Ukraine, Putin, and Biden

This wound up being longer than I'd anticipated, but there's a lot to cover regarding Ukraine and Russia.  I hope you'll find the time you spent reading it to be of value.

 There's a lot of bitching about Biden going off script and endorsing regime change in Russia (i.e. deposing Putin).  Many are saying his statements could escalate the war and sabotage peace talks.  However, let's face facts.  Old Vlad won't back off  until he's either won in Ukraine or leveled the fucking country.  Negotiations are a flat out joke, because whatever commitments he makes are meaningless.  Not to mention he poisoned the Ukrainian delegation this past week!  This asshat won't change his stripes, so the only way to bring peace to Eastern Europe is for Putin to die.  So, you can not say regime change all you want, but everyone knows that's the only way to end this.  Diplomacy is not going to work, this time, kids.  Truly, I can't see how Ukraine comes to the table with anything but "I concede you getting the fuck out of my country and providing copious reparations, because your president is a fucking imbecile."

For the moment, at the very least, we should be knocking out the Russians' ability to kill civilians and destroy non-military buildings.  These are war crimes and must be stopped, period.  Addressing the shelling would be a piece of cake for a couple Delta units.  They could sneak right up on the artillery and mortar emplacements, destroy the equipment, and not take prisoners (fuckers are war criminals prima facie and witnesses would be a bad thing).  They can carry AK rifles (which they're trained on) and use the explosives in the shells for the demolition.  In and out, with no evidence left behind who did it.  As for air power, fuck Putin; we complete the deal on the Migs from Poland.  He doesn't get to set the rules.

There are those who say such actions will escalate the conflict and cause Putin to potentially use nukes and they're correct.  But the fact is if we don't get involved with Ukraine, there will likely be another conflict that will be escalated, once he decides to go after Poland, Latvia, Estonia, or any of the other former Iron Curtain countries that border Russia and are now a part of NATO.  And he definitely will keep going, if he gets away with this invasion.  He's been very clear in his intentions to return Russia to the glory of the former USSR empire.  An empire that was rather shitty, by all accounts, but Putin has a grudge on his shoulders.

Would Dickhead use his nukes?  Who the fuck knows?  Then again, who put him in charge of the rules?  If his nukes are anything like his tanks and aircraft, it'll still be ugly, but the destruction won't be mutual, because half of his missiles won't launch.  Regardless, we'll reach that decision point, regardless of the outcome in Ukraine.  Admittedly, this all assumes he chose Ukraine for both cultural reasons as well as the fact it wasn't in NATO, making it an apparent slam dunk.  And who knows what's in his head?  Who knows what he actually knows about how the war's going, considering how giving Vlad bad news is well regarded to be a career and life limiting move.  Recent intelligence says he's not receiving all the facts and is pissed at his ministry of defense.  It could be a game changer if he really didn't have a clue how his forces were sucking ass.  It could cause him to actually back off.  

More on Putin and Russia Itself

My take on old Vlad is he's a slightly smarter Donald Trump, except he doesn't babble incoherently and was able to pull off a complete autocracy, whereas Cheeto Face failed.  There's no doubt he's a narcissistic sociopath, complete with a strong sense of entitlement.  That's been apparent from when he was a teenager, according to what I've read in various sources.  He remains pissed over the fall of the Soviet Union, which deprived him of a "glorious career" in the KGB.  In reality, he wasn't a very good agent, in the first place, being stationed in Dresden, where nothing really happened during the Cold War.  Yet, he continues to proclaim himself as a KGB man, because it suits his persona.  The informal creedo of the KGB was "The State First".  It's clear Putin doesn't meet that standard.

Taking a step back, Russia has been a kleptocracy since the fall of the USSR, when much of its industry transitioned from being state owned to the XXX  Boris Yeltsin and his clan made billions by grabbing all the plum companies in areas like energy and industry.  However, Yeltsin was reaching a point where he could no longer govern and needed a successor, who wouldn't either kill him or put him in jail for his raping of the country.  

Putin had already established himself as a corrupt piece of shit as the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, where he managed to divert hundreds of millions of dollars, earmarked to bring food into the city, where its residents were starving to death.  When the mayor was charged, Putin didn't give him up and helped him escape the country.  While Putin was woefully underqualified to run the country, he had proven himself to be loyal, which was all Yeltsin cared about.  Because history repeats itself, those are the exact same reasons Putin will never step down.  Once in office, Putin consolidated his power to where he is now.  Part of that power is establishing a system where the oligarchs syphon off a not insignificant amount of their profits to him (and themselves) in return for him having their backs with the law.  Contrary to what some may believe, these oligarchs have no real influence on Vlad, as illustrated by what happened to Mikhail Khodorkovsky.  Khodorkovsky owned Yukos Oil and was allegedly the wealthiest of the oligarchs, worth over $15 billion.  But he made the mistake of openly criticizing how Russia's kleptocracy prevented it from becoming a world leading economy.  He did this during a meeting with all the oligarchs and more importantly, Putin.  Within a year, Khodorkovsky was charged with massive tax evasion, arrested, and jailed, with Yukos being broken up and gifted to another oligarch.  After serving several years in Siberia, he now lives in Switzerland in exile.

Which brings me to the irony of Putin.  He could make Russia great and even continue to be a despot if he simply stopped being a crook.  Corruption has become so endemic to Russia that innovation just doesn't exist anymore.  There was precious little of it in the old USSR, but that was for different reasons (i.e. communism doesn't work).  Russia's industry has zero value to the rest of the world, beyond what they pump out of the ground, because its technology is antiquated.  If Vlad had half a brain cell and really cared about Russia, he'd have not been a scumbag himself and put an end to the corruption that's slowly killing the country.  At the very least, he'd have a respectable fighting force to retake Ukraine because their shit would work.