The Russian Federation’s illegal invasion cum genocidal war against the sovereign state of Ukraine as well as against the entire European continent and the world, are nothing but the ruthless culmination of President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s illusionary attempt at restoring Mother Russia to greatness by reuniting the historically Russian imperial territories against NATO’s superiority over his shrinking domain on the continent and, more globally, on the seas, trade, finance as well as culture. However, in his narcissistic and reality-denying hate-filled mind, he has concluded from the time he replaced his predecessor Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, that the only way he could accomplish his revanchist vision is by employing brutal violence and overwhelming coercion on the small as well as medium sized formerly Soviet and presently sovereign states. Hence, the so-called “Second Russian-Chechen War” from August 1999 to April 2000 between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria; the so-called Transnistrian Moldova-Russian War between 1990 and 1992, in which the western part of Moldova became a de facto Russian ruled independent entity; the Russo-Georgian War in August 2008, in which the former cannibalized the territory of the latter by creating two so-called “Republics” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and finally, the occupation and annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, as well as the occupation cum recent recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts as independent People’s Republics.
The consequences of President Putin’s habitual aggressions have been prolonged instability in the European continent that has become less and less tolerable to all the nations across the globe. History is like statistics or election polls. Depending on one’s preferences or loathings, everything can be proven by them, including their opposites. Accordingly, the diametrically different historical narratives of Russian, Ukrainian and foreign politicians, scholars as well as media pundits, although carrying significant relevance in understanding the underlying importance of national identities, have never been as revealing as the timely strategic and political consideration of the decision makers involved. The current geopolitical crisis does not constitute an exception. Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s competing interpretations could be useful in explaining the cultural and mental motives of their actions but are less revealing about the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In order to separate the limited view of the trees from the more global perspective of the forest, we must look for one overarching principle of the Russian and Ukrainian national identities.
From time immemorial, there has been a symbiotic relationship between foreign and domestic affairs of almost every nation. As far as Russia as a monarchy, then as an empire, more recently as a Socialist/Communist joke, and presently as a fake democracy cum antediluvian despotism are concerned, their foreign policies have been both absurd and fatal primarily to their own subjects cum slaves and beyond. Domestically their rulers and so-called governments have been the foolhearted dupes and miserable victims of their boundless greed for power, money and utter incompetence. Far from creating good governance and bolstering positive authority, these repeatedly absurd miseries have perpetuated inhumanity, oppression by unimaginably brutal force as well as nacked trickery, and an insane level of corruption that has entrenched incurable immorality. For these reasons, Russia always has faced the insoluble problem of survival on the edge of a slippery dometic as well as foreign precipice. Should it free up the creative resources and energies of their subjects cum slaves, or should it continue despotism at home and unchained military blackmail and terror abroad? Should it seek gradual integration in the rest of the world in order to improve the lot of Russia’s miserable subjects cum slaves? Should it abandon chasing the mirage of world domination, or should it manage an untenable as well as paradoxical situation that ultimately will drive the Russian pseudo-civilization to extinction? Should it continue being the eternal menace to European peace and stability, or should it cooperate constructively and not destructively for a lasting stability in the continent and beyond?
The Russian Federation’s despot de jour, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, is clearly imbued with all those immoral and ruthless characteristics that have shaped the uniquely Russian identity for many centuries. Having been born and grown up in St. Petersburg, in a hopelessly discombobulated family, in which he was the only surviving child, he has become a psychopath and a rebellious adult, mentally deeply submerged in the paranoid notion of victimhood. In his youth, he wandered around aimlessly committing plenty of violent crimes. These manifest violent aggressions have intensified with each failure and disappointment that he experienced until he reached the pinnacle of power in 2000. His stint with the KGB in East Germany was mired in repeated disappointments. His first steps in politics with the assistance of the mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak, his job as the Director of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor of the KGB, and the Secretary of Yeltsin’s Security Council, has established him not as an effective administrator, as his official biography states, but a malcontent rebel and a first rate bungler, a person with no definite character who gravitated from one extreme to another without any rational motive – an individual who has not commanded genuine loyalty or respect.
