Although Putin has been doing a fine job of destroying himself as well as the wealth, power, and relative security of his closest assigns and associations, he has still advanced weapons systems in submarines, hypersonic missiles, and “tactical” nuclear warheads, and he knows he may destabilize and destroy with impunity whatever he wishes for fear of his lunacy.
No mass death or destruction have yet come to Moscow or St. Petersburg.
The imposing of western sanctions has been but a matter of adjustment in relationships elsewhere.
The “Fragile Empire” has been proving surrounding polities, not only the “demo” made of Ukraine, more fragile in their development and heightened sensitivity to threats–or now imposed–disruptions.
And Putin’s “Mafia State” appears not to have interrupted anyone’s drug deal or other dark business for being so without conscience.
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How would you like to be hit by an enemy you’re not allowed to hit back?
What if it was your friend’s enemy enjoying that impunity, and you knew that you and yours would be next to be beaten, bribed, intimidated, robbed?
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What if you knew that your forces were blocking 90 percent of airborne attacks but the ten percent getting through was destroying basic civilian power infrastructure?
What does “winning” mean when your losing enemy forces are nonetheless freezing and displacing your people?
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Of course, Putin and his Russia are losing too, but he is only losing the better–the more good–of his human resources, and his state is only losing money and international stature. That’s not enough for stopping him. As the Malignant Narcissist (#MaligNarc) that he has been, he and his circle needs must be deprived of power and stopped cold, for in his own delusional mind, he cannot lose, and his enablers, sycophants, and fellow thugs are all in too deep for leaving him. War criminals themselves for what they have abetted, they, and exactly like the Nazis before them, may find no refuge elsewhere–or sadly find it through some realpolitik involving occult cash reserves that may land an obscure outpost or two for living (very well, thank you) on the lowdown.
๐ 50% of the territories of Ukraine, which #russia occupied after February 24, have already been liberated by the heroic Armed Forces of #Ukraine.
In Putin’s upside-down world, “winning” looks a lot like losing.
โ๏ธ #russia is destroying everything it can get its hands on. In #Bakhmut, they dropped bombs on the House of Culture, which was the cultural center of the entire district. Before the war, a theater worked there, but now only the walls were burning#RussiaIsATerroristStatepic.twitter.com/ZVNnSPe0X3
No less than the dictatorships and terrorists supported by Moscow during the Cold War Era and no less so in the post-Cold War Era–know the truth–Russia’s political culture has found no better motivation for being than the want of Absolute Power and demonic control of others via leverage, threat, and, finally, horrifying, mindless, and unwarranted violence.
The blog’s starting to carry quite a package! ๐
I think the “amateur psychologists” have been written off by the rough and tough get-it-done warfare analysts, but, sigh, Russia really does have a deranged narcissistic feudal-medieval “Vertical of Power” who has by his destructive and ruthless wiles and will made the powerful and wealthy of Russia dependent on his existence and his on them.
Who is Vladimir Putin to judge any of them?
Beneath heaven–and would they would ask themselves the same thing–I don’t know.
Whatever the answer (blackmail? intimidation? grandiose promises?), he has inveigled an entire class of associates, executives, and warriors in an archaic narrative of utterly barbaric cruelty, destruction, and ethnic cleansing. So far, not one of Putin’s oh-so-powerful associates appear capable of preparing any resistance to him or his crimes–or it’s they, at least a few, who have perhaps been pushing him. Either way, all have become themselves complicit in the leader’s ugly and cowardly fantasy about himself–and they are losing as mightily as they are clinging fast to this most backward, myopic, and villainous of daddies.
Are they brain dead?
Have they lost the last vestiges of conscience, humanity, and integrity?
Perhaps the worst thing–the most special truth, frankly–is they know what they have done and are doing and believing themselves bought in, doomed, and enslaved are walking themselves to their own ignominious end.
. . . two greater-than-civilizational stories run through the history of the region: 1) who were the Vikings, really, as defined both by the character of their leadership and the makeup of their complement? And 2) the condition of Russian soil (not so good) and the desirability of one of the world’s great crossroads and agricultural centers. The drive for Ukraine has been always south from today’s St. Petersburg. Boredom, corruption, criminality, greed have indeed enriched Ukraine’s soil over centuries. The inhabitants of the land in the early Byzantine Era had been Turkish (“Turkic”) tribes who chose to declare themselves Jews and probably so in defiance of expanding Christian and Muslim power.
