president Putin

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“Ukraine has not yet perished,…”

The title to this post is the first line of the Ukrainian national anthem and has an incredible resonance with the heroic efforts against overwhelming odds.

The people of Ukraine have not just resisted the unprovoked attack ordered by President Putin, they have fought back. It is difficult to know the truth of the Russian losses but at best they are bad. Nato estimates are between 7,000 and 15,000. Those losses have occurred in the space of one month. It compares with around 15,000 deaths in 10 years of war in Afghanistan.

Body counts in war are logistically difficult and as part of the propaganda campaign subject to significant variation. However, what cannot be gainsaid is that the planned blitzkreig by an overwhelmingly large military force has not turned out as planned. The incredible bravery and determination of the Ukrainians has not just mounted an incredible defence, in many areas they seem to have taken the battle to the enemy.

Incompetent though they have demonstrated themselves to be it is difficult to believe the enormous advantages in terms of resources and manpower they can draw upon will not lead to an ultimate Russian victory. Any views to the contrary depend upon a very difficult transfer of power in Russia which there is little sign of at the moment.

Given this, much weight is being placed on the peace negotiations occurring in several locations and at different levels. It is said real progress is being made, albeit slowly, and both sides are tempering their demands to more realistic levels. Agreement is tantalisingly close, some believe. In parallel some safe passage routes out of cities in the North are enabling citizens to escape the fighting.

Ominously, there is no safe corridor out of Mariupol. The bombardment of that city has been relentless and has effectively raised it to the ground by all accounts. The people trapped inside have no running water, declining food supplies, no heat or light. The conditions can only be imagined.

Mariupol is absolutely vital for both Ukraine and for Putin. For Ukraine it is a critical part of its economic infrastructure providing a route to market for much of the countries exports. For Russia it provides a land corridor to the Crimea seized in President Putin’s last illegal war.

If there is a peace deal I suspect it will only come after Mariupol has been taken which will be a blood bath. President Putin will claim any peace agreement should respect Russian control of Mariupol, and withdrawal of Russian troops will be subject to this. This will provide him with his land corridor to consolidate his earlier invasion and provide a way to strangle Ukraine’s economy in preparation for his next offensive in 5-7 years time.

It is not a peace Ukraine can accept, nor the West.

Political leaders in the West are rightly fixated on avoiding a world war that may go nuclear. My fear is this fixation, and the avoidance of Russian / Nato conflict it entails, may actually result in what they are attempting to avoid. The unbelievable sacrifice of the Ukrainian people will then have been for nothing.

President Zelensky’s calls for a no fly zone have fallen on deaf ears. He has now asked for demonstrations of solidarity in the West. We should paint the nation Blue and Gold.

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The Trials of Tyranny

President Putin is having a difficult time at the moment. Now that former president Trump has left office Putin has moved into the number one spot of most pressing threat to liberal democracies albeit probably not the long term greatest.

His arrest of the man he tried to have assassinated, Alexi Navalny, on his return to Russia has not gone well. First, tens of thousands of Russians in cities across the enormous country turned out in freezing weather to protest leading to some 5k arrests.

You can understand why President Putin does not see eye to eye with Mr Navalny given the latter’s remorseless focus on the former’s corruption. The YouTube video recounting some of the President’s early career and the development of Putin Palace has been downloaded by 6m+ people but has also been accessed via a range of other sites.

The video is the best part of two hours long and narrated at breakneck speed by Mr Navalny. Some will no doubt suggest this is simply an opposition politician trying to besmirch his opponent. However, much of the information about the President’s early career with the Stassi in Dresden, the Mayors office in St Petersburg and the Yeltsin government in Moscow ties closely with that provided by others notably Cathrine Belton’s excellent book “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West.”

Of course the Russian leaders duplicity is not something lacking evidence. His explicit rejection of any suggestion that his countries troops were in the Crimean peninsula until he annexed it in 2014. His denial of any involvement in the deaths of a number of people all of whom were opponents and critics, specifically threatened by the president before they were killed. Then of course there were the attempted assassinations of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Mr Navalny with the use of weapon grade Novichok nerve agent. None of which he knew anything about.

