There’s no doubt that the paranoid little Russian psycho (his mental health has declined over the years, some experts say), that evil man running the Third World petrol-state of Russia, has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew by invading a free and proud Ukraine. His reasoning was too moronically simplistic: He wanted to weaken the West in general and NATO in particular. What he got was patriotic Ukrainians killing young Russian soldiers who don’t even want to be there (some of those tanks and troop killers stall because they punch holes in the gas tanks). These soldiers aren’t dumb. For them and the rest of the world, it’s as if the leaders of Slovakia had ordered an invasion of the Czech Republic: Many Russians’ relatives and friends live in Ukraine, and there exist marriages where one partner is Russian, the other Ukrainian. As I sketched this article out this morning, two college buddies in Delaware, one Russian, the other Ukrainian, lamented the war and attacked the Russian madman (that means the Russian student can never return home, of course, unless Putin is killed, something we all should celebrate).
Ukrainians died for the USSR fighting Hitler’s Nazi hordes, so it’s absurd that Putin calls Ukrainians Nazis, and he has his sycophants like Lavrov spewing that BS on international TV. The Ukrainian president is Jewish. As one Ukrainian VIP put it, the West should never trust Putin! That goes for all his stooges, of course. But Putin is the worst because he’s a deranged bully that must be stopped. How dare he order his nuclear forces to go on alert!
Russian forces, though, are like Nazi Germany’s; and Putin is the 21st-century version of Hitler as he plots to rape Europe. But, just like the Nazis couldn’t control France after occupying it in World War II because of the French Resistance, every Russian in Ukraine, if that country is occupied, will suffer the wrath of the Ukrainian resistance as Ukraine becomes another Afghanistan or Chechnya for the Russians. Putin’s wild, wet dream of reestablishing the USSR will become his nightmare. And Russians might rise up as well, even the oligarchs who have enriched themselves with ill-gotten gains as they back the old KGB monster and now will lose them all.
Ukrainians will battle on, using the battle cry, “Russian warship, go f&^% yourself!” Unlike some politicians and media members in the US, Ukrainians are willing to defend democracy and energetically participate in the war against autocracy. Trump called Putin a genius, Pompeo expressed his admiration, and fascist Fox News pundits like Tucker Carlson spew the Russian party line. Isn’t that carrying free speech too far? Isn’t that treason?
I don’t buy that these actions by some American politicians and media members are just expressions of a new isolationism. The world’s far too connected to want or support isolation (that’s why the sanctions against Putin’s Russia will break them). The blathering by Trump and his supporters is yet another instance of American fascists calling for support of an enemy of the US and the free world, a free world that must include Ukraine.
If Putin occupies Ukraine, or installs a puppet regime, we must support the Ukrainian resistance in all possible ways. Any American fascist who objects to that should be tried for treason, and not only because they’re traitors of the US. They would be traitors of democratic freedoms, criminals against all that’s decent. We cannot let autocrats, Trump, Putin, Xi, or any others, turn the world into a dystopian, autocratic hell!