Is It Hysterical to Prepare for War with Russia?

I have repeatedly voiced my sense of deja vu as I watch events in Ukraine and listen to the lies and hollow denials of Vladimir Putin.  The world has heard these story lines before, particularly in 1938 and 1939 when no one wanted to seriously the ravings of Adolph Hitler.  Like Hitler, Putin is a megalomaniac and seemingly suffers from delusions of grandeur, seeing himself as Russia's new tsar.  Just as frighteningly, he seems to be tacitly accepting some insane and terrifying statements by those who would unleash atomic war warfare in Eastern Europe.  A piece in Slate ask the question of whether it is naive to believe that Putin will not do something crazy that threatens world stability (such as it is).  Here are highlights:

WARSAW, Poland—Over and over again—throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels—I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house. 

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to American or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine.

The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkov and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state—Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here—Novorossiya can grow larger over time.

Russian soldiers will have to create this state—how many of them depends upon how hard Ukraine fights, and who helps them—but eventually Russia will need more than soldiers to hold this territory. Novorossiya will not be stable as long as it is inhabited by Ukrainians who want it to stay Ukrainian. 

There is a familiar solution to this, too. A few days ago, Alexander Dugin, an extreme nationalist whose views have helped shape those of the Russian president, issued an extraordinary statement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote—and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of bastards.”

Not long ago, Vladimir Zhirinovsky—the Russian member of parliament and court jester, who sometimes says things that those in power cannot—argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries—“dwarf states,” he called them—and show the West who really holds power in Europe: “Nothing threatens America, it’s far away. But Eastern European countries will place themselves under the threat of total annihilation,” he declared. Vladimir Putin indulges these comments: Zhirinovsky’s statements are not official policy, the Russian president says, but he always “gets the party going.”

A far more serious person, the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes—perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city—to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.

Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But Mein Kampf also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.

But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication—and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either. So is it hysterical to prepare for total war? Or is it naive not to do so?

It is dangerous to cling to the hope that dictators are sane and rational individuals.  Hitler and Stalin made that very clear.

Putin Makes His Czechoslovakia Move

At the risk of beating a dead horse, previous predictions that Vladimir Putin was following the game plan Adolph Hitler used to justify Nazi Germany's move into Czechoslovakia in 1938 now have been substantiated.  NATO officials are reporting that Russian military forces are operating inside Ukraine's borders.  While Barack Obama has refrained from calling the move an invasion, it is hard to know what else to call it.  Russian military are inside the country without permission and taking armed action against Ukraine's forces.  The whole situation is a frightening case of repeating itself and one wonders if the west and NATO will respond with appeasement as happened 76 years ago.  The New York Times comments on Putin's lies and dangerous aggression.  Here are excerpts:

The evidence has been mounting for some time, but there is no longer any doubt: Russian troops are in Ukraine, not as volunteers, as the rebel commander in Donetsk would have the world believe, but in units equipped with mobile artillery and heavy military equipment.

A senior NATO officer reported on Thursday that the alliance had monitored a “significant escalation” in Russia’s military “interference” in Ukraine, and that well over 1,000 Russian soldiers are operating inside the southeast of the country. The officer, Brig. Gen. Nico Tak, called it “interference,” presumably because “invasion” would mean an all-out military assault. But, by any name, it is a large and unacceptable escalation of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

[A]mbassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, was more blunt in her address Thursday to the Security Council, where she described Russia’s actions as “a deliberate effort to support, and now fight alongside, illegal separatists in another sovereign country.” That should be the reality guiding Mr. Obama when he meets with NATO allies in Wales next week.

NATO suspects the Russian goal is to prevent a military defeat of the rebels and freeze the conflict in an open-ended cease-fire, with Russia left in effective control of Ukraine’s industrial heartland, following the template of Russia’s frozen conflicts with Moldova and Georgia. But Russia’s motive is not the issue here. It is Russia’s violation of a cardinal principle of the international order since World War II — states do not seize territory by force.

Mr. Putin has played his dangerous game in Ukraine with cunning and deceit since the ouster in February of the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych lost him a Ukrainian president he could manipulate. First he annexed Crimea outright. Shocking and outrageous as that was, at least no blood was shed; Mr. Putin claimed that history and a Russian population as justification for that seizure. The Western reaction was limited to modest sanctions.

After the rebels shot down a Malaysian jetliner with a Russian missile, and after Kiev made gains against the rebels, Russia’s involvement became more overt, with reports of artillery fire across the border, armored columns crossing into Ukraine and Russian soldiers caught or killed inside Ukraine. The United States and the European Union ratcheted up the sanctions, but Mr. Putin continued to deny any involvement. He will no doubt deny the latest evidence as well, and will cynically claim some Ukrainian or Western plot.

Comments from European leaders on Thursday showed they recognize the danger of this moment. European Union leaders meeting on Saturday must join the United States in expanding the economic sanctions. France should seriously reconsider delivering the Mistral assault ships it has sold Russia. And when NATO leaders gather next week, they should give strong reassurances to NATO members along Russia’s borders that they will be protected should Moscow turn its attentions on them.