In reality, initially he owed his promotions to the fact that no one feared him. Sadly, he has not belied his negative and repugnant nature since. After having served as a true believer of the Communist ideas, he has turned his back on Socialism/Communism and has begun to wholeheartedly embrace Russian orthodoxy, racist nationalism, imperialism and colonialism. In this manner, he has positioned himself as the bridge between the old and the ancient to which all the careerist gamblers and adventurers have tried to hitch themselves. Yet, President Putin has proven to be a feckless chief executive. Lacking both the character and the permanency of convictions, he has ended up as a corrupt, duplicitous, fidgety and conniving hoax of a statesman. His downfall is predetermined and Russia’s economic destruction is inevitable.
Thus, having been imbued with both conscious and subconscious sense of personal injuries, he has reveled at the thought of alone possessing the historical truths that has made him a superhuman loner amidst all the fools lacking even the semblance of historical perspectives. In his prejudiced mind, he is laying claim to territories that are unattainable, which again deepens his hatred toward everyone who dares to oppose his extremism. While he knows that his sick vision is in direct conflict with the rest of the world, he demands blind loyalty and even sycophancy. By thus oversimplifying his own place and role in the universe, he attempts to overcome his fears and convoluted inferiority complexes by evil deeds. In his core, President Putin is just another bitter, burned out politician, who is incapable of any meaningful compromise. Moreover, lacking human creativity and locking himself in his self-erected pseudo-intellectual penitentiary, he denies himself and his country any progression toward a liberating self-determination.
Just a reminder – the failure of Tsarist and Soviet totalitarianism ultimately brought down Russia itself in 1917 and in 1991. Under Presidents Yeltsin and Putin, the Russian Federation has morphed into a sort of mafia state with a criminal syndicate economy, run by a quasi-government that allowed its political favorites to plunder state enterprises in the name of “privatization.” This mafia state has delivered precious little to the average Russian, but enriched those with ties to the Kremlin. Illimitable corruption has become the lifeblood of Russia’s resurgent despotism.
President Putin is not a victor but a victim of his illegitimate aggression. His old/new national symbol, the Russian bear, has been depicted as proud and big-hearted, but shrewd , unpredictable and prone to extreme violence when provoked. These are the qualities that have combined to create and sustain Putin the Gambler, who has proved to be intuitively decisive, but narrow-minded, with little capacity to develop anything resembling a global vision, while impervious to the long-term consequences of his willingness to sacrifice everything for immediate self-aggrandizement.
This almost mythical, yet in reality fraudulent Putin has become a hero to the overwhelming majority of the Russian people in the wake of seizing and incorporating Crimea into Russia. The return of Crimea to Mother Russia and the illegal occupation of the Donetsk as well as Luhansk Oblasts was presented at home as well as abroad as a defensive reaction to save Russian civilization from the barbaric assaults of semi-Westernized Ukrainians. This Savior of Russian civilization has repeated his act of aggression in Ukraine, hoping that the world’s reaction would be as muted as it was in 2014. What should have been apparent to the latter was that a grand bargain with Putin’s Russia is impossible. With a historically abysmal economy, a hopelessly corrupt financial establishment, and an autocratic political system devoid of meaningful ideas, while relying on appeals of raw revanchism for legitimacy, Russia will always respond to strength and force alone. Presently too, this miscreant Despot in the Kremlin understands nothing but strength and the willingness to use that strength, if need be.
Deplorably, succession of American Presidents, their so-called expert advisors and administrations, with no or little knowledge of Russian culture and imbued with insane naivete, have allowed their policies to degenerate into the sad spectacle of an illusory competition between the United States of America as well as its allies and the Russian Federation for the honor of who is being more concerned about establishing stability in Europe and the world. The wholesale invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been a rude wakeup call for the rest of the world. Politicians across the globe have started to view the Russian-Ukrainian War as a global war between democracy and despotism, believing that for the sake of the future of mankind, the former must be victorious regardless of the costs.
