George Rebane

After President Trump’s telecon with Putin the other day, he announced with great satisfaction that not only did Putin want the war to end, but that Russia was willing to help Ukraine rebuild from country’s devastation caused by Russia’s incessant missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure.  What astounds many of us is that evidently the White House led by the president still does not understand Putin’s personal situation and the state of Russia.

Putin is a KGB trained ex-communist thug.  He has built an historic world-class thugocracy in which the corrupt oligarch and military elite capture the lion’s share of what wealth Russia’s economy still generates (mostly through its sale of its vast mined natural resources).  Putin’s political and personal survival has two distinct dimensions.  One requires that he keeps the Russian people mollified with their stark economic environment and state-controlled civil liberties.  And the other that provides assurances of stability to the upper echelons of industry-controlling oligarchs and the military.  Both cohorts, neither of which trust the other, are mega-scale grifters who want to maintain their sources and caches of wealth.

Russia’s citizenry are told daily that the west – e.g. through NATO – is constantly threatening Russia’s sovereignty and territory.  This is the same line that communists have used for decades to explain away the people’s misery through the need to allocate the nation’s resources to ‘defense’.  Hence they need today’s ‘military action’ against the ‘fascist regime in the Ukraine’.

The oligarchs continue to sign on to Putin’s stratagems so long as it doesn’t topple their apple carts.  And they know that provoking wholesale war with the west, led by the US, will bring to an end their ability to drain Russia’s economy and live high on the hog.  So Putin must walk a very narrow line between rioting in the streets or accidentally falling out of a window if he mismanages the war which must continue at an acceptable level to a successful end.  And success here is defined at a minimum as accession of conquered Ukrainian territory and the castration of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s future territorial ambitions.

But the real bottom line is that Putin cannot tolerate a cessation of hostilities that results in Ukraine rebuilding its infrastructure and economy, and turning into a prosperous west European nation with real security guarantees that mirror NATO’s Article Five provisions.  Such an outcome will be an intolerable burr under Putin’s (and Russia’s) blanket, giving obvious lie to all the years of propaganda fed to the Russian people.  At best, Putin will seek to have Ukraine turn into a Russian satrapy like Belarus, toothless and compliant to Moscow.

All of the above is blatantly obvious to students of history and those who study the ins and outs of current affairs on the international scene.  President Trump’s media and congressional allies have a hard time today for not calling him out for his highly visible naivete.  And I’m sad to say that there is no evidence that Trump has any close friends of stature who could in private advise him of his gross misrepresentation (whitewashing?) of Putin’s character, political ambitions, and precarious leadership of a corrupt world power.