“I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of “Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!”
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.
O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.”
–Babi Yar By Yevgeni Yevtushenko, 1961
In August 1968, I found myself in front of the Soviet Embassy in London. I had gotten to know several young Czechoslovaks who, like me, were discovering Europe. Their country was trying to create a better, freer socialism, unfettered by Soviet control. Their desire for freedom, their Prague Spring, was met with Soviet tanks, reminding me of Hungary in 1956. Like many Americans I had spent years fighting to end our stupid war of choice in Vietnam. I had to add my voice to those furious with the mindless, heartless terror afflicted by the Soviets.
Today, Russian bombs fall through Ukrainian skies and Russian soldiers kill their next-door neighbors. The Washington Post, on March 2, 2022, reported: “Russia was moving Thursday to extend its control over Ukraine’s southern coast, with ground forces seizing or encircling cities, as the governor in the port of Kherson reported that Russian forces had captured a key government building.
“In Mariupol, farther east, the mayor said that a Russian siege and hours of shelling that battered rail links and bridges had cut off water, power and food supplies … Over a crackling phone line, Petro Andryuschenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor’s office, said the port city was completely surrounded. ‘There’s no electricity, no heating. We haven’t got water,’ he said … ‘The last day and a half they’ve been bombing all the time. We can’t even go outside to assess’ … The most easterly side of the city is in ruins, he had reported. ‘A region with 150,000 people completely bombed,’ he said.”
Masha Gessen tells us something important about Ukrainians and Ukraine: “Ukraine has long represented hope for a small minority of Russians. Ukraine shares Russia’s history of tyranny and terror. It lost more than four million people to a man-made famine in 1931-34 and still uncounted others to other kinds of Stalinist terror. Between five and seven million Ukrainians died during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation in 1941-44; this included one and a half million Jews killed in what is often known as the Holocaust by Bullets. Just as in Russia, no family survived untouched by the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism.” [Emphasis added]
Putin seems determined to add yet another brutally unnecessary chapter to Ukraine’s tragic history. Nothing more starkly illuminates the stakes for Europe, for all of us, than the violent assault on Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant. The desire to punish Ukraine, somehow overriding the risk of poisoning the land, all those innocents, the young and old, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians who could, depending on where and how the wind blows, so easily be exposed to lethal radiation. The Washington Post reports:
“Russian forces in Ukraine seized Europe’s largest nuclear plant Friday after their shelling set part of the complex on fire, sparking fears across the continent of a nuclear disaster.
Ukraine’s official nuclear inspectorate said technicians in the Zaporizhzhia facility, about 342 miles southeast of Kyiv, were still at work, and local authorities confirmed that the fire was extinguished around 6:20 a.m. local time after blazing for almost five hours.
“Ukrainian officials immediately raised the possibility of another disaster echoing the deadly 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in a video message that an explosion at the six-reactor, 5,700-megawatt Zaporizhzhia plant could spell the ‘end of Europe.’ He accused Moscow of waging ‘nuclear terror’ and of firing at the reactors deliberately. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov pushed back Friday and blamed Ukraine for the fire at the plant, calling it a plot to discredit Russia.”
I turned to Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Craig Unger, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, and Luke Harding to better understand the man behind this unnecessary carnage, Vladimir Putin.
You might remember Fiona Hill, a former official at the U.S. National Security Council specializing in Russian and European affairs, testifying about U.S.–Ukrainian affairs during the impeachment hearings. Hill served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006–2009. In 2017, Hill was appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs. She writes in “There Is Nothing For You Here”:
“The congressional hearings and the impeachment trial of 2019–2020 marked the culmination of decades of political polarization in the United States and several years of bitter partisan battles triggered by the contentious 2016 presidential race. They also represented a triumph for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who unleashed the Russian security services to intervene in the 2016 election.
“I came into the government in early 2017 to deal with the national security consequences of this intervention … By the end of 2019, I was center stage, embroiled in partisan politics. This first impeachment trial focused on a July 25, 2019, telephone conversation between President Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine. In the call, President Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former U.S. vice president Joe Biden, who would run against Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Ukraine was in my official portfolio.”
Not surprisingly, Trump, who had delayed sending military aid to Ukraine to pressure Zelensky, turned against Hill and was outraged by her testimony regarding the former President’s attempt at blackmail.
