I have to write about the biggest story in town: the Ukraine invasion – Putin’s mad plan. Putin has said that his invasion of Ukraine is going to plan despite the fact that to outsiders it looks as if it is not going to plan because his troops are bogged down and Ukraine is defending itself against superior numbers. Putin means that Plan B is going to plan. Plan A was to quickly invade Ukraine, race to Kyiv within a few days, take charge and quash dissent. With a new puppet government in place, he would have been able to clear out the Nazis as he called them. By “Nazis” he means people who want to live in a democratic country.
Putin sees a democratic country next to his as a threat to his dictatorship. The word “Nazis” comes from a real Nazi who founded the Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky and he lived in Ukraine. His mission was to lead the white races of the world in a crusade. I think Putin got the idea from this racist, fascist man who happened to live in Ukraine. He now uses the description ‘Nazi’ to mean people who want to democratically install a president and government and not have a puppet president as was the case before.
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The current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, took office on May 20, 2019. That was a democratic blow to Putin. Putin also sees the NATO countries surrounding Russia as a threat and he wants to expand the population of Russia because it is declining. To take over Ukraine would provide an immediate and instant injection of 44 million people, many of whom are Russian in any case.
But Plan A failed, as we know, so he has adopted Plan B which was part of his initial strategy. And Plan B is to raise Ukraine to the ground, to ‘neutralise’ the country completely. According to one estimate 90% of buildings in Mariupol have been damaged or destroyed. Mariupol refuses to surrender. As a consequence, the inhabitants of that city face ‘military tribunals’ whatever that means. It is sinister. Putin needs to break their spirit.
He’s already deporting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens (according to Ukraine) to Russia to use them as propaganda tools and perhaps to indoctrinate them into the Russian way of life as he sees it. Another form of neutralisation. This means citizens who are permanently anesthetized to the truth via endless propaganda disseminated by the Kremlin. Moscow has just banned Facebook and Instagram for ‘extremist activity’.
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You might remember that he offered a ‘safe corridor’ for citizens of Mariupol on the East Coast of Ukraine. But that corridor went to Belarus or Russia. It was declined.
Plan B is to rebuild Ukraine from the ground up, it seems to me. The concept is to destroy first and then occupy it and create a dictatorship from what is left. It’s a very long-term strategy but Putin ends up with what he wants which is the removal of a threat to his dictatorship and in place a large country which supports his dictatorship. Ukraine is also the bread basket of Europe. A lot wheat is exported from Ukraine. A resource. Ukraine has other resources.
RELATED: PUTIN’S TROOPS ARE SHOOTING UP AND SHELLING ANIMAL SHELTERS IN UKRAINE.
It’s a grand plan which clearly completely disregards loss of life both in respect of his troops and innocent civilians including women and children. And with a disregard for the lives of Russian troops.
It also disregards the fact that Ukrainians will never accept it. And Russia does not have enough military personal to control every aspect of Ukraine life and stamp on dissent if and when he wins the war. Plan B can’t work.
It’s notable that the senior military commanders of the Russian troops don’t want to recover the bodies of their young soldiers even when offered by the Ukrainian military. Putin has all the characteristics of a psychopath who is obsessed with power and who tries to turn fake news into genuine news and genuine news into fake news. To create smokescreens.
When his forces bomb hospitals (110 have been shelled according to the Ukraine Defense Minister) or shopping centres to kill innocent women and children, Putin claims that the Ukrainian military have installations in these places which threatens Russia. He makes these claims without any evidence whatsoever and I for one find them ridiculous.
What has is to do with the animal-human relationship? Everything. If you’re killing innocent citizens including mothers and daughters you are killing companion animal care givers. And you are killing companion animals as well, en masse (see link above about shelling animal shelters). You are displacing thousands of cats. You are forcing the abandonment of an unknown number of cats.
What Putin is doing is bigger than considering animal welfare issues at a micromanagement level. What he’s doing is catastrophic in terms of animal welfare in Ukraine. He doesn’t care if he kills innocent people and he certainly doesn’t care if he kills innocent animals.
In the meantime, tough and widespread sanctions against Russia will bite in the medium to long term. The economy will struggle, even crash and this will also undermine Plan B.
The vast majority view in America is the same as that prevailing in Britain and the rest of Europe and that goes for both conservatives (I’m a Libertarian) and Liberals, and extreme leftists and most everybody in between these categories. We are appalled at Putin’s recklessness, ruthlessness and brutality. Although, I must admit there are a few, very few, mostly, and embarrassingly, on the right politically, who stupidly swallow Putin’s propaganda about James Baker’s “promise” that NATO would never expand eastward, and that the Ukrainian “nazis” overthrew Yanukovych and now rule that country, hook, line, and sinker.
