The disaster scenario is
now underway: Unless Vladimir Putin has a change of
heart or can be deterred by
the West, he appears willing
to kill as many people as necessary and destroy as much
of Ukraine’s infrastructure as
necessary to erase Ukraine as
a free independent state and
culture and wipe out its leadership. This scenario could
lead to war crimes the scale
of which has not been seen in
Europe since the Nazis.
The wired, globalized
world has never had to deal
with a leader accused of this
level of war crimes whose
country has a landmass spanning 11 time zones, is one of
the world’s largest oil and gas
providers and possesses the
biggest arsenal of nuclear
warheads of any nation.
Every day that Putin refuses to stop we get closer to
the gates of hell. With each
TikTok video and cellphone
shot showing Putin’s brutality, it will be harder and
harder for the world to look
away. But to intervene risks
igniting the first war in the
heart of Europe involving nuclear weapons. And to let Putin reduce Kyiv to rubble,
with thousands of dead —
the way he conquered
Aleppo and Grozny — would
allow him to create a European Afghanistan, spilling
out refugees and chaos.
Putin doesn’t have the
ability to install a puppet
leader in Ukraine and just
leave him there: A puppet
would face a permanent insurrection. So, Russia needs
to permanently station tens
of thousands of troops in
Ukraine to control it — and
Ukrainians will be shooting
at them every day.
I wish Putin was just motivated by a desire to keep
Ukraine out of NATO; his appetite has grown far beyond
that. Putin is in the grip of
magical thinking: As Fiona
Hill, one of America’s premier Russia experts, said in
an interview published Monday by Politico, he believes
that there is something
called “Russky Mir,” or a
“Russian World”; that Ukrainians and Russians are “one
people”; and that it is his
mission to engineer “regathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that
belonged at some point to
the Russian tsardom.”
To realize that vision, Putin
believes that it is his right
and duty to challenge what
Hill calls “a rules-based system in which the things that
countries want are not taken
by force.” And if the U.S. and
its allies attempt to get in Putin’s way — or try to humiliate him the way they did
Russia at the end of the Cold
War — he is signaling that he
is ready to out-crazy us. Or,
as Putin warned the other
day before putting his nuclear force on high alert, anyone who gets in his way
should be ready to face “consequences they have never
seen” before. Add to this the
mounting reports questioning Putin’s state of mind and
you have a terrifying cocktail.
The second scenario is
that somehow the Ukrainian
military and people are able
to hold out long enough
against the Russian blitzkrieg, and that the economic
sanctions start deeply
wounding Putin’s economy,
so that both sides feel compelled to accept a dirty compromise. Its rough contours
would be that in return for a
cease-fire and the withdrawal
of Russian troops, Ukraine’s
eastern enclaves now under
de facto Russian control
would be formally ceded to
Russia, while Ukraine would
explicitly vow never to join
NATO. Meanwhile, the U.S.
and its allies would agree to
lift all recently imposed economic sanctions on Russia.
This scenario remains unlikely because it would require Putin to basically admit
that he was unable to achieve
his vision of reabsorbing
Ukraine into the Russian
motherland, after paying a
huge price in terms of his
economy and the deaths of
Russian soldiers. Moreover,
Ukraine would have to formally cede part of its territory
and accept that it was going
to be a permanent no man’s
land between Russia and the
rest of Europe. It would also
require everyone to ignore
the lesson already learned:
Putin can’t be trusted to leave
Ukraine alone.
Finally, the least likely scenario but the one that could
have the best outcome is
that the Russian people
demonstrate as much bravery and commitment to their
own freedom as the Ukrainian people have shown to
theirs, and deliver salvation
by ousting Putin from office.
Many Russians must be
starting to worry that as long
as Putin is their present and
future leader, they have no
future. Thousands are taking
to the streets to protest Putin’s insane war. They’re doing this at the risk of their
own safety. And though too
soon to tell, their pushback
does make you wonder if the
so-called fear barrier is being
broken, and if a mass movement could eventually end
Putin’s reign.
Even for Russians staying
quiet, life is suddenly being
disrupted in ways small and
large. And then there is the
new “Putin tax” that every
Russian will have to pay indefinitely for the pleasure of
having him as their president. I am talking about the
effects of the mounting sanctions being imposed on Russia by the civilized world.
On Monday, the Russian
central bank had to keep the
Russian stock market closed
to prevent a panicked meltdown and was forced to raise
its benchmark interest rate
in one day to 20% from 9.5%
to encourage people to hold
rubles. Even then the ruble
nose-dived by about 30%
against the dollar — it’s now
worth less than 1 U.S. cent.
For all of these reasons I
have to hope that at this
very moment there are some
very senior Russian intelligence and military officials,
close to Putin, who are meeting in some closet in the
Kremlin and saying out loud
what they all must be thinking: Either Putin has lost a
step as a strategist during his
isolation in the pandemic or
he is in deep denial over how
badly he has miscalculated
the strength of Ukrainians,
America, its allies and global
civil society at large.
If Putin goes ahead and
levels Ukraine’s biggest cities
and its capital, Kyiv, he and
all of his cronies will never
again see the London and
New York apartments they
bought with all their stolen
riches. Instead, they will all
be locked in a big prison
called Russia — with the
freedom to travel only to
Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North
Korea and China, maybe.
Either they collaborate to
oust Putin or they will all
share his isolation cell. The
same for the larger Russian
public. I realize that this last
scenario is the most unlikely
of them all, but it is the one
that holds the most promise
of achieving the dream that
we dreamed when the Berlin
Wall fell in 1989 — a Europe
whole and free, from the British Isles to Vladivostok.
— Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, March 1, 2022
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