Hill offers a concise description of the consequences of Putin’s impact on Russia: “In the late 1980s and 1990s, Russia entered a promising period of democratization that was ultimately weakened by political upheavals and attempted coups, overwhelmed by economic crisis, and undermined by declining opportunity. Vladimir Putin was the first populist president of a major country in the twenty-first century. He came into the presidency at the end of 1999 promising to make Russia a great power again, blazing a restorationist political trail at home and abroad. Putin set a personalized, bravura style of leadership that others, including Donald Trump, sought to emulate. And over the next two decades Putin rolled back Russia’s democratic gains to firmly entrench himself in the Kremlin. First he served as president, then as prime minister, and then as president again. Each time he made adjustments to Russia’s political system, until finally, in 2020, he amended the constitution. In theory, Vladimir Putin can now stay in power until 2036. Under the guise of Putin strengthening the state and restoring its global position, Russia slowly succumbed to authoritarianism.”
Michael Isikoff and David Corn recall the efforts of the Obama administration to “reset” relations with Russia, and the critical role Vladimir Putin played in ensuring the failure of that effort: “In August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia in support of pro-Russia separatists. But as the new Obama team saw it, there was reason to believe a page could be turned.
“Putin still lurked in the background as prime minister and the power behind the throne. But Medvedev had a softer image … He looked like someone Obama might be able to do business with — especially on areas of common interest, including countering terrorism and controlling nuclear weapons.”
Michael McFaul and Celeste Wallander Obama’s National Security Council proposed “‘focusing on two to three ‘high priority issues … that can generate goodwill and produce early successes.’”
But when Russian emigres and opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, and Garry Kasparov met with McFaul, they stressed that it was Putin who held the power.
Isikoff and Corn note: “McFaul’s pitch reminded them of when George W. Bush tried to engage Putin eight years earlier … [and] Bush declared, ‘I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.… I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ Then came the Russian president’s crackdown on political foes, extensive human rights abuses in Chechnya, and the military intervention in Georgia.”
Isikoff and Corn explain: “Putin had once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ He was a Russian nationalist to his core. He wanted to extend Russian power, restoring its spheres of influence … He was not looking to accommodate.”
Putin was convinced the United States was determined to control the world. There was President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, followed by the U.S. intervention in Libya. Putin followed events in the Arab world with great interest, threatened by the Arab Spring’s call for democracy. In February 2011, protests in Libya spread to rebellion. When the U.S. and other nations pushed for UN action to protect the demonstrators, Medvedev didn’t support action but abstained without using a veto. U.S. and British, French and Canadian troops were soon taking military action against Qaddafi.
Isikoff and Corn continue: “Putin was furious — at the United States, for once again intervening in the Arab world, and at Medvedev, for not standing up to what he viewed as Washington’s arrogance … He seemed to be thinking, if the United States could go this far in overthrowing governments around the world, could Russia be next?
“Obama’s foreign policy team was caught off guard. ‘We did not recognize the degree it would tick Putin off,’ recalled Jake Sullivan, then the director of policy and planning at the State Department. Medvedev had one more year in his term, and it had been an open question whether Putin would allow him another term as president or would return to claim the position for himself. Putin’s harsh response to the Libyan action signaled the end of Medvedev’s days as president.”
In “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy offer an account of Putin’s 2014 announcement of the Russian annexation of Crimea. It seems so eerily similar to the self-serving mythologies and outright lies he used to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine:
“Vladimir Putin stepped up to a podium in the Kremlin to address the nation … officially reuniting the Russian Federation and the peninsular republic of Crimea, the home base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea had seceded from Ukraine only two days earlier, on March 16 …
“Putin invoked the origins of Orthodox Christianity in Russia. He referenced military victories on land and sea that had helped forge the Russian Empire … Crimea ‘has always been an inseparable part of Russia,’ Putin declared. Moscow’s decision to annex Crimea was rooted in the need to right an ‘outrageous historical injustice.’”
But history was far more complicated than Putin acknowledged. The Ukrainian people had actively turned against their pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Geesen writes: “when the President sold the country out to Russia — agreeing to scrap an association agreement with the European Union in exchange for fifteen billion in Russian loans —Ukrainians of vastly different political persuasions came to Independence Square again …They stayed when the government opened fire on them. More than a hundred people died before the corrupt President fled to Russia. A willingness to die for freedom is now a part of not only Ukrainians’ mythology but their lived history.”
Hill and Gaddy discuss what happened next: “At about the same time that Yanukovych left Ukraine, unidentified armed men began to seize control of strategic infrastructure on the Crimean Peninsula. On March 6, the Crimean parliament voted to hold a snap referendum … On March 16, the results of the referendum indicated that 97 percent of those voting had opted to unite with Russia.”
