He's In Trouble

Vladimir Putin is in trouble. His army is experiencing reversals. And he's calling up kids to replace his dwindling forces. Michael Harris writes:

In making these announcements, Putin has planted both feet in a bear trap. U.S. military experts who study developments in Ukraine with a lapidarian’s eye think that conscription will lead to more reversals on the battlefield. Does Russia even have the capacity to take such a large number of men and turn them into soldiers overnight? The Americans don’t think so. They say these new conscripts will be ill-trained, poorly equipped, and demoralized—which is a pretty good description of the ragged Russian units already in Ukraine. Putin has even taken to using mercenary convicts to shore up his battered forces.

Putin -- convinced that he  is a very stable genius -- has personally taken control of his army:

No modern, professional army operates like that. Command and control in combat is a vital component that goes out the window when the leading politician of a country makes himself the boss-hog general. Putin simply doesn’t know his ass from a bomb-crater when it comes to conducting a war. The results in Ukraine are making that painfully clear.

When Putin sent his invaders into Ukraine, most observers thought the Zelenskyy government would fall in a few days. There was a time when Russia controlled roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine.  Now, with continuing Western support, the betting is that Ukraine can not only reclaim lost territory, it may even be able to win the war.

And, once again, he's making nuclear threats:

If Putin is still rational, he will understand that the person who lifts the lid on that Pandora’s Box won’t see anything good happen. Russia is not the only country with tactical nuclear weapons. The West would be under tremendous pressure to ride to the rescue if Putin actually used his most fearsome terror weapon on Ukrainians. 

However, there are signs that ordinary Russians have had enough:

There is a real possibility that the war in Ukraine will not be decided on the battlefield of the world’s bread basket, but in the public squares of Russia. When was the last time you saw men, women, and children taking to the streets to oppose Vladimir Putin? That is exactly what they have been doing in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

More than 1,800 of them have been detained, half of that number are women and children.

Why are they in the street, knowing that their lives could be blown out like a candle, by a regime that doesn’t tolerate opposition? In a country where people keep falling out of windows, the sudden knock on the door could come at any time. They are in the street because they have heard the news from the front, where thousands of young Russians have been killed or wounded in this misbegotten and mismanaged war. According to the Ukrainians, who lost 9,000 military personnel in the first six months of the war, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s forces have killed or wounded 45,000 Russian troops.

The message in Russia is getting clearer: Putin’s “special military operation” is not a patriotic effort to liberate Russians or to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. It is Putin’s folly, a dreadful meat grinder that mothers in Russia have come to see as a threat to their families. That’s why 18 different regions in Russia have actually called for Putin’s resignation. Sadly, dictators don’t resign, they get even.

Or they are overthrown. Stay tuned.

Image: qz.com

The Soul Of The West

Michael Harris writes that, in the Ukraine War, the soul of the West hangs in the balance:

Ukraine’s pop-star president, the guy in the T-shirt, says if Ukraine goes down, it’s not just the end of one country. It is the end of the world. In other words, if Ukraine dies, ask not for whom the bell tolls. You know the rest.

It is true that war leaders deal in hyperbole, but Volodymyr Zelensky has a point. As he said, Ukraine is the border between the civilized world, and what used to be known as the evil empire; between democracy and brutal dictatorship.

Vladimir Putin, the villain of this piece and more than a few others, is proving to be a one-man geopolitical pandemic. Despite all the death and destruction Putin has already caused, French President Emmanuel Macron warns that the “worst” is yet to come in this unprovoked and savage war against a sovereign, democratic state.

When Putin invaded Crimea, he learned that the West would not fight for Ukraine:

Russia has now used its uncontested land grab in Crimea as a key staging area for a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine. It is a war that could create five million refugees and kill 50,000 civilians.  This time the target is not Sevastopol, it is Kyiv. 

True, the West has imposed disastrous sanctions on Russia. But they are not enough to stop Putin:

So far, there is no sign that severe sanctions have done anything but make Putin double down on his outrageous invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces continue to inexorably close in on the country’s key cities, including Kyiv, in what has been called by U.S. intelligent analysts, the “slow annihilation” of Ukraine’s military assets. Despite Putin’s denials, civilian targets are also being ravaged by intense shelling. 

So if the goal of the sanctions, the shaming, and the isolation of Putin and his band of thugs and oligarchs was to stop the invasion, it hasn’t worked, at least not yet. 

And even if, over time, the sanctions work, what if the net result is an isolated Putin driven into the arms of China? What if China becomes the buyer of last resort for Russian wheat and energy? What if the two countries conspire to set up a course of their own, buying and selling securities and commodities in a non-dollar currency? If your neighbourhood is Asia, how tempting would it be to work with Peking rather than New York, even if the deals weren’t denominated in U.S. dollars?

Emmanuel Macron is right. The worst is yet to come.

Image: news.sky.com

The Face Of Fascism

Donald Trump tells a Big Lie. Vladimir Putin tells a Bigger Lie -- which is what all fascists do. Andrew Nikkiforuk writes:

Whenever asked about his historical or philosophical influences Putin cites an obscure Russian fascist by the name of Ivan Ilyin. Born into a noble family in 1883, Ilyin embraced white fascism as a response to Red fascism, also known as Bolshevism. Ilyin openly admired both Mussolini and Hitler and dreamed of a fascist Europe. Not surprisingly he remained a forgotten Russian émigré who died in Switzerland in 1954.

In his writings, Ilyin consistently advocated for a unique brand of Russian fascism. First and foremost he imagined Russia as an innocent Christian “Spirit” that the West had repeatedly tried to corrupt. Russia, in other words, was always a political innocent requiring an imperial defense.

Second, he refuted the rule of law and regarded lawlessness as patriotic act: “The fact of the matter is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness,” he wrote.

Third, he believed that only a dictator could save Russia in its constant historical struggle against evil: a redeemer with a mystical connection to his people and history. In Ilyin’s religious world view all politics becomes “the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” Only a healthy Russian empire could deliver salvation against the godless agents of globalism.

Like fascists before him, Putin seeks to up end the world:

Thanks to Putin’s aggression, democracies will face higher energy prices, severe inflation, rampant political volatility and unexpected consequences throughout the global economy. War has a way of begetting more war.

By invading Ukraine, Putin is also openly signalling to neighboring democracies that he considers them weak and manageable. Sanctions cannot hurt or dissuade this dictator who has imperial ambitions wrapped in a quasi-religious crusade.

Putin has also calculated that the world will not risk nuclear war just to save a struggling democracy of 44 million people in Ukraine.

The truth is that Russia is in a very bad way:

To project strength, the autocrat must make democracies look more disorderly than Russia’s oligarchy. Because Russia can’t address its problems, it must therefore export them — everything from disinformation to lawlessness to inequality abroad. The more democracies celebrate wealthy billionaires and nationalist movements, the more they look like Russia. The more they celebrate emotion and falsehood, the more Putin wins — for the moment.

So besides feeding Putin's lust for power, the war in Ukraine creates a diversion for Russia's population. They will suffer much more before this is over.

Image: CNN