In a year’s time, what has Putin achieved? To set the stage for this full-scale invasion-it should be recalled that the first act of aggression came in 2014, when Russian soldiers took Crimea and infiltrated the Donbas––he issued a long, historically perverse manifesto that asserted what he had been telling foreign leaders for years: that there is no such thing as Ukrainian nationhood. In Bucha, Kherson, Izyum, and elsewhere, Russian forces and mercenaries have carried out acts of torture, which have been well documented by journalists and human-rights organizations. His strategy, it turned out, was of the most primitive and criminal variety: the deliberate targeting of civilian structures-schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, power plants, bridges. But every credible analyst of the invasion has been stunned by the scale of Putin’s folly-the miserable planning and poor intelligence, the lack of training and logistics, the lawlessness of his officer corps. And what of his strategic mastery? For years, the Kremlin leadership advertised the modernization of its post-Soviet military, the sophistication of its “asymmetric” fighting doctrine. Unmoved by the losses on his own side, much less on Ukraine’s, Putin has sent his minions to the provinces to scoop up more human material for the meat grinder of his war. We do not know the precise number of dead and wounded, though it is certainly more than a quarter of a million. Putin was counting on historians to celebrate his rightful restoration of Imperial Russia.Ī year later, the ramifications of his delusions are enormous and bloody. Putin’s serene presumption was that, within a week, his forces would overrun Kyiv, arrest Zelensky and his advisers, and install a cast of collaborators. And what of Ukraine itself? It was a pseudo-nation, hopelessly corrupt and led by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former sitcom actor with an approval rating south of thirty per cent. So who was going to stop him on the road to Kyiv? Hadn’t Donald Trump, during his Presidency, exposed and deepened the fissures in the NATO alliance? Under Joe Biden, the United States seemed finished with foreign adventures-humiliated by its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and distracted by its internal divisions. For years, he had been regarded in the world press as a singularly cunning strategist at the same time, he methodically crushed civil society in his country and sidelined any dissenting voices in the Kremlin. On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, ordered the invasion of Ukraine, unleashing the full force of his military on an unthreatening neighbor, and the full force of his propagandists on his own population.
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