On February 22, 2014, the Ukrainian parliament removed Yanukovych from office. Elections were scheduled for May 25 and two days later, a warrant issued for Yanukovych’s arrest for killing civilian protesters.
This is a perfect time to remind you of one of the critical connections between Former President Trump and Yanukovych and, by extension, Vladimir Putin. The pro-Putin propaganda coming from Donald Trump, right-wing Republicans, and FOX Newsers, even as Russia commits genocide, comes as no surprise considering how attracted they are to autocrats, and how hard Putin’s Internet Research Agency worked to elect Trump. You can read Mueller’s indictment of the Agency and details about their disinformation campaign here.
And the New York Times reminds us of what Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, two important members of the Trump 2016 election campaign team, did for Yanukovych and Putin in Ukraine: “Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted on Tuesday in his financial fraud trial … Mr. Manafort hid millions of dollars in foreign accounts to evade taxes and lied to banks repeatedly to obtain millions of dollars in loans.
“Mr. Manafort was convicted of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account … The trial focused on Mr. Manafort’s personal finances, in particular the tens of millions of dollars he made advising a political party in Ukraine that backed pro-Russia policies.”
NBC News reminds us: “Paul Manafort … spent nearly a decade as a consultant to Ukraine’s Party of Regions and its standard-bearer, Viktor Yanukovych. Backed by Russian-leaning oligarchs, the party opposed NATO membership and spouted anti-Western rhetoric that once helped fuel violence against American marines. Its reign ended when Yanukovych fled to Russia after bloody street protests against his personal corruption and pro-Moscow actions.
“Manafort also earned millions doing private business deals with some of the oligarchs who backed the party … Viktor Yanukovych had been governor of Donetsk, a Russian-speaking region close to the Russian border, and then the prime minister of Ukraine. He and his faction, the Party of Regions, were thought by many Western observers to have links to organized crime. As a young man, Yanukovych had been convicted of robbery and assault.”
But as far as Putin was concerned, this supposed revolution in Ukraine was but a CIA-instigated coup. And that grievance has been nurtured and metastasized. The New York Times reported:
“Over the past eight years, the Russian government has promoted the idea that the motherland is surrounded by enemies, filtering the concept through national institutions like schools, the military, the news media and the Orthodox Church. It has even raised the possibility that the country might again have to defend itself as it did against the Nazis in World War II.
“Now, as Russia masses troops on the Ukrainian border, spurring Western fears of an impending invasion, the steady militarization of Russian society under President Vladimir V. Putin suddenly looms large, and appears to have inured many to the idea that a fight could be coming.
‘The authorities are actively selling the idea of war,’ Dmitri A. Muratov, the Russian newspaper editor who shared the Nobel Peace Prize this year, said in his acceptance speech in Oslo this month. ‘People are getting used to the thought of its permissibility.’
“Speaking to Russian military leaders on Tuesday, Mr. Putin insisted that Russia did not want bloodshed, but was prepared to respond with ‘military-technical measures’ to what he described as the West’s aggressive behavior in the region.”
So, who is Putin? Hill and Gaddy write: “we are dealing with someone who is a master at manipulating information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo-information … [and] we remain ignorant of some of the most basic facts about a man who is arguably the most powerful individual in the world, the leader of an important nation.”
They offer this outline of his first 40 years: He was born in 1952 in Leningrad. As a boy, he learned a combination of judo and wrestling called sambo. He graduated as a lawyer in 1975, then joined the KGB. After training at their Moscow academy, in 1985 he was sent to Dresden in East Germany. And moved from Dresden to Leningrad in 1990, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR.
Craig Unger in his “House of Trump, House of Putin” adds some texture to these facts: As a teenager in the late 1960s, Putin began judo workouts at Leningrad’s Trud athletic club with Leonid Ionovich Usvyatsov as his coach. Usvyatsov had previously served a 10-year sentence for rape, and was a key figure in St. Petersburg’s Tambovskaya crime syndicate, later known for smuggling heroin from Afghanistan to St. Petersburg and Western Europe. Usvyatsov was connected to Vyacheslav Ivankov, tied to Semion Mogilevich, the Russian Mafia’s “boss of bosses” according to the FBI and featured for many years on its Ten Most Wanted. If there was any question about Usvyatsov, it was answered by what was written on his tombstone: “I may be dead, but the mafia is immortal.” And so it was that early on Putin was introduced to “the kleptocracy he later created, complete with wannabe oligarchs and Bratva mobsters.”
