Every so often Vladimir Putin draws back the shades and gives the West a portal into what he’s thinking. He did so Monday, unspooling a rambling hourlong monologue that served as revisionist red meat for the former Soviet KGB agent’s domestic audience, and a gauntlet on the floor for President Joe Biden and the nation he leads.
Putin railed against U.S. dominance in the post-Cold War world order, and demeaned Ukraine as a concoction of the Bolsheviks — an entity that has no legal justification to enjoy statehood. He fabricated a broad array of rationales for Russian aggression, including the wholly fantastical notion that “only in a matter of time” will Ukraine become a venue for Western nuclear weapons pointed at Moscow.
And then he delivered his fiery harangue’s capstone. Russia recognizes Ukraine’s separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics. That declaration was followed by Russian troops moving across the border and into those two war-torn lands in Ukraine’s east. Putin called them “peacekeeping troops,” a classic example of Orwellian doublespeak that would be comical if it weren’t for the pall of bloodshed that Russia’s latest move foretells.
