Posted on 07/20/2014 1:10:29 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
RUSSIA’S President, Vladimir Putin, the little man with the big stare, has always been in control. It starts with those chameleon eyes and what, at least one observer assumes, must be decades of practice. Does Putin ever blink?
He has never bothered with charm. No need. Newspapers that write the wrong thing? They close. Naughty rock singers? They go to jail. As for Western powers united in condemnation? So what?
Until Thursday afternoon, that is, when a plane fell out of the Ukraine sky and Putin, a master manipulator and (sometimes shirtless) man of action, sensed it at once. A student of history, he recognised a turning point.
The MH17 disaster was a coincidence of timing, a tick over a century to the day since a crazed Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand.
The Archduke’s assassination was terrorism at its clumsiest, a blunder in a heightened time of tension. Comparisons are tempting. Putin seemed to know that the downing of MH17, too, would be a shot “heard around the world”.
He blinked. He had lost control.
For the first time in months, if ever, Putin feigned care for Western attitudes. First, he told US President Barack Obama about the MH17 blast in a (previously scheduled) phone call. There was a cabinet meeting, with a minute of silence (photographed), and his (published) declaration that such acts were “absolutely unacceptable”.
Then, the real work, the kind of shameless propaganda for which Putin owes his popularity at home — despite an economy hurtling into recession — could begin.
He stopped playing at Ivan the Terrible and started playing at Bob the Builder. There must be peace, he proclaimed, despite the many months he had surreptitiously sponsored war.
If his backflip seemed absurd, it also showed the depth of Putin’s dilemma.
As did Ukraine’s decision yesterday to publish a photo of a dead infant in a field. Accompanying it was an accusation against Putin, the glib kind that sticks: “Damn you for centuries.”
By then, as the numbing details grew, Putin had been promising transparencies that conflicted not only with his leadership, but with a personality type that loathes scrutiny or small talk. Putin promised a thorough investigation. Subsequent reports that local military chiefs could not agree to a ceasefire, and therefore allow access for investigators, seemed truer to Putin’s disingenuous styling.
One report says the Russian separatists were using the confusion to destroy incriminating evidence.
For months, Putin had denied connections with Russian separatists. The US, meanwhile, had tightened sanctions against Russia’s biggest companies for those connections — this was the original point of Thursday’s phone call with Obama.
At first, Putin had sought to offload responsibility, to smudge any association between himself and the suspected perpetrators. They are ragtag zealots — some armed with sophisticated weaponry originally designed for World War III, some wielding sticks. They constitute what have been labelled in America as “Russia’s Taliban”.
For Putin, the opening gambit went like this — the Ukrainians were to blame.
If there was no war, he argued, the tragedy would not have happened. No matter, it seemed, that Ukraine broadcast audiotapes, apparently of separatists describing the crash site. The speakers sounded disappointed at an absence of weapons amid the body parts.
No matter, too, that a Russian separatist fighter, Igor Girkin, had apparently imitated drunken sports stars everywhere, and taken to social media to boast of the downed plane. They had been warned, Girkin posted, before someone in his camp thought the message might be best deleted.
GIRKIN had form. In late June, he wrote on social media about acquiring “Buks”, the type of rocket launchers almost certainly responsible for MH17’s destruction. Back in April, Girkin, a figure almost as nebulous as Putin himself, nominated one-third of his fighters as non-Ukrainian: soon afterwards, he said it was 10 per cent. His materialisation at the time — he is thought to be a Russian intelligence officer — bolstered the case for Russian involvement.
Girkin said most of his men had followed from battles in Crimea, which was annexed in March and led to a massive poll surge for Putin. It was only in April, with typical opaqueness, Putin admitted that insurgency had involved Russian troops.
Girkin has a prim moustache and a thirst for nationalist military causes in former
Soviet states. He has been variously described as “wildly Messianic” and “delusional”, and is fond of donning old uniforms to re-enact nationalistic military scenes.
On Friday, The New Yorker’s David Remnick offered views of Putin and Girkin from a former Putin adviser, Gleb Pavlovsky.
The adviser said Putin was no Joseph Stalin, who bent public opinion to his whims by contriving of a healthy nationalist majority against a “pathological” liberal minority.
