Today, we’ll discuss a paradoxical question: Why won’t Putin stop the war right now?
Let’s be honest, Putin and his aides don’t give a hoot about Kyiv, Odesa, Mariupol, and Donetsk.
If you know anything about these people, you can’t take some of the Western analysts’ commentary seriously.
Like, Putin has read philosopher Ivan Ilyin cover to cover.
He was inspired by philosopher Alexander Dugin, and now he’s yearning to revive the Russian Empire.
The reality is way more jejune.
The rationale behind this war was to extend his tenure and tighten up his grip on power.
But 17 months in, it’s not the war or unattainable victories but urgent peace that’s capable of keeping him in office.
There’s a parable about a doe. Whenever you adopt a doe, your livelihood plummets,
and the best-case scenario is for you to just return to the status quo.
The happiness coming from the fact that your doe has been taken away from you is overwhelming.
The same goes for this war.
Since Putin considers himself a history buff, he could’ve picked up on one uncanny pattern.
History suggests that none of Russia’s “quick and victorious” wars were either quick or victorious.
The Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Winter War, the Afghan War,
and the Chechen War all ended up as brutal and inglorious carnage.
But there was something else.
The best news for Russians has always been the announcement of peace, not toughing it out for the win.
The longer the war took, the less interest there was in the terms of a peaceful treaty.
The joy from people coming home and the country returning to a normal life was so strong,
nobody cared what they’d achieved (typically, not much).
There’s nothing to suggest that anyone was pissed by the Soviet troops withdrawing from Afghanistan winless.
No one will even recall why they invaded the country in the first place, even though
the vet generation is still alive.
But the country was unanimous in its elation over the fact that the soldiers had returned home
and that they no longer had to hide their conscription-age sons in the basements.
The best election campaign gift and the best shot at a reelection will be the reverse of Feb. 24, 2022.
The endless convoys of personnel and equipment leaving the occupied provinces and heading toward Russia.
No more deaths, no more mobilization scare, no more hatemongering on TV. Just a routine life.
The extent of people’s gratitude and enthusiasm on the heels of that decision
will be beyond anyone’s imagination.
Hey, even your pro-war estimates and official polls show that over 50% of citizens will accept
any decision you make, whether it’s taking Kyiv or surrendering Donetsk.
These people go, “Do what you please, just leave us the heck alone!”
What stops you from pulling out the troops and sending them back to Russia
to solemn drumroll and a live stream of mainstream media?
It’s hard to figure out who will mind this call.
Who are they scared of? Is it the jingoistic pro-war crowd of their own making?
Is it those who can’t string a sentence in Russian and yet have amassed a thousands-strong
following by feeding them with hate stories?
You’ve already seen what they are worth and how unpopular they are.
The law enforcement publicly nabbed former FSB colonel, Igor Girkin, the instigator of the Donbas war,
that was almost in compliance with the International Criminal Court.
How did his supporters react? Out of an almost 800,000-strong following,
a couple dozen showed up at his arraignment.
The rest of the pro-war social media crowd, though, flinched at the first sign of trouble.
A single picture of Igor Girkin in a courtroom glass cage was enough to shut up radical patriots
and stop them from trashing the military and political leadership.
That’s the level of fearlessness those truth-seekers have shown.
The war is far from over. They still have the audience. What will happen once both are things of the past?
Here’s a likely scenario.
They’ll be facing the fate of those dumb enough to buy into the Russian Spring tall tales from nine years back.
They’ll return to their cramping homes and keep whining from their decrepit armchairs,
waxing nostalgic about the heroic legacy to an audience of a couple hundred fellow pathetic individuals.
OFF-RAMPS
Setting up a legal framework for a potential retreat may seem like a problem, even a dead-end.
They’ll have to leave the lands Russia has already claimed.
Do they amend the Constitution yet again and thus attest to their defeat?
In reality, there’s no need to amend anything. Things like that have already been done.
The city of Kherson is a Russian municipality, as per your laws.
In Russia’s official and government-mandated databases, Kherson is part of the Kherson Region,
which is, in turn, part of Russia.
This ghost city has featured prominently in Russia’s official paperwork for almost a year.
