Saturday, March 26, 2022

Hitting Putin Hard To Topple Him

The Biden red line to not send ground troops into Ukraine is a sound decision, although it is hard to watch.

But that restraint has to be matched with an abundant supply of weapons so the army and volunteers in Ukraine can fight their own war. This is war. You can not send in planes, but you can share satellite surveillance, you can share intelligence. You can share surface to air missiles. You can give cutting edge communication gear. You can supply. You can not enforce a no fly zone, but you can share real time intelligence on all Russian air movements, plane to missile. Putin has to see a military defeat in Ukraine. That is when he starts losing support in his inner circles also.

The Russian air advantage is obvious. There is no risk to them in firing missiles to bring down apartment buildings. And they are relentless about it. Assad has come to Ukraine.

But there are individual volunteers who are streaming in from all sorts of countries. And half a million hackers from all over the world have come together to attack the Putin regime in the cyber sphere. That is a substantial move.

Plenty of refugee aid is being provided. That is commendable. The move is temporary. The Ukrainians will be home for Christmas. The Russians who have also fled will be home before the year is out.

But it boils down to the Russian diaspora taking the lead to get hyper organized so to take back Russia. There has to be a coordinated effort to take to the streets of Moscow in the largest numbers in the history of that city. That is what will end this horrible, horrible war. We need a regime change. Russia deserves democracy as much as anyone else.

You do not have Moscow, yet, but you do have Warsaw, you do have Prague, you do have London and New York, you have Paris and Berlin. March.

It is the Putin stagnation that has deprived Russians of their dignity.

A vibrant, democratic, federal Russia will live in harmony with its minorities and its neighbors.

Regime change is the solution. And that will come about when the Russians take control of the streets of Moscow. Perhaps Putin can retire in Pyongyang.

No peace talk will end this war. There is no Zelensky-Putin summit to be had. There is no deal to be cut. Putin's departure is the only end to this war.



The Making of Vladimir Putin Tracing Putin’s 22-year slide from statesman to tyrant......... His opponents, a “fifth column” manipulated by the West, will meet an ugly fate, Mr. Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.” ........ Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth. ....... 22 years of power and five American presidents. As China rose, as America fought and lost its forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as technology networked the world, a Russian enigma took form in the Kremlin. ........ Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, piece by piece, year by year, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory. ......... “He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.” .......... The West had to provide Russia with humanitarian aid, so dire was its economic collapse, so pervasive its extreme poverty, as large swaths of industry were sold off for a song to an emergent class of oligarchs. ............ But Mr. Putin was no Marxist, even if he reinstated the Stalin-era national anthem. ........ The new president would work with the oligarchs created by chaotic, free-market, crony capitalism — so long as they showed absolute fealty. Failing that, they would be expunged. If this was democracy, it was “sovereign democracy,” a phrase embraced by Mr. Putin’s top political strategists, stress on the first word. ............ Putin does appear to have been guardedly open to the West early in his rule. ......... He mentioned the possibility of Russian membership of NATO to President Bill Clinton in 2000, an idea that never went anywhere. He maintained a Russian partnership agreement signed with the European Union in 1994. A NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. .......... “You should never lose control,” he told the American movie director Oliver Stone in “The Putin Interviews,” a 2017 documentary. He once described himself as “an expert in human relations.” German lawmakers were not alone in being seduced by this man of impassive features and implacable intent, honed as an intelligence operative...........

“You must understand, he is from the K.G.B., lying is his profession, it is not a sin,”

said Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2017 to 2020. “He is like a mirror, adapting to what he sees, in the way he was trained.” .......... “If he wants you to like him, you will like him.” ......... The previous time I had seen Mr. Khodorkovsky, in Moscow in October 2003, was just days before his arrest by armed agents on embezzlement charges. He had been talking to me then about his bold political ambitions — a lèse-majesté unacceptable to Mr. Putin. ......... In 2003, Mr. Putin’s personal tastes did not yet run to palatial grandiosity. .......