The current occupant of the White House is more a Doofus than a Commander in Chief. Lacking the mental ability to think lucidly, he is the prisoner of a bunch of incompetent and misguided bureaucrats. After ruining the American economy in less than a year, he has embarked on destroying the United States of America’s international standing too. From his monumentally destructive “Build Back Better” idiocy to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the revival of the Iran nuclear deal, President Biden has demonstrated his lack of mental capacity to think coherently. Clearly stated, the fraudulent redeemer of America’s division and the God-like savior of world peace of the 2020 campaign is all hat and no cattle. More unambiguously, he is a disgrace for America and an unmitigated disaster for mankind. With him at the helm of American foreign policy, the United States of America appears to be a headless giant. Moreover, his family’s shady involvements in corrupt Russian, Chinese and Ukrainian businesses disqualify him from being an honest defender of the Free World in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
To wit, the ghost of the Cold War is back in its unresolved splendor. So long to President George H.W. Bush’s disdain for the “vision thing,” to President Bill Clinton’s “peace dividend,” to President Bush’s son’s “I looked in President Putin’s eyes” primitive illusion, President Barack Obama’s incompetent “reset,” President Donald Trump’s futile personal diplomacy, and demented President Joe Biden’s, his incompetent Secretary of State Blinken’s and his clueless Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s laughable attempts at squaring their imaginary circles on the ruthless stage of world politics.
Meanwhile, Ukraine, which since its independence in 1991, has been oscillating between waves of constructive and destructive revolutions, which have sidetracked, paralyzed and occasionally killed its progress toward a more open society, is crying out against the scandalous degree of corruption and the usurpation of democratic principles of the past. On the verge of national annihilation by a militarily mightier foreign power, the people have awakened under the leadership of a former actor cum comedian and a Jew in a previously anti-Semitic society. Yet, there has always been more to President Volodymyr Oleksandrovich Zelenskyy’s personality than his acting career. He grew up speaking only Russian until he learned Ukrainian in his thirties. He graduated from a law school and as a businessman produced his own show. Upon his election in 2019, in his inaugural address he stated: “I do not want my picture in your offices: the President is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kid’s photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
Having risen from a lightweight figure to a national hero, a statesman and a real leader as a result of his uncompromising and righteous patriotism in the midst of the murderous Russian invasion, President Zelenskyy has pulled the curtain wide open for Ukraine to find its true identity in the unity of fighting to the end for his nation’s collective liberty. He alone has understood that President Putin is the product of Russia’s troubled culture and, therefore, the underlying rationale of the latter’s policies, like the invasion of Ukraine, is fear. Fear of his own people, fear of being called out as a despot in the guise of a savior, fear of his own fragile despotism and fear of his adversaries who are much stronger militarily, economically, financially and politically than he is. Finally, President Zelenskyy knows that his counterpart in the Kremlin is horrified, for the problems he is expected to solve have been and are still insoluble without the total destruction of the historically slumbering Russia.
Generally speaking, the histories of the Russian and Ukrainian people were characterized by nomadic migrations, invasions, separations as well as melding of populations and displacements. After a brief but overrated reign of the Scandinavian Varangians between the tenth and twelfth centuries in the Kievan Rus, the Euroasian Steppe was conquered around 1240 by the Mongol Horde. The Mongol conquest was brutal, ruthless and unforgiving. Towns were completely destroyed and the nobility was mercilessly slaughtered. Dschinghis Khan and his successors erected a World Empire upon the mountain of human skeletons and the enormous expenses of barren lands. When the occupation of the Mongol Horde ended in 1502, two distinctly different political and military communities were formed. One was the Ukrainian Zaparozhian Sich on the Dnieper bend and the other was the Don Cossacks on the Don River bend. In addition, the Khanate of Crimea was also formed, supported by the Ottoman Empire.