As for Putin and the KGB: in 1984, Putin trained in what they called “active measures” – aka mis- and disinformation in Moscow, then was sent to Dresden, East Germany. While Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was determined to curb the power of the KGB, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov began a counter-offensive by creating hundreds of front companies to provide jobs and money for loyal KGB officials.
Unger offers this insight from John Sipher, who spent 28 years in the CIA, even running operatives in Moscow: “The Russians wanted to have intelligence officers in country even if the embassy was down … So in addition to having legal residents who were intelligence officers in embassies, they had illegal residents who might appear to be French citizens living in France or Finnish citizens in France, but they were fake. They were really Russians. It was an incredible amount of work to give these people real backgrounds, languages, passports, and real businesses. But as the Soviet Union fell apart, Kryuchkov wanted to make sure he had Russians in other countries working for Russian businesses that were self-supporting and could support intelligence activities.”
Putin returned to Leningrad after the Berlin Wall fell. Unger continues: “According to Oleg Kalugin, who was one of his bosses, within the KGB, Putin was something of a cipher … ‘He came from Germany with no job … He had to be a cab driver with his own car he brought from East Germany, a Trabant probably. And he drove for a few months, six or eight months, just earning money’ … For a brief period that year, Putin took an administrative post at Leningrad State University — a fairly standard cover for a KGB operative. Then, just as the Soviet Union was dissolving, Anatoly Sobchak, a former law professor of Putin’s at Leningrad State, became mayor of Leningrad … he was wise enough to realize that he’d be better off if he picked his own deputy from the KGB …[and] wanted someone who was not immediately identifiable as a high-profile, hard-line KGB operative, so instead, he hired Vladimir Putin, a mere lieutenant colonel, whom he had known when Putin worked at Leningrad State. Putin was still on active reserve with the KGB, which was monitoring the ascent of the new ‘democratic’ leaders in Russia.’”
Hill and Gaddy explain that one of the great Putin mysteries is his steady rise from KGB functionary to president: “In less than two-and-a-half years from 1997 to 99, Vladimir Putin was promoted to increasingly lofty positions, from deputy chief of the presidential staff, to head of the FSB, to prime minister, then to acting president. How could this happen? Who facilitated Putin’s rise? Putin does not have a story about that in his official biographical interviews … All the versions of who made this important decision are based on retrospective accounts … Almost nothing comes from real-time statements or reliable accounts of actions taken.”
Meanwhile Unger reminds us: “KGB men began turning up at the sides of newly minted oligarchs, government ministers, at the highest levels of power. In Moscow, that included President Boris Yeltsin, who, from the first moment he succeeded Gorbachev, found that wherever he went, KGB bodyguards were watching his every move.”
Back to Hill and Gaddy: “As a good KGB operative, Vladimir Putin kept his own ambitions tightly under wraps. Like most ambitious people, he took advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. Mr. Putin paid close attention to individuals who might further his career. He studied them, strengthened his personal and professional ties to them, did favors for them, and manipulated them. He allowed — even actively encouraged — people to underestimate him even as he maneuvered himself into influential positions and quietly accumulated real power.”
Luke Harding served from 2007– 2011 as the UK Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief. As Putin’s hatred of his reporting grew, Harding became the first journalist to be deported by the Kremlin since the days of the Cold War. Lucky for us, in his “Collusion,” Harding provides enormous insight into the Russian attempt to weaken American democracy by employing cyber warfare on behalf of Donald Trump.
Harding writes: “After twenty years in office, Putin was reshaping the world to his advantage. He was using the same plucky tactics favored by Yuri Andropov, the KGB’s chairman turned general secretary. They included trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing the truth, as well as large-scale disinformation, rolled out at home and abroad.”
You might say that America’s inability to clearly see the killer Putin, the evil of Putin, has made us vulnerable to his latest willingness to utterly destroy Ukraine. Anne Applebaum, who has studied autocrats and autocracy, recalls in her “Twilight of Democracy” how an earlier generation of American right-wingers, including presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, predated Trump and Tucker Carlson, and adopted Putin as an alternative to U.S. liberals:
“[Buchanan] fell hard for a false Russian narrative, created by Putin’s political technologists, that Russia is a godly, Christian nation seeking to protect its ethnic identity. Never mind that only a tiny percentage of Russians actually go to church, or that fewer than 5 percent say they have ever read the Bible; never mind that Russia is very much a multiethnic, multilingual state, with a far larger Muslim population than most European countries; never mind that Chechnya, a Russian province, is actually governed by sharia law, or that its government forces women to wear veils and tortures gay men; never mind that many forms of evangelical Christianity are actually banned. The propaganda — the photographs of Putin paying homage to an icon of Our Lady of Kazan, for example, or the incorporation of religious services into his inaugurations — worked on Buchanan, who became convinced that Russia was an ethnic nationalist state of a sort superior to America, which he describes with disgust as a ‘multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual universal nation whose avatar is Barack Obama.’”