Mr. Putin, as he likes to do, kept us waiting for many hours. It seemed a small demonstration of one-upmanship, a minor incivility he would inflict even on Ms. Rice, similar to bringing his dog into a meeting with Ms. Merkel in 2007 when he knew she was scared of dogs.

.......... At this time, Mr. Putin had already clamped down on independent media; prosecuted a brutal war in Chechnya involving the leveling of Grozny, its capital; and placed security officials — known as siloviki — front and center in his governance. Often, they were old St. Petersburg buddies, like Nikolai Patrushev, now the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council. The first rule of an intelligence officer is suspicion. .......... there was “a varnish of liberalism to his discourse in the early 2000s,” but the pull of restoring Russian imperial might, and so avenging Russia’s perceived relegation to what President Barack Obama would call “a regional power,” was always Mr. Putin’s deepest urge. ....... an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook. ........ Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, “the weak get beat.” .......... “He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort.” ............ Mr. Putin brought a measure of that comfort to Russia in the first eight years of his presidency. The economy galloped ahead, foreign investment poured in. “It was perhaps the happiest time in the country’s life, with a measure of prosperity and level of freedom never matched in Russian history,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. ........... And remember, in the 1990s, everyone had been poor as a church mouse.” Now the middle class could vacation in Turkey or Vietnam. .......... The problem for Mr. Putin was that to diversify an economy, the rule of law helps. He had studied law at St. Petersburg University and claimed to respect it. In fact, power proved to be his lodestone. He held legal niceties in contempt. “Why would he share power when he could live off oil, gas, other natural resources, and enough redistribution to keep people happy?” ......... “Having toyed with an authoritarian rule-of-law state, he simply become the oligarch-in-chief and turned the state into the enforcer mechanism of his oligarchical clan.” ........... Still, the biggest country on earth, stretching across 11 time zones, needed more than economic recovery to stand tall once more. Mr. Putin had been formed in a Soviet world that held that Russia was not a great power unless it dominated its neighbors. ...... In November 2003, the Rose Revolution in Georgia set that country firmly on a Western course. ....... Once, asked by Ms. Merkel what his greatest mistake had been, the Russian president replied: “To trust you.” .......... The president scrapped elections for regional governors in late 2004, turning them into Kremlin appointees. Russian TV increasingly looked like Soviet TV in its undiluted propaganda. ......... In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist critical of rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow on Mr. Putin’s birthday. Another Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent, who had dubbed Russia “a mafia state,” was killed in London, poisoned with a radioactive substance by Russian spies. .........

“Putin’s nightmare is not NATO, but democracy”

