Update April 7, 2022, May 8, 2022: Within a few days after the Feb.21 update, Russia invaded. It was clear Putin had miscalculated, but so had the rest of the world. The common wisdom was that Putin's army would be in Kiev and 'Zelenski would have been taken out in three days. The Feb. 21 column below missed an important element, the leadership of Zelenski who refused to be evacuated as Russian troops advanced into Ukraine and told the US offer, don't send me transportation, send me weapons. Further rallies were from the Snake Island defenders, who told the Russian warship to go f ...yourself...an icon that became a battle cry of defiance. /The rest is playing out before our eyes on television.Russia’s Grave Miscalculation: Ukrainians Would Collaborate - The New York Times (nytimes.com. We all, Putin included, underestimated the strength of the human spirit to resist tyranny.
Update February 21, 2022 continues. This may have been Putin's epic miscalculation. Over 50 percent of Ukrainians oppose Putin's invasion...and most of those would take up armed opposition or civil demonstrations. Ukrainians were supposed to put their ethnic ties with Russia above national identity and desire to be in the western economic and democratic orbit. In fact, there was a bloodless coup that resulted in the pro-Russian president fleeing to Moscow. and a democratic election of a new president. Putin may have expected Ukrainians would quietly accept a Russian quisling government and Russian troop occupation. Putin was only half right. His problem is where he is half wrong. The opposition was going to be deadly and drawn out as the outgunned Ukrainian military planned to fade into the population and undertake urban guerilla warfare. They have been trained and weaponized for that by the West. In effect, there was going to be a bloody civil war. The question is whether the Russian public has much stomach for that, believing Ukrainians were close ethnic cousins. This is why there is speculation Putin planned to cook up Ukrainian aggression against Russians within and outside Ukraine as an excuse to give Russians a justification and why the body bag count of dead Russian soldiers could damage Putin's political grip in Russia itself. With 100,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian borders, that Ukraine would attack Russians is a very unbelievable story. The US landing tons of small arms weapons and ammunition for use by pro-western Ukrainians is part of the credible threat that body bags filled with Russian soldiers would be sent back to Russia is a real threat to Putin and as a rational actor, he may be taking into account and his calculation in the timing. It takes time for the effects to be felt and perhaps he thinks he can beat down opposition and consolidate power before his own populace feel the blowback. . The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan once the maimed and dead soldiers were in critical numbers to overcome their government propaganda to any contrary. That Putin cares about sanctions, no matter how extreme, is doubtful and it would take some time before Russian consumers would feel the pinch. Those massive refugees would result in the Russian invasion is also a slow developing anti-Russian propaganda impact. He may save face by a smaller incursion where the population is more to his liking, formalizing his prior stealth take over Donbas and breaking it from the rest of Ukraine and getting a better land bridge to Crimea. We will see. with a few weeks while frozen ground can give tanks traction. Update Feb. 21: https://www.vox.com/2022/2/21/22944995/russia-vladimir-putin-orders-troops-ukraine-east-donbas /The response from the West will determine whether he gets away with that without triggering massive sanctions and succeeds in taking the whole enchilada.
The original February 7, 2022 posting continues: There is speculation that Putin may have been influenced by the USA's messy withdrawal from Afghanistan, thinking that the America was so weak and lacked resolve or desiring isolationism, that it would not get heavily involved in a Russian military invasion of Ukraine. This is the danger of MAGA. It makes the US look weaker, not greater. We do not know what is in Putin's head, but if he thought the isolationist had won in the US, as evidenced by the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan, the weak response to Russia's military grabs in Georgia, Syria and Crimea, he miscalculated. If Putin pays little for marching into Ukraine and the west does not inflict pain on him for doing so, others will take that as a green light and try it elsewhere such as China with its designs on Taiwan. Serbia and Bosnian Serbs still have hopes the northern half of Bosnia (ethnic cleansed of Muslims and Croatian Catholics in the 1990's civil war) would become part of Greater Serbia and are watching for the intensity of western response to Russia's actions in Ukraine. The MAGA movement period is similar to the America First and isolationist era in the 1930s. The pro-fascist movement in the US gained steam and adherents in spite of FDR's disposition to the contrary. Before TV and and the internet, America had radio and fascist, isolationist media personalities like Father Coughlin, with a large radio following and an anti-Semitic demagogue supporting German fascism. . The 1938–39 deplatforming of Father Coughlin. (slate.com)The Father Coughlin of our era is FOX news and Tucker Carlson. Carlson's spiel is not anti-Semitism, but an admirer of autocracy instead of democracy and an apologist of Putin's rule and expansionism. He ignores the anti-Semitism that tinges these autocrats, especially Viktor Orban of Hungary.. Tucker Carlson Says Ukraine Isn’t Important. These Key GOP Voters Beg to Differ. - POLITICO. Tucker Carlson, Hungary, and the right’s embrace of authoritarianism - Vox Hitler, maybe have thought, thought the US would be content to remain in Fortress America. Before Pearl Harbor, America stood by while Czechoslovakia's ethnic German Sudetenland province was handed over to Germany, (to get Peace in our Time0, Poland was invaded, Anschluss with Austria was finalized, France and Norway fell to the Germans, Britain was pulverized in the Blitz and the US was asleep at the wheel until December 7th, 1941. One wonders what kind of a country we would have been had not Pearl Harbor happened. It gave FDR the political winds in his back to fight a two-front war as the American public realized that isolationism did not work with airplanes as the new weapon in the sky. The world in 2022 is even more intertwined by trade, alliances, and technology, cyber vulnerability, and nuclear weapons with intercontinental reach than it was then.
These kinds of conflicts do not end well. This reminds me of the horrific Bosnian war of ethnic cleansing in the first half of the-1990s and the death of 100,000 civilians.. Until now, this was the only hot war in Europe since World War II. The Serbs lost their attempt to expand the boundaries to encompass all of their ethnic kinfolks and their president died in the Hague awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. The result is that the current population of Bosn1a, once similar to Colorado's, has decreased from 5 million in 1991, the beginning of the conflict, to 3 million, resulted in massive emigration, is the poorest per capita economy in Europe, still subject to ethnic strife and threatened with renewed violence and break up. My fear is that Ukrainians would devolve into this tragedy. The size of the impact dwarfs the Bosnia conflict. The population of Ukraine is 44 million. and the threat extends to all former Russian satellites bordering it
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