When we see the Russians in the streets, in increasing numbers, let us know that the moment of change from within has come and the System has allowed protests and even discreetly encourages them, in order to democratically “legitimize” the replacement of the Great Leader and try to resume a new historical cycle of deceiving the West.
Valentin NaumescuPhoto: Contributors.ro
In short:
- 1. Let’s face it, there were no elections in Russia on March 15-17. In Russia, in fact, elections have never been held. Throughout his history, the Russian people never elected their Leader nor has it ever changed its Supreme Ruler through elections, democratically. The Russians don’t even know how that would come, should they actually elect the one to lead the country or remove him from office when they don’t want him anymore, if he is still alive or if the Kremlin’s inner circle of power didn’t push him down stairs with resignation in hand, like the first two presidents in Moscow (Yeltsin in 1999 and Gorbachev in 1991).
- 2. According to the Russian tradition, the state and police apparatus confirms the existing Leader in the Kremlin, in a pluralist simulacrum. Citizens have no choice. And Vladimir Putin gained de facto power in August 1999, when the then exhausted, sick, alcoholic and blackmailed president, Boris Yeltsin, appointed him Prime Minister, only so that, according to the Constitution, upon his predictable resignation a few months later, in December 1999, the ambitious and rising young leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to become Acting President of the Russian Federation. From this privileged position, in which he had already obtained executive power, without having been elected even once by the people to any public office, he would be confirmed by the system in the so-called elections of the spring of 2000, as “president elected by the people” . Like Yeltsin in 1991, already prime minister of Russia. No real choice ever made by the Russian people. Only internal designations, made by the power system around the Kremlin.
- 3 The Kremlin electoral militia reconfirmed him in office with 87%, for his fifth and last term (theoretically six years, it will probably turn out to be shorter), on the Great Leader, who will turn 72 this year, having been in power in Russia for 25 years. How do we know it’s the last term? Simple. Because Putin has already started making the typical mistakes of dictators at the height of power, who always announce the beginning of the end. None have escaped the mistakes of too much power and too little opposition, when they cross an unseen line of measure.
- 4. In his new and last term, just begun, Putin has already been thoroughly humiliated by the catastrophic terrorist attack on March 21 in Moscow, which blew away all his defiant, triumphalist speech and made it look embarrassing on top of that, after the US had warned Russia on March 7 of an imminent terrorist attack, “probably in a crowded place, at a concert, etc.” The fault therefore lies with the Great Leader and his security apparatus, effective only at suppressing political opposition, stupid when it comes to defending the security of Russian citizens in the face of four terrorists who have come to kill in mass, armed with machine guns, bombs and incendiary devices and calmly parking an ordinary car in front of the mall.
- 5. Any domestically humiliated dictator has a primitive tendency to increase his aggression. VV Putin will do the same soon. It is the only way a dictator knows how to “restore his prestige and credibility” so shamefully damaged.
- 6. Putin will unleash the final assault on the West in this mandate, whom he hates with the passion of a profession of faith, for a lifetime (especially since he experienced, as a KGB officer posted in Dresden, the failure of the Soviet Union before the USA and the West), hoping, in his morbid delirium, accentuated by age and the cult of personality, to leave his image as the Great Leader imprinted in Russian history, alongside what he believes to be the “glory of Stalin IV” or Peter the Great. It is the obsession of all criminal dictators, aged in power, when they feel their biological end approaching, to force things and leave behind “epic achievements”. This is exactly where the end of his long and bloody dictatorship will come from. The Obsession of the Grand Legacy which they must leave behind digs all dictators, sooner or later, the political grave. They don’t know when or how to stop, to prolong their reign.
- 7. What would be the ultimate goals of this hybrid assault looming in the coming years? The definitive and total subjugation of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova in the Russian world (with the imposition of Russophile regimes in Kiev and Chisinau), the dissolution of NATO and the departure of US troops from Europe, the disintegration of the European Union, the revision of the world order with the involvement of Europe in the geopolitical compact of Eurasia, the restoration Moscow’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and its status as a global great power. After 16 years since he started his war against the West (through the August 2008 invasion of Georgia), Putin missed all its strategic objectives. But this is the final assault.
- 8. I will not tire of repeating, although I may seem insistent on this topic (about which I have been writing and detailing periodically since January 2022[1]before the invasion of Ukraine, about which I no longer had any doubts), that Russia will lose Putin’s War against the West in the long run. Not in the short term, when it might have some territorial gains in Ukraine, but in the long term, from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis and economic-social development, in which Russia will lag far behind Ukraine, for example. In 2030, as a symbolic landmark, this will be clear to everyone – to us, to the Russians, and to the Ukrainians. Pro-Western Ukraine has a future, while the ideological phantasms of Putin’s Russia do not.
