The Western world watched as Russian President Vladimir Putin (aka the Butcher of Bucha) presided over his May Day parade today. But everyone waited with bated breath to hear what he would say about his “special military operation” in Ukraine.
To say what he said was anticlimactic would be an understatement. Frankly, it was like listening to a Donald Trump campaign stump speech for the umpteenth time – complete with lies, conspiracies, and grievances that define his (i.e., Putin’s) presidency.
Here is how the Associated Press reported on it:
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday sought to cast Moscow’s military action in Ukraine as a forced response to Western policies and a necessary move to ward off a potential aggression. …
While lambasting the West, Putin gave no indication of a shift in strategies or made any indication that he was going to declare a broad mobilization, as some in Ukraine and the West have feared. …Putin again scolded the West for failing to heed Russian demands for security guarantees and a rollback to NATO’s expansion, arguing that it left Moscow no other choice but to launch an action in Ukraine. …
Some in Ukraine and the West expected Putin to use his speech at the parade to switch from describing the Russian action in Ukraine that the Russian officials have called the ‘special military operation’ to calling it a war.
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But surely all Russians would have been better off just watching Putin’s pundits on TV aping their North Korean counterparts. This, by feeding increasingly isolated, poor, and hungry Russians hollow threats about destroying enemies of Russia’s own making.
Like North Korea’s Kim, Putin remains hell-bent on impressing his people with the MAD delusion that Russia is the only country that possesses the nuclear weapons he paraded for victory display.
But it speaks volumes that all he has to show for his “special military operation” is a Ukraine reduced to rubble, a once-vaunted Russian military exposed as a bungling menace of marauding incompetents, and over 20,000 dead soldiers returned home in body bags. Not to mention that Western sanctions means that, like Kim, he will soon be convincing his people that eating grass is every bit as nutritious as eating wheat …
Which makes one wonder how much longer ordinary Russians will obey Putin’s implicit demand to participate in his lies. Because, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his essay “Live Not By Lies,”
All loyalty lies in that.
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