War Crimes Expert: "Putin Incriminates Himself Every Day”
‘We live in a closet stuffed with skeletons’
Maxim Trudolyubov on how Russians’ inability to condemn the crimes of the past has led them to war
Nearly six weeks ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From that moment, the history of the Russian state’s past crimes ceased to be history, argues Meduza’s Ideas editor, Maxim Trudolyubov. Russia’s shared present once again includes a fight against the country’s own population, the trials of “enemies of the people,” deportations, occupations of neighboring countries, and “cleansing operations” in countries that were once part of the Soviet bloc. In the war against Ukraine, all of the Russian state’s worst facets in its Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet guises have coalesced. This war is a living indictment that brings together all the things Russian society can no longer ignore.
The Kremlin’s attitude toward the problem of history was made clear in the persecution of Memorial — the human rights group that once formed the backbone of civil society in the new Russia and facilitated Russian society’s first attempts to overcome the burdens of the past. As one of the prosecutors in the case remarked, “In speculating about the topic of political repression, Memorial creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state. Why should we — the descendants of the victors — repent instead of being proud of the country that defeated fascism?”
Time does not heal old wounds
The important thing to note in the prosecutor’s statement is not the typical distortion of facts (Memorial’s objective was not one of repentance, but of providing a legal account of past crimes) but of “winner’s syndrome” — of seeing oneself as a victor in a war that one had nothing to do with personally. In the imagination of the Russian leadership, World War II — in which, incidentally, Russians fought alongside Ukrainians and other peoples — somehow erases the other terrible stories of the past and provides the Russian state and Russian society with moral standing.
It is not only the Russian government that has sought to distance itself from the past. A significant part of Russian society has wanted to do the same thing.
In discussions of history among public intellectuals, the question of the statute of limitations for past crimes has continued to pop up. It may be formulated in different ways, but the intention has always been to tone down the intensity of the debate. Yes, it’s true that there was never a grand, final trial of the Communist Party and its security services — or rather, there was an attempt at a trial, but it was unsuccessful. But look at how much time has passed! Why should we divide the public even more when they are already exhausted by the struggle for daily existence? The USSR doesn’t exist anymore. We have another country that needs to be built. We need to look toward the future and not toward the past. Plus, we already have plenty of monuments to the victims of terror in Russia. They are commemorated in churches. Books are published about them and films are made. We even have a state museum dedicated to the history of the Gulag and an official “Wall of Grief.”
This kind of thinking no longer makes any sense. As it turns out, time does not heal old wounds. We need to overcome not only the “winner’s syndrome” within the Kremlin, but also all sorts of attitudes outside the Kremlin that have prevented us from confronting our past in all its severity. We live in an enormous closet stuffed with skeletons.
Crimes with no statute of limitations
Before February 24, 2022, one could have made the case that a victory in a just war — the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is known in Russia) — was one of the foundations of our collective identity. In a country where traditions and connections between generations and different groups of society have been repeatedly severed, the memory of World War II provided a binding and unifying myth.
In the public imagination, the history of the war outweighs the cruelty and cynicism of other pages of Russian history. There is nothing unique in any of this. People want to remember the good and not the bad, especially politicians. In the politics of memory, most countries seek to highlight their victories and shift attention away from their defeats. But every country has defeats and shameful episodes in their histories. And every nation and society deals with the pain of history in its own way. Russian society has coped with shame thanks to the memory of the victory in World War II.
For many years, the memory of victory prevented us from directly confronting our history. The nightmare of what is happening now, however, should encourage us to do so.
In our past and present, there is a tendency to view neighboring countries as buffer zones that have no legitimate claims to sovereignty. In our past and present, there is a willingness to use violence against entire peoples who appear disloyal to Moscow. We have followed a policy of colonialization in neighboring countries — and with our own people. In our past and present, people — whether citizens of other countries or of Russia — are seen as expendable in the eyes of the authorities. The Russian (and especially the Soviet) state has never limited itself in its methods.