Rebecca Solnit, the UK Guardian’s United States correspondent, talks about the consequences of not clearly appreciating what Putin is doing and what he has done, and not seeing the Trump–Putin connection for what it is: “In 2014, the Putin regime invaded Ukraine’s Crimea. In 2016, the same regime invaded the United States. The former took place as a conventional military operation; the latter was a spectacular case of cyberwarfare, including disinformation that it was happening at all and promulgation of a lot of talking points still devoutly repeated by many. It was a vast social-media influencing project that took many forms as it sought to sow discord and confusion, even attempting to dissuade Black voters from voting.
“Additionally, Russian intelligence targeted voter rolls in all 50 states, which is not thought to have had consequences, but demonstrated the reach and ambition of online interference. This weekend, British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr said on Twitter, “We failed to acknowledge Russia had staged a military attack on the West. We called it ‘meddling.’ We used words like ‘interference.’ It wasn’t. It was warfare. We’ve been under military attack for eight years now.”
“As she notes, Putin’s minions were not only directing their attention to the United States, and included pro-Brexit efforts and support for France’s far-right racist National Front party. The US interference – you could call it cyberwarfare, or informational invasion – took many forms. Stunningly, a number of left-wing news sources and pundits devoted themselves to denying the reality of the intervention and calling those who were hostile to the Putin regime cold-war red-scare right-wingers, as if contemporary Russia was a glorious socialist republic rather than a country ruled by a dictatorial ex-KGB agent with a record of murdering journalists, imprisoning dissenters, embezzling tens of billions and leading a global neofascist white supremacist revival.”
Today we are watching in real time the familiar Putin playbook. Before the war and now during the rolling in of tanks employing “fake news” and outright lies. What we’ve come to know as “asymmetric” warfare.
Before the bombs, the Putin lies. The New York Times offers excerpts from Putin’s speech on Ukraine, turning the real Ukraine into a fiction: “Modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia, more specifically the Bolshevik, communist Russia … This process began practically immediately after the 1917 revolution, and moreover Lenin and his associates did it in the sloppiest way in relation to Russia — by dividing, tearing from her pieces of her own historical territory.”
But as the Times reminds us: “The capital, Kyiv, was established hundreds of years before Moscow, and both Russians and Ukrainians claim it as a birthplace of their modern cultures, religion and language. Kyiv was ideally situated along the trade routes that developed in the ninth and 10th centuries, and flourished only to see its economic influence diminish as trade shifted elsewhere. The many conquests by warring factions and Ukraine’s diverse geography — with farmland, forests and a maritime environment on the Black Sea — created a complex fabric of multiethnic states.
“The history and culture of Russia and Ukraine are indeed intertwined — they share the same Orthodox Christian religion, and their languages, customs and national cuisines are related. Even so, Ukrainian identity politics and nationalism have been irritants in Russia since the feudal czarist times that predated the Russian Revolution.”
But the debate about legitimacy is all about what we in America used to call our sphere of influence, and what was in fact Imperialism — a phrase popular with American radicals to describe our policies in Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., but just as perfectly describes the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and explains what is happening on our TV screens right now: “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas.”
Putin then offered a laundry list of justifications for his war of choice. Putin transforms the understandable desire for those nations now free of Soviet domination to join NATO for self-protection as instead a direct attack on Russia: “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”
As Harding points out, for Putin, these popular efforts for independence and democracy “were nothing more than CIA-instigated coups.” And in the up-is-down world of Putinesque logic, he argues that his decision to obliterate the sovereign nation of Ukraine is necessary because Ukraine’s decision to maintain independence is their way of declaring war on Russia. And in the time honored “it takes one to know one,” turning a nation stumbling towards democracy, with a Jewish president, into a supposed Nazi fascist state.
And so, invasion, wanton destruction, and occupation is but a legitimate and necessary response: “We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation … It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”
But Ukraine is not in NATO and has not threatened Russia, except, in its ability to evolve toward democracy and to survive without a Russian-puppet corrupt president, it provides an example for others, an example for the Russian citizenry.
