Putin’s Imperial Land Grab

With today’s general invasion of Ukraine, it’s now clear how Vladimir Grozny has snookered the West. He’s misled his adversaries, his prey, and even his own people about his real motives and aims. Now it’s likely too late to stop him from annexing all of Ukraine, or turning most or all of it into an unwilling vassal state.

With this general invasion, Putin is finally showing his true colors. He simply wants Ukraine as part of Russia’s empire. Period.

His “fears” about NATO, EU and Western encroachments were plausible distractions. His analogy to the Cuban Missile Crisis was a clever ruse. So was his recent Hitler-like diatribe about alleged cultural affinity and betrayal.

Here’s the analysis:

The Cuban Missile Crisis is irrelevant, if not obsolete. Deterring a nuclear first strike no longer depends—if it ever did—on how close to your territory your adversary has ground-based nuclear weapons. As long as enough of your own weapons can survive long enough to get up in the air, and so to menace your adversary’s capital and major cities, mounting a first strike against you would be untenable.

This is especially so for Russia, with all its huge territory and eleven times zones. It would be virtually impossible for any enemy to launch missiles from enough separate locations to take out all of Russia’s land-based missile systems simultaneously. Even if such a minutely choreographed global launch were possible, the various missiles would have to travel vastly different distances. So the Russians could easily detect the furthest away to launch long before the first-to-arrive struck, thus leaving ample time to launch a devastating second strike. The risk would be too high for any sane adversary to take.

What probably precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis was our developing nuclear submarines first. In theory, those submarines were hard enough to detect to get close enough to both St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow to mount an effective first strike.

The Soviets then had nothing like our nuclear subs. The subs they sent to meet our fleet blockading Cuba were obsolete diesel models, built for cold climates, whose interior temperature rose to 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the tropical waters near Cuba. So the Soviets understandably wanted ground-based missiles in Cuba to deter a possible first strike.

Today, the Soviet K-19 disaster, chronicled in the famous movie, is ancient history. The Russians now have competent nuclear subs. Even if they’re not quite as quiet or as big as ours, their deterrent, in Shakespeare’s words, “twill serve.” Russia’s subs’ ability to hide, launch nukes from anywhere in the sea, and so mount a devastating second strike is a deterrent good enough.

Add to this Russia’s much-hyped hypersonic missiles, which allegedly can evade all our airborne missile defenses. If Russia can penetrate even our best land-based missile defenses, its second-strike deterrent would be secure even without subs. So Putin’s display of paranoia about encirclement was little more than a clever act.

The key to understanding Vladimir Grozny is that he’s an absolutely brilliant spook. He manipulates people as a sculptor molds clay.

He got George W. Bush to trust him, and to see into “his soul,” simply by wearing a crucifix and talking a bit about religion and history. He got our Demagogue to see him as “a genius” and play his lackey, probably by cruder and more mercenary means not yet fully known. Earlier, Putin got the whole world to treat him like a democratic visionary, by speaking about peaceful trade (in fluent German) before the German Bundestag and about poverty in Russia on the national news. In understanding what people want to hear and how to influence them, Putin may be unmatched among world leaders today.

In this round, Vladimir Grozny snookered the West by playing on our own fears of nuclear Armageddon. He also played on the empathy of many of our geopolitical analysts, who thought NATO’s encirclement of Russia had gone too far. (I must confess that I was among those empathizers. [Search linked source for second occurrence of “NATO”]).

Yes, at 490 km, Ukraine’s border is closer to Moscow than, say, Vilnius in Lithuania is, at 784 km. But Lithuania is already a member of NATO and the EU. Is that 294 km difference—182 miles—really worth going to war for, with all the other practical means of assuring a devastating second strike? And if future deployment of nukes or troops were the real issue, why not rely on diplomacy to prevent it, at least as a first resort?

Vladimir Grozny has been equally brilliant on the people side. He avoided the Nazis’ catastrophic mistake of racism and claiming racial supremacy. Instead, he emphasized the brotherhood and cultural affinity of Russians and Ukrainians. By painting the West as the divider and conqueror, he created some doubt, if not credulity, among his own people and even some Ukrainians.

(If WWII Germans had not been Nazi racial supremacists, but simple, honest imperialists, with a bit of people skills, and if they had had the good sense not to invade Russia, Germany might today be master of virtually all of Europe, and Europe might be a far more stable and safer place. But that’s another story. [Search linked source for first instance of “alternative”.])

If our Demagogue is right about anything, it’s that Putin is a manipulative genius. The express and implied threats that led me to name him “Vladimir Grozny” are just one of his many techniques of manipulation.

Anyone who knows history knows how specious was Putin’s recent diatribe. But WWII, let alone the great famine (Holodomor) that Stalin caused in Ukraine, is beyond the memory of almost everyone living. Putin has created a modern, mostly fictional, social-media meme that is plausible and attractive to many Russians and to some Russian-leaning Ukrainians. To the West, it’s an effective distraction from his real motives.

So what are his real motives? To say that Putin is not a moral man would be a breathtaking understatement. But so would saying he’s just smart. He’s well aware of Russia’s economic failings. He just doesn’t understand or appreciate how business under recognized international rules might help. As a consummate spook and true kleptocrat, he feels safer keeping the goodies for himself and his cronies and under his control.

What he does understand is that Russia makes little, if anything, that the rest of the world needs. And what Russia has in abundance—oil and gas—is poisoning our planet. So the rest of the world is trying to stop using it.

But Ukraine has vast natural resources that will never go out of style. Food is one. Ukraine is Russia’s traditional “black earth” breadbasket; that’s why Stalin squeezed it enough to cause the Holodomor.

Ukraine also has vast mineral resources, including uranium (for carbon-free nuclear power), iron (to make steel), and titanium (to make bearings and jet engines). Used for burning renewables-derived hydrogen, turbines with titanium blades might someday replace jet engines using fossil fuels.

There is a far greater list of Ukraine’s vast natural resources circulating on the Internet. I haven’t had the time to check it all out, and I don’t intend to add to the cesspool of misinformation that is social media. But the apparently reliable sources linked above have convinced me that Ukraine would make a substantial addition to Russia’s natural resources, material wealth, and future productivity.

In contrast, most of Russia’s vast unused territory is Siberian tundra unsuitable for growing rice, wheat or corn. Its mineral wealth, if any, lies mostly unknown and unexplored. As global warming melts its permafrost, many of its roads will become unusable and may have to be rebuilt at great expense.

So it looks as if Putin has pulled a clever fast one on the West, on Ukraine, and on his own people. With the advantages of speed, distraction and overwhelming force, he appears close to taking the whole of Ukraine for Russia in a vast, twenty-first-century land grab.

What will the West do, if anything, when satellite and drone photos start showing trucks carting Ukrainian resisters off to the gulags? Can we make up for failing to anticipate and plan intelligently for the worst? Only time will tell. But the task will not get easier the longer we wait and temporize.


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