Apparently in thrall to a neo-Freudian death wish, self-loathing scholars, self-adoring media figures, and fringe politicians in the West continue to serve up geopolitical leftovers long since gone rotten concerning Russia’s president and aspirant czar, Vladimir Putin: Putin must not be humiliated…Russia has legitimate regional interests…Moscow has valid security interests…and, of course, Ukraine is corrupt, unlike the immaculate Third Rome to its north and east…
This is bullshit.
First, insisting that we not tread upon Putin’s delicate feelings is equivalent to claiming that we should have taken Hitler’s emotional vulnerability into account and stopped at the Rhine as the Second World War neared its end. We must not pander to Putin. He is a mass murderer on a grand scale and an aggressor whose like we have not seen within or on the fringes of Europe since the Third Reich. Putin must not only be defeated utterly, he must be tried for his crimes, should genuine Russian patriots not kill him first.
As for Moscow’s “legitimate security interests,” our Putin-worshippers mean that Russia deserves the right to dictate the fates of all countries large or small on its borders—in essence, we should ignore the legitimacy and independence of states and peoples that have suffered horrifically, repeatedly, and remorselessly under Russia’s merciless rule (whether in a czarist or Soviet identity). Shall we deny elementary human rights to tens of millions of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Moldovans, Poles, Georgians, and Central Asians simply because Russian conquerors had already tormented them repeatedly? Shouldn’t we give Putin Finland, too?
Does Russia’s history of attempting to exterminate Ukrainian identity, intentionally starving somewhere between three and ten million Ukrainians to death, and even executing folk musicians en masse assign to Moscow an eternal right to occupy Ukraine? If this be so, then the Mongols have a just claim to ruling Russia and, by the way, the Turks have a right to rule Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which the Ottomans occupied a century longer than czarist Russia occupied Ukraine.
Putin’s apologists sputter that Ukrainians, Latvians, and others voluntarily fought beside the Nazis. Indeed, some of them did. Had you witnessed your family starving to death after commissars confiscated their meager food supplies, might you not have seen the enemy of your barbaric enemy as your friend? The case of Latvia is representative of so many others: In its brief, shining period of independence between the world wars, this small country stunned all with its burst of creativity and artistic accomplishments, its brave grappling with old wrongs, and the challenge of self-government. Then the Russians returned, wearing red stars this time, and executed tens of thousands while shipping tens of thousands more off to slower deaths in the GULag. Might the Latvians not have the right to be slightly peeved at and mildly wary of Moscow?
Throughout the Baltics and in Ukraine, partisans, fighting against literally impossible odds, continued to resist Soviet-dyed Russians into the 1950s. And those partisans were patriots, not fascists as Putin would have it.
Does yesteryear’s slaughter-by-Russians condemn a people to control by Russians today?
As for Moscow’s “legitimate security interests,” which state on or near Russia’s borders has attacked it? Oh, okay: The Poles did come for an armed visit in the early seventeenth century (perhaps that brief occupation gives Poland a right to rule Russia?), but the truth today is that no one would want responsibility for ruling the vast wreck of humanity self-imprisoned between Kaliningrad and Vladivostok. No one except the Chinese.
Had the West wished to “destroy” Russia, no better opportunity beckoned than the turbulent 1990s. How many Abrams or Leopard tanks crossed the Russian border?
Rather the contrary: Western good will toward the “reborn” Russia was self-emasculating. Thereafter, inattention to and willfully blind underestimation of Putin abetted his rise and consolidation of power. Our refusal to see Putin as he really was—obsessed, brilliant, and destined for madness—bears partial responsibility for every missile or rocket that lands on Ukrainian soil today.
Russia has no rights beyond its borders. Putin has only the right to a fair trial. And all the survivors in the now-free states tormented by Moscow for centuries have a right to live without the Cyrillic alphabet or the secret policeman.
