Strategic clarity at last

When it comes to defining their war objectives, the Russians not so much move the goal posts as throw them out of the stadium.

When Putin’s hordes flooded into the Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, the objective was defined as de-Nazifying and demilitarising the country. Wiping the Ukraine out as a sovereign state in other words: that was the only way to achieve such worthy goals.

When several crushing defeats turned that objective into a pie in the sky, Vlad lost the thread. Having missed the original target, he began both to lower his sights and to raise them – sometimes in the course of a single day.

Aiming low, he’d announce ad urbi et orbi that all he wanted was to make sure Russian-speaking Ukrainians wouldn’t be abused by bloodthirsty Judaeo-Nazi Ukies. In the next breath, he’d go global. His redefined aim was in fact defending (or else creating – it could be either) a Pax Russica, made up of all Russian speakers around the world.

That gave me a few sleepless nights, pursued as I was by the nightmares of Russian tanks rolling down Piccadilly to protect my right to speak Russian, which I don’t want to speak anyway. I was also tempted to alert the residents of Brooklyn’s largely Russian-speaking Brighton Beach to the imminent airborne landing of Spetsnaz paras.

Jesting aside, unclear strategic objectives compromise tactical operations, and someone must have put a quiet word to that effect into Putin’s shell-like. To his credit, he understood and acted on that understanding.

Earlier this week Vlad convened his Security Council and delivered a speech meant to eliminate any strategic obfuscation once and for all. The Council members applauded, and so did much of the rest of the country. Now they knew.

“In the Ukraine,” said Vlad, “Russia is waging war on the USA to create a Palestinian state. The absence of such a state is the principal injustice of today’s world, which the USA is guilty of, and which Russia must correct by fighting in the Ukraine.”

Clarity at last, happiness all around. Noticing the unbridled enthusiasm written on the faces of everyone present, Vlad went on to explain that the West was the “root of evil” in the world.

“Behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East, the conflict in Ukraine, many other conflicts in the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and so on, are the ruling elites of the United States and their satellites,” continued Vlad, like a thief screaming “Stop thief!” as he runs ahead of his pursuers.

“It would be good for those who worry so deeply about citizens of Israel to investigate what their special services are up to in Ukraine, and that they are trying to provoke pogroms in Russia,” added Putin. “Pure scum, there is no other word for it.”

He was referring to the pogrom at Makhachkala’s airport the other day, when a mob screaming “Allahu akbar!” rushed onto the runway hoping to massacre Israeli passengers on the flight arriving from Tel Aviv.

In the process they looted the airport shops, proving that the terminal has come up in the world since I myself landed there. My friend Tony Daniels and I went to Makhachkala in 1995, when the FCO asked us to have a look at the refugee camps on the Dagestan-Chechnya border. At that time, there were no shops to loot at the airport – but on the plus side, there was plenty of naked concrete.

The horror stories of Russian atrocities we heard at the camp were the worst I had ever heard, and people dying in front of our very eyes proved the stories were true. If further validation was necessary, the Russians have now provided it by their inhuman massacres of civilians in the Ukraine, every bit as horrific as in the two Chechen wars.

Rallying Dagestani Muslims to storm that airport, while also launching an anti-Semitic riot in Khasavyurt (the site of that camp in 1995), seems like a task beyond even the combined efforts of CIA and Mossad, but well within the capabilities of the FSB. It has form in that sort of thing: Russian and Soviet security services have always whipped up anti-Semitism to channel resentment into that proven conduit and away from the government.

Putin then accused the dastardly Yankees of using their Israeli proxies to murder “hundreds of thousands” of Gaza civilians, including the mandatory “women and children”. Since Hamas sources themselves had only claimed 8,000 such victims, Vlad was out by two orders of magnitude at least. But that, as the Russians say, is only half the trouble.

If the Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for the most deranged speeches, it would have to be updated every time Putin opened his mouth in public. Accusing others of atrocities against civilians when the Russians are indeed killing hundreds of thousands of them in the Ukraine takes more than just mendacious cynicism.

Putin seems to have lost all touch with reality, but the scary thing is that the Russians don’t mind. Their social networks are bursting at the seams with messages of enthusiastic support and calls for immediate nuclear strikes on all major Western cities.

All this should eliminate all doubts, if any still exist, as to who really is the root of evil in the world. Putin’s speech is nothing short of a declaration of war on the West, specifically the US.

He is issuing a war cry: by murdering Ukrainian civilians, Russia is fighting the US to create a Palestinian state. This sounds deranged, and at the level of semantics it is. But the semiotic signal comes across loud and clear: Russia considers herself at war with the US and the West in general. I do hope we are listening and making notes.

P.S. Speaking of evil, the other day the Israeli authorities showed an audience of foreign reporters a 43-minute film cut together from footage shot by the bodycams of Hamas terrorists.

Those reporters have been around a block or two, and they’ve seen horrors worse than those Tony and I witnessed in 1995. Yet the bloodbath shown in the film shocked even that blasé audience.

Many hyperventilated and ran out, others threw up, some others had hysterical fits. Those experienced people had seen many massacres, but scenes of people dismembered with hoes and babies roasted in the oven were too much even for them.

In 1945 the victorious Allies forced many Germans to watch documentaries of Auschwitz and Treblinka. It would be nice to do the same thing by forcing all those pro-Hamas demonstrators to watch that horror film. Greta Thunberg should get a free ticket.