In our past and present, the state has arrogated to itself extraordinary authority, unlimited by laws and institutions. Although the Russian Empire might have had jury trials and an independent bar, the Soviet state labelled these legal institutions as bourgeois artefacts. The Soviet system’s approach to the “rule of law” — first revolutionary and later socialist — was to provide legitimacy to any action that was expedient from the point of view of building communism. The system, of course, had nothing to do with protecting the rights of people or with providing justice. In our past and present, expediency is valued more than human life.
The means that the Soviet authorities used are well known, including repressions, summary executions, arrests, forced labor, and the requisitioning of food and property leading to starvation and death. And let’s not forget about military aggression against neighboring countries, attacks on civilians, hostage-taking, torture, persecution of peoples based on their ethnicity, and the deportation of entire national groups.
These methods were used inside the Soviet Union as well as during the seizure of Eastern and Central Europe at the beginning of World War II and immediately after the war. They were used in the two Chechen wars, as well as in Georgia, eastern Ukraine, and Syria — wherever Russia has decided to use force. Much of what was done in these places qualifies as crimes against humanity — which have no statute of limitations. (You can verify this by reviewing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the most comprehensive document in international law on this issue.)
In war-torn Ukraine, as well as in Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Finland, Czechia, and other countries that at one time or another have had to confront Russia, people talk about the past crimes of the Russian state as if they were being committed today. Most of these countries are taking in refugees from Ukraine. No matter how the fighting ends, this will not be forgotten.
Means without ends
Russian citizens, and people who consider themselves ethnically Russian, can no longer pretend that the past is merely an issue for academic discussion or journalistic debate. The past is now being reproduced in Ukraine. The current war has been made possible by the fact that the Russian state’s historical crimes have never been put on trial and that the perpetrators have never faced a day in court. It has been made possible by the impunity of the Russian leadership.
Those who are now making decisions on behalf of Russia have no great ends, no knowledge of absolute truth, no ideological or divine legitimacy — although they do their best to pretend. The only thing that they have managed to replace the long-absent “great idea” (both imperialist and communist) with is lies. The organizers of the war against Ukraine have decided that performances and fiction are all that is needed to legitimize the war.
It is possible that Putin believed his own propaganda and began to act based on the pseudo-reality invented by spin doctors on his order. However, whether he believes in something is not really that important. It is enough for us to see Russian officials and the Russian military continue to justify their actions with the help of crude disinformation campaigns that tells us that women dying in labor are actresses, that nationalists are holed up in hospitals, that Nazis are in control of Ukraine.
As a political entity, Russia today has only the lies and methods inherited from KGB agents and Stalin. The methods are the same, but they are now deprived of the window dressing of ideological excuses. The Russian state has become zombified — it is a soulless body that crushes everything in its path without understanding why.
Judgement, not pardons
Varlam Shalamov wrote, “Is the destruction of human beings with the help of the state not the main issue of our time, of our morality?”. Yes, it is. And the more Russian citizens and people who consider themselves Russian realize this, the sooner we will have a trial over the crimes of the Russian state. Without such legal proceedings, Russia will neither be able to become a full-fledged home for its citizens, nor a political entity in which trust and dialogue is possible. If “Russia” as a national and cultural project would like be part of the global community again, then the first new institution established in the country after the war should be a court empowered to investigate the crimes of the Russian state in all its guises, past and present.
The logic of the statute of limitations — the logic that there are no perpetrators or witnesses among us or that there is no one left to judge — is no longer valid. Such people are certainly around, including those who made the decision to attack Ukraine. The court must be independent of the state, otherwise the process will accomplish nothing. Thirty years ago, the trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union failed because the judges serving on the Constitutional Court were recently party members, and the Court was not sufficiently independent from the state.
If, in the aftermath of the war, Russian society manages — for the first time in its history — to establish a truly independent court, then it will demonstrate to itself and to others that a society exists in Russia. Indeed, the main sign of its existence will be agency, which allows for a legal evaluation of the actions of the state and its leaders. If this can be done, then perhaps Russian citizens will be able to keep building other institutions.
