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.