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Craig Butcher's avatar

Ukraine won't survive this one because it's not the war the West's public and leadership seems to think it is -- a contest between nations or peoples.

It is a war to crush and eliminate Ukraine as an idea, and from all the evidence we can see (facts on the ground, instances of defiant heroism notwithstanding) -- it's proceeding on schedule and according to plan. The Ukrainian resistance has heroes. But Putin has what trumps heroism -- all the divisions he needs, the means to supply them, and all the time required to deploy them to victory because no none outside can dare intervene.

Putin has driven out now what, almost two million refugees? And more to follow. This will tax the West's ability to absorb them and its time and attention. This only makes Stalin/ --I mean Putin's work easier.

Next step will be a new "de-kulakization." Here Putin has tools available that Stalin did not. Ukraine is a modernized, electrified, urbanized nation. Putin can control electricity, water, and food. Stalin showed how to destroy a population -- starve it. Putin can also freeze it and dehouse it.

It will be some weeks or even months yet, but as Russia's military occupies each additional area, and the death squads go through and exterminate all leadership, the surviving population will not be allowed to eat until it capitulates and acquiesces...

if you want a ration card... or fuel... or your job... or permission to inhabit your dwelling place ... you will need to accuse friends and neighbors of being resisters. The point is not actually so much finding out those in whom the flame of opposition still flickers as it is breaking the belief in one another which is the essential feature of a community. Once you get everybody turning everybody else in to the secret police, they are broken.

That's the goal and the plan. Which is why Putin isn't really worried about the consequences of the brutality any more than someone setting out to hike the AT l is deterred by rain or mud or bears. If you are doing the hike, you do it.

The only way this "miscalculation" can be a miscalculation that creates a Ukraine that cannot be broken is if Putin makes the mistakes the West always makes -- which is to shrink back from doing all the evil in its power.

Why does he "hide" it from the Russian people? I don't see it as weakness to pass laws imprisoning people who report that the sky is blue when the official line is it's green any more than it is weakness in Republicans to insist that the election was stolen. It's the same strategy -- conform or die. The very fact of its falsehood makes acquiescence into complicity.

Far from being a sign of weakness -- it's a measure of how complete his actual power is.

Putin, unlike Americans, knows that history is not an arc bending toward justice. It's made by those strong and ruthless enough to exceed even the furthest limits of indecency and monstrousness.

It wasn't moral outrage that defeated Hitler. It was Stalin.

Sorry about the pessimism. But we've seen this before, and it works. Not sure there is a feasible strategy even to impede it, much less defeat it.

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Liberal Cynic's avatar

This post seems extremely disconnected from reality. Are you sure you didn't mean to post this on Truth Social?

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Craig Butcher's avatar

I am not sure about a disconnect with reality... it is to be hoped I am wrong about the future I foresee; but Putin's objective, and the means he is at this very moment using to attain it, seem to me as real as a punch in the nose.

And the consequent no-limits ruthlessness that will be required to secure victory against the ensuing resistance almost has to follow the formulae employed by empire after empire-- including the Russian empire in the twentieth century in Ukraine itself, and the new Russian empire's behavior since in places like Chechnya.

Certes I've come to a much darker view of reality than I had a month ago. Reality isn't what it used to be, and not for the better. Maybe I've been reading too much about Genghis Kahn, Caesar in Gaul, Suetonius, Procopius... but Putin looks to me a modern Cato in determination: Ukraine delenda est.

Putin is serious, which (I assume) not even Truth Socialists doubt -- and gives every indication of willingness to push to the brink of nuclear war rather than fail. Maybe it's bluster but not all bluster is mere pretense. Terrorists do also actually kill their hostages. I see no evidence Putin is anything less than an obsessive imperialist megalomaniac who may be running out of time personally and in any event has run out of patience with subtlety.

Maybe he was surprised, and even a bit taken aback, by the immediacy and intensity of current Western disapprobation, but in any case he was obviously angry enough about being thwarted hitherto that he decided he just didn't ultimately give a damn. Maybe he has overrerached and ends like MacBeth-- lay on, MacDuff, and cursed be he who first cries hold, enough... or maybe the MacDuffs are the ones who get painted on a pole.

If one assumes that Ukrainians today really are minded to resist, then Putin's only hope is to literally obliterate them as even the idea of a people or nation other than as a helot population within the Russian empire. And if they capitulate sooner rather than later -- well, maybe the same outcome, except with less destruction of property.

I think we are fooling ourselves to imagine that Putin's revanchist nightmare dream stops anywhere short of the point where Ukrainian resistance vanishes--by whatever means necessary. It isn't going to happen through persuasion.

I commend to all the article "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“ by Vladimir Putin himself which should be read in the context of what he is doing today in Ukraine. From its premises there is pretty much no action Russia could take that could not be justified as self-defense.

"...But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today... involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us."

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

You really should read the whole thing. In much of it there is only the thinnest pretense of self-control stretched taught over a surging ethnic rage. (The characterization of the Odessa fire in 2014 is a pretty good instance.) Most chilling to me is the final sentence: " And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide." Stripped from context it seems anodyne. But taken with the article as a whole, it means: The real Ukrainians are the Russian Ukrainians.

In fact, the first sentences of that same paragraph read, "Today, these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways."

Whether objective reality turns into Putin's reality remains to be seen, but the odds against it don't look good. In any case the "reality" we are trying to comfort ourselves with in the West is completely discordant with Putin's. And because Putin's power, motivations, and perception of the world are themselves real world realities, our comforting version is also discordant with objective fact.

Sun Tzu famously wrote:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

I'm not sure about the first sentence always being true. But the last one does have the odor of universality about it.

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