Baltic States and Poland, which simply disappeared from Russian maps following its forced incorporation into the Soviet Union.
It was not until 1946, when Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, that the West
shook off its partly self-induced slumber. Russian historians date the Cold War
from the delivery of Churchill’s speech.
The Churchill speech – The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain
Speech’) – may be found here. The speech, even today, gives
voice to what Abraham Lincoln once called “the mystic chords of memory.”
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,”
Churchill declaimed in what historians have called his most important speech,
“an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all
the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw,
Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these
famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the
Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet
influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control
from Moscow.”
Ukraine went down Stalin’s throat like a porcupine with its
quills dangerously extended. In 1932-33, Stalin contrived a famine in Ukraine,
later called the Holodomor, that resulted in the
death by starvation of 8 to 10 million Ukrainians. The figures are fungible
because, for reasons known only to Stalin, the census data figures covering the
years of the Stalin induced famine went missing, as did many vocal Ukrainians.
Stalin did not
believe in half-measures. Stalin’s shock troops descended upon Ukraine and
destroyed even the ovens used by small farmers. Starving Ukrainians who were
forced to eat the leaves off the trees in their despair were hidden from word
view by Pulitzer Prize winning reporters such as Walter Duranty, the New York Times’
chief reporter about whom Malcomb Muggeridge said that Duranty was the worst
pathological liar he had ever encountered in journalism.
Putin’s most serious mistake involves the reorientation of
Russia, historically and culturally a western not an eastern state. Not only
the Russian Czars -- principally Peter the Great, who modernized the country,
quickly transforming it into a major European power -- but its greatest and
most intellectually gifted writers and artists are western to the core. By reorienting
his country east towards China, a neo-fascist state, Russia cannot help but
surrender to China its much prized insularity – its freedom from foreign
influence. Geographically China lies beneath Russia’s 2,615.5 mile long soft
underbelly, one of the longest international borders in the world. The northern
province of China boasts a population of 123 million, while the population of
Eastern Siberia, about half of Russia, is a scant 14 million.
The map pictured above outlines Russia’s vulnerability to
China. Geography matters greatly in world affairs, and cultural affinities are
determinative. Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky and Chekov are all read and admired in western nations. Imprinted
with centuries of cross cultural pollination, they carry to Russians and
Americans the fructifying ideas of western civilization.
Putin’s peace offensive and his war offensive are exactly
the same. During the Stalinist period, the second worst terrorist in modern
history rightly considered Ukraine, brought to knees by means of the Holodomor,
the gateway to Eastern Europe and Poland. Once Stalin annexed Ukraine through
terror and bullets, the door lay open to the Baltic States and Poland. In the
construction of the Soviet Union, Germany itself was Stalin’s ultimate prize.
When Russia’s Stalinists met a principled opposition from Western Europe,
including the United States, the Berlin Wall went up. Stalin knew that war was
diplomacy by other means. Putin has been Stalin’s faithful student.
The West, including weak and vacillating presidents of the
United States, know what Putin wants --because Putin told the West what he
wants when he said the loss of the Soviet Union was the worst calamity in
modern post-World War II history.
Russia under Putin, a Potemkin Village
of a country, is – and here this writer chooses his words carefully – an unholy
mess. The Russian economy is what one would expect of a South American drug
cartel holding at bay through unspeakable terror a quasi-democratic country
such as Mexico.
The pro-Kremlin Moskovskij Komsomolets newspaper reported
recently that the "overwhelming majority of [regional] governors are
experiencing problems with filling their budgets this year… due to a general
slowdown in the economy, a drop in business profits, the closure of and restrictions
on the work of enterprises, [and] problems with the export of key
products." Inflation, hovering at 10%, is out pacing revenue gains by a substantial
margin, partly because nondefense government expenses are also increasing significantly. Regional government
budgets are running a total deficit of nearly $5 billion over the first part of
2025. The Washington
Examiner notes, “That's no small amount for an economy 13.5 times
smaller than that of the United States.”
But Putin is right about one thing: War, if one may call the
unremitting bombing of civilian targets a war, really is diplomacy by Iranian
manufactured drones and bullets. So far, Putin’s diplomacy has been partly
successful, if not victorious. Ukrainians know their own history. When Abe
Lincoln, in the midst of a civil war, was pressured by everyone, including
important members of his cabinet, to ditch Ulysses Grant, he said he could not
get rid of Grant – “That man fights.”
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