Most likely, institution-building will need to begin with those institutions that protect people (both Russians and others) from state violence. We must ensure that anyone who espouses the notions of “one people,” “common destiny,” “great history,” or other grandiose generalizations never be allowed to come to power. And, obviously, our future politicians should not be able to take military action based upon nothing but their fantasies. Their hands should be tied.
This will be extremely difficult to accomplish in a country where institutions, laws, and even the education system have always acted in the interests of central authorities and not the people — in a country where the main purpose of the social order has always been to justify violence. The success of this complicated endeavor is by no means guaranteed, but Russia will have no future if it cannot be done.
"For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and the darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them."
Through in-depth conversations with multiple heads of U.S. intelligence agencies, diplomats, Russian politicians, historians and journalists, this special report chronicles events that shaped the Russian leader, the grievances that drive him, and how a growing conflict with the West exploded into war in Europe.
🇺🇦 “We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors.” @AssociatedPresshttps://t.co/wReVZFYfAI
"I promise to pay $1,000,000 to the officer(s) who, complying with their constitutional duty, arrests Putin as a war criminal under Russian and international laws. Putin is not the Russian president as he came to power as the result of a special operation of blowing up an apartment building in Russia, then violated the Constitution by eliminating free elections and murdering his opponents. As an ethnic Russian & a Russia citizen, I see it as my moral duty to facilitate the denazification of Russia. I will continue my assistance to Ukraine in its heroic efforts to withstand the onslaught of Putin's Orda"
B.C.'s Vikram Bajwa hopes the promise of $50 million will be enough for someone in Putin's inner circle to turn him in to stand trial for war crimes #EndPutin
Have a look at this wonderful yacht called Scheherezade. It’s been talked about for a while. The rumour is it belongs to Vladimir Putin. But there is not much proof, only talks. And that's why it hasn’t been arrested yet. It just sits there in the port of Carrara (🇮🇹). pic.twitter.com/1vnYDREc0Z
But the sobriety of our assessments does not negate the fact that arbitrariness must be fought. When you are killed and robbed, you should at least scream loudly.
Let's think logically. Even my micro-Instagram is read by 60,000 people (love, hug, thank you). @teamnavalny has 195,000 followers. @navalny has 3.5 million followers. There are really many of us. Not in a metaphysical sense, but literally, if you count on the heads. And on the other hand, okay, Putin, the presidential administration (stupid, cowardly bums), some bunch of security officials who can intimidate the controlled media and force them to keep silent about the process. Will we be able to break through the information blockade and make sure that the whole country knows about this lawlessness? So that we and the whole world can see how shamefully Putin is trying to get rid of the main opposition politician? What a pity they forge documents and falsify the trial? Of course we can. Easy peasy. After all, there are a lot of us."
5/10 The money part of the Sakharov Prize given to me by the @Europarl_EN will be the first contribution to this fund. EU citizens, via their representatives, gave me this award for the fight against corruption. I am grateful and I'm allocating their money to continue this fight.
Read what Navalny said in court yesterday. Sounds like a great guide. Everything is clear, there are a minimum of questions. We have already begun our part (investigative), do not lag behind.
“I’m telling you now, dear court, dear prosecutor, you can write down: at 4:25 pm, citizen Navalny, being at such and such an address in the colony, called - here and here - all employees of the Anti-Corruption Fund to continue investigations, continue to publish facts of corruption, to find where Putin, his group, his relatives, his second wife, third wife - where they put the stolen money. Investigate all these United Russia ministers, publish it, encourage everyone else to spread it.
I call on everyone, as usual - an "unlimited group of people",
people, citizens of Russia, I call on donations to us in order to finance this anti-corruption activity. Spread it properly, because this is my political activity, and I am fighting, yes, to change the government in the country. I do not want these people to sit in the Kremlin. They've been there for decades! Well, it can't be that every minister in our country is officially a dollar millionaire. They are thieves. I believe they are thieves. I ask for donations so that we can investigate the activities of these thieves.”
And on Navalny’s Youtube channel, I recommend watching @ioannzh’s big video about why Putin wants to imprison Navalny, with the results of the first day of the trial from @kira_yarmysh, and of course with the speech of @navalny himself in court.