In its mentality, the emerging Tsardom of Russia in the early 16th century was the spiritual heir of the Mongol Horde’s regime. It had a relatively large and effective army that began to expand mostly to the south by gradually defeating several khanates. Importantly, there were no clear boundaries among the permanently warring parties. What is today’s north and west Ukraine, alternated between Poland and Lithuania that with time merged into the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. With the so-called Union of Lublin in 1569, Ukraine was transferred from Lithuania to Poland. Subsequently, multiple uprisings against Poland resulted in the emergence of Bohdan Khmelnytsky who in 1654, became a vassal of Russia by the Treaty of Pereyaslav. Then the Russo-Polish War followed. As a result, Russia came to the possession of Smolensk and Chernihiv. Moreover, Tsarist Russia occupied the territories east of the Dnieper, including Kyiv. Then again, eastern Ukraine was divided into four distinct areas in 1667. Poland, Russia, the Cossack Hetmanate and Sloboda (Free) Ukraine shared suzerainty over the landmass stretching from the north to the south of today’s Ukraine. Additional wars and conquests followed between 1686 and 1792. In 1793, Tsarist Russia under Catherine the Great occupied the Right-bank of Ukraine and Belarus. Finally, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, again divided Poland and Ukraine between Tsarist Russia and the Austrian Hapsburg Empire.
This division lasted until late 1917, when Poland and Ukraine regained their independence. On December 30, 1922, the Declaration and Treaty on the Formation of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, originally composed of the Russian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Belarusian SSR and Transcaucasian SFSR was signed. In the 1930s, in the 1940s and in the beginning of the 1950s, Stalin’s Mongolian hatred toward the Ukrainians knew no bounds. According to historian accounts, during the Holodomor – Russian for killing by starvation -, also known as the Terror Famine or the great Famine, millions of Ukrainians were brutally murdered by Stalin’s criminal henchmen. Since 2006, this Soviet genocide has been recognized as such by many states across the globe. Finally, on December 26, 1991, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Council of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Prior to the actual dissolution of the USSR, the Ukrainian legislator, the Verkhovna Rada, on July 16, 1990, adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine. On August 24, 1991, Ukraine officially declared itself an independent state. On December 1, 1991, over 90% of the Ukrainian voters approved a referendum formalizing independence from the Soviet Union. Ethnic Russians in the Crimea and in the eastern part of Ukraine also voted overwhelmingly for independence. The Soviet Union legally ceased to exist on December 16, 1991, when the presidents of the founding members, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, decided in Belovezhskaya Pushcha to dissolve their union.
Independent Ukraine was ruled successively between 1991 and 2004 by two former Communist Leonids – Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma. Their combined reign for almost a decade-and-a-half benignly could be characterized as the establishment and maintenance of a giant criminal syndicate of former Communist potentates. After the elections of 2004, Ukrainian history has taken another turbulent turn. As has been entrenched in Russia’s political culture for many centuries, lying, cheating and rigging political occurrences have gotten the better of Viktor Fedorovich Yanukovich and his followers by scheming to commit a chain of egregious voting frauds. The public outrage triggered the so-called Orange Revolution that resulted in new elections elevating Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko to the Presidency. His campaign program called for Ukraine joining the European Union as well as NATO. In 2008, NATO promised him that one day in the future Ukraine could join the alliance.
In 2010, Viktor Yanukovics returned triumphantly as the President of Ukraine. In 2013, his administration backed out of association talks with the European Union, triggering another revolution in Kyiv and the rest of the country. The so-called Maidan Revolution stripped Viktor Yanukovich of his presidency. Threatened to be charged with genocide and corruption he fled to Russia. The Kremlin response was immediate. Russian troops, disguised as Crimean residents, seized the local parliament and raised the Russian flag. After quickly annexing Crimea illegally, a fake referendum was held on March 16th that, in turn, resulted in the incorporation of the peninsula into the Russian Federation. To add another illegal insult to its already existing international terrorism injury, the Kremlin arranged for some ethnic Russians in the eastern region of Ukraine to declare independence by establishing the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic respectively.