......... “It’s the color revolutions, thousands of people on the streets of Kyiv. Once he embraced an imperial, military ideology as the foundation of Russia as a world power, he was unable to tolerate this.” ......... “Putin is of course right that a democratic Ukraine integrated with Europe and successful is a mortal threat to Putinism. That, more than NATO membership, is the issue.” ....... His loathing of weakness dictated a proclivity for violence. Yet Western democracies were slow to absorb this basic lesson. ........ The Russian president, who was the first to call President Bush after 9/11, was an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity. ........ In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program? ........ “Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into a ‘Europe whole and free,’” he wrote. As he relates in his memoir, “The Back Channel,” Mr. Burns added that Russian “interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role” would “sometimes cause significant problems.” .......... When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as “Yankees” — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had “humiliated us, put us in second position,” Mr. Putin told him. NATO was an organization “aggressive by its nature,” used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements. ....... “He is a man who always wants to demonstrate a kind of implacable determination, but also in the form of seduction, almost gentleness. An agreeable tone alternates with brutal outbursts, which are thereby made more effective.” ........... Convinced of the exceptionalism of Russia, its inevitable fate to be a great power, he could not abide American exceptionalism, the perception of America throwing its power around in the name of some unique destiny, an inherent mission to spread freedom in a world where the United States was the sole hegemon. .......... Putin’s ferocious speech in 2007 to the Munich Security Conference. “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he declared to a shocked audience. ......... Mr. Putin put his two children in Moscow’s German school after his return from Dresden. He liked to quote from German poems. ........... “We deeply believed it would not be good to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO,” Mr. Heusgen said. “They would bring instability.” Article 10 of the NATO Treaty, as Mr. Heusgen noted, says any new member must be in a position to “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” Just how the two contested countries would do that was unclear to Ms. Merkel. ............. Mr. Bush wanted a “Membership Action Plan,” or MAP, for Ukraine and Georgia, a specific commitment to bringing the two countries into the alliance, to be announced at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. NATO expansion had ensured the security and freedom of 100 million Europeans liberated from the totalitarian Soviet imperium; it should not stop........... “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have to yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” ............. Already, in February 2008, the United States and many of its allies had recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a unilateral declaration rejected as illegal by Russia and seen as an affront to a fellow Slav nation. ........... France joined Germany in Bucharest in opposing the MAP for Georgia and Ukraine. “Germany wanted nothing,” Ms. Rice recalled. “It said you could not take in a country with a frozen conflict like Georgia” — an allusion to the tense standoff between Georgia and the breakaway, Russian-backed, self-declared republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. ....... To which Mr. Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, retorted: “You were a frozen conflict for 45 years!” ....... and calling Kyiv the mother of all Russian cities — a claim that would develop into an obsession. ......... suggesting that Poland and Russia simply partition Ukraine ........ Three months later, a five-day war erupted in Georgia. Russia called it a “peace enforcement” operation. Having provoked an impetuous Georgian attack on its proxy forces in South Ossetia, Russia invaded Georgia. Its strategic goal was to neutralize any ambitions for Georgian NATO membership; this was largely achieved. Moscow recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, integrating them into Russia. .......... The outbreak of large street protests five months earlier, with marchers bearing signs that said “Putin is a thief,” had cemented his conviction that the United States was determined to bring a color revolution to Russia. The demonstrations erupted after parliamentary elections in December 2011 that were widely viewed as fraudulent by domestic and international observers. ............. Mr. Putin’s definitive “choice of repolarization” in 2012. China had risen, offering new strategic options. “He had become convinced that the West was in decline after the 2008 financial crisis,” Mr. Duclos said. “The way forward now was confrontation.” .......... He cast himself as the macho embodiment of conservative Orthodox Christian values against the West’s irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, homosexuality, mass immigration and other manifestations of “decadence.” ............ Putinism, as it was now fleshed out, stood against a Godless and insinuating West. Moscow had an ideology once more. It was one of conservative resistance, and it appealed to rightist leaders across Europe and beyond. ............. Putin was not joking about his conservative challenge to Western culture. It allowed him to develop his own support in Europe among hard-right parties like the French National Rally, formerly the National Front, that received a loan from a Russian bank. Autocratic nationalism revived its appeal, challenging the democratic liberalism that the Russian leader would pronounce “obsolete” in 2019. ............ Ivan Ilyin, increasingly influenced Mr. Putin’s thinking. Ilyin saw the Russian soldier as “the will, the force and the honor of the Russian state” and wrote, “My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” Mr. Putin took to citing him frequently. ......... “By the time Putin returns to the Kremlin he has an ideology, a spiritual cover for his kleptocracy,” said Mr. Snyder, the historian. “Russia now extends however far its leader decides. It’s all about eternal Russia, a mash-up of the last 1,000 years. Ukraine is ours, always ours, because God says so, and never mind the facts.” ............. “Power, for the Russians, is arms. It is not the economy” ....... “When I first met him you had to lean in a little to understand what he was saying,” said Ms. Rice, the former secretary of state. “I’ve seen Putin go from a little shy, to pretty shy, to arrogant, and now megalomaniacal.” ........... An important moment in this development appears to have come with Mr. Obama’s last-minute decision in 2013 not to bomb Syria after Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, crossed an American “red line” against using chemical weapons. Mr. Obama took the case for war to a reluctant Congress instead, and under the lingering American threat and pressure from Moscow, Mr. al-Assad agreed to the destruction of the weapons. ......... Ukraine, by ousting its Moscow-backed leader in a bloody popular uprising in February 2014, and so de facto rejecting Mr. Putin’s multi-billion-dollar blandishments to join his Eurasian Union rather than pursue an association agreement with the European Union, committed the unpardonable This, for Mr. Putin, was the devouring specter of color revolution made real. It was,, he insisted, an American-backed “coup.” .......... Two decades earlier, in 1994, Russia had signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its vast nuclear arsenal in exchange for a promise of respect for its sovereignty and existing borders. But Mr. Putin had no interest in that commitment. ............ “He said there were some Chechen fighters and terrorists there, and he did not want them back, and he would bomb the whole of Aleppo to get rid of them,” Mr. Heusgen said. “It was of an absolute brutality. I mean, how brutal can you get?” ...........

