The Russian stock market collapsed until trading was halted. Putin expected that. The ruble fell to its lowest level against the major currencies of the world, until the central bank stopped the exchange. Putin didn’t care. Russia’s international borrowing rate exceeded 15%. Putin created a surplus to cover that. Freezing the assets of oligarchs globally, banning international travel for Russian politicians and oligarchs, creating a no-fly zone that includes most of Russia… Putin shrugged his shoulders.
His intelligence units have uniformly informed him that the United States is in “terminal decline,” “hopelessly polarized” and unable to mount, sustain or lead international resistance to any military moves against Ukraine (and potentially other CIS republics that he may covet). Putin was surprised that the NATO bloc rallied so completely to President Biden’s leadership, but his intelligence officers tell him that holding his allies together is unsustainable. All this from our own intelligence services, which have been accurate to a fault.
The United States, however, reacted late and inadequately for what they predicted was occurring. We are no longer able to supply the upgraded weapons Kyiv needs to mount a critical resistance by air. That technology now has to be funneled in by land and would include Stringer 92 surface-to-air and air-to-air (via needed drones) missiles that are capable of taking out lower-flying Russian aircraft. This needs to happen big time and very quickly. A show of force with US moving large bodies troops and military weapon systems into NATO allies bordering Russia, Belarus (which is Russia lite) and Ukraine. Mr Putin’s reminder to the West that he has one of the biggest stockpiles of nuclear weapons is a threat without historical precedent… and suggests a degree of mental instability that should concern us all.
But it was precisely that Soviet era development and stockpile of nuclear weapons that should have protected Ukraine from Russian expansionism, both in 2014 (over Crimea) and today. Putin’s proclivity to abrogate treaty commitments, not entirely different from Donald Trump’s litany of the same sort during his brief tenure, was and is beyond blatant. The excuses, paralleling Adolph Hitler’s invasions of the Sudetenland (where many Czech citizens were of German ethnicity), Austria (Hitler was born there) and Poland, are still his go-to excuses today. Protecting ethnic brothers, reacting to protect the national security… and denying legitimacy to coveted land mass.
To understand how diabolical this abrogation of Ukrainian territorial rights is, you need to go back to 1994, when the young Russian republic sought to contain the spread of nuclear weapons houses in various new CIS countries.
Shortly after Putin’s unlawful annexation of Crimea, Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, wrote: “When the Soviet Union collapsed [in 1991], Ukraine had on its territory the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. It was bigger than Britain, France and China combined. And the Ukrainians were prepared to eliminate that arsenal to transfer the warheads to Russia for their dismantlement, but the Ukrainians asked for certain things. And one was security assurances that the United States and Russia would pay attention and respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, that there would be no use of force or threat of force against Ukraine.
“And the 1994 Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances was the document that reflects those commitments by the United States. And Russia also joined by Great Britain to extend to Ukraine those assurances, including respect for its territorial integrity.” Putin has made a mockery of respecting treaty commitments. We can see it in the current massive pincer attacks to bring Ukraine to its knees, install a Putin puppet government, and repress dissent until stability returns. But Ukraine’s hatred of Russia has deep roots. For all the glory of WWII and Joseph Stalin, Ukraine found itself starved to death by Russia’s cutting off food supply to enforce Stalin’s yoke (four million Ukrainians starved to death) with untold hundreds of thousands (if not millions) simply executed in Stalin’s infamous pogroms.
But if Ukrainians, strong and stubborn people with their own culture and language, refuse to accept Putin’s jackboot on their necks, and slowly but consistently fight – even after conquest – never giving up… and assuming the US is able to continuously supply the needed weapons of insurrection (as did the CIA during the mujahedeen jihadists who ultimately forced the Soviets out of their country – see the above photo), Putin faces the ugliest crowd of unarmed power of his life. Soviet mothers gathering, growing and drowning his efforts at repression, as their sons become the sacrificial lambs for a brutal dictator’s unstable, unhinged lust for power. These mothers were one of the major forces that brought down the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and if those body bags with the sons come back in sufficient volume, Putin’s rule will end, perhaps violently as some Russian “patriot” – it’s the Russian way – terminates Mr Putin with extreme prejudice. It won’t be mere sanctions that take Putin down… Body bags! A concept Russians understand.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the unfortunate cost of the above scenario is time… time to kill, maim, repress and destroy human lives in that region… for no good reason.
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