"A Pity They Both Can't Lose": Why Zelensky & Putin Must Fall & So, Too, The Russian and Ukrainian Oligarchs
How The Civilized World Wins From the Russian-Ukraine Conflict
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“It’s a pity they both can’t lose,” replied Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and future Theranos advisor, when asked about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
I confess to feeling somewhat similarly about the Ukraine-Russian conflict currently underway. My girlfriend and others tell me I should express the usual sympathies for the death of civilians in Ukraine, and I do. Consider that expressed. Obviously no one likes to see innocent lives lost in any conflict and Ukraine is no different.
But our duty is to explain how leaders think and predict how they might act. Our concern first and foremost is toward the American interest. Someone has to care about it and it might as well be us.
We’ve hitherto explored why Russia had to attack Ukraine and how Ukraine is a mob state neither deserving of respect nor support so long as its leader is backed by Ihor Kholomoisky.
I reject the facile and frankly stupid Anne Appelbaum view of autocracy vs. democracy. To my mind, the democracy vs. autocracy frame seems awfully familiar to the “with us or against us” frame that led to so much misery over the last twenty years. The 1980s called and they’d like their foreign policy back, thank you. No more Manichean silliness.
No, our frame is far more predictive: the three countries. They are AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, and America) vs. Greater Russia vs. China.
We pay attention to what the great powers do and not what they say. In fact, we seldom pay attention to what they say at all. Actions, the cliché goes, speak louder than words.
No less an eminence than our current director of CIA — William Burns — has argued that Ukraine is a redline for the Russian state, roughly equivalent to Mexico or Canada for the United States. Or Alaska.
Follow Director Bill Burns on Russia. And indeed, much of the conflicts going on around the world.
Writer Peter Beinart notes with careful attention detail:
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
Consider then that the Director of CIA is making the argument that it’s not just Putin who wants to keep Ukraine in Russia’s sphere of influence. Could it be that Putin is acting to ingratiate himself to his equivalent of a deep state? And that he isn’t alone in wanting war?
The assessment from Burn is important especially as Director Burns has quietly called for Zelensky to flee the country and warned obliquely about a Russian plot to assassinate Zelensky.
Zelensky has so far remained in Ukraine and been cast by our largely foolish media as somehow heroic because he donned body armor. Do we not recall Dukakis?
Apparently Zelensky can play act at both clown and wartime leader.
In point of fact Zelensky’s presence in Ukraine is going to lead to more people dying, especially as the Russians begin the siege of Kiev and where heavy fighting seems inevitable.
Recall that the Russian army has experience sieging major cities — the Battle of Grozny comes to mind. The Russians will soon have air superiority, if they don’t have it already.
Zelensky has Ukrainians as his hostages. It could well be that Zelensky’s show of defiance was, in fact, orchestrated by his paymasters.
The Odessan gangsters know the score. They know that their time is up and so they’ll likely go down with a hail of gunfire. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is apparently walking around Kiev with AK-47 in hand. (At least as far as CNN is concerned.)
I suspect this, too, is a form of play acting. Who do you think the Russians will turn to when Zelensky is deposed? Why, they’ll bring back Poroshenko, who can now credibly claim he stood rifle in hand against the Russian invasion. Try then to claim that he is a stooge of the Russians. His resistance was even filmed on CNN and they would never lie to us about the conditions on the ground in a war now, would they.
So what do we do?
Here’s what I would be prepared to offer for Zelensky.
A non-prosecution agreement from the US Department of Justice. It’s well known that Zelensky and much of his government are the creations and creatures of the Ukrainian Jewish mob, especially Ihor Kholomoisky. Zelensky should turn states’ evidence against the Ukrainian mob and help rid Ukraine of the gangsters who have hitherto ruled the country.
Israeli citizenship. Zelensky has reportedly asked Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to intercede on his behalf and the Russian government appeared amenable to this sort of thing. This is the new Israeli government’s moment to shine.
Truth and reconciliation and then amnesty for the Ukrainian-Jewish gangsters once they pay their exit fee, of course. Could you even trust them to keep their end of the deal? Let’s not forget that Kholomoisky armed his own militia in 2014. The sort of man who can do that, well, he can call real shots.
I don’t think any of that will happen. At least, not immediately. The oligarchs aren’t going to give up their control of Ukraine without a major fight. They’ve cynically exploited the good feelings that all people have to their homeland. And the Ukrainians have even waged a very good propaganda campaign in the West whilst the Russians have curiously neglected to.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that everyone seems to be putting up their “Stand with Ukraine” propaganda on social media. How that show of support will blow up Russian tanks remains to be seen.
A friend writes in regarding Ukraine. I agree in the main.
Putin invading is a sign of domestic political weakness not strength.
The Zelensky regime in Ukraine clearly is tied in with bad actors like Kholomoisky, but it is democratically “legitimate” in a way that Lukashenko for example is clearly not.
Putin is fundamentally a mobocrat in a way the USA and Chinese regimes aren’t, although he relies on support from the Russian security apparatus obviously to survive.
The new sanctions regime and the invasion will not be good for the oligarchs in either Ukraine or Russia.
The invasion is a mixed bag for China, they have plenty [of] ties to both countries but at the end will choose Russian natural resources over Ukraine money laundering, especially now that their own economy is much more developed than in say the 90s.
Russian and Chinese influence in the Eurozone and neighboring countries will almost certainly decrease rather than increase as a result of naked Russian aggression and implicit Chinese backing.
In the end I suspect Putin will win but it’ll be a punic victory.
The oligarchs know and that’s why they are trying to scapegoat Putin.
But if you’ve lost the Swiss, you’ve lost the game.
Indeed one gets the sense that even the Russian oligarchs are turning on Putin, probably because the order was just handed down to track all of their properties in the West.
And the Russian people are starting to notice who is and who isn’t in the trenches with them.
Will America’s oligarchs take their cues?
Or do we have to threaten to seize their yachts and mansions too?