The source I generally cite for Russian history from before the Rus has been Pipes, Richard. ย Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. ย New York: Charles Scribnerโs Sons, 1974, but I have reached an age where re-reading seems in order while the taking of voluminous notes defies the contemporary zeitgeist, however enamored one may be of 19th and 20th Century methods in scholarship. Informal conversation serves the note as well, and one may indeed “fly” south from St. Petersburg via Google Maps and practically hit Kiev as is being done today but primarily for want of unobtainable pride.
David Arakhamia, the head of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyโs party in parliament and a member of Kyivโs negotiating team with Russia released a Telegram statement about the incident, saying: โRussian illegal construction is starting to collapse and catch fire. The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, sooner or later, it will explode. And this is just the beginning.โ
Mykhailo Podoliak, who serves as an adviser to Zelensky echoed the sentiment. โCrimea, the bridge, the beginning. Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled,โ Podoliak said.
Ukraine, perhaps, has announced its full intention to divorce Russia from its sovereign territory without exception. Today’s explosion and fire on Kerch Strait Bridge, the lengthy causeway linking Russia to Crimea by road and rail, will slow Russian resupply to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Russians, and Russian soldiery recently delivered to Crimea for training.
Given Ukrainian President Zelensky’s determination to remove the last Russian armed presence from Ukraine’s sovereign territory, the contest is bound to lead to the elimination of Russian Naval Base in Sevastopol. The base had been started in 1772, finished eleven years later, fought over in the 19th Century, abandoned by Russia in 1855, occupied by the German Imperial Army in 1918, again lost to Nazi Germany in 1942, and leased by Russia for its Black Sea Fleet since the end of the Cold War.
As noted in a France24 video in 2019, a tour guide says to the reporter, “It’s a fleet that was armed two years ago. Everything we see in this bay is weaponry that appeared over the past five years” (1:55).
Times Radio analysis, posted to YouTube, October 8, 2022.
BackChannels concurs with perhaps less subtlety: Russia has clearly overplayed its position, and in the say of “soft power”, it has sacrificed any cultural or peaceful benefits it may have brought with its presence in exchange for bullying willful destruction and terror and nothing else. Russia has nothing to offer Europe or Ukraine at this time, and with Putin’s criminal enterprise–that’s all it has been since the early-mid 1990s–it has no place to go in history and has only sealed its fate in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has never been a rational state actor but always a piratical “malignant narcissist” engaged in the cover of a projection of an heroic self with impression enforced by the many methods of perceptual control. As his fear of being “found out” becomes realized, he doubles-down in defense of image and becomes more surreal by the day. As he has never authentically served Russia but plundered her by developing his mafia-style monopoly on power, one may only hope that his own “tire” of him post-haste and with ambition to return to modernity, which some have quite enjoyed, will take the reins in the direction of reform.
For the time being, the world surrounding Putin’s Imperial Russian Kleptocracy would seem stuck with containment, defense, and deterrence. For Russians who would be modern and well dressed with a Modern Political Mentality: despair, flight, lethargic cooperation, passive resistance; and for some close in with the little monster grown fat, one might hope for treachery.
The end-state desired would seem a modern responsible-responsive Russian state, not Putin’s criminal feudal-medieval monstrosity loaded up with 2,000 tactical nukes (advanced hypersonic missiles and stealthy submarines) x hate, ignorance, and fear to match, not to mention the leader’s criminal — and politically criminal — narcissism.
Some of us are just waiting to see Robert Kraft’s Superbowl ring returned to him. And all of this over that? Could be as that ring is symbolic of the criminal, piratical, and unhinged nature of Putin’s increasingly naked regime.
Related Online
Anderson, Hans Christian. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
#Russia on ๐ฅ: Novokuznetsk Iron and Steel Plant owned by Putin's mafioso Roman #Abramovich caught fire in the evening of September 24th. The plant employed 11,500 people in Siberia. "Leading manufacturer of rail products in Russia and the only manufacturer of tram rails." pic.twitter.com/3tkSnO9qaH
โThis is cool that we have all gathered here today because we came here not on party or state orders, which is also sometimes necessary, but because we all wanted to be together, here and today,โ Putin told the crowd, calling them โbrothersโ.