Of course that’s ridiculous. James Baker was only Secretary of State and at times held other positions, so he never had the authority to promise anything. He said he only asked if, hypothetically, NATO refrained from expanding eastward, what would Russia be prepared to offer in return? His boss, the President, overruled Baker, and made no such offer. Even the President wouldn’t have had the power to commit NATO to any such deal without getting the approval of the other NATO countries. America is only primus inter pares in NATO because we provide the largest single share of both troops and funding, we don’t control NATO, as was made clear when Trump couldn’t get more Western European countries to keep their promises about the percentages of their budgets committed to military spending. But at least, unlike ever other American President, he seriously tried. I think that now, many European countries wish he had succeeded in this.
And, in any event, despite what he says, and it is usually wise to pay more attention to what leaders actually DO, rather than to what they say, Putin wanted NATO to expand eastward. To illustrate this, simply consider what Putin would’ve done if he’d seriously NOT wanted NATO to expand eastward. Obviously he would’ve done anything in his power to assure all the eastern European countries that the Stalinist old Soviet Union, which oppressed, controlled, and invaded them on several occasions was really dead, and that a new, kinder, gentler Russia was now in its place. He would’ve offered them sweetheart economic deals, cheap Russian gas, and shown restraint in dealing with breakaway countries he didn’t like, and to assert that NATO would dominate them like the old Soviet Union and buy up all their assets, all to dissuade them from joining NATO. Instead, what does he do? He does the exact opposite: He destroys Chechnya. He invades Georgia. He bullies and threatens. Assuming that he’s not a complete idiot, NATO expansion is what he wanted. Why? One can only speculate. Perhaps he felt he needed NATO expansion as a perceived threat to Mother Russia to arouse the nationalism of the Russian populace to get them behind his goal of restoring Russia’s borders back to those of the old Soviet Union. This is just a guess.
I confess I first thought Putin’s troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders was an exercise in saber-rattling. When his saber-rattling didn’t get him anything, the worst I thought he’d do was use his army to sever Luhansk and Donets from Ukraine and absorb them into Russia. I never imagined he’d be this rash. I confess I gave him credit for more brains than this. Perhaps with 22 years of his yes men telling him he’s infallible he now believes it.
Additionally, it was stupid to say that western counties were hysterical and Russia would never invade, and THEN invade a few days later. All governments lie, but few lie so blatantly and stupidly. He should’ve said something like: there will be no military action unless Ukraine provokes it, but that he is working “diligently” to prevent war.
I hope this answers your question. I meant to say yesterday, that if Russia succeeds in destroying Ukraine, the next victim will likely be Moldova which is small and not a NATO member.
I’m sorry for always going on for such length. I’m 68, but the older I get the more uncontrollably prolix I get.
Great comment Tod. I enjoyed it and it certainly does answer my question. I am pleased that Americans are involved in this as Europe needs them. The older I get the angrier I get 😊. Just one of those things and I think it is normal. Take care.
As you say, the Ukrainians will never go along with the plan B you mentioned of a Russian ruled Ukraine and Putin doesn’t have enough troops to enforce it, so it seems to me that, like Milosevic before him, he will resort to “ethnic cleansing”. He will chase as many Ukrainians out of the country as he can or kill them and then re-settle more pliant Russians to take their land.
Western leaders, I think, make a mistake if they think that sanctions, no matter how strong, will bring Putin to the table to negotiate seriously. He may make a show of agreeing to a peace deal if things continue to go even more badly militarily for him than they have so far, but he’ll only keep his word until he feels stronger and then he’ll invade again. He is a strongman, not a politician. Moldova will be next. We must meet each of his threats with timely and equal threats of our own. We must see to it that he worries about the dangers of provoking us, rather than the reverse that I hear from some western diplomats and politicians.
If NATO had matched his troop build-up in the frontline NATO countries while he was doing it from the East, he would never have dared to invade. Like all bullies, he doesn’t take risks he considers to be serious.
Thanks for this. I have forgotten. Are in America? If so how are the Americans viewing this?
Putin is blackmailing NATO by threatening to use nukes if NATO gets involved and stops him from taking over Ukraine. So what is to stop him from invading Poland or any of the other Baltic states. Putin and Belarus are not going to stop at Ukraine. Putin wants his USSR back.
I say go for it NATO call his bluff. We cannot live in fear of what Putin will do. It’s time for the USA to go in and bomb the shit out of the Russian border with Ukraine.