Political Cynics’ selective reading.

MAY 10, 2023

The opening paragraph:

I have not written much about the war in Ukraine lately because so little has changed strategically since the first few months of this conflict, when three overarching facts pretty much drove everything — and still do.

Next paragraph:

Fact No. 1: As I wrote at the outset, when a war of this magnitude begins, the key question you ask yourself as a foreign affairs columnist is very simple: Where should I be? Should I be in Kyiv, the Donbas, Crimea, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels or Washington?

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No. 2 and Plan B

Which leads to fact No. 2: Putin never had a Plan B. It’s now obvious that he thought he was going to waltz into Kyiv, seize it in a week, install a lackey as president, tuck Ukraine into his pocket and put to an end any further European Union, NATO or Western cultural expansion toward Russia. He would then cast his shadow across all of Europe.

This leads to fact No. 3: Putin has put himself in a situation where he can’t win, can’t lose and can’t stop. There’s no way he can seize control of all of Ukraine anymore. But at the same time, he can’t afford to be defeated, after all the Russian lives and treasure he has expended. So he can’t stop.

To put it differently, because Putin never had a Plan B…

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Putin’s Plan B is to disguise that Putin’s Plan A has failed

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Operation Save My Face.

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Western “globalists and elites

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Putin invaded Ukraine to preserve Russian family values.

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Putin is quite frightened today by two subjects: arithmetic and Russian history.

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in lyrics from the song “Everybody Talks” by one of my favorite rock groups, Neon Trees.

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EVERYBODY TALKS.

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Plan B — starting with subtraction.

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Mr. Friedman seems, from this point to have regained his political/argumentative composure, after his reliance on free imaginative variation, including a quotation from his favorite band ‘Neon Trees’.

I’ll quote from a selection of portions of these paragraphs:

The White House reported last week that an estimated 100,000 Russian fighters have been killed or wounded in Ukraine…

That is a big number of casualties — even in a big country — and you can see that Putin is worried that his people are talking about it, because,…

Putin would not be going to such lengths if he was not fearful that, despite his best efforts, everyone was whispering…

Read the recent essay in The Washington Post by Leon Aron, a historian of Putin’s Russia and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, about Putin’s visit in March to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian…

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“Two days after the International Criminal Court charged Putin with war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest,” Aron wrote, “the Russian president came to Mariupol for a few hours.

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Aron told me that the Russian media later scrubbed “It’s all lies” from the audio, but the fact that it had been left in there may have been a subversive act by someone in the official Russian media hierarchy.

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Which leads to the other thing Putin knows: “The gods of Russian history are extremely unforgiving of military defeat,” Aron said. In the modern era, “when a Russian leader ends a war in a clear defeat — or with no win — usually there is a change of regime.

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It’s for these reasons that Aron, who just finished a book about Putin’s Russia, argues that this Ukraine conflict is far from over and could get a lot worse before it is.

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“There are now two ways for Putin to end this war he cannot win and cannot walk away from,” Aron said.

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And the other, he argued, “is to somehow force a direct confrontation with the U.S. — bring us to the precipice of an all-out strategic nuclear exchange — and then step back and propose to a scared West an overall settlement, which would include a neutral, disarmed Ukraine and his holding on to the Crimea and Donbas.”

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In the above Mr. Friedman takes the word of a Neo-Con?

It’s impossible to get into Putin’s head and predict his next move, but color me worried. Because what we do know, from Putin’s actions, is that he knows his Plan A has failed. And he will now do anything to produce a Plan B to justify the terrible losses that he has piled up in the name of a country where everybody talks and where defeated leaders don’t retire peacefully.

Plan A and B make a return to the stage, along with Friedman’s ‘color me worried’.

Political Cynic