Ukraine's Real Threat to Putin

Having studied Russian history in college and followed events in that country ever since, from the time of the Bolshevik revolution onward, the biggest threat to Russia's dictatorial leaders has been the inability to deliver an ever improving standard of living to the population and/or having the Russian citizenry learn that other nations - especially democracies - provide a better lifestyle and standard of living than Russians (save for the oligarchs) enjoy.   The Internet has made the task of supressing the truth from the Russian population more difficult and despite Russian xenophobia and a cynical alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin and his cronies face a difficult task in continuing the lie that Russia is exceptional.  Ukraine's young democracy and better standard of living have made the task even more difficult and now rank and file members of the Russian military in Ukraine are seeing for themselves, despite the destruction they are inflicting, that Ukraine provides its people a better life.  Hence Putin's obsession with making the nation cease to exist.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality and the threat it poses to Putin's dictatorship.  Here are highlights:

In early April I walked into Andriivka, a village about 40 miles from Kyiv, with my battalion in the Ukrainian territorial defense forces. We were among the first Ukrainian troops to enter the village after a Russian occupation that had lasted about a month. Shell casings and boxes of ammunition were scattered everywhere, and the houses were in various states of ruin. In one of the yards we passed there was an abandoned burned-out tank sitting on the grass.

The Russians killed civilians in Andriivka, and they ransacked and looted houses. The locals told us something else the Russians had done: One day they took mopeds and bicycles out of some of the yards and rode around on them in the street like children, filming one another with their phones and laughing with delight, as if they’d gotten some long-awaited birthday present.

A few days earlier we were in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv that was subjected to an infamously brutal occupation. The people there told us that when the first Russian convoy entered the town, the troops asked if they were in Kyiv; they could not believe that such idyllic parks and cottages could exist outside a capital. Then they looted the local houses thoroughly. They took money, cheap electronics, alcohol, clothes and watches. But, the locals said, they seemed perplexed by the robotic vacuum cleaners, and they always left those.

This war is Vladimir Putin’s fatal mistake. Not because of economic sanctions and not because of the huge losses of troops and tanks but because Mr. Putin’s soldiers are from some of the poorest and most rural regions of Russia. Before this war, these men were encouraged to believe that Ukrainians lived in poverty and were culturally, economically and politically inferior.

Now the invaders have seen the reality: The Ukrainians live better than they do.

The war has brought that reality home to me, too. When Ukraine and Russia left the Soviet Union about 30 years ago, we had the same resource-based economies, the same endemic corruption and poverty. Foreigners would often think Ukraine was part of Russia, and even Ukrainians did not always understand the fundamental differences between Russians and us. But at some point, our paths diverged.

Ukraine has learned how to build roads, schools and hospitals. Ukrainians have been able to travel to the European Union without a visa since 2017. And when Volodymyr Zelensky, a political outsider, was elected president in 2019 on an anticorruption, pro-European platform, the incumbent president, Petro O. Poroshenko, conceded immediately.

Of course, Ukraine still has its problems. There is still corruption. We cannot say that we are satisfied with our justice system: Our courts are not independent. Before the war, large numbers of Ukrainians left to work in Poland and other countries every year. We still have a long list of work that needs to be completed.

But these problems are not the same as those in Russia, where Mr. Putin has been more or less in charge for more than 20 years and elections are basically meaningless, where badly maintained roads crisscross the country — except when they just end — and where a person can be sentenced to prison for merely expressing an opinion, like Aleksei Gorinov, a member of a local council who was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

Ten years ago Ukrainians could drink beer with Russians after the European Championship soccer matches, but we didn’t realize then that Ukraine was moving forward and Russia was moving in the opposite direction. Ukraine was trying to build a path to freedom, and Russia was building a path back to the Soviet Union with Kremlin TV and petrodollars. Eventually we grew too far apart, and something snapped.

Every day for months, I have been carrying Ukrainians who have been wounded in the fight to protect what we’ve built. Now the invaders have seen what we’ve built, too. That’s a truth that they can take home with them.

Hopefully, one day the Russian populace will rise up and overthrow Putin.  Putin sees himself as the new Tsar - may he meet the same fate as the last Tsar under the Bolsheviks.