An absence of transparency leaves room for conjecture relying on indirect evidence. Thus we don’t know when Putin will stop the war. Never, would be my guess.
The whole Russian economy has been reconfigured in a war mode, and swarms of Putin’s cronies depend on perpetual conflict for their further enrichment. Moreover, demobilising several hundred thousand trained killers and releasing them into civilian life will spell a social disaster.
The precedent was set after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan ended in 1989. That was the onset of the so-called ‘Afghan syndrome’, when thousands of demob-happy soldiers failed to integrate into normal life. However, they did integrate seamlessly into criminal gangs, turning Russian cities into Chicago, circa 1930, with shootouts a normal daily occurrence.
The decade the Russians call ‘the roaring 90s’ saw the rise of organised crime fused with the secret police, with the ‘Afghans’ taking care of the muscle end. And the number of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan was half that of the troops involved in the Ukraine.
All things considered, I see little possibility for lasting peace in the region, certainly not while Putin’s regime is still around. When Trump et al. talk about peace through negotiations, they really mean only a temporary ceasefire. Before long Russia would strike again, with the Ukraine or any other former Soviet republic as her target. (Unless, of course, the Russians make good on their threat to bomb London, which on balance I’d rather they didn’t.)
In any case, the smoke signals Putin is sending out suggest he won’t enter into any negotiations that include Zelensky. The Russian dictator and his acolytes keep mouthing lies about Zelensky being an unelected dictator of an illegitimate country, which is par for the course.
Say what you will about, or against, Zelensky (and there’s a lot to say), but he has led his country heroically during the Russian invasion, rallying his people to arms.
I remember him telling his TV audience on 24 February, 2022: “The next time you see me I’ll probably be dead.” And yet he didn’t flee, the way Putin’s quisling Yanukovych did in 2014. Instead he inspired a fightback against overwhelming odds.
It would be incongruous if Putin felt anything other than visceral loathing for Zelensky as the embodiment of Ukrainian independence, which is abhorrent to Russian fascists.
Yet even dictators like Putin can’t just say they detest their enemies and leave it at that. They have to come up with some justification for their hatred, and Putin has focused on the supposed illegitimacy of Zelensky’s tenure.
His propagandists picked up that theme and have been coming with all sorts of variations on it. Fair enough, they are earning their keep. But why are pro-Putin propagandists in Western governments and media repeating the same lies, usually verbatim?
Biden’s and Trump’s administration are united in their underhanded attempts to oust Zelensky. On 14 May, 2024, Anthony Blinken, Biden’s State Secretary, visited Kiev where he insisted that the Ukraine hold presidential elections immediately.
Just a few days ago, Gen. Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for the Ukraine and Russia, repeated that demand. Let’s hold both parliamentary and presidential elections, he said, and then we’ll talk peace.
Since Messrs Blinken and Kellogg clearly believe that Zelensky is no longer electable, they simply echo Putin’s demands, giving credence to his lies. I don’t follow the Ukraine’s domestic politics closely enough to comment on their premise, but their sycophancy to Putin is unconcealable.
The two gentlemen, or rather the US government, ought to be commended on their unwavering attachment to democratic procedure. However, the two linchpins of the anti-Hitler coalition, Britain and the US, didn’t show the same rigour during their war.
Britain held no general election for 10 years between 1935 and 1945. The proper date for it was in 1940, but at that time Hitler’s bombs, mostly Soviet-made, were raining on London. Normal democracy was put on hold. And FDR was elected to four consecutive terms in the White House during roughly the same time.
Legal niceties fell by the wayside too. The US incarcerated, without due process, 120,000 Nisei (ethnically Japanese) Americans, while Britain did the same with Nazi sympathisers and refugees from Germany, including Jews. I wonder how they coexisted in the same internment camps, but I’ll have to read up on that.
So now the US government demands that, with his country at war and martial law in place, Zelensky scrupulously worship at the altar of democracy – something even the countries with a much longer democratic tradition refused to do under similar circumstances.