Appeasing bullies only makes them increase their bad behavior.  The disaster of the 1930's ought to remind all involved of this reality. 

Russian Troops Cross Ukraine Border To Open New Front

As the world remains distracted by the atrocities being commuted by ISIS and at home many eyes remain focused on racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Vladimir Putin continues to follow Adolph Hitler's model of how a nation invades another sovereign nation under the guise of "humanitarian relief" and protecting those of the same ethnic background as the invaders.  Huffington Post looks at Putin's continued flouting of international law as he gambles that the West will allow him to mimic Hitler's move into Czechoslovakia in the late 1930's.  Here are highlights:

Ukraine accused Russia on Monday of sending soldiers across the border to open a new front in the separatist war that has devastated the east of the country and provoked the gravest East-West crisis since the fall of communism.

The charge, dismissed by Moscow, dealt a blow to already slim hopes of progress at talks on Tuesday towards ending the conflict between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian troops, in which more than 2,000 people have been killed.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who is due to meet Russia's Vladimir Putin in the Belarussian capital of Minsk, expressed "extraordinary concern" at the Russian move, his press service said, setting the scene for a possibly angry encounter.

The Ukrainian military said a group of Russian forces, in the guise of separatist rebels, had crossed into south-east Ukraine with 10 tanks and two armored infantry vehicles. It said border guards had halted the column outside Novoazovsk, Ukraine's most south-easterly point on the Azov Sea.

With the rebels largely encircled in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine has been pressing its advance while its Western allies have waited nervously to see if Moscow will intervene to prevent the separatists being crushed.

NATO said last week that Russian forces had been firing artillery both within Ukraine and across the border, but Moscow has consistently denied taking part in the fighting or supplying weapons to the separatists.

NATO: Russians Open Fire in Ukraine

Vladimir "Hitler Want to Be" Putin seemingly is continuing to follow Hitler's game plan from the 1930's when Germany used the pretext of protecting ethnic Germans to seize Czechoslovakia.  New NATO reports indicate that Russian troops have opened fire within Ukraine's borders.  It's all part of Putin's feigned claim of sending "humanitarian aid" to those in need due to the fighting that has ensued between Kremlin backed separatists and the Ukrainian government.  It is telling that the supposed 200 truck convoy entered Ukraine without permission for Kiev or the International Red Cross.  One has to wonder when Putin will take the step of growing a Hitler style mustache.  The man needs to be removed from power and his supporters in Russian need to read their history books and recall the fate that Hitler brought to Germany.  The New York Times looks at the frightening developments.  Here are excerpts:

Russia on Friday escalated tensions with Ukraine to the highest level since its stealthy invasion of Crimea in the spring, sending more than 200 trucks from a long-stalled aid convoy into rebel-held eastern Ukraine over the objections of Kiev and, NATO said, conducting military operations on Ukrainian territory.

NATO officials said that the Russian military had moved artillery units inside Ukrainian territory in recent days and was using them to fire at Ukrainian forces. Russia has repeatedly denied sending troops or military hardware into Ukraine, just as it denied any link to the unidentified gunmen who paved the way for Moscow’s annexation of Crimea — until President Vladimir V. Putin stated in April that Russian troops were “of course” involved.

There has been “a major escalation in Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine since mid-August, including the use of Russian forces,” Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen of NATO said in a statement. “Russian artillery support — both cross-border and from within Ukraine — is being employed against the Ukrainian armed forces,” Mr. Rasmussen added. 

Russia’s Permanent Mission to NATO, in a statement, accused the alliance of indifference to humanitarian suffering in eastern Ukraine and described its protests over the entry of a Russian aid convoy into Ukraine without Red Cross escorts as “another cynical attempt to cover the crimes of Ukrainian authorities.”

The NATO statements added new pressure on Moscow before a flurry of diplomacy in coming days, including a visit to Kiev on Saturday by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and a scheduled meeting next week between President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine and his Russian counterpart, Mr. Putin, in Minsk, Belarus.

Ms. Merkel spoke by telephone with the Russian and Ukrainian presidents on Friday and “expressed her great concern” over Russia’s unilateral decision to move its aid trucks into Ukraine, her spokesman said. She also spoke with President Obama and, according to the White House, both leaders agreed that the arrival of the convoy represented “a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

“It is important to remember that Russia is purporting to alleviate a humanitarian situation which Russia itself created,” Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement. “If Russia really wants to ease the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine, it could do so today by halting its supply of weapons, equipment, and fighters to its proxies,” she added.

[T]he arrival of Russian trucks — only 34 of which Ukrainian officials inspected Thursday evening on the Russian side of the border, and found to contain buckwheat, rice, sugar and water — appeared to be a Russian effort to stall an accelerating offensive by Ukrainian forces against beleaguered pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. 

The disingenuousness of the Russian statements is amazing and truly sounds like something coming out of Hitler's Nazi regime or the old Soviet Union.  Does Putin really think we are all so stupid that we believe his lies?