Vladimir Putin is a butcher with a modern, updated approach to war-criminal standards. His strategy and the nature of his global threat must be identified and considered by the United States, the current leader of the free world.
I say current due to the menacing threat to American democracy by the Republican Party.
It is not like Putin’s terrorist tactics in Ukraine are new. His Ukrainian playbook is familiar, most recently in Syria with his years-long bombardment of Syrian civilians. There as in the Ukraine, it includes bombing hospitals, schools, places of worship and deliberate targeting of civilian refugees seeking escape. The disinformation campaign is familiar as well.
In the fall of 2016, Russia and its allies bombed Al-Sakhour Hospital in Aleppo, Syria at least four times. The international outcry was met with disinformation and lies. During a press conference by a Russian general, he called media and eyewitness documentation of airstrikes as “plain forgeries,” supplying his own satellite photos of the areas, saying they proved the hospital unscathed, and, of course, access to prove otherwise was impossible. It mirrors current Putin lies and his restriction of any independent news coverage in Russian media.
The Russian warplane bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9th killed or wounded scores, many mangled and trapped under the rubble, this in a southern Ukraine city besieged by brutal bombing without pause for more than two weeks. To make Ukrainians as captives to his brutality, Putin forces use all means to block escape of tens of thousands of civilians trapped without food and shelter.
Currently, Russia is trying to starve Mariupol into surrender. The port city is a key strategic target for the Russian military. Around 300,000 people are believed to be trapped there with supplies running out and any humanitarian aid blocked from entering. To assure none escape the city, Russia is using land mines to keep people imprisoned in the city.
Mariupol was once a beautiful, thriving coastal city of almost half a million people. Now 90% of it is rubble, atrocity bombing by Putin forces. It is a repeat of his legacy in Aleppo, Syria six years before. Now like ghouls overseeing a city-wide coffin, Russian forces commit cease-less destruction, ruthlessly threatening any activity such as burying the dead or searching for food and water. Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and crucial communications: cell phone, radio and TV towers. Still Mariupol citizens prevail.
Schools, hospitals, theatres, public buildings, homes, apartments – all lie in ruins, many with people trapped and buried under the rubble, ceaseless bombing keeping rescuers away.
It is evident that Putin, lacking the varied, modern military forces and economic strength of the United States, is using his own tactics of civilian brutality in war, along with global nuclear threat, cyber warfare, and terrorist bombing for his conquest targets.
And instead of good-faith negotiations and diplomacy, he prefers a divide-and-conquer approach which spreads division and chaos, especially among democratic governments.
With a ruthless and cynical KGB background, compromise and cooperation are not on his agenda, rather division and conquest. Being one of the richest individuals on the planet, he knows greed, self-interest, and exploitation firsthand and expects it in others.
Americans like Donald Trump and his self-absorbed followers can be used to play into his plan of conquest and power, for example, Trump to weaken and divide the U.S. and Tucker Carlson to augment his propaganda campaign against the Ukraine.
His war plans against the Ukraine didn’t include a unified European-American front against him, not to speak of most of the rest of the world. He obviously expected Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in the US and the authoritarian path of the Republican Party, already underway before the election of Trump, to stifle any unity, within America and worldwide.
Putin’s ruthless and vicious terrorist presence in the war against the people of Syria must have brought the rise of authoritarian governments in Europe he had hoped for, a reaction to millions of Syrian refugees besieging Europe, which his merciless, terrorist bombing in Syria helped precipitate. The border assaults also helped to foster the divisive Brexit vote of the British people.
Putin must have expected conditions to be top-notch for an eventual re-formulation of the Soviet Union with a full-scale attack against the Ukraine, a huge prize he could quickly achieve. Not getting his expected quick victory, Putin has good reason to pursue a merciless repeat of his Syrian bombing campaign, figuring it would bring victory in the Ukraine.
His vicious bloodlust must be recognized for what it is.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim, “WWIII may have already started” is probably true in terms of Vladimir Putin’s displayed megalomania and, perhaps, an imagined long-range goal of world conquest.
First, he wants to re-establish the Soviet Union after the conquest of the Ukraine. Like Hitler was emboldened by an appeasement he encountered almost a century before, Putin was most-likely expecting a similar appeasement from Biden and Europeans, this out of economic self-interest.
He has also voiced the same kind of resentment Hitler and the German people felt against the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty after WWI. For Putin, it is the humiliating dissipation of the Soviet Union and the treatment of Russia in the aftermath.
If Putin’s threat is not taken seriously, Putin seems capable of the same motivation of payback and revenge as Hitler almost a century before. With dictators, nothing seems to change.