*
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is at the height of power and of his ideological delirium. A crowd of people, who have been kneeling for a very long time, sit with bowed heads before him. And this is precisely where the decline begins, just when he has the impression that no one and nothing can stop him from fulfilling his will.
The state and police apparatus of Kremlin established and delivered – 87%. Honestly, they exceeded my expectations, two months ago I would have said 75%. However, that much seemed to those in the System to be due to a Great Leader of Russia, who is waging the “holy and just war” of Moscow’s revenge against “US hegemony, the abuses and historical injustices of the West towards Russia”. The story of the “Ukrainian Nazis” is secondary, coloratura, for the stupidest part of the stupid public in Russia, that is, the segment that can swallow anything. Central to Putin’s strategy are, in fact, his anti-Western and revisionist goals. He sought revenge for the loss of the Cold War and the breakup of the Russian Empire.
How was the Great Leader going to get under 70%, which was what they had solved, in the papers, last time? It would have meant that confidence in the Kremlin was declining, which was unacceptable especially now, during the war. Not only Putin himself had to be massively reconfirmed, but also or especially the idea of war against the West (his ideological mantra), in which Putin engaged the country with the invasion of pro-Western Georgia in August 2008, as a measure to block the small post-Soviet republic that had dared to want to join NATO.
Formally, the Kremlin ensured that the political message was conveyed internally and externally – “there is strong public support of the Russian people” for Putin’s war against the West. Russians follow him, support him, want him.
Putin is Russia. Russia is Putin. This was the essential purpose of the electoral masquerade. That’s why it took three days (a first in the history of Russian “democracy”) – not just for Putin’s victory, which wasn’t even a stake anymore, but to deliver the huge turnout and approval frenzy of war.
What will he do now? With or without the March 21 terrorist attack, it would have been triggered anyway the final assault. VV Putin wants to quickly and brutally cut things in his favor, because the war will soon begin to have visible and painful costs for Russia and the country, although huge, will not be able to wage this war for more than 1-2 years. Neither military, nor economic, nor social. China doesn’t want to prolong the war too much anymore, having even higher stakes than Putin’s.
An armistice on the terms imposed by Russia is all that Putin wants for 2025, after making a few more important conquests – Kharkiv, Odesa, Transnistria/Republic of Moldova. Not necessarily a peace treaty with Ukraine, but only an armistice with the recognition by Kiev and the West of new territorial realities, possibly a frozen conflict, which would allow Russia to breathe outside again, to sell hydrocarbons to the West, to import technology, to be restored. As we know, armistice does not mean peace, only the cessation of war. Perhaps in 10-15 years, another Great Ruler from the Kremlin will once again attack Eastern Europe, carry on the work begun by his glorious predecessors, and once again make Russia great. That is why the war must only be stopped, not the conflict definitively extinguished. As it was with the February 2015 Minsk II Agreement, just good for lulling naive Westerners to sleep and preparing the grand invasion for over seven years. This is the Kremlin’s vision and hope. Endless expansion with strategic pauses. An armistice therefore under the conditions imposed by Russia, with the recognition of the accomplished fact on the front. That’s what the Russians have always done, throughout their history.
President Putin knows that in 12 months at most he will have to stop the offensive and talk. Even if Donald Trump will return to the White House, who in turn will want to quickly link his name to the political-diplomatic “great success” of peacemaking. Next year, Russia will run out of available troops (even if Putin will soon make another partial mobilization), grinded by the Ukrainians, and economic resources, exhausted by the war machine. Although silent and modest in apparent impact, Western economic sanctions work hard in the depths, eroding the base of the Russian economy. We see a proud house on the surface, brightly painted, but with an increasingly shaky foundation. We know what happens to buildings whose foundations give way.
But now, in the spring of 2024, more than ever after February 24, 2022, the context appears to be favorable for him to maximize territorial gains in Ukraine. So he will press the gas pedal all the way.
Ukrainians they are out of ammunition and somewhat hopeless, in an almost desperate defensive, Europeans and Americans are in complicated and tough choices, antiliberal revisionism is growing, social networks they also confound the atmosphere in the West as much as they can, intoxicating the minds of people with low-quality and sketchy education, in countries that enjoy “freedom of speech”, exploited from without by the enemies of the West, and from within by useful idiots. It seems to be Putin’s moment of glory in front of the West and liberal democracies. It just seems.
Even for the delusional Kremlin, however, it is clear that in a few months, if they hold out until then, the Ukrainians will begin to balance the military situation on the front, after they start receiving ammunition from the West again and begin to increase their own weapons production and ammunition, under Western licenses. But now is the weakest moment, now they are discovered and vulnerable. And even now, in 2024, elections keep Western democracies busy and divided. It is the most dangerous year of this decade, on which much will depend in the years to come.
Yes, we expect that the war to escalate in the coming weeks and months. It is the predictable move of Putin at the height of his power. He feels that the stars have aligned in his favor and he will win. – Read the rest of the article and comment on Contributors.ro