Lies and brutality: The core methods of late Putin were clear enough.

.......... Europe, once the Cold War ended, should have built “the common European house” — a “free economic zone” from Lisbon to Vladivostok — rather than expand NATO eastward. ........... The oligarchs continued to make “Londongrad” their home; Britain’s Conservative Party was glad to take money from them. Prominent figures in Germany, France and Austria were happy to accept well-paid Russian sinecures. They included Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, and François Fillon, the former French prime minister. Russian oil and gas poured into Europe. .......... “The United States applied itself to humiliating Russia,” she told a French TV interviewer, suggesting the simultaneous dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have better served the world. .............

As for former President Donald J. Trump, he never had a critical word for Mr. Putin

, preferring to believe him rather than his own intelligence services on the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election............ “We did not realize that Putin had spun himself into a historical mythology and was thinking in categories of a 1,000-year empire. You cannot deter someone like that with sanctions.” ................ “The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.” .......... After President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Putin at opposite ends of a 20-foot table last month, he told journalists on his plane that he found him more stiff, isolated and ideologically unyielding than at their previous meeting in 2019. Mr Macron’s aides described Mr. Putin as physically changed, his face puffy. “Paranoid” was the word chosen by the French president’s top diplomatic adviser to describe a speech by Mr. Putin just before the war. ............ That Ukraine got to Mr. Putin in some deeply disturbing way is evident in the 5,000-word tract on “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” that he penned in his isolation last summer and had distributed to members of the armed forces. Marshaling arguments ranging back to the ninth century, he said that “Russia was robbed, indeed.” Ukraine was now home to “radicals and neo-Nazis” intent on effacing any trace of Russia. ............. The West, Mr. Putin had long since concluded, was weak, divided, decadent, given over to private consumption and promiscuity. Germany had a new leader, and France an imminent election. A partnership with China had been cemented. Poor intelligence persuaded him Russian troops would be greeted as liberators in wide swaths of eastern Ukraine, at least. ............ “Putin was drunk on his success. In recent years, he has won enormously.” In Crimea, in Syria, in Belarus, in Africa, in Kazakhstan. “Putin tells himself, ‘I am advancing everywhere. Where am I in retreat? Nowhere!’” ....... In a single stroke, Mr. Putin has galvanized NATO, ended Swiss neutrality and German postwar pacifism, united an often fragmented European Union, hobbled the Russian economy for years to come, provoked a massive exodus of educated Russians and reinforced the very thing he denied had ever existed, in a way that will prove indelible: Ukrainian nationhood. He has been outmaneuvered by the agile and courageous Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a man he mocked. ......... Yet the Russian leader retains deep reserves of support in Russia, and tight control over his security services. ........... If nuclear war remains a remote possibility, it is far less remote than a month ago .......... It is as if, after a flirtation with a new idea — a Russia integrated with the West — Mr. Putin, who will be 70 this year, reverted to something deeper in his psyche: the world of his childhood afterThe Great Patriotic War had been won, with Russia in his head again liberating Ukrainians from Nazism, and Stalin restored to heroic stature. ...........

“I think at this point he either wins or he’s done. Done politically, or done physically.”

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