Russia is a terrorist state which violates international law! This state has no right to be part of the organisation promoting peace, democracy and sustainable development. REMOVE RUSSIA FROM THE @IPUparliament!#IPU144pic.twitter.com/GPZzXwXKjv
— Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine - Ukrainian Parliament (@ua_parliament) March 21, 2022
In the decades-long unfolding of Vladimir Putin's insane war on the world, America, like Ukraine, has been used as a test lab, for destabilization, disinformation, election subversion, extremist manipulation & corruption on a scale that now threatens to end our culture & our democracy with violence, terror & criminal conspiracy, surrounding Trump org, a side-project of Putin's oligarch gang.
What is mystifying to younger generations is how the "world order" of the UN, NATO, EU, have acquiesced to criminal terror, murder, poisoning, torture, imprisonment of political opponents, for decades allowing Putin & other corrupt warlords to destabilize the world. We've all been warped by a world system which allows psychopaths like Putin & Trump to seize power & smother the possibilities for humane, progressive & peaceful outcomes. Did humanity not learn anything from the century of world wars of the 20th century, with the genocide, slaughter, repression of millions?
This tyrannical psychopathology has become epidemic, intentionally spread like a virus to threaten many countries & billions of humans, from China & Myanmar to Russia, Belarus, Syria, Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, like an Orwellian, totalitarian blueprint for enslaving all of us, keeping us all in a state of panic & confusion, or behind barbed wire. Given Putin's latest psychopathic threat, to use nuclear weapons, let us not forget, even for an hour, that we are all living on a gigantic frankenstein monster made of cruise missiles, submarines, stealth jets & planet-scorching atomic bombs.
Is it coincidental that as these psychopath cults turn up their rage & paranoid threats, humanity is faced with unprecedented climate catastrophes, battered, baked, inundated, forced to flee from extreme weather, requiring us to rally together as a world & radically change our fuels & industries? One can argue that underlying the extremes of politics & environment lies a bed of corruption, connected directly to petroleum production & weapons of war. Obsolete & toxic industries need a reason to continue, or a smokescreen (like war) to hide behind.
Is it possible we are witnessing the dying desperation of these 20th century modes & mobsters of corruption & tyranny? Or are we going to continue to be victims of their violence, madness & theft of possibilities? Will we wait until we no longer have any possibilities left but become refugees, prisoners, hostages struggling just to survive? At what point will the institutions of world order & justice step in to hold these psychopaths & their enablers accountable? We can see in Ukraine how humanitarian intentions, prayers & appeals for sensibility mean nothing to the psychopaths, who actually revel in the cruelty & suffering they cause.
Humanity has reached a winnowing point in our evolution. We are planetary. We know within minutes what has happened on the other side of the planet. We all pretty much know who the psychopaths, criminals, warlords, manipulators are, with detailed documentation available right here on the internet. The "social media" companies know this too.
What is the bottleneck we are being squeezed into? Like the sages of ages & saviors have warned: money (is the root of all evil). Everything on the planet, in the bloodshot eyes of industry, including you & I, has been reduced to a monetary value. In this respect, we are all slaves to a brutal & exploitative economic system which favors control by any means necessary, be it corrupt, homicidal, or completely inhumane (as war is). If an alien occupation of overlords imposed this system on us, we would all rebel, but we have been groomed from birth to acquiesce to the numbers & values of the $y$tem & accept its abuse.
‘It’s not rational’: Putin’s bizarre speech reveals the real Vladimir
Putin references neo-Nazis & drug addicts in bizarre speech to Russian security council
Andrew Roth in Moscow
Looking dead-eyed into the camera on Friday, Vladimir Putin gave one of the most bizarre speeches of his 22 years as Russia’s leader, a directive that managed to sound alarming even in a week when he has ordered tanks into Ukraine and missile strikes on Kyiv.
“Once again I speak to the Ukrainian soldiers,” he said, addressing his enemy. “Do not allow neo-Nazis and Banderites to use your children, your wives and the elderly as a human shield. Take power into your own hands. It seems that it will be easier for us to come to an agreement than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.”
