A little while ago Donald Trump issued one of his cockamamie statements. This time he denied the fact that he took top secret material to Mar-a-Lago. He said, “I wasn’t a filing clerk.” He also said in the body of the statement that he was too busy “keeping Russia from invading Ukraine.” Wowey zowey, is that what happened? Vladimir Putin was going to do then exactly what he is doing now, except he was sore afraid of Donald? Righto.
All comic relief aside, America stands at a threshold that she has not stood on since the ’40s. Putin is ready to unleash humanitarian hell in the region. But is he the genius mastermind we’ve always been told or is he out over his skis on this one? This synopsis from Politico Nightly is the most cogent that I have seen.
We might be overestimating Vladimir Putin.
That’s what two former ambassadors to Ukraine told Nightly this week as the world waits to learn whether the Russian president will begin the largest war in Europe since the 1940s.Despite the widespread sentiment that Putin has the West playing by his rules, the Russian president doesn’t seem to understand Ukraine too well, said William Taylor, a former ambassador to Ukraine and the vice president of Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
“He thinks that if anybody speaks Russian, they’re going to be supporting him and Russia. Turns out, Mr. Putin, that’s not the case,” said Taylor, who served as ambassador from 2006 to 2009 and again as acting ambassador from 2019 to 2020. “In particular, since Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Ukrainian people, no matter if they speak Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, or German, they hate President Putin.”
Ukrainians’ feelings toward Putin won’t do much to stop a potential invasion, one that U.S. military and intelligence assessments suggest could leave up to 50,000 civilians dead or wounded, lead to the collapse of Kyiv within days and spur a humanitarian crisis with up to 5 million refugees. “As of this moment, I am convinced he has made the decision,” to invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden said today, citing “significant intelligence capability” for his assessment.
But if Putin thinks this level of catastrophe will do anything to change Ukraine’s perception of Russia, it’s a “massive fail,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000 and now a William J. Perry fellow at Stanford.
The nearly-200,000 troops lined up for an attack, Pifer said, have galvanized NATO and increased the West’s support for Kyiv.
“It’s a huge miscalculation,” Pifer said.
Not only have NATO and Europe stuck together, but also Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t blinked — likely surprising Putin, Taylor said. Now the Russian president is faced with a choice: back down, agree to the proposals on the table and appear weak, Pifer said, or invade and accept a costly war.
The war would be devastating for Ukraine, Taylor said. The U.S. assesses that Russia has between 169,000 and 190,000 personnel in and near Ukraine, including troops on the border, in Belarus, occupied Crimea and other Russian-led forces in eastern Ukraine. Western officials are warning that new provocations and shellings in eastern Ukraine’s breakway regions mean Putin could use the violence as a pretext to launch an attack.
“My biggest concern is the number of Ukrainians that will be killed, and it’s gonna be military and civilian. The Russians have the capabilities,” Taylor said, from ballistic missiles and aircrafts to naval ship mounted artillery and missiles. “I’ve got a lot of friends there, and I worry about that.”
To understand the current moment, we have to look at Putin’s choices over the last decade in particular, Pifer said. While Putin’s policies have long alienated Ukraine, his actions in 2014 hardened Ukrainians’ anti-Russia sentiments, he said. Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and threw its support behind conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region soon after. The fighting, which began more than seven years ago, has killed more than 14,000 people.
Now 62 percent of Ukrainians support their country joining NATO, the highest percentage since 2014, according to Rating, a Ukrainian polling agency. Given NATO’s unwillingness to agree to further enlargement right now, it’s sort of a non-issue,Pifer said. But the figure does reflect Ukraine’s shift in attitude — and the unlikely prospect that Russia would be able to exert the kind of influence over Kyiv that it wants any time soon, Pifer said.
Putin is misjudging the ability of his military to invade at a relatively low cost, Pifer said, and he’s likely underestimating the degree of resistance he’ll face from Ukrainians.
“I was there two weeks ago,” Pifer said. “And people are basically saying if the Russians come, I’m going to get a gun.”
There have been many moving stories coming out of Ukraine lately. A few days ago I saw one that touched me, a gal of 70 was training in the use of a rifle. The ensuing story did not paint a people who are going to just curl up and die like a spider when stepped on.
I hope and pray that it doesn’t come to combat, obviously. But if it does, Putin may find it a more costly war than he is prepared to fight. It won’t be a cakewalk if that’s what he’s anticipating.
