Thomas L. Friedman
I See Three Scenarios for How This War Ends
The...world has never had to deal with a leader accused
of this level of war crimes whose country... possesses the biggest arsenal of nuclear warheads of any nation.
Every day that Putin refuses to stop we get closer to the gates of hell. ...it will be harder and harder for the world to look away. But to
intervene risks igniting the first war in the heart of Europe involving
nuclear weapons....
Putin doesn’t have the ability to install a puppet leader in Ukraine and
just leave him there: A puppet would face a permanent insurrection. So,
Russia needs to permanently station tens of thousands of troops in
Ukraine to control it — and Ukrainians will be shooting at them every
day. It is terrifying how little Putin has thought about how his war
ends.
It is more terrifying, TLF, how little the West has thought through how this war ends.
I wish Putin was just motivated by a desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO;
his appetite has grown far beyond that. Putin is in the grip of magical
thinking: As Fiona Hill, one of America’s premier Russia experts, said
in an interview published on Monday by Politico, he believes that there is something called “Russky Mir,”
or a “Russian World”; that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”;
and that it is his mission to engineer “regathering all the
Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the
Russian tsardom.”
Combining the genocide in Ukraine with Russky Mir one gets Hitler's dream "New Order."
To realize that vision, Putin believes that it is his right and duty to
challenge what Hill calls “a rules-based system in which the things that
countries want are not taken by force.” And if the U.S. and its allies
attempt to get in Putin’s way — or try to humiliate him the way they did
Russia at the end of the Cold War — he is signaling that he is ready to
out-crazy us. Or, as Putin warned
the other day before putting his nuclear force on high alert, anyone
who gets in his way should be ready to face “consequences they have
never seen” before. Add to all this the mounting reports questioning Putin’s state of mind and you have a terrifying cocktail.
The second scenario is that somehow the Ukrainian military and people
are able to hold out long enough against the Russian blitzkrieg, and
that the economic sanctions start deeply wounding Putin’s economy, so
that both sides feel compelled to accept a dirty compromise. Its rough
contours would be that in return for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of
Russian troops, Ukraine’s eastern enclaves now under de facto Russian
control would be formally ceded to Russia, while Ukraine would
explicitly vow never to join NATO. At the same time, the U.S. and its
allies would agree to lift all recently imposed economic sanctions on
Russia.
Oh man, that's a dirty compromise that is hard to swallow, as well. Why isn't the following a plausible scenario?: Let Russia have its way in Ukraine and stop all dealings with them, i.e. no diplomatic relations, no easing, much less lifting, of sanctions, just cut them off from the rest of the world and be done with them. "From culture to commerce, sports to travel, the world is shunning Russia
in myriad ways to protest President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine.”-Mark Landler. That's right! Why do we have to reengage with them?
This scenario remains unlikely because it would require Putin to
basically admit that he was unable to achieve his vision of reabsorbing
Ukraine into the Russian motherland, after paying a huge price in terms
of his economy and the deaths of Russian soldiers. Moreover, Ukraine
would have to formally cede part of its territory and accept that it was
going to be a permanent no man’s land between Russia and the rest of
Europe — though it would at least maintain its nominal independence. It
would also require everyone to ignore the lesson already learned that
Putin can’t be trusted to leave Ukraine alone.
Finally, the least likely scenario but the one that could have the best
outcome is that the Russian people demonstrate as much bravery and
commitment to their own freedom as the Ukrainian people have shown to
theirs, and deliver salvation by ousting Putin from office. ...if a mass movement could eventually end Putin’s reign.
Man, I think that is even more "least likely" than Friedman does. Substitute "Russian elites" for "Russian people" and that is more likely than "least likely" and perhaps not "least likely" at all. Having said that a Times reporter yesterday quoted a Pentagon official as stating they are looking closely for "any fissures" in Putin's support among elites "but we're not seeing any significant cracks," completely contrary to Jennifer "The End of Putin" Griffin.
...
For all of these reasons I have to hope that at this very moment there
are some very senior Russian intelligence and military officials, close
to Putin, who are meeting in some closet in the Kremlin and saying out
loud what they all must be thinking: Either Putin has lost a step as a
strategist during his isolation in the pandemic or he is in deep denial
over how badly he has miscalculated the strength of Ukrainians, America,
its allies and global civil society at large.
RIGHT! I just said that. You went all Russian Moms to elites. (?)
If Putin goes ahead and levels Ukraine’s biggest cities and its capital,
Kyiv, he and all of his cronies will never again see the London and New
York apartments they bought with all their stolen riches. There will be
no more Davos and no more St. Moritz. Instead, they will all be locked
in a big prison called Russia — with the freedom to travel only to
Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North Korea and China, maybe. Their kids will be
thrown out of private boarding schools from Switzerland to Oxford.
Right again! "Locked in a big prison called Russia," for eternity! How many times are we going to welcome "perestroika" and "glasnost" only to get Russky Mir. Instead of Russian World let's make it Planet Russia. Planet China too! Enough with these people!
Either they collaborate to oust Putin or they will all share his
isolation cell. The same for the larger Russian public. I realize that
this last scenario is the most unlikely of them all, but it is the one
that holds the most promise of achieving the dream that we dreamed when
the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — a Europe whole and free, from the British
Isles to the Urals.
Oh my God, here he goes all Friedman on us. He's trapped in his 1989 dream. Russian Students for a Democratic Society collaborating with their dads? Nyet. "We are the world!" No. Friedman! Friedman! Wake up! It was a dream. It wasn't real. Go have some coffee.