In the ensuing May 2014 presidential elections, Petro Oleksandrovich Poroshenko won with a pro-Western agenda. True to his campaign promise, in 2017 he signed an association agreement with the European Union that opened the markets for free trade of goods and services, and visa-free travel to the European Union member states for Ukrainians. In April 2019, Poroshenko was decisively defeated by Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky, a popular Jewish actor and comedian. In January 2021, President Zelensky appealed to President Biden to consider NATO membership for Ukraine. As an answer, President Putin ordered the military to send troops to Ukraine’s borders.
The strategic as well as economic importance of the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk for Russia cannot be overestimated. Geostrategically, Russia’s interest in Crimea goes back to the Russo-Ottoman Empire war of 1768-1774, which ended in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, providing the former direct access to the Black Sea region through the Kerch and Azov ports. In 1783, utilizing the continual unrest in Crimea, Prince Grigory Potemkin occupied militarily and Catherine II annexed the entire peninsula. The same year, Russia built the city of Sevastopol in Crimea. In 1954, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s merger with Tsarist Russia, the then Soviet Dictator Nikita Khrushchev “gifted” the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new leadership of the Russian Federation became obsessed with the notion of “near abroad.” Thus, Ukrainian Crimea was again elevated to major strategic importance for the Kremlin. However, in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States of America, Russia, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, with the support of France and the People’s Republic of China, jointly guaranteed the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula, in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of all the nuclear weapons left behind after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In clear violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 as well as the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation of 1997, which mandated the recognition of the inviolability of existing borders, the principles of mutual respect for territorial integrity and the commitment not to use their territories to harm the security of each other, Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014.
Contrary to the beliefs of Western politicians and the feckless media reporting, these agreements have been interpreted in the Kremlin as faint attempts at temporary normalization and not as binding international obligations to define with absolute finality the relationship between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. In fact, the Kremlin has viewed these “peace agreements” as simple calls for non-belligerence. Accordingly, in President Putin’s eyes peace only meant temporary armistice without actual normalization. Moreover, in light of Putin’s interpretation, these agreements are legally suspect and even invalid, because they were concluded between a legitimate state, namely Russia, and a non-state entity that, in reality, never existed as a legitimate state. Intoning in his speech, in which he justified Russia’s lawlessness, that “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” he appointed himself the supreme arbiter of deciding which state in Europe and beyond could be considered as legitimately sovereign. In the same vein, President Putin has also declared that there are no Ukrainian people as such and, consequently, the latter are essentially Russians whose only desire is to be embraced as brothers and sisters by their kinfolks in Greater Russia.
Sadly, by that kind of pseudo-historical reasoning, every politician or every state that possesses superior military capabilities would be entitled to one-sidedly misinterpret the status quo to further its nefarious ambitions and produce geopolitical cataclysms – up to and including war, genocide and civilizational disintegration. In case President Putin’s primitively ahistorical rationale is not challenged, the world would become the playground of psychopaths, enabled by politicians lacking in basic courage and contemptibly feckless rationalizers.
Closely related to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula has been its military intervention in Syria, in September 2015. In addition to propping up the defunct minority Alawite dictatorship of Bashar Al-Assad, presently, Russia operates an air base in Latakia and feverishly expanding its naval base in Tartus. Moreover, it was hoped in the Kremlin that the Syrian Civil War would become President Putin’s military laboratory for future conflicts and wars against NATO and Ukraine too. The plan was to give the inexperienced Russian military combat experience and train its soldiers to learn synchronizing ground maneuvers with air and drone attacks. President Putin rationalized his intervention in the Civil War in Syria thus: “We are acting preventively, to fight and destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupy, not wait for them to come to our house.” However, his Islamic anti-terrorism crusade quickly turned into an unabashed defense of the Assad regime. As Foreign Minister Sergeyy Lavrov later admitted, the Russian military fought whoever it defined as “terrorists.” Yet, the first week of the invasion has confounded those hopes and expectations in Ukraine. President Putin and his advisors have been confident that the Russian military could employ the same double-talk to justify their illegal war in Ukraine. In this manner, suddenly, Ukraine has become full of “Nazis,” “Drug Lords” and “Genocidal Murderers,” who only deserve ruthless extermination by any means.
Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, since the Alawites in Syria are considered by Iran as well as by most of the Sunni Muslims a Shi’ite Sect, Russia has become a tactical partner of the Islamic Republic of Iran in securing the so-called “Shi’ite Crescent” from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. Considering Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Israel’s resolve not to allow the former to establish itself as a nuclear power, the greater Middle East could become another major geostrategic theater of military confrontation between Russia and NATO.
President Putin’s artificial construction of false historical realities is most outrageously glaring in the case of the Donbas region, also known as the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. It is also a typically erroneous presentation of his sick mind’s perceived worldview to accommodate a small minority, namely the ethnic Russians, who for centuries have suffered pathological limitations vis-a-vis the Ukrainian majority. These pathological limitations have led the former to mentally poison reality by first embracing and subsequently celebrating their self-defeating victimhood. The geopolitical danger of President Putin’s violation of all the agreements that he signed to recognize the inviolability of Ukraine sovereignty is that by the use of military force to radically change the status quo he has replaced reality with the mirage of unilateral use of military power.
Misinformation as well as disinformation have been inexorably fixed in Russian culture. Lying has never been a vice but has always been a virtue among Russians. Successfully misleading and outsmarting one’s opponents, even by cunning as well as outrageous lies, has always been a sign of superior intellect as well as spiritual domination over the inferior, naive and gullible non-Russian people. Hence, President Putin’s raving about “Fascist and Genocidal” Ukraine and his statements about the “Nazi and Drug Dependent” Ukrainian politicians, including the Jewish President Zelenskyy. Yet, President Putin’s lying does not stop with attempting to justify under false pretenses his illegal war on Ukraine. He and his administration also lie to their own military about their invasion into Ukraine. The poor and miserable Russian soldiers were told that they are in Russia participating in “training exercises.” Infuriated Russians with access to foreign media reportings as well as aggrieved relatives of conscripted soldiers charge President Putin of lying and of using their kins as “cannon fodder.” In a video released to the foreign press, a mother shouts down Sergey Tsiviles, the governor of Kuzbass region in Siberia, who tried to present President Putin’s war as a “special operation” thus: “We are all deceived, all deceived. They were sent there as cannon fodders. They are young. They are unprepared.” Yet, the gold medal of obscene lying about the Ukrainian war indisputably has to go to Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov. In his recent press conference in Antalya, Turkey, he claimed with a straight face that it was not Russia that invaded Ukraine, but inversely Ukraine that invaded the territory of the Russian Federation.
To quote Foreign Minister Lavrov: “We do not plan to attack other countries, we did not attack Ukraine either.” Then, to pile up on his monumental lie, he explained that Ukraine had been planning to attack the breakaway Donbas region. Again, to justify his lie, he “revealed” that the Russian authorities suddenly and mysteriously have found a “secret document,” allegedly dated January 22, 2022, and signed by National Guard of Ukraine Commander, Colonel General Nikolay Balan, ordering a joint forces operation in Donbas.
Another extensively propagated Russian lie has been the invincibility of its military. Yet, reality again contradicts the official Russian lies. Going back no farther than Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, who attacked the weakened Livonian Confederation and lost, through Peter the Great’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1710-1713, continuing with the Crimean War of 1856, which ended in the Treaty of Paris excluding Russia from the Black Sea, then arriving at the well known events of World War I, which resulted in the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, and the so-called Winter War that is also known as the First Soviet-Finish War, in which the much vaunted Red Army suffered severe losses and the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for illegally attacking the sovereign state of Finland. Finally, the Soviet-Afghan War that lasted for ten years and ended in 1989, must be mentioned as a more realistic depiction of the effectiveness of Russia’s conscription-based military.
Judging by the unprofessional and amateurish performance of the Russian military in the preceding two weeks in Ukraine, Putin’s War has already been a failure for the absence of the strength of effective coordination among the various institutions of the state. These institutions do not guarantee transparency that, in turn, also rob the Kremlin of the public support that it would need in the long run. More generally, as long as Putin’s despotism rules, he will not enjoy the confidence of the majority that is the only sentiment capable of securing protracted peace and stability within the Russian Federation. Here again, it is time for the despot and his minions to face reality. Everything that has happened since 1991, has been a lie ending in the inevitable and recurring collapse of the mendacious Russian political despotism. Oppression, corruption and deliberate fallaciousness must yield to clear-sightedness, honesty and the courage of the undiscriminating mind. More plainly speaking, Russia needs real and normal leaders who live in the real world and not in a psychopathologically artificial construct that resembles more a closed mental institution than a civilization of sane people.
Never mind that President Putin does know how absurd his narratives are. Yet, he hopes that he would be able to create a “cult impression” among the majority of ill-informed and less educated Russians mostly in the countryside. Moreover, President Putin is also convinced that his illusionary concoctions would serve in the future to start a political campaign through the use of force to replace reality with his lies to their fullest. Therefore, his unlawful invasion cum war against Ukraine is a part of his desperate attempt to change the world from what it is now to a new one that would be transformed to what it should be in the future in line with his pathological desires. In this manner, he expects to portray his enemies, namely, the entire non-Russian world, as abnormal, while the Russian people as the only truly normal human being.
In reality, his psychopathological antics are as old as the lies of all the utopian World Revolutionaries of the past. More recently, the useful idiots of the French Revolution as well as the mentally dysfunctional Fascists of Mussolini’s, the deluded enthusiasm of Hitler’s Germany, and the Soviet Communists of Lenin and Stalin’s, demonstrated the fleeting successes of such destructive nonsense. Clearly, what the democracies of the world have not understood sufficiently has been that the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist intellectual garbage is a life or death proposition for all normal civilizations.
Recognizing President Putin’s false reality is essential for countering it successfully. Thus, the idiocy of all the destructive movements in the United States of America and even within the international organizations, including NATO, must be resisted with decisive force as well as relentless endurance. Conversely, the more indulgent rational people are toward these psychopathological misfits, the more emboldened the latter are to ruthlessly spread their false narratives. Moreover, accepting President Putins’s deliberately twisted dialectics, humanity would inexorably descend and, ultimately disappear, into the bottomless black hole of bogus realities.
The overwhelming majority of states across the globe have woken up to the new reality that beyond President Putin’s Russia there is its fundamental inhumanity. President Putin’s laughable justifications for his illegitimate invasion of Ukraine have been “Denazification” and “Demilitarization.” In reality, he wants to reincorporate Ukraine into the Russian Federation. In this pseudo-state, the Despot and his criminal syndicate are more important than the people. Men and women are not sovereign individuals. They are considered to encompass the Russian nation, the collective Russian soul. This collective identity, in turn, comes from its religion, namely Orthodoxy; Autocracy, namely Despotism; and Nationality, namely pan-Slavism, which is the uniquely twisted presence of Slavic Racist Chouvinism. In this cruel and unreal world, exaggerated demands will be manufactured against all opponents that realistically cannot be fulfilled, rendering automatically the latter responsible for all the failures that will accrue from any refusal or incorrect implementation of Russia’s brutal and immoral regime. Accordingly, President Putin’s Russian Federation has a single credo: “If you do not obey unconditionally, I will crush you.” To wit, it is a tragic world of mentally challenged individuals that, in the long run, means death and annihilation for everyone.
For this reason alone, the March 2, 2022, UN General Assembly vote, condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is of fundamental importance. In an emergency session, 141 of the 193 member states voted for the resolution, 35 member states abstained and five voted against, stating: “The UN deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” Furthermore, the UN demanded that “the Russian Federation immediately cease its use of force against Ukraine” and “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces.” Delving more deeply into the votes cast, the Russian Federation essentially has become isolated in the world – it’s only support came from Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea and Syria. Noteworthy that long standing Russian allies, such as China, Bolivia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Nicaragua all decided to abstain. Hungary and Serbia, with close ties with Moscow , voted for the resolution. However, while Hungary’s by now unprincipled equivocation was manifest in it’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister’s unprofessional explanations, Serbia did not mince words: “The Republic of Serbia is committed to observing principles of territorial integrity and political independence of states as one of the basic principles of international law.” True to his government’s form, Russia’s Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya cynically shrugged off the significance of the non-binding vote thus: “This document will not allow us to end military activities,” while simultaneously blaming the war on “radicals and nationalists” in the Kyiv government.
In this context, the People’s Republic of China’s stand is interesting. While President XI Jinping has refused to call Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “invasion” and condemned Western-led sanctions, Chinese state-owned financial institutions discreetly distanced themselves from Russia’s troubled economy. Bank of China’s Singapore operations already ceased financing deals involving Russian oil and other firms, according to the Reuters news agency. In a previous article, Bloomberg reported that the Bank of China and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China had restricted financing of Russian commodities. On the other hand, Russia and China signed several trade deals, mostly supplying Russian gas to China. Meanwhile, trade between the states have risen to $146.9 billion at the end of 2021. The People’s Republic of China’s balancing act could face severe strains when the United States of America and its European allies ratchet up their sanctions against the Russian Federation. Out of this ambiguous Chinese karaoke game comes one certain conclusion – Xi Jinping’s firm message to the rest of the world that his country and the Russian Federation are definitely not allies.
Be that as it may, the Kremlin’s isolation and its sense of an approaching domestic as well as international disaster will surely grow in the near and the longer future too. The ominous signs of a worldwide upheaval against President Putin’s revanchism are multiplying by the hour. The list of political, economic and financial sanctions against Russia is appropriately long and getting longer daily. The United States of America, the European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, etc., have instituted a series of sanctions against Russia targeting banks, oil refineries and military exports. Admittedly, these sanctions are designed to “asphyxiate Russia’s economy.” In addition, Russia’s banks have been barred from the SWIFT international payment system. Moreover, wide restrictions on oil and gas imports, airspace, travel, semiconductors, telecommunication, encryption security, lasers, sensors, navigation, avionics and maritime technologies have been put in place. Simultaneously, Russia’s military industry has been targeted too. Finally, thus far, at least twenty four Russian and Belarussian so-called oligarchs and entities have been sanctioned. To add insult to injury, Switzerland has expressed its solidarity with the sanctions imposed by the European Union by adapting them to the fullest.
President Putin and his accomplices must learn ones and for all that flaunting international law, promoting illegal use of military aggression, and any attempt to destroy the harmony and balance of the European continent and the world are never constructive, but unequivocally destructive, and will not be tolerated by the world community. Moreover, President Putin and his accomplices must be taught that peace and stability cannot be imposed upon sovereign states externally by military force, according to the will of the stronger states. Finally, rogue states, such as the Russian Federation, cannot replace legitimate national interests with reckless and irresponsible expediency. For these reasons, NATO, the European Union and the rest of the world must be unyielding in their demand for the Kremlin to fully restore the status quo ante of 1991.
Accordingly, tyranny is no alternative for legitimate governments. In the long run, freedom and democracy will prevail over lawlessness and despotism. The existing sanctions must be maintained and, if needed, new and more severe sanctions must be instituted until President Putin and his accomplices return all the illegally seized territories from the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For lasting peace in the world can only exist where equitable principles are strong enough to govern relations between the strong and weak states. The alternative is the exclusive belief in violence, and that through illegitimate use of force the stronger could accomplish everything, including creating vassal governments and even a world order, in which chaos and anarchy would reign. No politician or ordinary person should be under any illusion that presently Russia is not a partner in solving the Ukrainian crisis. It is because of preventing a protracted stalemate and the accompanying global ignominy, the world must remain firm in its intention to erase the scourge of Putin’s Russia from the face of the earth.