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Reading Putin: July 2021 Foreshadows February 2022
On July 12, 2021, the Kremlin published an article with Putin as the official author. This was a Moscow-centric telling of the history of Russia and Ukraine. It denied, by omission, the Holodomor and the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tartars, because Stalin had been rehabilitated as a great patriotic leader by Putin. On February 21, 2022, when Putin went before the Russian and international public with his effective declaration of war against Ukraine, readers of the official English translation found a message consistent with last summer’s supposed historical account. We were all warned, before the execrable Biden regime execution of the Afghan exit.
Putin issued his justification paper last summer in the context of internal moves to whitewash Moscow’s Soviet era depredations and the Democrats, emplaced and empowered by the social media billionaires, unilaterally crushing American oil and gas dominance. The Democrats, empowered by evil Alphabet (Google/YouTube) and Zuckerberg’s stealing of the 2020 election, made the world much more dependent on Russia and other bad actors, pouring petrodollars into a struggling economy, enabling the financing of military adventurism. Now they say we must pay for the effects of their lab-coat leftist regime by massive increases in the cost of fuel and every item delivered by truck.
President Trump had Putin tightly contained, unlike Bush the Younger (who lost the country of Georgia’s independence), Obama (who green-lighted the initial covert invasion of Ukraine), and now the Biden regime. President Trump contained Putin by making NATO members take ownership of their treaty obligations, by praising Polish independence in Poland while recalling the wrongs done by both Germany and Russia, by being much more decisive militarily, by effective financial threats to stop Nord Stream 2, and by driving down energy costs and flooding the world market with American oil and gas capacity. The current regime undid all of this in the first months of 2021, signaling Putin that he could go back to reestablishing the pre-1991 borders of Greater Russia.
In case you start nodding about Moscow’s claims to have some right to “protect” or speak for all ethnic Russians, understand that was exactly the claim advanced by Hitler, pretending that Austria, parts of Poland, and Czechoslovakia were in need of his solicitude. Indeed, as Kiev was an early Rus cultural and political center, so Austria was an ancient center of Germanic culture and politics.
As a side note, Tsar Putin must have in the back of his mind the unfortunate parallels Emperor Xi might invoke, citing Putin’s own telling of history and subsequent actions to justify a similar telling of the history of what is now the eastern end of the Russian Federation. Xi has at least as good a claim to take back “Vladivostok” as “Hai Shen Wai.” Just as Putin blames Lenin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev, so Xi can blame Hu Jintao for his 2005 agreement on the territory ceded in the 19th Century treaties now styled “unequal” by the Chinese. Oh, and the collapse of Russian birthrates and the surplus of Chinese men has led to economic migration back into the territory once within Chinese borders.
Here are the direct links to the 2021 article and Putin’s recent justification for invading Ukraine:
- Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“
- Address by the President of the Russian Federation
I earlier extensively quoted important earlier statements by Putin, whitewashing Stalin’s crimes against humanity and his role in starting World War II as an aggressor. Those two posts, also linked to the official Kremlin transcripts, are worth your attention, if you had not previously read them. Putin’s February 2021 speech is consistent with these earlier positions, as he has been building a case for Greater Russia, a revived Russian empire, while insisting Russia has always been in the right and must not be criticized.
Published in Foreign Policy
Which alternative would you prefer? Planet Of The Apes? :-)
Yes. Confirmed by the conspicuous absence, of any declaration of authorizing Keystone and opening all public lands for oil and gas exploration, in Biden’s weak announcement today. The lab-coat left means to use this crisis, of their creation, to make us feel even more pain so we submit to the Green New Deal as the only alternative left.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point, Biden reverses the EOs he did on Day One to cause so much trouble, and then claims that it was his idea to start with. Anyone who points out that he caused the problems originally, will be a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier.”
Exactly so. We especially fail at our peril when we fail to notice increase capabilities, across all instruments of national power, in the hands of Russia, China, and Islamists. What do we think the British Empire did? What do we see in the Great Game between the mostly maritime British and mostly land power Russian empires? What did China do over the past thousand years when it could?
Planet Limbaugh in the Milton Friedman cluster…
We’d have to get there first, and that might require Star Trek.
Would that he could, but I fear that the pain we will all feel is seen as a feature, not a bug, in the campaign to drive us into the Green New Deal and permanent lab-coat leftist rule.
Clifford, I do agree with the point you made in the OP, echoed in some of the comments, about the negative effect of Biden’s energy policy on this entire situation.
I don’t know enough to determine the proportion of the energy price increase attributable to this decision. Energy prices are up quite a bit, and this enriched Russia. I strongly agree that this was a very bad move by President Biden.
I initially wrote “a foolish President,” but I’m not sure whether Biden is a fool in this regard, in this sense. He’s beholden to the radical Left, and the environmentalists in particular. I suspect that he changed energy policy to satisfy this constituency. It was bad for the country, but may have been more “spineless” than “foolish.”
I accept your criticism about my tone. I’ll try to do better.
And the people who elected him. Consider it done. I condemn them, and also admire and thank them.