News reports went viral yesterday about how military advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin routinely lied because his war in Ukraine was not going to plan.
Putin was misled by advisers who were too scared to tell him how poorly the war in Ukraine is going and how damaging Western sanctions have been, White House and European officials said on Wednesday. …
‘We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisors are too afraid to tell him the truth,’ [Kate Bedingfield, White House communications director, told reporters during a press briefing].
(Reuters, March 31, 2022)
Except what were his advisers to do after watching Putin for 20 years lie through his teeth every time he opened his mouth. They were only doing to him what they saw him do to everyone else so effectively. Karma’s a bitch. Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine is just showing that it can also have genocidal consequences.
But their mendacious cowardice is only half the story. The rest pertains to why US and EU leaders are engaging in an orchestrated declassification of intelligence to tell us about these advisers.
An increasingly isolated and paranoid Putin has already “purged” and jailed a number of them. This makes clear the declassification’s strategic value. It also makes clear that the Stauffenberg fear Putin’s notorious long tables betray is the least of his worries.
But I submit that US and EU leaders are providing a pretext (or an off ramp) for Putin to salvage what little remains of his reputation as a master military strategist. This, by ending his shambolic war, executing a Stalinist purge, and pleading for NATO countries to lift sanctions – swearing that he had no idea his bungling soldiers were committing genocidal crimes … against their Ukrainian brothers no less…
Meanwhile, it speaks volumes that even his most ardent supporters can no longer say with a straight face that Putin’s war is going to plan. Only this explains the car-crash interview Maria Butina – member of Russia’s State Duma – had on yesterday’s edition of HARDTalk on the BBC.
Except, notwithstanding all that, Putin is still strutting and fretting his stuff on the world stage. Only this explains the threat he made yesterday to cut off gas supplies to EU countries unless they pay him in roubles.
Of course, nobody should have been surprised. After all, he has been weaponizing Russian oil against Ukraine for nearly a decade. Here, for example, is the prescient way I alluded to this in “Russia Gobbling Up Ukraine: First Crimea, Now Donetsk … Next Odessa?” May 13, 2014:
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Putin clearly intends to occupy and/or control as much of the former republics of the Soviet Union as Western leaders will let him get away with. The only question is at what point Western leaders will do anything to stop what he’s doing, instead of waiting in each case to slap him on the wrist (with more penny-wise, pound-foolish sanctions) after he has done it.
He can certainly be forgiven for calculating that, even if he takes all of Ukraine, these same Western leaders will be anxious to normalize relations with him, after duly venting their outrage for posterity, if only to ensure Russia’s uninterrupted supply of oil and gas.
This is why former republics that, like Ukraine, are not members of NATO have just cause to fear Putin doing to them what he’s doing to Ukraine.
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What is surprising, though, is the way OPEC countries are enabling the Axis powers, namely Russia and China, much to the chagrin of the allied powers, namely NATO countries. I’m on record noting that it has always been Putin’s intent to have China play for Russia the Axis role Japan played for Germany during WWII.
The only question has been to what extent Xi would subordinate his grand ambition for China to play in this 21st century the superpower role the United States played in the 20th. And he has already kowtowed far more than I thought he ever would.
China is playing this fence-sitting role with all the diplomatic tact of a bull in a china shop. It wants the world to think of it as a worthy alternative to the US as a sole superpower. But if it were up to this (Xi’s) China instead of Roosevelt’s America, all of Europe would be under Nazi rule to this day.
As for OPEC:
With analysts warning of a coming oil supply crunch, OPEC and its allies, including Russia, decided on Thursday to stick with their previously agreed plan of modest monthly increases. …
After months of fruitlessly asking OPEC Plus to increase oil production to calm roiled markets, Washington seems to have decided to take charge.
(The New York Times, March 31, 2022)
In fact, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, UAE and other OPEC countries are demonstrating unprecedented solidarity in their refusal to help Western countries overcome Russia’s attempt to use its oil and gas to blackmail them.
This is why I hope the unprecedented solidarity Western countries are demonstrating to sanction Russia obtains to rebuff these OPEC countries when they come begging for military (and other kinds of) aid. The sooner the West transitions to renewables, the sooner the West can leave those SOBs to their sectarian devices … for them to drink their friggin’ oil…
No one should ever forget or forgive OPEC’s refusal to help Western countries help Ukraine in this fight between good and evil. And I’m all to mindful that it comes after OPEC’s de-facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, reportedly snubbed President Biden’s request for a personal call earlier this month, only to make a public show of taking one from Putin.
Karma – their day cannot come soon enough…
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gobbling up Ukraine… Stauffenberg…