Putin, Not Russia

The Russian president seeks to rebuild the Soviet Empire, or at least increase his sphere of influence

Vladimir Putin hates us; always has. I’m not a hater, and I won’t go so far as to return the sentiment. Besides, I love the Russian people. My maternal grandparents grew up in the Soviet sphere and encouraged me to take Russian in high school. Just because I was totally lost and richly deserved my final failing grade, didn’t mean I didn’t appreciate what I did understand. Russian (and German, Yiddish, and Polish) were spoken around the house. I once asked my grandmother why she knew so many languages. She said, “Vell, dahlink, you never knew who was going to be at the door.”

But I digress. The point is it’s okay to love the Russian people and intensely, deeply, not love the former KGB officer and current klepto-thug who runs the place. The home of Fabergé and Tolstoy hasn’t given the world much in the recent past. They went nuclear because we shared, wittingly and unwittingly, the research that became the atom bomb. Sputnik was already an ancient accomplishment at the turn of the century. They have hackers, sure. Reverse engineers who can tear apart your work and use it against you, as in the ransom and larcenous schemes they launch on us, and but they do not make anything on their own that is worth owning.

What’s left for Putin is pride and pressure. He can put the screws to Europe by shutting down oil exports, but only at great cost to his own economy. Whether he’s the scorpion who stings the frog carrying him across the rapids, securing both their deaths in the bargain, or whether his shrewdness can overwhelm his stinging nature, we are yet to see.

A retired Army colonel of my acquaintance thinks he’s seen this movie before, and that the puppeteers are actually the generals in the Russian Army. (He has similar thoughts about China’s President Xi and the People’s Republic Army.)

Fiona Hill, the Russia advisor to President George W. Bush and Barack Obama had this to say in a recent op-ed in the New York Times: “Mr. Putin can act as he chooses, when he chooses. Barring ill health, the United States will have to contend with him for years to come…Getting out of the current crisis requires acting, not reacting. The United States needs to shape the diplomatic response and engage Russia on the West’s terms, not just Moscow’s.”

Mostly, he wants us out of Europe, and Ms. Hill intimates, wants to humiliate us the way he feels Russia was humiliated when, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Moscow had to withdraw troops and missiles from the Western edge of the old Soviet Union. That’s why, experts assert, he’s threatening to ship hypersonic missiles to Cuba and/or Venezuela, and is histrionic about our forces still being in Japan. Red herrings and distractions all.

We are, quite smartly, taking the bat out of his hands by revealing intelligence that he intends to attack, and that an attack will likely follow Russian skullduggery intended to provide a reason for their tanks and troops to roll. Any scenario in which he feels constrained is a winning one for Ukraine and the West.

A word about cyber defense because, as a Royal Australian Navy officer reminded me, nations always prepare for the last war, and are never ready for the next one. What, I asked does the next one look like, and he said it begins in cyberspace, and is fought tactically by remote and unmanned weapons.

Putin’s timing is no accident, and it couldn’t be better. We are faced with violent right wing groups that hope to inspire a new civil war. The Russians know we have our hands full here following the Big Lie that animates a significant portion of what used to be the Republican Party, an attack on the Capitol and democracy itself, and as we’ll see in March in a Federal courthouse in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the trial of the paramilitary militiamen who planned the kidnapping of Governor Gretchen Whitmer for her desire to keep her citizens safe from Covid.

At the U.N. on January 31st, Russians—with a straight face—said we are the cause of the tension over Ukraine, not the 130,000 troops they have surrounding the sovereign nation. They’ve either taken a rhetoric class from the King of Projection, or the Former Guy learned it from them.

Putin is going nowhere. He’s enriched himself beyond the dreams of avarice, and should he ever leave office, he’ll spend the rest of his life in a gulag, if they don’t poison him first—an outcome rich with irony.

He’s winning on a couple of very important, very modern fronts: social media and cyber. We need to get in the game.

©2022 Jon Sinton