Can the World Survive Putin’s Well Intentioned Mistake?
Death Can Be the Unintended Consequence of Good Intentions
Paul Craig Roberts
Yesterday on Canadian Prepper Nate and I discussed the dangers in Putin’s patience with an ever-widening war and the puzzle that Putin prefers the risk of these dangers to quickly winning the war.
There is no question that the war has greatly widened. The first widening of the war occurred from the increase in capability of the weapons supplied by the West to the West’s Ukrainian proxy. These weapons that the West assured would never be sent, such as long-range missiles, were sent. The missiles and drones supplied by the West to Ukraine widened a conflict initially confined to Donbas, a former Russian province, to all of Russia. Russian oil production and refining facilities and oil storage depots have been damaged and destroyed. Russian civilians including school children and vacationers have been killed, airports disrupted, and waiting lines and higher prices for gasoline have inconvenienced the population. Long-range weapons have been used to attack the Russian strategic bombing fleet and Putin’s home. The war has moved from the Donbas battlefield to deep within Russia herself.
Putin’s response has been to deny that the attacks on Russia are part of the war. He calls them terrorist acts and distinguishes them from the war which he confines to Donbas. It is delusional not to realize that the war has moved from Donbas to Russia herself.
The false narrative that Putin has constructed has convinced Europe that there is no risk in provoking Russia. Both the British and the Germans openly supply long-range weapons, useless for the Donbas battlefield, to Ukraine where they are provided with US and UK guidance technology to their targets inside Russia. For some time European leaders have been urging preparation for war with Russia. Two formerly neutral European countries have joined NATO in alliance against Russia, and two European countries have rescinded their long-term policy and announced that they will host US nuclear missiles on their territory. While Putin’s policy remains “trust in Trump,” Trump has cleared the transfer of Turkey’s attack weapons to Ukraine, thus supplying Ukraine with more long range capability.
In view of the actual easily documented facts, how does Putin get away with pretending that the only war is in Donbas where the taking of long-deserted villages and settlements is evidence that Russia is winning?
On August 19 Putin acknowledged that Ukrainian strikes on Russian industrial facilities were causing damage but claimed that they have not produced “critical consequences.” https://www.rt.com/russia/644435-zakharova-warns-retalation-ukraione/
Putin left “critical consequences” undefined, and he did not say at what point the continuing damage becomes a critical consequence of his never-ending war.
Yesterday Gilbert Doctorow cited official Russian sources that Russia is importing diesel fuel to alleviate the shortages inside Russia resulting from the US-guided Ukrainian attacks. https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/russia-in-now-importing-diesel-fuel?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1203055&post_id=211987309&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=dx5km&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email Yet Putin still trusts Trump. Putin still refuses to acknowledge the strikes as an expansion of the war far from the Donbas front. If Putin acknowledges that Russia is actually at war with the West, he would have to respond, and he doesn’t want to.
Gilbert Doctorow maintains, I think correctly, that a pusillanimous Putin has destroyed Russian deterrence, because Putin’s refusal to enforce his own “red lines” has convinced the West that he will not fight. The West continues to embarrass Russia in hopes that it will undermine Putin and lead to his replacement. The West thinks that a willing Western puppet will take his place, but more likely Putin’s replacement would be a Russian nationalist.
The point I have made for some years now is that Putin has no war plan for victory. The Kremlin describes Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian facilities as “retaliation for Ukrainian strikes against civilians.” https://www.rt.com/russia/644435-zakharova-warns-retalation-ukraione/
Tit for tat is not a war plan. It is a never-ending scenario.
The Russian foreign ministry shares Putin’s inability to acknowledge reality. Here is the foreign ministry’s latest:
“Russia does not prefer escalation, but will continue to retaliate to Ukraine’s attacks on civilians and infrastructure, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned. In an interview with Izvestia published on Thursday, Zakharova accused Kiev of showing ‘complete unwillingness to negotiate’ while stepping up terrorist attacks against Russia’s civilian population and infrastructure.” https://www.rt.com/russia/644435-zakharova-warns-retalation-ukraione/
We want to negotiate, says the formerly hardline Zakharova, but the Ukrainians are making us fight. The “war plan” is limited to retaliation.
This is hardly an indication that shows Russia to be a dangerous enemy to cultivate.
Is there any explanation for Pusillanimous Putin? The one that I have offered, one that speaks well of Putin in a way, is that Putin hoped to use the conflict with the West via Ukraine to settle wider and more important matters than the conflict with Ukraine. My suggestion is that Putin hoped to use negotiations about the conflict to resolve not merely the conflict but a wider and more important issue–the conflict that the West brought into the West’s relationship with Russia. Putin hoped to use the Ukrainian negotiations to negotiate a mutual security pact between Russia and the West. This was what Putin and Lavrov were trying to do from December 2021-February 2022. Washington, NATO, and the EU refused, because while Putin relied on the Minsk Agreement, the West built a strong Ukrainian force to invade the independent Donbas republics, massacre resistance, and return these former Russian provinces to Ukraine where the Russian culture and language would be suppressed. It was Putin’s inability to stop this diplomatically that forced Russia’s military intervention, an intervention for which Russia was unprepared.
Everything I have written in this article is easily substantiated. Yet none of this information is part of the foreign policy discussion. It is excluded, because it does not support the false narrative. So where does this leave us?
It leaves us with a conflict spinning out of control due to Putin’s pusillanimous behavior and miscalculation and to Washington’s policy of US hegemony. Washington’s belief in the reality of its agenda of hegemony has gained strength from Putin’s pusillanimous submissiveness. The Russian leader won’t even admit that he is at war. He hides the war by calling it “acts of terrorism.” This is not a position that the West will take seriously.
Myself, Gilbert Doctorow, and John Helmer agree that the only way to avoid a much wider war, probably a nuclear one, is for Putin to tell the Russian military that he wants a war plan for victory to be achieved in four weeks. Once the war is over, it cannot continue to widen. The impact on Europe of a Russian iron fist would be dramatic. It could even unravel NATO.