Earlier in the day Russian media broke news of a car bomb explosion in the DNR. This made perfect sense because it’s said that Putin plans to manufacture a crisis and stage a false flag attack in order to have the pretense he needs to invade. Also, the Deputy Commander of the DPR Operational Command, Eduard Basurin, claimed Friday Ukrainian military had started shelling in Donbass.
Putin is setting the stage to claim Ukraine is the aggressor and he’s there to instill peace in the region. He’s not fooling anybody.
Now you know some of the best speculation that there is on this topic. Now we sit and watch and pray for God to help the people of Ukraine. And God help our species. We are capable of some amazing things when we’re not being combative and warring and stupid.
God f___ing dammit, I have LONG said we’ve been overestimating Putin. I get the why of it, mind; when an abuser does enough psychic harm, they loom in your mind as an interior threat. Such is how Putin AND Trump still live in too many of our fellow travelers’ heads rent-free at this late date. But Putin’s epic mismanagement of the COVID crisis was the tip-off to me. As bad as our numbers are, their are way worse. Ditto the vaxx skepticism, which cuts across multiple ideologies there.
Now he’s going ahead with a plan that would have worked a lot better with his puppet in charge. Worse, he’s gone all in and Biden/NATO is calling. The two choices our Ukrainian ambassadors were talking about, I figured out last week. It’s just a matter of how he wants to lose now.
Russia is a country with a massive inferiority complex and has been that way for centuries. The Cold War made it a real and dangerous force to be reckoned with but it all came crashing down. Historians will long analyze and debate just how much but there’s no doubting that Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan bled them both militarily and economically. It also shattered their ability to promote some kind of pretense of being interested in anything other than domination of ever more land/territory. They greatly underestimated the hatred Afghans would have for them as well as their willingness to fight. It took time to arm them, in part because our country and other western powers had to ensure the assistance was “covert” although everyone figured out what was going on. The plausible deniability in arming the Afghans was providing them only weapons they could conceivably stolen or captured from Soviet forces.
Ukraine and it’s allies in NATO don’t have that problem. They can arm Ukrainians who are also willing to fight Russian in guerilla warfare (if things come to that) but will have the best equipment we can provide. For all the hoopla Russia makes and others believe (with some justification) about fierce nationalism what many don’t realize the fierce nationalism of Ukranians. They WILL, even if badly bloodied by a Russian invasion and takeover of their country fight back, and will begin doing so far more quickly and effectively than was the case in Afghanistan. These are educated people. They already have armed forces and older people who have served when younger. And they already have a network set up that will provide both supplies and intelligence, something the Afghans never had at the height of our assistance.
Putin has tunnel vision, and probably those close enough to him to give him advice are too afraid to speak up for fear of being taken to Lefortovo for a brutal interrogation followed by a bullet to the back of the head. But he was a young KGB officer trying to work his way up back during his country’s disastrous invasion of Afghanistan and for a long time during his quest to rebuild a leaner, meaner and more durable version of the old USSR he was mindful of what led to its downfall. Yes, he correctly blames assistance from NATO and other western powers (including Israel which might be why the Saudis are playing footsies with him all of a sudden – or they might just be hoping for Russia’s collapse so they can gain a greater share of the energy market) but it’s the details of how we helped the Afghans that he seems to have forgotten. And, as I’ve noted he has either overlooked or chosen to willfully ignore the fact that Ukraine will not only get far more (and effective) assistance but far faster. He also seems to have become so blinded by his goal of regaining control of Ukraine and turning it into a Russian province that he’s forgotten that less than ten years ago Ukrainians forced his puppet government to flee back to Russia!
If Russia thinks the mess they create will, despite an early “victory” will be worth it they are mistaken. In the end they will lost and lose big. The tragic part is how many will die before that happens, but it WILL end with Russia deciding that as with Afghanistan the costs were too great to bear.
Putin has put himself in a bad spot. He can lose little (back down and while he’s still got juice set himself up for a comfy retirement even if in exile) or lose big by finding himself in the same position the USSR was in when they left Afghanistan in humiliation. It will be the beginning of the end of his regime and whatever position Russia has achieved via the blackmail of western Europe with natural gas. And perhaps his own assassination – a modern Brutus dispatching him with a knife.
I often wonder which is the more crippling national character flaw: Russian inferiority complex or China’s inability to fully commit to ambitions relating to the outside world.
You aren’t the only one.
We have our own not having dealt with racism since 1776.