Seth Jones of the Center for Security and International Studies states that the attempted Russian conquest of Lyman (one of Ukraine’s near targets for reclamation) would “highlight disconnect in the Kremlin between fantasy and reality. Putin is attempting to solidify control of areas he is actually losing through sham referendums. The fall of Lyman would…….deal yet another blow to Putin’s doctrine of seizing all of Donbas.” In other words, not least because of the horrified flight reaction of many of the Kremlin’s prospective draftees, Russian prestige in arms as the would-be conqueror of Ukraine is on the ropes.
Was this predictable? No, and neither was Vladimir “the Great’s” sudden departure last February from longstanding practice of holding Russian government in uneasy stability, reducing its citizens to passive acceptance and running Father Time’s clock out to the end of his administration, to stand down eventually as a post-Soviet national hero with plenty of playthings in retirement. Instead, to put it rather delicately, the little man is quite mad. Putin is going to go, but in considerable ignominy as a demagogue who played roulette with the lives of his supporters and engineered ghastly destruction of innocent people on both sides of the ill-defended Russian border.
To seem generous, he is allowing the first wave of ex-pats to escape to neighboring countries; he could hardly close borders and arrest all unwilling soldiers without looking like the worst of Russian tyrants from history. Putin fancies himself a benign, beloved President, but that ship has sailed…………any veneer of ordering military destruction in Ukraine from a cherished desire to restore ancient boundaries and resurrect Imperial Russia has vanished, along with his credibility as a continuing demagogue. There are plans to replace him, but he will not go gently or so soon, and assassination would simply cement the home fiction that he is a patriot and a semi-saint. For visionary, violent national policies to succeed in any dictatorship, they must still be “sold” to a willing audience, and Putin has failed severely in his selling job.
Meanwhile, Russia prepares to forcibly seize four key Ukraine districts after an enforced referendum during which locals declining to vote for this were beaten or threatened with summary execution. So much for a laughably sham and ungenuine annexation. Ukrainian President Zelenskiy has called a meeting of his National Security and Defense Council, including the CnC of all armed forces, his defense, foreign and prime ministers, plus the head of Ukrainian Security Service (a savagely patriotic entity which gladly makes the old and dreaded Irainian Savak and Israel’s Haganah look like a gentlemen’s club). War is an impolite and deadly pursuit. Zelenskiy is not bluffing.
Putin, despite wide consensus that he ISN’T, is. He has metal, but lacks the steel. His meaningless, unauthorized territory grabs at gunpoint are backed up, so he graphically threatens, by his capability to deploy “tactical nukes” – a debatable and fairly meaningless term, as nuclear weapons are deployed when all strategy has failed and utter ruin is engendered. Once a short-strike rocket has lobbed into a populated town of 50,000 or more with Hiroshima-like effect, ladies, the gaming tables are closed and the House is bankrupt. Contagion spreads along with horrid suffering, and the west’s responding proportional-but-end-game-strike would wreak serious business, indeed. Putin is canny and crazy, yes, but his maniacal profile does not fit a suicidal intent, and most dictators are solicitous for their own skin, if not that of others. The next few weeks, and possibly days, will tell a great deal; smart money backs the good guys. Score a big round of applause for Zelenskiy, who morphed from comic entertainer to a leader of global stature. He has earned it.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