The speech seemed to be ripped from an alternate reality – or from the second world war, where Putin appears to be spending more of his time as he launches the kind of broad military offensive not seen in Europe for nearly 70 years.
All this week, Putin’s megalomaniacal tendencies have been on display like never before. He has summoned his aides for a surreal national security council that resembled a television reality show and launched tirades about Lenin and decisions made nearly 100 years ago.
He has also, for the first time, spoken about his maximalist goals in this war: regime change in Kyiv, toppling the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and replacing it with a more pliant leadership. Putin’s call for a coup in Kyiv indicates that if Russia wins this war, Zelensky will almost certainly not remain in power. How he achieves that is anyone’s guess.
A number of analysts predicted this as Russia deployed more than 60% of its ground forces to Ukraine’s borders and demanded concessions that could never be granted.
But Putin’s unhinged appearances and apparent drive to war have raised questions of whether he remains a rational leader.
“Despite Crimea and everything else, Putin had always seemed an extremely pragmatic leader to me,” said Tatyana Stanovaya, the founder of R.Politik. “But now when he’s gone in this war against Ukraine, the logic in the decision is all about emotions, it’s not rational.”
Those emotions are deeply rooted in history and the historical injustices suffered by Russia. Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, said he saw Putin as a man with “a historical map in his mind and a plan to use his military to achieve it”.
Central to that map is Ukraine, which he has described as an artificial state. “Modern Ukraine was wholly and fully created by Russia,” Putin said in a historical sleight-of-hand, “namely Bolshevik, communist Russia.”
To help picture it, state TV ran a map earlier this week showing Ukraine cut up to represent which parts were “presents” from various leaders, including Stalin, Lenin and Khrushchev. Some commentators said it represents the partition that Putin himself might be imagining if he gets his way.
While once the map may have been viewed as fantasies or media trolling, a western diplomat based in Ukraine on Friday pointed to his speeches and to that map as a serious sign that Putin was weighing up a dismantling of the country.
“He is not pretending anymore. For the first time I think he’s revealing who he really is,” the diplomat wrote.
Why Putin’s Reasons For Invading Ukraine Are ‘Total Fiction’
Time to stop appeasing Putin and confront Russia’s imperial ambitions
By Paul Grod
The collapse of the USSR was in many ways remarkable as it happened so quickly and took place largely without bloodshed. However, it has since become increasing obvious that Russia never really came to terms with its reduced status or the loss of empire.
Unfortunately, a new generation of Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, and Belarusians currently find themselves forced to defend their freedoms as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to reassert his country’s old imperial influence. Meanwhile, nations in nearby Central Europe are also facing up to the return of a hostile Russia.
The epicenter of this new Cold War is Ukraine.
Since 2014, Russian aggression in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has taken the lives of more than 14,000 Ukrainians and forced millions to flee their homes. While the front lines in the east have remained largely static since 2015, Ukraine continues to suffer regular casualties. Meanwhile, around 7% of the country is under Russian occupation.
Ukraine’s December 1991 referendum was in many ways as significant an event as the initial declaration of independence which took place a little more than four months earlier. While the parliamentary declaration is marked every year on August 24 as Ukraine’s official Independence Day, the referendum paved the legal pathway towards the formal dissolution of the USSR.
The late 1991 referendum was also crucial in securing recognition of Ukrainian independence from the international community. Many of the first countries to recognize an independent Ukraine including Canada, Poland, and the United States would go on to become the country’s closest allies, standing shoulder to shoulder over the coming decades as Ukrainians struggled to achieve their aspirations for peace, personal freedoms, and human dignity.
In order to secure these goals, Ukrainians have sought to join the key institutions of the democratic world. Since early 2019, the country’s NATO and European Union membership aspirations have been enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution.
Ukraine’s progress since 1991 has been anything but straightforward, but the country has emerged from years of domestic political turbulence as a vibrant and highly competitive democracy. This makes Ukraine a source of inspiration for the wider post-Soviet region. At the same time, Ukraine’s democratic progress means it is seen in Moscow as an existential threat to Russia’s own authoritarian model.
The current Russian military build-up along the Ukrainian border has attracted considerable international attention. As political leaders and analysts speculate over the likelihood of an invasion, it is vital to underline that Russia has already invaded Ukraine and is waging a war against Ukrainian statehood that is currently in its eighth year.
Putin has made it clear he does not accept Ukraine’s independence. His recent essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” and his frequent claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” reflect the Kremlin ruler’s denial of Ukraine’s very existence as a distinct and separate nation. This rhetoric directly echoes the language of the Czarist era and exposes the imperial ambitions driving Putin’s war against Ukraine.
The democratic world now has an opportunity to demonstrate to Russia that the rules-based international order will prevail by adopting a decisive response to the Kremlin campaign against Ukraine.
It is no secret that the only language Russia respects is the language of strength. Unfortunately, Western efforts to continue doing business with Russia since 2014 have served to encourage further bad behavior. In geopolitics as in the school playground, the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them.
There are a number of options available to the West that would send an unambiguous message to Moscow. Freezing the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would be a strong signal. It is also important to upgrade military cooperation with Ukraine, including the provision of defensive weapons.
Ideally, Western leaders would demonstrate their rejection of Russia’s imperial ambitions by moving forward with NATO membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia. Allowing Moscow an unofficial veto on future NATO membership rewards the Kremlin and is the surest way to guarantee continued Russian policies of international aggression.
Thirty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted for independence. Tragically, they are now dying in defense of this independence in a war waged by a revisionist and resurgent Russia.
With the Russian military currently massed along the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin is threatening to launch a major escalation in its campaign to extinguish Ukrainian independence. Putin has already plunged the world into a new Cold War in his quest to subjugate Ukraine. He will continue to advance his imperial agenda until confronted decisively.
At stake are the values that will define international relations for decades to come. The West needs bold and visionary leadership to end this war on democracy and a rules-based international order. The alternative is a new age of empires where great powers are free to impose themselves on weaker neighbors. Putin wants to resurrect the Soviet Empire and reverse the verdict of 1991. We cannot allow him to succeed.
Paul Grod is President of the Ukrainian World Congress.
This is not a ‘meme’, but our and your reality right now.
Masha Gessen: Vladimir Putin's eerie similarities to madman Hitler
Masha Gessen
Vladimir Putin has enjoyed a stunning variety of incarnations in the American imagination in his nearly 15 years as Russia’s leader. He started out as an economic reformer and a budding democrat. His graduation to dictator took years.
In that time, he dismantled Russia’s electoral system, took over its media, saw many of his opponents killed, jailed or forced into exile, created one of the most ruthlessly corrupt government systems in history, made peaceful protest punishable by jail time, waged a long and brutal war on his country’s territory and a short one against a neighboring country, Georgia, a piece of which Russia bit off in 2008.
But it was only after he invaded Ukraine last month that Americans’ image of him took another drastic turn. German Chancellor Angela Merkel ostensibly told President Obama that Putin was out of touch with reality. And then former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler.
So is Putin insane, is he Hitler, or is he both? He is none of those things. In fact, he may be unlike any politician the world has known.
Russian television parrots what Putin has been telling the Russian people for more than a decade: Russia is a country under siege, surrounded by enemies, perennially on the brink of catastrophe, from which only Putin can save it. In Ukraine, and everywhere, he is defending poor besieged Russians, not to mention the history and honor of the U.S.S.R.
Putin expressed this worldview long before he became president, and he has consistently acted on it since.
The day after Merkel’s statement became public, Putin held a news conference in which he denied that Russian troops were in Crimea and made so many other fanciful statements that the State Department issued a fact sheet exposing 10 of his most blatant lies.
Many analysts concluded that the bizarre news conference proved Putin had indeed lost his mind. They were wrong. Putin was acting the way he always has, like a playground bully. Bullies do not aspire to lead through rhetoric; they dominate by intimidation. When confronted, they either lash out or they obfuscate.
Putin said the troops occupying Crimea weren’t Russian, then promised to deploy the Russian military to protect civilians in Ukraine, then disowned deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. He was like a bully caught wearing a younger boy’s jacket — first claiming it was his own, then saying he got it from a friend, then that he wasn’t friends with that guy anyway. This is a tried-and-true intimidation strategy: Bald-faced lies render opponents helpless.
So if Putin is not insane, is he Hitler?
There are some eerie similarities: his obsession with imminent catastrophe, his total distrust of the rest of the world, his paranoid scapegoating of particular minorities, and his appetite for annexing new territories.
But knowing that Putin is similar to many 20th century dictators is not very useful or even interesting. He does, however, have one trait that sets him apart. History’s dictators have generally tried to claim that they were good people fighting the good fight. But Putin has no positive spin for his aggression — or his actions in general.
The political culture Putin has created in Russia is based on the assumption that the world is rotten to the core.
In his official autobiography, published in 2000, Putin told a joke in which President Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev compare notes: Both are embezzling, but Brezhnev embezzles twice as much, blatantly. This is the line Putin’s officials have taken in response to all accusations of graft over the last 14 years: Corruption is endemic to all governments; Russian corruption is just less hypocritical.
The same goes for Russia’s treatment of minorities and political protesters, as well as violations of international law: Putin and his officials are always quick to point out that Western countries are also imperfect on these issues.
A corollary is Putin’s conviction that his opponents act out of self-interest rather than on the basis of political conviction. When members of the punk rock group Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail, he said they got what they wanted.
This belief that everyone, without exception, acts solely out of base self-interest is what has led Putin to ratchet up the aggression, meanness and vulgarity of his public statements and political actions.
For American culture, which relies heavily on a belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, this is an impossible world view to absorb. It is another world indeed. But that does not make it crazy.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of the political biography “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”
Renewable Energy Solutions Can Save Our World from Kleptocracy & Corruption: How to defeat Putin & other Petrostate Tyrants
by Bill McKibben
‘Imagine a Europe that ran on solar power and windpower. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia.’
The pictures this morning of Russian tanks rolling across the Ukrainian countryside seemed both surreal – a flashback to a Europe that we’ve seen only in newsreels – and inevitable. It’s been clear for years that Vladimir Putin was both evil and driven and that eventually we might come to a moment like this.
One of the worst parts of facing today’s reality is our impotence in its face. Yes, America is imposing sanctions, and yes, that may eventually hamper Putin. But the Russian leader made his move knowing we could not actually fight him in Ukraine – and indeed knowing that his hinted willingness to use nuclear weapons will make it hard to fight him anywhere, though one supposes we will have no choice if he attacks a Nato member.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to dramatically reduce Putin’s power. One way, in particular: to get off oil and gas.
This is not a “war for oil and gas” in the sense that too many of America’s Middle East misadventures might plausibly be described. But it is a war underwritten by oil and gas, a war whose most crucial weapon may be oil and gas, a war we can’t fully engage because we remain dependent on oil and gas. If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.
Russia has a pathetic economy – you can verify that for yourself by looking around your house and seeing how many of the things you use were made within its borders. Today, 60% of its exports are oil and gas; they supply the money that powers the country’s military machine.
And, alongside that military machine, control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon. They have, time and again, threatened to turn off the flow of hydrocarbons to western Europe. When the Germans finally this week stopped the planned Nordstream 2 pipeline, Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev , said, “Welcome to the new world where Europeans will soon have to pay 2,000 euros ($2,270) per thousand cubic meters!” His not very subtle notion: if the price of keeping houses warm doubles, Europe will have no choice but to fold.
Today, 60% of Russia’s exports are oil and gas. Control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon
Finally, even the Biden administration – which has been playing its hand wisely in the lead up to the invasion – is constrained by oil and gas. As we impose sanctions, everyone’s looking for an out: the Italians want to exempt high-end luxury goods and the Belgians diamonds, but the US has made it clear that it doesn’t want to seriously interrupt the flow of Russian oil for fear of driving up gas prices and thus weakening American resolve.
As one “senior state department official” told the Wall Street Journal this week, “doing anything that affects … or halts energy transactions would have a great impact on the United States, American citizens and our allies. So our intention here is to impose the hardest sanctions we can while trying to safeguard the American public and the rest of the world from those measures,” the official said. It’s obviously not an idle fear: as of this morning Tucker Carlson was attacking Russia hawk Lindsey Graham for supporting a conflict that will bring “higher gas prices” while he has a “generous Congressional pension”. If you’re an apologist for fascism, high gas prices are your first go-to move.
So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.
Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power: whose cars ran on locally provided electricity, and whose homes were heated by electric air-source heat pumps. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia – it could impose every kind of sanction, and keep them in place until the country buckled. Imagine an America where the cost of gas was not a political tripwire, because if people had to have a pickup to make them feel sufficiently manly, that pickup would run on electricity that came from the sun and wind. It would take an evil-er genius than Vladimir Putin to figure out how to embargo the sun.
These are not novel technologies – they exist, are growing, and could be scaled up quickly. In the years after Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, America turned its industrial prowess to building tanks, bombers, and destroyers. In 1941, in Ypsilanti, the world’s largest industrial plant went up in six month’s time, and soon it was churning out a B-24 bomber every hour. A bomber is a complicated machine with more than a million parts; a wind turbine is, by contrast, relatively simple. In Michigan alone (“the arsenal of democracy”), a radiator company retooled to make 20m steel helmets and a rubber factory retooled to produce the liners for those helmets; the company that made the fabric for Ford’s seat cushions stopped doing that and started pushing out parachutes. Do we think that it’s beyond us to quickly produce the solar panels and the batteries required to end our dependence on fossil fuel?
Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia
It’s not easy – among other things, Russia has a good deal of some of the minerals that help in renewable energy production. (Nickel, for example.) But, here again, the example of the second world war is helpful – with the Axis in control of commodities like rubber, we quickly figured out how to mass produce substitutes.
It’s true that we could produce carbon free energy with nuclear power too, as long as we were willing to pay the heavy premium that technology requires – and right now Germany is probably regretting its decision to hastily shut down its reactors in the wake of the Fukushima accident. But if you think about the scenario now unfolding across Europe, you’re reminded of another of the advantages of renewable power, which is that it’s widely distributed. There are far fewer central nodes to attack with cruise missiles and artillery shells – targeting reactors is pretty easy, but driving your tank across Europe from one solar panel to the next so you can get out to smash it with a hammer is comical.
At the moment, big oil is using the fighting in Ukraine as an excuse to try to expand its footprint – reliable industry ally Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, went on Fox this week to argue that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline had empowered the Russian leader, for instance, and the American Petroleum Institute today called for more oil and gas development. But this is absurd – we may need, for the remaining weeks of this winter, to insure gas supplies for Europe, but by next winter we need to remove that lever. That means an all-out effort to decarbonize that continent, and then our own. It’s not impossible.
We have to do it anyway, if we’re to have any hope of slowing the climate change. And we can do it fast if we want: huge offshore windfarms in Europe have been built inside of 18 months without any wartime pressure.
We should be in agony today – people are dying because they want to live in a democracy, want to determine their own affairs. But that agony should, and can, produce real change. (And not just in Europe. Imagine not having to worry about what the king of Saudia Arabia thought, or the Koch brothers – access to fossil fuel riches so often produces retrograde thuggery.) Caring about the people of Ukraine means caring about an end to oil and gas.
Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College.
Alexey Navalny turns out to be a great journalist/investigator Navalny video about ‘#Putin’s Palace’ will help sort out the oligarchs (some Trump org overlap) ♞♘ Companion excellent website: https://palace.navalny.com
The Other Mr. President: #Putin the creepy enigma of war https://t.co/JKCvvjbDPE Vladimir Putin elevator pitch: if the Truman Show surrounded a homicidal malignant maniac, had its own military, now invading from an evil alternate dimension w/extremist cults. #PutinIsaWarCriminal
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