Just possibly, he might not survive “an attempted escape”. Russian special forces may try to kidnap the president, stuffing syringes into him and flying him to some Russian “psychiatric clinic”. Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine’s legal government are already targets. And the real danger is not primarily mad dictators. Suddenly, the world is very dangerous again. More probably, it means the installation of a puppet government in Kyiv, to run a cut-down, smaller Ukrainian protectorate pledged to support Russian foreign and defence policies. That’s unlikely to mean some temporary junta to supervise complete abolition of Ukrainian independence and annexation by Russia.
But Putin may recall how Stalin fought Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas for years after the Second World War, without letting those murderous repressions distract the Soviet Union as a whole. Armed resistance might continue, especially in the hills and forests of western Ukraine. First, military victory, achieved mainly by isolating resistance in a few cities and then shelling them to blackened husks, as the Russians did to Grozny in Chechnya. The meetings with western leaders across that long table, hinting at terms for a bargain, were all fake.Īt the moment of writing, Putin’s plan seems to have two stages. Under the bluster, wasn’t there still that shrewd, cautious Putin with whom one could do business? But Ukraine proves the opposite. With Putin, the west wrote off his increasingly wild talk about breaking Nato’s encirclement and restoring Russia’s dominion over post-Soviet space. Diametrically wrong! The crazy speeches gave his true intentions the sober reflections over coffee were all lies. Obviously, foreign visitors concluded, the public stuff was just for show while the “serious” Hitler was revealing his real mind. But the “other Hitler”, in private, could sometimes talk quite charmingly and constructively about possible agreements. Hitler raved on in public about getting rid of the Jews and conquering Lebensraum in eastern Europe. And in both cases they were not taken seriously until it was too late. And his use of police terror against his own people, though horrifying, is distinctly less effective.Īll the same, that wise historian Margaret MacMillan sees one desperately important parallel. But Putin’s grip on the Russian imagination is weaker than Hitler’s on the Germans. Both men qualify as psychopathic dictators, swaddled from reality in fantasies of geopolitical revenge. He will die a disappointed old nuisance in exile somewhere, rather than by Heldentod suicide in his bunker. It may be that Putin’s 24 February 2022 will turn out to be like Hitler’s 22 June 1941 – the day he invaded Russia, doomed himself and Germany to destruction and made inevitable a divided Europe whose Cold War and barbed wire would last for half a century. It just tries to remember an old song it heard once.
0 kommentar(er)
