On Friday, March 18, 2022 I posted this piece, Russo/Ukrainian War, Part 2 (a): President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, originally wanting to do a multipart series on this, but, I do these pieces with the information from many sources, and I save that materiel to organize in an article. It's difficult and a lot of work. The information I stored for these pieces on Putin amounted to 135 Word pages, so in my old age, I got mentally lazy and procrastinated, and truth be told, I wish I'd never started this series.
Part One dealt with President Joe Biden, and Part III will deal with Ukraine President Zelenskyy. Here is the second part of Part II, and it seems likely, there will be a third, fourth and fifth article of Part II, maybe more, none of which I look forward to, as it appears I will have to abandon all the other articles and issues I'm working on to do it. But hey, who said retirement was supposed to be easy?
Recently I did a book review of Red Notice noting an important part of what was actually going on with Putin and Obama. For years I had said Putin was playing chess while Obama was playing checkers. I was wrong. They were both playing patty-cake, and both Kerry and Hillary were a party to that. Putin was never playing chess, and the reason why is he never had to play chess, at least until Trump was elected. And as it turned out he was ill equipped. And that's the most important insight you need to have as the rest of this story plays out. His mind is still the mind of a KGB Lt. Colonel thug who became Russia's President, then it's dictator and now it's Czar, and the head of a massive criminal enterprise known as the government of Russia. And there are no boundaries to the savagery of his mind, or the minds of his myrmidons.
For years we all thought if the Russians wanted to rush down the north European Plain all the way to France, Europe couldn't stop them, ergo, American military power was needed to stop them. The problem as I saw it.
Russia is not a natural capital generating nation because it's entire economy still functionally operates as a communist central planning country with corruption so rampant it's impossible for Russia to face the upcoming economic disaster they're bound to face. They - like Europe - are breeding themselves out of existence, and that vital 15 to 50 age group in their demographic pyramid is small, sick with drug resistant TB and AIDS, and drunk.
Russia has seven defensive gaps with only manpower to defend three, and they're facing serious problems internally. Russian leaders still think they can push everyone around without consequence, and that's not happening and in the future their bully boy tactics will come back to haunt them even more because - they're broke and going more broke by the hour - and they're not going to be able to fix it because they refuse to give up control of the economy and allow private ownership of property.
That's a bit of a problem for Putin. There has been an attempt by Putin to modernize what they have on new military equipment and systems, which were based on 25 year old technology. But that takes money, a lot of money, money they don't have.
Once you scratch the surface of Russia military you will find bad workmanship and equipment that doesn't work as planned. Their special forces are top notch, but their military overall is ill equipped, ill trained, ill motivated, undermanned and a demographic pyramid that's all out of whack and now his plan to reconquer Ukraine is collapsing he's looking around to blame everyone except himself.
He's now convinced his military leaders misled him, but he's surrounded himself with people who are afraid to tell Putin the truth, and for good reason. In his efforts to become all powerful, he methodically got rid of anyone who questioned him, much like Stalin, and surrounded himself with yes men, sycophants and flunkies. He demanded loyalty, not truth, and he got what he wanted. Loyalty first, competence second, truth in a far behind third place. So no one dared question his vision of conquering Ukraine, which has not gone well at all.
Daniel Treisman in his Foreign Affairs article, Putin Unbound, How Repression at Home Presaged Belligerence Abroad states:
Before he started massing troops, few expected Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, and even once he did, few expected him to behave the way he has. In a shocking act of aggression, the Russian leader sent troops to bomb cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol and to attack schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings throughout the country, killing hundreds—if not thousands—of civilians. His extreme demands—calling for Ukraine to disarm, formally recognize the loss of Crimea, give up large swaths of territory in the eastern part of the country, and renounce any intention to join NATO—have stunned the world, as has his repeated nuclear saber rattling.
Instead of winning over the Ukrainians, Putin has quickly turned the population irrevocably against him. And he has grossly overestimated the strength and speed of his military, which stumbled badly in the early weeks of the war. How could a leader regularly hailed as a skilled tactician, if not a strategic genius, make so many rash and seemingly counterproductive moves?
We now know he's not the chess master we all thought, and his military isn't the tiger he worked to create, and it's clear he would be incapable of marching down the North European Plain even without American support. And now all his scheming is backfiring on him internationally, economically, and strategically. More on this in another piece.
And understand all the excusatory clabber I keep reading about this invasion being predicated over his concern about NATO expansion is horsepucky. He knows NATO wasn't formed as an aggressive organization, but a defensive one, and that was to defend Europe from Soviet aggression, which was blatant. And just as there were excusers of Stalinist aggression, we're seeing the same kind of clabber about Putin. That meme is nothing more than an excuse for revanche, a word meaning a political policy designed to recover lost territory. The only thing he feared about NATO is they might interfere with his aggression.
But this was poorly planned with no end game planning. The fact is Putin doesn't have the manpower to occupy such a large area. How could he not know that? Easy, his generals lied to him, and it's not his fault. Well, that's what happens when you surround yourself was yes men, sycophants and flunkies.
We now know that's not entirely true, he was told, he just didn't listen, as a retired Russian military officer, Mikhail Khodaryonok, wrote three weeks before the invasion, warning this was not going to be as easy as they believed because "Ukrainian morale is high, their conscripts are motivated and well armed thanks to the west, and Russia’s international isolation is unsustainable."
More to come!
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