Putin certainly has strategic interests in Ukraine — a Black Sea warm water port, and Russia’s concerns about a spread of Kiev’s increasingly Western perspective. Yet Pavlovsky spoke of Putin’s continuing menace in Ukraine as a political ploy aimed at a home audience.
“Today, 40 per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine,” the adviser told Remnick.
“Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”
Putin’s problem is that all threads of blame, ultimately, lead to him. On the ground, the troops are considered Putin’s “proxy” fighters, given their ideological bent, regardless of how directly Russia has armed them. He was already isolated politically; earlier this year, Prince Charles dispensed with the usual niceties, and compared Putin’s incursions in Ukraine to the work of Hitler.
If, as assumed, the MH17 attack was a deliberate strike on a mistaken target, the argument goes Russia should never have allowed such unprofessional troops, with primitive radar systems, access to such sophisticated weaponry.
After all, this was the third plane strike in recent days — the first two were against Ukraine military craft. Michael Desch, from University of Notre Dame, argues that in such circumstances, such a tragedy might have been anticipated.
Obama offered a surprisingly muted opening response. Other American representatives openly assumed the separatists launched the MH17 attack. They lined up to denounce Putin for reneging on de-escalation agreements.
Senator Lindsay Graham hinted of a wide sense of residual bitterness.
“I don’t even need the airliner incident,” he said. “I would go ahead and arm the Ukrainian military so that they could better arm themselves, and I would push the international community to get behind the new round of sanctions. (Putin) doesn’t need to shoot down an airliner to be in my bad graces.”
Putin would be mindful of the consequences of the 1983 shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, when 269 passengers died. That error upset the Soviet Union’s Cold War priorities.
His Ukraine ambitions appear to be scuttled, lest he buck a torrent of condemnation from Europe, the US, as well as Australia. He chose to ignore sanctions from the start of this year. The tragedy of MH17 redefines him and his plans.
From now on, every time his government closes a business, or is accused of murdering a journalist, he will stand to be scrutinised with an attention he has never before received.
The chameleon has lost his camouflage. For now, he is being told to end a war. As the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday: “This isn’t a neighbourhood autocrat trying to redress local grievances. He’s a would-be czar ... This has been obvious for years for those willing to look.”
PUTIN is due to attend the G20 summit in Brisbane in November. Those who encounter him will be surprised to find that, like so many powerful men, he is surprisingly short.
He bows to his country’s former greatness, and the little favours his ancestral history turned his way. Putin’s grandfather, a chef, served Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin. In his office, Putin sometimes turns to the collection of Stalin’s books. He shows off the red crayon scribbles in the margins to visitors.
Putin has wielded superpowers for decades, but little is known about his private pursuits — he once admitted, begrudgingly, a fondness for Brahms and the fact he does not do email. His spy past is credited for his air of secrecy. When a reporter asked about his marriage in 2008, her newspaper closed soon afterwards. Such methods are effective; Putin has two daughters, but no photos have been published of them as adults.
Members of Pussy Riot, an all-girl rock band, were jailed in 2012 for subversiveness (among other things, their lyrics were critical of Putin), despite the worldwide bemusement. Gays are bad and empire-building is good; Putin has never cared much about world opinion, certainly not when populist politics play well to traditionalist voters.
“I think there’s going to be hell to pay,” said John McCain, assuming Russian-backed involvement. Other Congress representatives spoke of acts of “war” and “terror”. Putin, much like the Malaysians discovered with MH370, cannot control the intensity or direction of the worldwide media gaze.
He is the first leader to extend Russia’s borders since World War II. In 2007, he lamented to Time magazine the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a “tragedy”, mainly because 25 million ethnic Russians were stranded in “foreign” lands.
In the same interview, he expressed suspicion foreigners cast Russians as savages so they could better meddle in its internal affairs.
Now, internal savageries have exploded as a global scandal.
Russia’s chameleon leader has lunged for territories with a sudden and sharp flicks, much like the reptile gathers food with its tongue. His gaze, it seems, will now be forced to cast further than the aloof disregard he has normally shown for realms beyond his troubled patch.
Putin’s snappy response suggests a keen awareness a single rocket launch on Thursday on Thursday afternoon could be empire changing. As was a bullet fired by a crazed nationalist in a Sarajevo street a century ago.
And FDR let the Russians take a pounding at the hands of the Germans and without that strategy, the Russians would have gone deep into W Europe after the war.