If all those protests a were not enough, he then has a phone conversation with the new President of the United States. This time the content of the call was made public by the White House and not the Kremlin in a break with recent tradition. Also the tone seems to have been somewhat different. It was not a cosy chat about the many things Russia and the US have in common!

President Biden raised a number of awkward matters. Notably the ongoing cyber attack on the US, Russias’s actions in the Ukraine, its attempts to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections and specifically the attempt to assassinate Mr Navalny, and his arrest on his return to Moscow. Further, president Biden did not come off the call to announce that he had been reassured by president Putin that all these things were not true, or grossly exaggerated by hostile press coverage and president Biden’s own misinformed National Intelligence agencies.

All of this must have made Putin long for happier times, before the November US election. Many would think that after twenty years being top tyrant and an increasingly hostile environment the attractions of retirement would start to grow in President Putin’s mind. Unfortunately, this is not so simple, even if he was tempted.

One of the biggest problems of being a tyrant is how you step down with out getting killed. As top tyrant you can only stay there by destroying or cowing all alternative centres of power, like a free press and independent judiciary. That is all ok when you can rely on people with guns doing as you tell them. The minute you cannot you are at the mercy of whoever is next top tyrant.

This creates something of a vicious circle. You are loath to stand down for the reason suggested above so you have to remain in power. But in order to remain top tyrant, you have to keep all aspiring top tyrants in fear of you. Over time this begins to rub more and more of them up the wrong way. You notice this and redouble your efforts to instil fear, and so on until…

There is no doubt President Putin is a shrewd operator and had built a veritable army of supporters who depend absolutely on his patronage. However, when the economy is performing terribly, and at the same time as wages and pensions are stagnant the states coffers are being pillaged to build Imperial Palaces tempers fray.

As a court decides the fate of Mr Navalny it is very likely that telephone justice will prevail and a call from the Kremlin will determine the views of the justices. But the Kremlin may be thinking very hard about what the call should say. Opposition is growing and it is difficult to know whether Mr Navalny is more of a threat outside and campaigning or inside and a continuing focus on Russian injustice. Sadly, I suspect president Putin will revert to his standard playbook and imprison his opponent.

However he should keep in mind that there is no rule says countries can only have one revolution.

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The Deep State is Growing!

In the US it seems ever greater numbers of people are becoming part of the deep state. More and more members of the Republican party are starting to contradict the presidential view of the world. Even some of the party’s long time strategists like Karl Rove, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff under GW Bush, has stated that the election result will not be overturned. That, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Even Fox news has called out against the president.

Many of the GOP’s leaders are finding ever more convoluted ways of supporting the president. Very much trying to hide behind a commitment to observing the law. Trying to pretend that baseless legal challenge is a concern for procedural propriety and not an attempt to subvert the democratic process.

An agency of the president’s Department for Homeland Security has supported a daily initiative to address rumours about election fraud. In a joint statement the Elections Infrastructure Government Co-ordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive (to be fair some parts of the state need to be deep, in fact the deeper the better!) stated “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American History.”

Those responsible for the election process in the swing states have been quick to address and rebut claims of fraud. Of course they have only been rebutting such claims with facts, and there may be “alternative facts” out there, nay possibly an alternative universe in which larger numbers count for less than smaller ones, and in which a second Trump term is in prospect. Here on planet earth, however, more and more people, Republican as well as Democrat are recognising the reality of a Biden win.

As the numbers of those who accept the result increase, the numbers in the deep state increase. As it deepens and widens what happens when the vast majority are in the deep state?

All of this, of course is ridiculous. In a film it would be a fantasy comedy. In reality however it is serious. The lives of dedicated election employees, and volunteers, are being threatened; a smooth transition of power is being prevented; worst of all there is an attempt to undermine faith in the keystone of the democratic process – free and fair elections.

President Putin is not going to contact president-elect Biden until president Trump’s legal challenges have been through the courts. I wonder if he has spoken to president Trump since the election. He may well prefer another four years of Trump but I am sure he is happy with the outcome to date.