Six down! Maybe General Dvornikov will be number seven? The Russian troops are untrained raw recruits, mere lads drafted unwillingly to fight Putin’s War. They don’t care about Putin’s dream about becoming the next Peter the Great because they know that dream has become their nightmare. They know people at home don’t know what’s going on or don’t care if they do. They have no respect for their leaders either at home or on the battlefield. In brief, their hearts aren’t in this fight.
Contrast that with the Ukrainian soldiers and people, all fighting for the right to exist as a sovereign, democratic nation. The genocidal psychopath Putin wants to obliterate everything that’s Ukrainian, and the Ukrainians are highly motivated to thwart his murderous extinction program. If they don’t win and push the Russian army out of Ukraine, they will still be a model for freedom-loving people everywhere to follow in this worldwide war of democracy vs. autocracy.
Thousands of Russian soldiers will die, Russian military equipment will lie rusting in the Ukrainian, more Russian battlecruisers like the Moskva will be lost, and Russia’s economy will be in tatters. That’s what Putin’s War will bring, no matter who claims victory.
The problem with autocracies and the autocrats who lead them is that they exist through fear. Patriotism can be a motivator, in the sense that it can be used to justify the maiming and killing, but the homeland becomes toxic to love of patria in an autocracy. Many Russian soldiers will know that. Generals like Dvornikov, the “butcher of Syria,” defile patriotism to become only murdering bastards. And in an autocracy like Russia, the sons of the patria are asked to die for some psychotic leader and his close sycophants like the oligarchs and generals like Dvornikov.
Fear is the principal tool of despots like Putin, and technology provides many ways for them to use it. Lack of information and deceitful lies are others. There are ways to get around a despot’s control, though, even in the technology-rich twenty-first century. We must use those same tools against the autocrats if we are to win this war for freedom and democracy.
But let me end with a literary “hurrah!” for the brave and courageous Ukrainians. Calling what’s happening in Putin’s War crimes or genocide is just using words. The Ukrainians are beating the crap out of Russians up to now, and will probably keep doing it, and that makes a bold statement. They fight overwhelming forces with small, tactical units carrying out decisive missions; those missions are often guided by Ukrainian elders and youths using their cellphones to inform on enemy positions and movements; and every Ukrainian is motivating their fellows to fight the Russian invaders. General Dvornikov might survive this conflict, but Russia will forever be changed…and for the worse. Putin’s armies have been shown to be incompetent and ill-prepared to fight. Ukraine’s have beat them down and demoralized them. That’s Dvornikov and Putin’s legacy, and its only good quality is showing the world how the will of a people to survive can win any war against autocracy.