Dmitry Orlov

By now even the dimmest of bulbs from the world of American and European politics, journalism, and think tanks have realized that the Ukrainian project is dead as a fencepost. And yet journalists have to fill space with verbiage in order to run ads, think-tankers have to pretend that their think tanks still have some magic mind juice to sell and, most importantly, politicians have to somehow find a way to get their sorry selves reelected, or at least to not get thrown to the ground and booted in the ribs, repeatedly and from both the right and the left, by their endlessly frustrated, infuriated constituents.

How can they compensate for the infinitely sad result of throwing endless money and weapons at the stupendously corrupt Kiev regime? At this point, the Ukraine has no industry, a largely destroyed army and a political system that consists of just one party called “Servant of the People” eponymous with the sitcom in which the former Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky starred prior to becoming president. But his acting career is long over and so is his political career now that his five-year presidential term ran out on May 20 of this year. He is now just a squatter in the presidential office.

The Ukraine is bankrupt. It is missing roughly a half of its population, who by now have either decided that they are Russian or have dispersed across Europe. Its energy grid is unlikely to survive the next winter. Most of its military-age men who are fit to serve are dead. It is a rotting corpse of a country and it is now infested with worms: a thriving subculture of people feeding strategically important information to the Russians in an effort to ingratiate themselves with them.

A case in point: just yesterday a Russian rocket strike demolished a recently, expensively rebuilt underground center at which Ukrainian F-16 pilots were being trained for their missions by mostly Belgian and Dutch personnel. Their mission details were leaked along with everything else: a squadron of F-16s would take off from an airfield in Poland, land in the Ukraine for refueling, then fly into Russian airspace to launch rockets. After the Russian rocket strike, the site was littered with several hundred corpses and hundreds more severely wounded were being evacuated to Poland and Germany. That is just a particularly striking example, but there are many others: almost the entire Ukrainian military, including at least a dozen high-ranking Ukrainian army officers, are eager to make nice with the Russian side in preparation for what’s coming up. Very few of them are dumb enough to want to die for Zelensky, the political corpse in chief.

Given this situation, what could possibly qualify as any sort of victory as far as European and American politicians are concerned — because, you see, they do need some sort of victory in order to get reelected in all of the numerous elections that are coming up shortly. One bright idea is to sell the Ukraine’s decomposing corpse to Russia, burdening the Russians with the responsibility of reanimating it. There are a few problems with this plan. First, how does one distinguish giving something to Russia and Russia simply taking it without permission? Second, what would entice Russia to offer anything in return for graciously accepting the Ukraine? Third, and perhaps most importantly, what could possibly compel Russia to work out any sort of deal, and to do so in enough of a hurry to allow it to positively influence the elections in Europe and the US that are coming up?

What the Europeans and the Americans are finding particularly maddening is that Russia appears to be sending what to them must seem as mixed signals. On the one hand, the Russian leadership (Putin and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov both) expresses willingness to negotiate. On the other hand, Putin endlessly brings up the matter of Russia being fooled-jipped-swindled as a result of previous negotiations: the promise to Gorbachev of NATO not expanding to the east; the Minsk agreements which both Angela Merkel and François Hollande freely admitted to have been cynical ploys to buy time to train and arm the Ukrainians; the İstanbul agreements with the Ukrainian delegation which were close to being signed but were then cancelled by Boris Johnson. Americans have trouble understanding why Putin continues to bring up such fiascos; after all, being played for a sucker is, to an American, an embarrassment that one should not be eager to broadcast far and wide.

What Americans fail to understand is that Putin comes from a different culture. In Russia, most deals aren’t even committed to paper — a simple handshake is usually enough. If a deal is signed, it is not a bloated document stuffed with small-print legalese, as with the pathologically litigious Americans, but a simple statement of intent that fits on a single page. This has changed in recent years and there is now more legal boilerplate to deal with. But in the 1990s, which were a formative period for Putin, law and order in Russia were largely missing and what prevailed was something called “ponyatia” and can be loosely translated as “mob rules.”

Suppose that you were a Russian businessman trying to run a business in Russia in the 1990s. You struck a deal with a supplier, made an advance payment to reserve a share of production and then the supplier reneged on the deal, absconded with the money and laughed at you. What you would do in response is visit every single one of his clients and tell them what happened. The untrustworthy supplier would probably never see another advance payment again and also lose some clients simply from it becoming known that he is not a man of his word. This is rather different from Americans who, given their perverse notions of success, would perhaps only feel proud to be swindled by such a successful con artist.

What the Americans and the Europeans can’t seem to get through their heads is that by complaining about being repeatedly fooled-jipped-swindled by them, Putin has ruined their reputations once and for all. In a rapidly changing world, the “rules-based international order” that American and European politicians keep prattling about has gone altogether missing and all that is left is personal integrity and the good reputations of specific leaders.

The latest efforts by both the Americans and the Europeans to steal Russia’s sovereign reserves and give the money to the Ukrainians (to steal) has plunked a massive gravestone on top of their reputations: they are now regarded not as sharp operators but as mere common thieves. Their failure to (so far) go through with the theft is only compounding the problem by also making them look like cowards: they’d steal that money in a heartbeat but fear the consequences. Who in the world would possibly want to trust them after that performance?

Their inability to grasp the situation is not necessarily a problem. If they were to abandon their efforts to put some lipstick on the Ukrainian pig, they might hurry up and stir up some additional trouble somewhere else. For instance, they could turbocharge their plan to destroy Moldova and absorb it into Romania, thus shifting it from being constitutionally neutral to being NATO territory. They have already made some preparations along these lines: banning the use of both Russian and Moldavian languages, installing a puppet president (Maya Sandu, a Romanian national) and corrupting the court system and much of the rest of the government to serve foreign interests, all while driving the rapidly dwindling population of Moldova into destitution.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/f5245796-be9c-422a-a965-6782b454fa07