This is so manifestly absurd that one has to believe the demand is motivated by bad faith and the urge to kowtow to Putin. Next thing you know, the CIA will underwrite a plot to assassinate Zelensky, who in their eyes may resemble Diem.
At least the two gentlemen I’ve mentioned are quite subtle about it. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, can’t be mentioned in the same sentence with subtlety. He repeats Putin’s lies with febrile alacrity and no regard for facts.
Thus, more zealous commentators than I counted 74 boldfaced lies Carlson uttered in his conversation with Piers Morgan. Each one of them comes with an FSB approval stamp.
“The first feature of a dictator is that he is not elected, Zelensky is not elected,” said Carlson, and I wonder if his nose got twice as long as he was speaking.
Zelensky was elected on 21 April 2019, when he received 73 percent of the vote. That sort of majority is usually described as a landslide, but as far as Carlson is concerned anything short of 100 per cent makes Zelensky a dictator.
“He [Zelensky] has murdered his political opponents,” added Carlson. Now that’s a serious accusation that’s crying out for prima facie evidence. Can Tucker kindly name any victims of Zelensky’s beastliness?
He can’t because there aren’t any. The same job would be much easier with Putin’s Russia where political assassination is the ubiquitous political ploy. Putin’s opponents are shot, poisoned, beaten to death, defenestrated, strangled, murdered in prison, and the open season never stops.
In the name of globalism, that type of business is pursued internationally, with numerous hits carried out in Britain, Spain, Germany, France. What does Carlson think about that?
“He [Zelensky] has also banned religious denominations,” insisted that big fat Tucker, referring to the ban on the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox churches under the aegis of the Moscow Patriarchate.
I don’t know whether Carlson is aware that Patriarch Kirill is a lifelong KGB/FSB agent, whose ‘denomination’ has been actively involved in anti-Ukrainian, pro-Putin propaganda. Carlson should exercise his imagination and picture the reaction of Messrs Churchill and Roosevelt if, say, the Lutheran Church had engaged in incessant pro-Nazi agitprop in 1942.
What would they have done? Don’t answer that, just think of those German refugees and Nisei Americans. And Zelensky hasn’t interned any clergy.
“He [Zelensky] has banned a language group,” was how Carlson continued to weave his tissue of lies. I assume he meant Russian, which is at best ignorant and at worst consciously mendacious.
Russian (which is one language, not a ‘group’) was never banned in the Ukraine, and in fact Zelensky himself is a native Russian speaker. As is to be expected in any former colony, an emphasis was placed on the indigenous language in all official communications, but millions of Russophone Ukrainians happily converse in their mother tongue.
I occasionally listen to intercepted radio exchanges among frontline Ukrainian soldiers, and at least half of them are in Russian. Are they ignoring the ban or is Carlson a Putin poodle? You decide.
And then the powerful final chord, synchronised with Hitchens’s noises: “Ukraine had a coup, sponsored by the United States government, the CIA, in 2014.” Hitchens prefers the word ‘putsch’, whose Nazi implications add an emotional pow to the punchy lie. Tucker should take lessons from Peter.
The Ukrainian revolution was a grassroots reaction to the Ukraine’s president selling his country out to Putin. The people demanded independence in fact, not just in name, and they wanted the Ukraine to turn westwards towards Europe.
When Putin’s stooge Yanukovych instead tried to push the country back into Putin’s embrace, the people spontaneously rose in revolt. The ousted puppet (whose CV included convictions for robbery and rape) escaped to Russia, his spiritual motherland. I’ve seen no proof that the CIA sponsored that uprising, but I’ve heard Putin say it hundreds of times.
I’m not often given to reveries, but I do cherish some fleeting images. One of them involves Carlson, Hitchens and other witting or unwitting agents of Putin joining him and his clique in the dock, and then in prison cells.
I know that’ll never happen, but a man must be allowed the odd daydream. What’s life without hope?