Putin evoked the American wars in Iraq and interventions in Libya and Syria, without balancing our aggression with theirs: the Russian attempt to occupy Afghanistan, the brutal war in Chechnya, the bombings in Syria. Then, much like Trump and his Trumpists playing the culture war card (substitute Russia for America, so Let’s Make Russia Great Again): “They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature. This is not going to happen.” Enough with these gay people, LGBTQ rights.
Finally, it’s not his genocide but theirs: “This brings me to the situation in Donbass. We can see that the forces that staged the coup in Ukraine in 2014 have seized power, are keeping it with the help of ornamental election procedures and have abandoned the path of a peaceful conflict settlement. We had to stop that atrocity, that genocide of the millions of people who live there and who pinned their hopes on Russia, on all of us.”
We hear a lot about Putin’s psychopathology, but little about what Russia can gain by controlling Ukraine. WorldAtlas describes the riches awaiting the Russians: “Although it accounts for only 0.4% and 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface and world’s population respectively, the country has approximately 5% of the world’s mineral resources. Over 20,000 deposits of 194 known minerals can be found in Ukraine. Of these deposits discovered, 7,800 deposits of over 90 hold important industrial minerals. Ukraine has one of the leading reserves and extraction of manganese, iron, and non-metallic raw material. The deposits can be found in different regions across the country. Here are some of the major natural resources of Ukraine.
“Ukraine was estimated to hold over 1.1 trillion cubic meters of natural gas reserves in 2004, ranking it 26th among the countries with proven gas reserves before Crimea was annexed. It is also estimated to hold over 135 million tons of oil and 3.7 billion tons of shale oil reserves. The country also has reserves of gas condensate of about 80,000 tons.”
The impulse to control territory, natural resources, and people has so often overtaken men who adore power. And Harding reminds us that “Russia’s kleptocratic model has gained ground. The same traits of corruption and dissembling are visible in Washington.” It’s been interesting and highly ironic to watch as former Republican Cold Warriors have found themselves enthralled and jealous of Putin’s cold-hearted authoritarian embrace of violence.
And so, while some pseudo conservatives would have us believe there is something admirable about Putin, it’s important to understand Putin’s willingness to kill. Everything he is doing to Ukraine, he has done to real people. Killing thousands has been preceded by killing one by one. His is a politics of elimination. “Shadow State” begins with the cold-blooded assassination attempt of Sergei Skripal living in Salisbury, Surrey, England and his daughter Yulia visiting from Russia. Skripal had betrayed the GRU for money provided by MI6; he was a minor asset. Two Russian colonels poisoned Skripal’s front door handle with the toxic chemical novichok.
Of course, the Russians knew how to kill traitors in England; they had done it before. In 2007, they had poisoned former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko with a cup of radioactive green tea at the Millennium Mayfair Hotel in London. While Skripal and Yulia eventually survived, Litvinenko died.
Harding reminds us: “These killings sat on a spectrum. Some were invisible. Victims were silenced by injection under the guise of hospital treatment … Others were showy, and deliberately terrifying … There was nothing subtle or delicate about using a nerve agent in a crowded civilian area. It was an act of stunning recklessness. The effect, as the GRU must have known, was to inculcate terror in the local population, and more widely among the Brits and their European and American allies.
“There was a short-term objective: to get the US and the EU to drop economic sanctions against Russia. And a longer one: to create chaos and division within the West, not by starting from nowhere but through exploiting existing tensions and cleavages. The ultimate goal was to smash apart Western institutions and democracies.”
Putin had no problem ordering the killing of Skripal and his daughter, of Litvinenko, former colleagues in the small world of Soviet espionage, men hardly any real threat to him. And he has no problem murdering a nation.
Watching the TV coverage, the correspondents based in several cities in Ukraine, in Moscow, Poland, and Hungary, it is so very clear that there is no containing the effects of Putin’s mad attraction to power, his need to punish.
I’ve watched as former generals, former diplomats, our current president, and political leaders explain how we are limited in our response. How any attempt to counterbalance the Russian military’s obliteration of civilian neighborhoods would be regarded as a step too far. How imposing a no-fly zone would be considered a provocation that could lead to World War Three. All understandable and remarkably realistic. But still I ask, hasn’t Putin, like Hitler, committed himself to a world war three for the Ukrainians and his Russian soldiers? Hasn’t he committed himself to kill a country? Where is the line for us? Does the line begin at the Polish border? Obliteration on one side, survival on the other. Is Ukraine doomed to be smashed to smithereens?
I’m asking the same question President Volodymyr Zelensky is asking us:
