Once we all saw photos of the Russian troop build-up along the Ukraine border with both Russia and Belarus, it became almost impossible to believe that Putin would take his bloody toys and go home without inserting those troops into a peaceful Ukraine. That his justifications are such beastly lies barely registers with a world weary of this malevolent product of the old KGB.
Putin tells the world that Zelensky is a Nazi, he says that Zelensky took power in Ukraine through a military junta, or by force. Zelensky explains that he is half Jewish and has no connections to Nazism, but Putin’s lies gain force by the very fact that he sticks to them and keeps repeating them as if he knows some secret Zelensky family history. There is most likely no secret history of Nazi leanings in the Zelensky family. Putin simply knows that if you repeat something often enough, especially in his country where no other voices are allowed, it will begin to have the weight of a fact. This is something all authoritarians seem to understand, and it is one of the reasons Americans know that Trump is an authoritarian-style leader. Zelensky used no violence to gain power in Ukraine. He was elected.
Putin says that he must protect citizens in the Donbas, who are more sympathetic to Russian rule than other Ukrainians (this could have to do with ‘necessity from proximity’). He tells us that the Zelensky government has persecuted and used violence against the residents of the Donbas because of their Russian sympathies. Zelensky, in an impassioned speech on Russian television (which Russian citizens probably never got to see), said that he was born in the Donetsk and would never attack there or in Luhansk where his best friend’s mother still lives. He has close connections in the Donbas and no animosity.
Zelensky tells us that Putin is creating lies to justify his invasion of Ukraine. Those of us who are still sane understand that Putin is not even trying to present us with believable justifications for his military attacks on nine or ten locations within Ukraine. Trump seems to enjoy the brilliance of justifications that the rest of the world knows are false. It doesn’t matter if people see through lies Trump seems to think, because with repetition they will become true to some. We have been told that Putin has an enemies list of “traitors” that he intends to seek out and kill or imprison. They are only traitors in the mind of Putin which insists that Ukraine is not an independent nation; it is an insurrectionist state. He needs to pull Ukraine back under Russian influence because it will ‘complete’ him – until he has to add back another old soviet state to fill another hole in his dark soul.
As to sacrifices that we might have to make in order to stand with Ukraine, these will be mostly economic. Apparently, Russia is the third largest supplier of oil and gas in the world, and we do get some supplies from Russia. California explains that when they halted fracking and drilling, they had to make up lost supplies, so they turned to Russia. This does not bode well for global efforts to get to net zero to stave off extreme climate changes. The oil and gas industry keeps telling us that there are not enough alternative energy sources to allow us to stop using fossil fuels. Are they deliberately making this so by not helping with development of alternative energies or is this a fact we cannot get around? Having to turn to an authoritarian nation, an adversary, to buy oil and gas suggests that we are no longer independent of foreign oil, and this makes us vulnerable. It affects the kinds of pressures we can bring to bear on a nation we depend on for an essential substance. This is a familiar place as we once depended on authoritarian countries in the Middle East for oil (and we probably still do).
How much of inflation is coming from price gouging and how much is coming from a state of war near Europe? Someone knows the answer, but we will probably not get an accurate assessment. Americans may not mind paying higher prices to support sanctions designed to deter a cruel dictator against a characterful leader of a small nation if the connections are clear.
The fact that Putin has decided to care so little for the good will of Europe and America is a sobering thought. There was a moment when Putin seemed to be ready to enjoy a sense of belonging, but then he annexed Crimea, so his relatively cheerful participation may have been a ruse. Now he has declared himself free of any desire to hobnob with the West and is truly a rogue actor on the world stage, a rogue actor with nukes and perhaps that new Electromagnetic Pulse technology which may allow him to terrorize us without having to resort to nukes. Attacking people’s brains and causing dysfunction or death from a distance – hard to think of that being used on the scale of world war without a sense of terror. One man has just escalated the world back into a Cold War that could warm up at any moment. If it wasn’t for the fear of thermonuclear disaster, we would probably be at war now.
In our hearts we are with you Ukraine, but we fear that you will most likely be unable to endure against such enormous force. If you can’t win, persevere to fight another day. Our sympathetic hearts may be admiring your bravery, but they are also heavy with the losses you are likely to suffer.
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