Both Vladimir Putin and his wannabe American fanboy?
For the longest time it seemed as if Donald Trump fancied himself a Vladimir Putin knock-off, as if Trump wore a secret WWVD bracelet. Lately, one might interpret the Russian president’s moves in Ukraine through a Trumpian lens. Putin is in a fix, for sure, as is Trump. Is either a reflection for the other?
For Trump, threats and intimidation are reflex. But delay is his go-to move. His battles are fought in courts where he sees time and deep pockets as allies. He fights wars of legal attrition hoping to exhaust his enemies’ ability to fight.
Vladimir Putin’s declared annexation of parts of eastern Ukraine is not a sign of strength, but weakness. Now what? He has deeper pockets than Ukraine, but not a NATO-supported Ukraine. And Ukraine has — call them spiritual — resources Putin’s not-so-formidable army lacks.
Putin thought he could blitz his way to victory over Ukraine’s defenders with “lunkhead masculinity.” Instead, he’s found himself losing a war of attrition. His decision to “annex” areas of Ukraine under his control is a desperation move, a way of upping the ante for NATO countries supporting Ukraine with equipment and ammunition. Somthing to improve his military and political leverage and to make credible his threats to go nuclear, if necessary.
Those threats are failing him, too. They “appear only to have strengthened Western resolve to continue sending weapons to Ukraine,” explains the Washington Post.
Russian allies India and China are “growing uneasy” about Putin’s attempts at building a greater Russia:
“No one knows what Putin will decide to do, no one,” said a European Union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. “But he’s totally in a corner, he’s crazy … and for him there is no way out. The only way out for him is total victory or total defeat and we are working on the latter one. We need Ukraine to win and so we are working to prevent worst case scenarios by helping Ukraine win.”
The goal, the official said, is to give Ukraine the military support it needs to continue to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory, while pressuring Russia politically to agree to a cease-fire and withdrawal, the official said.
The problem is neither his conscription of troops or threats to use nukes will help Putin, says a senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London:
Despite some wild predictions on Russian news shows that the Kremlin would lash out at a Western capital, with London appearing to be a favored target, it is more likely that Moscow would seek to use one of its smaller, tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield to try to gain advantage over Ukrainian forces, said [Franz-Stefan] Gady.
The smallest nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal delivers an explosion of around 1 kiloton, one fifteenth of the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which would inflict massive destruction but on a more limited area.
Because the war is being fought along a vast, 1,500-mile front line, troops are too thinly spread out for there to be an obvious target whose obliteration would change the course of the war. To make a difference, Russia would have to use several nuclear weapons or alternatively strike a major population center such as Kyiv, either of which would represent a massive escalation, trigger almost certain Western retaliation and turn Russia into a pariah state even with its allies, Gady said.
“Even though Putin is dangerous, he is not suicidal, and those around him aren’t suicidal,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe. In that, Putin and Trump align.
Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker:
Again and again, Putin has profited from the application of military force to achieve otherwise unattainable political gains. He came to power by promoting war in the separatist Russian province of Chechnya. He sent Russian troops to Georgia and Syria and, in 2014, to Ukraine. Each time, there were endless rounds of speculation in Western capitals about how to create an “exit ramp” that would finally entice Putin to end his incursion. Putin just kept barrelling down the highway.
So, yes, I’m skeptical when I hear the latest round of “exit ramp” talk. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching Putin all of this time, it’s that he is not one to walk away from a fight or back down while losing—escalation is his game, and by now he is very, very practiced at it. As the Moscow Times put it, in a fascinating piece of reporting from inside the Kremlin, “Putin always chooses escalation.”
Russia expert Fiona Hill tells Glasser she believes we are already fighting a Third World War and simply fail to recognize it:
Moscow’s bogus annexation of more Ukrainian territory seems likely to produce only more Western sanctions—and the possible extension of the war that Putin looks increasingly like he is losing. “The problem is, of course, us misreading him, but also him misreading us,” Hill observed.
Beltway pundits, Democrats, and Republican leaders misread Trump for years. They treated him as a rational actor, an aberrant corrupt politician but essentially sane one. We know Trump will sacrifice averyone around him to save his own skin. WWVD?
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