Putin's war on Ukraine

Putin is an imperialist set on conquering Ukraine. His goal is to install a corrupt, pro-Putin kleptocracy. This is a classic good vs. evil conflict. I see it mostly as concentrated power and wealth fighting against more distributed power and wealth, roughly tyranny vs. democracy. It is sad and deeply discouraging to see this. One can hope that Putin changes his mind and leaves, but that seems increasingly unlikely. 

Much of the death and physical destruction in Ukraine are on Putin's hands. How much? I don't know. How much of a role did corrupt radical right authoritarianism in the US play? Maybe little or none. Maybe more. Putin uses the excuse of NATO expansion as a key propaganda argument. But since NATO was always a defensive pact, it never represented a major invasion threat to the Russia, no matter how many times he lies about it. It never even represented a minor threat. NATO was never intended to invade Russia.

Eastern European countries are unsettled by Putin's imperialism. The New York Times writes:

“Nobody here trusted the Russians before and we certainly don’t trust them now,” said Mieczyslaw Zuk, a former Polish soldier who oversees the once top-secret nuclear site. The bunkers were abandoned by the Soviet military in 1990 as Moscow’s hegemony over East and Central Europe unraveled in what President Putin has described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Now Eastern European countries fear a catastrophe of their own could be in the making, as Mr. Putin seeks to turn back the clock and reclaim Russia’s lost sphere of influence, perilously close to their frontiers. Even leaders in the region who have long supported Mr. Putin are sounding the alarm.

Warnings about Moscow’s intentions, often dismissed until last Thursday’s invasion of Ukraine as “Russophobia” by those without experience of living in proximity to Russia, are now widely accepted as prescient. And while there has been debate about whether efforts to expand NATO into the former Soviet bloc were a provocation to Mr. Putin, his assault on Ukraine has left countries that joined the American-led military alliance convinced they made the right decision.  

Fear that Mr. Putin is capable of just about anything, even using nuclear weapons, is just “common sense,” said Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia.

Mr. Ilves announced this week on Twitter that he was “accepting apologies” for all the “patronizing nonsense from Western Europeans” who complained that “we Estonians were paranoid about Russian behavior.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Ilves said he had not received any apologies yet but was gratified to see Russia’s “shills and useful idiots getting their comeuppance.”

Western Europeans who once scoffed at his dark view of Russia, he added, “have suddenly become East Europeans” in their fearful attitudes. “This past week marks the end of a 30-year-long error that we can all come together and sing kumbaya.”

Apparently, Putin could not hide the fact that he is attacking Ukraine from his own people any longer:

A War the Kremlin Tried to Disguise Becomes a Hard Reality for Russians

Moscow posted a death toll [498 dead Russians] from its attack on Ukraine for the first time, and Russians who long avoided politics are now grappling with the fact that their country is fighting a deadly conflict.

On Feb. 23, Razil Malikov, a tank driver in the Russian Army, called his family and said he would be home soon; his unit’s military drills in Crimea were just about wrapping up.

The next morning, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Malikov hasn’t been heard from since. On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion.

“He had no idea they could send him to Ukraine,” Mr. Malikov’s brother, Rashid Allaberganov, said in a phone interview from the south-central Russian region of Bashkortostan. “Everyone is in a state of shock.”

The reality of war is dawning across Russia.  

Russians who long avoided engaging with politics are now realizing that their country is fighting a deadly conflict, even as the Kremlin gets ever more aggressive in trying to shape the narrative. Its slow-motion crackdown on freedoms has become a whirlwind of repression of late, as the last vestiges of a free press faced extinction. 

 

Background: Russian military vehicle on fire

Foreground: a dead soldier

Police in Moscow arresting an anti-war protester

See? It really is a war of tyranny vs. democracy. It is the same war that China and other dictatorships are waging against the US and other democracies.

Your thoughts? Is it good vs. evil, or something else?