Moreover, the same is true of Zaporizhzhia that’s still out of the Russian army’s reach.
Yet, the city of Zaporizhzhia was officially logged into Russian databases,
with street names that are at odds with Russian propaganda.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s been almost a year that Russia has had virtual borders and cities
that exist as part of this country only on paper.
New laws are adopted, and various official decisions are made regarding them.
Russia’s unified index of companies has a whopping number of businesses registered in Kherson.
You’ll be remiss if you don’t expect them to be taxed even next year.
Here’s a Kherson-based limited-liability company, with a TIN and other legal documentation in place.
Here’s its address. What prevents you from demanding tax reports from them?
What prevents you from scaling this practice to all of the occupied Ukrainian provinces
that you’re going to vacate?
Arrange the administrations of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions as well as the so-called DPR
and LPR in a Moscow business center and create hundreds of new jobs for your kids, mistresses,
their offspring, and mistresses of your offspring.
And all these people will be hard at work renaming the cities,
adopting long-term growth policies and urban improvement plans,
and denouncing the crimes of the Kyiv regime.
A year ago, I would’ve said it was unfeasible.
You can’t just erase the memory of purportedly Russian cities, towns,
and entire regions that Russia has no control over.
But you’ve proven it wrong. You didn’t even bother to have recorded your territorial losses on paper.
You can live in pure abstraction.
Granted, Russia can keep printing new maps and having its databases
where its borders don’t mesh well with the internationally recognized ones. So be it.
The characterization of this process alone may seem totally nonsensical. But that’s the whole point.
The public doesn’t want to hear a word of the bloody and pointless war you started, much less about the life
and times of the Russian city of Kherson.
Undoubtedly, the same reaction will be exhibited toward other cities in eastern Ukraine that you’ll leave.
It’s just that the real border with Ukraine will be somewhere within the virtually drawn Russian borders.
Nobody cares. After all, Yandex maps show no borders whatsoever as if the world had already been swept
by the long-coveted global revolution and Communism.
An even simpler solution is referring to these lands as “temporarily occupied.”
Alternatively, don’t mention them at all, for that matter.
Oblivion and nationwide amnesia appear to be something you deal in effectively.
In a couple of years, everything will be ancient history.
You’ll re-amend the Constitution, and it’ll enshrine child care and elderly care,
and honor the memory of the Eastern Front of WW2.
A tiny amendment will be the exclusion of four regions.
It won’t be noticed by anyone except a handful of political scientists.
Crimea is worth a separate conversation. Of course, it’s another occupied Ukrainian province.
But both de jure and de facto, it’s been part of Russia for almost a decade now.
This problem won’t fade into oblivion. It needs to be settled.
But the odds are, it won’t happen while the Russian troops are pulling out of the rest of Ukraine.
And maybe not on Putin’s watch, either.
There won’t be any strikes on Crimea provided that the Russian forces commit
to leaving the remainder of the occupied provinces.
To be completely honest with you, you have no better option.
The longer this war drags on, the more people it draws in, the higher the death and casualty tolls,
and the more obvious the economic issues, the harder it’ll be for you to maintain the illusion of normalcy.
True, you’ve struck a deal with Prigozhin. But the very fact of the mutiny was no small matter.
16 months into the war, you got an unequivocal black swan flying in your direction.
You were taught a harsh lesson: you can’t be honing unprosecutable killing skills in 100s of thousands,
pardoning 10s of thousands of inmates, and distributing weapons all over the place while overlooking
the needs of your own army without any blowback.
What’s the plan now? Extend the number of those involved to millions?
Do you want millions of unclothed and unfed people sitting in your trenches?
Do you want an entire class of resentful armed people on your hands?
If you want to stay in power, you’ll still need to end this war.
And the odds of winning aren’t something worth dwelling upon now.
There’ll be no wins. Worse still, nobody needs them.
The only thing worth contemplating is the scope of damage you’ll have to deal with after the war is over.
In 2014, Georgian statesman and reformer Kakha Bendukidze said of Ukrainian reforms that they weren’t
about a richer or poorer future for Ukraine.
