The largest land war in Europe since 1945 was scheduled to start sometime Sunday or Monday — within hours — according to the consistently breathless cable news coverage that had just trimmed the tentative kickoff from within days.
It was Sunday morning in the United States when Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, told CBS’ Margaret Brennan that Russia was “not trying to take any territory of foreign countries,” and that eastern regions of Ukraine where separatists have been fighting for almost eight years are indeed “part of Ukraine.”
Not 36 hours later, Russian president Vladimir Putin was on global television demonstrating still again why nothing he or his government says can ever be taken at face value. In a nearly hourlong history lecture of equal parts Czar envy and tortured reasoning, Putin eventually got around to explaining that Russia would indeed be lopping off two parts of Ukraine at its eastern extremity, just as it had Crimea in 2014, and that this would begin with the rapid deployment of a heavily armed “peacekeeping” force into both regions.
No one even blinks anymore when Russia says one thing and does the opposite the very next day, as even those with a geopolitical awareness that starts and ends with the Olympics are painfully aware that lying and cheating are official Russian policy. Russian athletes have been stripped of Olympic medals for doping at nearly five times the rate of any other country.
It’s one thing for the International Olympic Committee to persist in its malignant gutlessness and let Russia continue to compete at the risk of poisoning the medal count, but it’s entirely something else for NATO and Western democracies led by the United States to allow the largest country in Europe, a democracy no less, to be invaded by an unabashed autocrat.
The West’s response will be further calibrated in the days ahead, but the realization that it must be severe is already clear in Germany’s decision to shut down Nord Stream 2, the natural gas pipeline out of Russia. The combined cost to Russia of an all-out war in Ukraine and potentially devastating economic sanctions at home could rattle global politics for generations.
“Why, why did we have to be so generous — even some ardent nationalists would not even dream of this — and give those republics (including Ukraine) the right to leave this union without any terms and conditions,” Putin said through an extremely nervous-sounding interpreter Monday night in Moscow. “This is just madness.”
There’s little doubt madness is and was afoot in the long journey to this crossroads, a fine madness Putin quickly ascribed to the notion that the main objective of the Bolsheviks, after the 1917 revolution, “was to stay in power at any cost.”
The plain irony is that Russia has become the beneficiary of this exact strain of madness in the otherwise empty head of Putin’s American lapdog, Donald J. Trump. The 45th president’s performance in Helsinki in 2018 removed any mystery as to his inclinations. It was there that Trump went against his own FBI, his own Justice Department and his own National Security operatives by accepting Putin’s assertion that Russia had not tried to influence on the 2016 U.S. election. “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” said the late Sen. John McCain.
Incapable of feeling shame, Trump went on to help Putin try to weaken NATO, then threaten to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its president announced an investigation of the Bidens. (Trump didn’t much care if there actually was an investigation, just that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy go to a podium somewhere and announce one. On TV, of course.) For that Trump was rightly impeached, but the Senate acquitted him as only one Republican (Mitt Romney) could identify that as an abuse of power. One. Not to worry, he’d be impeached again.
Fortunately for Putin, even as Trump fades into his own aggrieved madness, there are plenty more useful idiots who’ll endorse the Russian autocrat’s anti-American initiatives, most of them employed or deployed by Fox News, the rest garden variety MAGA Republicans who somehow shiver in Trump’s shadow.
Putin and Pals (I’m pitching that as a new Fox News daytime panel) at least spent the first part of the week being skewered by Garry Kasparov, the activist and former chess grandmaster.
“What’s most pathetic is that these Republicans are openly supporting a dictatorship that has attacked America,” Kasparov tweeted. “Putin openly treats the United States as an enemy, and they are doing his bidding in slandering Ukraine, his target.”
And, after Mr. Putin’s speech:
“No one should bother deciphering this garbage. Putin wants conflict because he needs conflict. He must distract from his failures in Russia, destroy any democratic model nearby. He looked around to see if anyone with the power to stop him would use it, and they all declined.”
In America at the start of the new war, you can find a number of polls indicating Republicans have a more favorable opinion of Putin than of Joe Biden.
Madness, I think is the term.
Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Contact mctdirect.com
