In 2012, Vladimir Putin took his media corps out to an Arctic peninsula in Siberia to showcase his leadership prowess for all the world to see.
Then he dressed up like a bird, donning a billowy white suit and white helmet, climbed into a motorized white-winged hang glider along with a skilled pilot. They took off on a flight designed to show he could get a flock of endangered Siberian cranes to follow him so they could learn how to migrate south for the winter.
Only one did.
So Putin, ever persistent, tried again. And this time five cranes began to fly with him. Three soon lost interest; but two flapped willingly alongside the white-winged craft piloted (or co-piloted) by their newfound alpha crane.
In 2022, things seem to be going much the same for Putin with his flock of flummoxed generals and inaccurate intelligence advisers. Their first invasion of Ukraine stalled on the ground, failing to achieve Putin’s military objectives. They failed at the basics: They couldn’t get food and fuel to their stalled invading forces. Ukrainian forces were stronger and far fiercer than Russia expected; Ukraine’s civilians were too.
Putin’s generals, fearing the career-ending brutality of their ruler’s wrath, deceived him about the extent of their invasion’s failure, according to U.S. officials. Just as Putin had been deceiving his people about what his invasion was all about from the outset. So things came full circle in Putin’s inner circle.
As Putin began realizing that his ground invasion wasn’t working, his troops began indiscriminately targeting with artillery, rockets and bombs Ukraine’s innocent civilians. He was, of course, killing and maiming and terrorizing the same women, children, elderly and infirm whom he had told his fellow Russians he merely wanted to liberate because Ukrainians are as Russian as they were. He made up a lie, saying he was liberating Ukrainians from a government run by fictional neo-Nazis. And Putin’s Big Lie worked, as millions of Russians believed him.
Now Putin has his forces circling back around for a second, face-saving try at invading Ukraine. His shamed and stalled ground forces north of Kyiv have been pulled back to redeploy. Putin wants to at least liberate the Donbas region by making it clearly independent and, mainly, very loyal to his Russia. But Putin’s innermost objectives are not entirely clear — probably not even to his own inner circle, which now appears more like a vicious circle.
Longtime Putin watchers believe that what the Russian dictator really wanted most was to re-create the power-and-glory — plus the fear-and-glory — that young Vladimir Putin most loved about old Joe Stalin’s Soviet Empire. Instead, Putin belatedly discovered that his feared army got massively kicked and killed by little old Ukraine — so badly that his generals conned him rather than telling him the truth that the rest of the world was seeing on its news screens. U.S. officials believe that, after Putin discovered he’d just gotten his own aspirations kicked, he angrily moved a few of his military and intel insiders even further inside. He put them on house arrest.
The real reason Russia invaded Ukraine, of course, has nothing to do with fake Nazis or feigned liberation. Or Ukraine’s Nobel-deserving Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Putin’s inner volcano has been erupting ever since 2014, when he became obsessed with his impression that Kyiv was way-too publicly dissing Russia, its motherland. Just weeks before Russia was going to host a G-8 economic summit in Sochi, Ukraine spurned a new trade arrangement with Russia and sought to join the European Union. And Mount Putin erupted. He snatched Crimea. The G-8 canceled its summit, expelled Russia, rebranded itself the G-7. And Putin has been militarily menacing Ukraine ever since.
As Russia’s generals and intel chiefs prepare to take off on their second, more carefully calculated, military invasion of Ukraine, Putin feels he at least has one massive force under his secure control: Russia’s people. A solid majority once believed their dictator-president’s Big Lie about Nazis ruling Ukraine.
But online reality has begun to seep through to Russia’s masses. More and more, Russians are realizing Putin’s slaughter of Ukraine.
Russia’s president also now knows he vastly underestimated the power of the sanctions imposed by America, NATO and others. Russia’s people, now isolated from a prosperous global economy, will soon be suffering.
Putin can bash Ukraine until, as Winston Churchill once put it, he makes the rubble bounce. But he cannot win. And he may lose everything, once ordinary Russians become fed up at the global shame and economic suffering that will be Putin’s legacy.
That’s why Putin, being scheming smart, may soon get it: His smartest move now is to declare victory and get the flock out of Ukraine.