The key thing, he argued, was who would be undertaking them: Ukraine or Vladimir Putin.
Now you’re faced with a similar plight. There’s no question if this war will end.
The question is: Will it be you who’s going to end it?
At the moment, you still haven’t run out entirely of legitimacy and support.
Even in terms of the Russian revolutionary movement, Bolsheviks were a fringe faction.
But they were the only ones who flouted the terms of a peaceful treaty but just advocated for one.
And as of the fall months of 1917, three long years into WW1, this was enough
for people to overlook the rest of their political platform.
The ending of this war and the withdrawal of your forces from the occupied provinces will be historically inevitable.
It’s just up to you to either fall victim to this process or lead the charge.
True, you’re still concerned about saving face. It seems to you that you can’t afford a surrender.
But the truth is, no one cares about your face. No one’s looking at it.
There’ll be no “surrender” because for it to take place, you need to have high expectations of winning
and large-scale support for the continuation of this war.
But right now, the only thing most people are preoccupied with is for the khaki-clad government officials
to stop impinging on their private lives.
Should the government make this call, they’ll be able to ride the crest of this momentum
and cash in on people’s joy to breeze through the election.
NO BLACK SWANS
The biggest question is: What are you expecting when you refuse to stop the war right now?
Where are you expecting any help from?
Pundits claim you’re banking on the U.S. presidential election.
Like, we’ll hang on for a while until the day Trump stages a comeback to the White House
and— what happens next is unclear, though.
Just as a reminder, this is at least the third miracle you’re counting on.
Neither the winter in Europe nor the 2022 U.S. midterm elections have brought you any relief.
But let’s consider your third gamble when it comes to hope.
Your game plan is to gamble your entire regime and existence on Donald Trump winning the U.S. election,
an event with heads-or-tails probability.
At any rate, should he win the election, Trump won’t be sworn in earlier than Jan. 2025.
By that time, the war in Ukraine will have been almost three years in.
Given the current rates, the death toll will be north of 150K.
But what will happen after your gamble pays off and Trump will reassume office 35 months into the war?
His whole rhetoric revolves around national security and appeals to working-class households in rural America.
If your logic is anything to go by, you’re expecting Trump to address the public, saying,
“Dear Lockheed Martin workers building HIMARS systems for Ukraine, folks,
we’re canceling your orders and laying you off.
We want to pally up with the country that threatens to nuke the hell out of us.” Is that what it is?
Let’s grant it for the sake of the argument. Suppose the Trump you’ve dreamed up does win the election.
Suppose it’s okay to bet your future on the unpredictable U.S. voters and the image of Trump you’ve conjured up.
It’s still 18 months away.
Over the last 18 months, the Kerch bridge was bombed twice, the drones hit the Kremlin,
and you had to resort to a mobilization drive.
Even a horde of mercenaries was a hundred miles away from hanging you in downtown Moscow.
Do you really think you have the time to wait for the miracles you’re banking on?
Are you expecting the next 18 months to be a walk in the park?
Just get real. The war will end. The Russian troops will pull out of the occupied Ukrainian provinces.
There’s no alternative option.
You won’t be able to retain control over the foreign territory despite the resistance
of the international coalition making up half of the world’s GDP.
Moreover, this country’s army is committed to retaking these territories,
and local residents are hoping to see you ousted.
There’s no way you can successfully occupy them. You’ll have to leave anyway.
But today, you’ll have a chance to do it without losing power.
Later, you may even get away with it and remain at the helm. Maybe you won’t. But you still have a shot.
Many people will stay alive to boot. The miracle isn’t on the cards. You won’t make up for the losses.
But right now, you can still limit the damage.
The only real question is if it’s going to happen with or without you in power.
Vladimir Putin and your associates, I don’t feel like dishing out useful tips to you.
It would be great if you persisted in your fundamental stupidity
and went with the war that would be your undoing.
The trouble is, it will claim 10s, even 100s of thousands of lives. You won’t be pitied, but they will.
Put your guns on the ground and roll back.
People having to put up with your faces in high sinecures a couple more years is better
than people dying for the speediest removal thereof.
See you tomorrow!