Putin's endgame is coming into view more and more, and I keep saying it even if nobody believes me. The only reason for going into Ukraine that makes sense, literally the only one, is to ruin the world economy, and we're getting closer and closer to exactly that. 1/3rd of the world's wheat comes from around Ukraine. 1/3rd less wheat? 1/3rd of the world wonders if it will have a next meal. Even if everybody always gets their next meal, the worries drive the prices of food through the roof. When food gets more expensive, the value of currency goes down, and down, and down, interest rates go up, products cease to be bought, products cease to be made, products cease to be shipped... Economics is the only sane reason to launch this war, literally the only one, and as decrepit as Putin looks, and as insane as his propaganda makes him seem, you cannot tell anyone that he has lost his sanity completely.
I may be the only person in the world who believes it, but if Putin is dying, then this is Putin's final gambit in a generation long blitzkrieg of behind the scenes misdirection and manipulation, and it may be his masterpiece. Putin never wanted Russia to conquer the world militarily, he wanted Russia to take the world through intelligence, and in the age of Trump and Brexit, he looked as though he almost succeeded. All it took was a little internet malfeasance to swing a couple hundred thousand voters in the wrong direction, and the biggest worldwide crisis since WWII was created.
Then came COVID, the ultimate destabilizing event. But once everybody realizes how unstable their world is, they try at least to lurch toward stability - just as we did after 9/11, and just as after 9/11, the appearance of our government's reliability was short lived.
From certain vantages of December 2020, covid looked as though it just might have restabilized the West.... Biden was soon to be President, Boris Johnson was clearly floundering and the new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, was and remains damn electable. Merkel was capping an historically great tenure in Germany, and Covid forced world cooperation to administer vaccines.
Everybody knew that this was all just a temporary mirage, but nobody knew from which direction the new misdirections would come. Though ultimately, everybody knew it had to come from one of two places.... Kyiv, or Taiwan....
We have two years until the next Presidential election. Even though 2/3rds of the country is desperate to not elect Trump, nobody can agree on who instead. if Trump himself seems more unelectable than ever, he's come back from just as bad, and even if he doesn't, Ron DeSantis is clearly palatable to many Republicans while in some ways running to Trump's right. Currently, there is no Democratic alternative looking viable yet, not even Biden. Germany is in political transition - there's a very good reason Putin chose the exact moment he did for the invasion, and it was because it was right as Merkel left office and the next German chancellor would have to prove their competence. Macron received a second term as French president by pure luck, and finds France as ungovernable as every French president has. Liz Truss in Britain is entirely new, but she is known for her divisive rhetoric, and all she has to do is be a divisive enough Prime Minister to enrage Labourites and a younger version of Jeremy Corbyn could easily be re-ascendant.
Putin knows all this, and what he is buying Russia is time. If he can put the world economy into freefall just in time for the next US and UK elections, what will be blamed is US leadership, and the entire foundation of liberal democracy for which the US stands. However well or ill the US lives up to its image, the only way to pass into something better than our current incarnation of liberal democracy is through a long period where any sort of liberality is threatened by dictatorship all around the world.
It is very easy to blame the person in charge for not being able to control situations where nothing can be controlled. As always, there are people blaming the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as though Vladimir Putin simply decided to become a supervillain because he was provoked into it. They say that if the US had not expanded NATO and gone into Russia's sphere of influence, there would be no Russian invasion of Ukraine - this, of course, goes against the last 350 years of Russian history with all its attempts to expand its territory into mainland Europe, but they don't care.... It's much easier to blame liberals who might concede some of your points than it is to blame authoritarians who would concede none of them.
NATO is what's held the world in peace and what continues to keep the world from getting destroyed. Full stop. Had NATO not been expanded to the Baltics and former Soviet satellites, Russia would have long since invaded Ukraine, then they'd have eaten up the Baltics, then Poland, then Finland, then the Balkans, then Hungary, then the Czech Republic, and now we'd be right back to exactly where we were from 1945-1990.
People say that the US backed Russia into a totalitarian relapse, ignoring that Russia was never democratic, and there has never been a single Russian head of state with democratic aims - not a one, not even Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin could have done it, but instead he fired a series of Prime Ministers, composed his inner circle almost completely of former KGB, and let them feast on the Russian industries and recreate themselves as oligarchs with monopolies. A number of Yeltsin's Prime Ministers tried to push through democratic reforms - Yeltsin fired them all.
How can NATO be responsible for Russia's aggression when, in 1997, Russia signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 which guaranteed unlimited NATO expansion? Putin's security may be threatened by its neighbors, but Russia's is not, and NATO has never threatened Russia's security by anything but the soft power of putting economic prosperity right at Russia's doorstep. If Russia were truly threatened by NATO,'s power, they could have always joined it.
Russia and the USSR reaffirmed its commitment to allowing foreign countries to choose their own foreign policies with treaties in 1945 (UN Charter), 1975 (Helsinki), 1990 (Paris), and 1997. One can blame the US for turning their own back on just as many treaties, but to blame the US disproportionately to blaming Russia for the same is basically the same as saying you hate your friends more than your enemies.
We are waiting for Putin to die. It may be in a month, it may be in ten years. But basically, Putin needs to last one more year to effect the change he wants. I still very much doubt he's going to use nukes, but he doesn't have to. Conquest of Ukraine gains him nothing, arresting the world's supply chain gains him everything, and he will go out with his objective reached - the toppling of any dream of a liberal democratic world order ushered in by the US. Every major Western country would stand on the precipice of being a repressive government of gangsters who use their economies as a pig troth to engorge a few thousand people at the top, paying their populations subsistence wages, letting them see only what propaganda tells them is going on in the world. Those who would show their populations more objective truths would be imprisoned, killed, or intimidated into silence. More prosperous countries nearby who stand in their way can always be invaded until their economies drop dead.
If Putin doesn't become a figure of history by this time next year, we have to help him.
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