Don’t bash the Bieb.
Ohhh wait until that son of a chef sees that one —
He doesn’t need to personally order you dead. He just lets his fanboys take care of that at their own time and pleasure. That’s the big analysis I have come too. You can criticize Putin all you want, but don’t expect the dogs in his home to be hospitable, or expect him to have the dogs on leashes.
That’s the sad time of day when your enemy has more discipline within his own house than you do.
.....And right now with America being very weak it will only get worse the next two and a half years.
Putin has nothing to fear, with wimpy Obummer in charge. In 1983, we had Reagan who went all out against the Soviets and bankrupted them by beefing up our military and creating anti-missile defenses. Now we have Obummer who does the opposite, tearing apart our military while funding the Russians space and missile technology. Different scenario now.
You’re talking about a four-time elected president of Russia. Do some Russians dislike him? Sure they do, but his popularity is borderline diety with the Russian populace, and most of his dissent that gets recorded is the kinds of people we would view as nuts. With the Russians, Putin has a very good PR campaign. And what’s sad is that he actually runs the opposing team in a fairly orderly manner, while our nation is controlled by a college fraternity/sorority packed into one.
....Or that in two years time Americans will get the “wake up and smell the coffee” moment and vote in better and stronger leadership for thw WH.
Actually, Stalin signed a Pact with Hitler in 1939. Hitler stabbed him in the back in 1941, though they both invaded Poland in 1939. Stalin provided trainloads of war supplies to Hitler right up to days before Hitler invaded Russia in ‘41. Churchill and others warned Stalin, but Stalin didn’t believe them. Hitler did kill many people in Eastern Europe and Russia in a genocidal conquest. FDR, as soon as he could, aided Russia with all types of war equipment. Russia did go deep into Western Europe after the war; they were in Berlin, after all, Czech (remember 1968?)and Hungary (remember 1956). It was a communist ploy to call all of Central and Western Europe Eastern Europe without regard to geography or historic reality. This was done to make Soviet/Russian control over these nations seem all the more natural. But the nations held by the Soviets behind the Iron Curtain were mostly central European ones. Yet Marxist and commies called the captive nations Eastern Europe. Liberal Democrats did too. I see nothing crafty, prescient, or cunning in FDR’s policies. He was if anything the most naïve US President whoever dealt with the Soviets or “Uncle Joe” as he called the butcher Stalin. Roosevelt was very much like Obama in the sense that both of them believed their own charisma would make criminal tyrants swoon to them and bend their ideology.
In light of the recent Malaysia Airlines tragedies (one missing, one brought down by the Russians) I completed a project I began some time ago to remind us of an earlier Russian involved murder of hundreds of innocents. Will someone please remind obozo that it’s still a jungle out there!
(It’s a short 8 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgCIrUeuh0&list=UUFDlhK80EdO28R-iGTXiGaw
That's the Soviet propaganda version of WWII. The truth is D-Day was a massive operation that could not have been achieved any sooner than it was. We fought the Germans where we could as soon as we could, starting in North Africa and Italy. We also had to put massive resources into the Battle of the Atlantic, and the air offensive against Germany (not to mention Japan). And the reality is that almost exactly half of Germany's armed forces were deployed on the Western Front, from Greece to Norway, from late 1942 on. We also provided the Soviets with aid, especially 2.5 ton trucks. Without those trucks the huge Soviet offensives of 43-45 would not have been possible.
Word is, Putin will invade Ukraine if the final round of sanctions go through.
Since the West will not use military force including nuclear weapons, and Russia is willing to undergo that privation, who do people think will win ?
Putin knows that the bottom line is military force. Diplomacy is for weaklings. So until we ramp up and get serious with our military, he will get away with what he wants. First issues - Closing the Border and Missile Defense for America. Support Poland and Western Europe. And STOP Supporting Terrorists. It always bites you in the behind.
Putin/his successor's legacy is in a good position; especially due to the US military's/Administrative obsessiveness in promoting vaginas/pigment/contrarian ideologies rather than reason and time tested measures.
The same goes for who the electorate pick to represent them. The moderates today who currently are the best we can get, were the poison yesterday. We continue to pick destructive ideologues which does not help either.
Well, Museums are not churches, which was the original comment by someone else.
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