He ended by shouting โlong live Russia, long live Ukraineโ and โlong live bikeโ in Ukrainian before heading off to a meeting with President Viktor Yanukovich.
Well, doesn’t that make plain what all the chaos, death, destruction, and suffering come down to?
Posted to YouTube, August 30, 2011.
Now the deluded, deranged, and tyrannical Vladimir Putin wants to restore his biker party no matter how many Ukrainians and Russians prove themselves willing to die for him without their cooperation or consent.
The clip appears to have come from the 2011 Sevastopol Bike Show, and it would appear to show how much Putin loves the Russians and Ukrainians that were his to plunder with impunity before Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity that had the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych skedaddling north to Mothering Russia (as Putin would have her) for reassurance, a kind of “That’s alright, my blubberous little buddy. We’ll get it all back the way it was. Or we’ll destroy it.”
Probably, Putin has been always a malignantly narcissistic, petulant, and posturing little boy.
This story posted today on YouTube turns out as much about OSINT detective work from within Russia as about the internal brutality of the politically criminal and thoroughly kleptocratic regime of Tsar Vladimir the Small.
While the United States has its own Russian infection with Trump’s own anti-democratic and demagogic and delusional fascist nationalist base, he has yet to turn American national and state military defense and police security services into his own personal goons, Americans on the way to mid-term elections are not waiting for him or his cult to amass that kind of power. Trump represents a diminishing base of corrupt or diminished or greedy Americans who crave his “power” — his appearance of it, in any case — in relation to their own damaged psyches and penchants for absolute and sadistic personal and political control — under cover of Christian zealotry, no less — of all that surrounds themselves.
In addition, I have come to view “9/11” as a primarily KGB-guided Reflexive Control Operation designed to goose patriotism in the west by sparking a war with Radical Islam (mission accomplished!) while inducing the “New Nationalism” in EU/NATO as well as drift and permit for Ultra Nationalist efforts in the same that were to form up and return modern states to deeply conflicted feudal-medieval polities (the democracies most degraded thereby: Hungary, Italy, Poland Turkey, and the United States).
Given Vladimir Putin’s malignant narcissism and Russia’s related self-absorbed messianic (“special truth”) civilizational narcissism, the Russian state may and must be treated as an irrational medieval polity obsessed with its own paranoid want of control and power that has spread corruption and disinformation throughout EU/NATO and the world, frankly, and that has sought also to monopolize basic resources, energy and food foremost, and occupy strategic military regions (like the Black Sea and the North Pole) with and from which it may blackmail and intimidate the world.
Of course, that’s the way the world works, isn’t it?
Or is it not?
Whether it is or not, it is today the west that has the freedom and humanism as well as the obligation, and responsibility to defend Earth herself–and humanity itself and its evolution, no less–and do so by bringing Russia’s barbaric feudal-medieval totalitarianism–sustained by a criminal and most rapacious and self-indulgent KGB/FSB and its leader–to its natural close.
If the west refuses the work, then we may expect to see Russia expand its chaos-and-control program and its related sphere of human disposal, enslavement, rubble, and suffocation without limit.
Aleppo, Syria, Russia’s Way, posted to YouTube by Euronews, September 28, 2016.
Mariupol, Ukraine, Russia’s Way, posted to YouTube by NewsNation, using drone footage by Reuters, April 23, 2022.
Addendum, November 9, 2022
Mikhail Arutyunov only stayed in politics for a few more years after 1991. He strongly opposed the first Chechen War, and became utterly disillusioned with the new Russia he had helped to build. He watched, helpless, as oligarchs and corrupt officials replaced Communist Party members as the country’s new elite.
“What we have ended up with is what we were fighting against at the time,” he says. “The population is separating into the extremely poor and the extremely rich. Unfortunately our people have always been very passive except at critical moments.”
He predicts that Russia’s days of revolution are not yet over, “I think that what is happening now will eventually lead to another wave of anger.”
This is a translation of excerpts from a blogPutinism As Isby a Radio Svoboda analyst and blogger Artem Kruglov. In the light of Helsinki Summit 2018 and Trump/Putin relationship, it is important to know these facts of Putinโs background.
BackChannels 