Through his latest attempt of invading Ukraine and expanding the size of the land of Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin has already put his own political future at stake, while there are speculations of a sudden coup inside Kremlin, which would make an end of 22-year authoritarian rule of this Russian iron man.
Commenting on the Ukraine crisis, Fredrick Kempe, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council wrote:
This is about him [Vladimir Putin], it’s about us, and it’s about Ukraine.
First, the Ukraine crisis is about Russian President Vladimir Putin, suffering from what historians refer to as the “rationality slippage” that comes with 22 years of autocratic power. Having grown more rigid and isolated with time – surrounded by sycophants and facing unanticipated Ukrainian resistance – he is doubling down on his premeditated, unprovoked, illegal, and immoral war.
Second, however, it is even more about the West, and whether we can reverse the “purposefulness slippage” among Western democracies of the past three decades, underscored by an erosion of democratic gains around the world since 2006. Putin is the result of our mass amnesia about what despots do when they are appeased for too long. Ukraine is the immediate, but not only, victim.
We responded too little after Russia’s cyberattack on Estonia in 2007, Russia’s Georgian invasion in 2008, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Donbas military intervention in 2014; Russia’s ongoing cyber and disinformation attacks on US and other democracies; its repression and assassination of opponents; and now this unfolding international crime scene in Ukraine.
A flurry of weekend announcements signals a tectonic shift in Europe and no less significant a move within the Biden administration to a more assertive posture, suggesting a growing realization that Putin’s aggressions are as much a danger to Europe’s future as it is to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Iranian mullah mafia regime has extended its support to Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
According to Jerusalem Post:
Reports and video footage on Saturday show a group of Iranians assembled outside of Ukraine’s embassy in Tehran urging the collapse of Vladimir Putin’s government in an audacious protest against the Islamic Republic’s full-throttled support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Despite the Iranian regime’s ban of demonstrations against Putin, the group of Iranians declared “Death to Putin” in what might be an unprecedented move by anti-Putin Iranians.
“Bravo to Iranian compatriots who gathered in front of Ukrainian Embassy in Tehran to show solidarity with victims of Putin’s aggression. They reminded the world that Islamic President [Ebrahim] Raisi, a Putin protege, doesn’t represent the views of our people. Protesters behaved with dignity”, wrote Amir Taheri, a prominent Iranian journalist on Twitter.
Taheri added “Khomeinist trolls say Iranians who demonstrated in front of Ukraine & Russian embassies in Tehran to condemn Putin’s invasion & show solidarity with victims of aggression, were ‘few’. Yes. But better fewer but better. Not like rent-a-mob Hezbollah crowds of boot-lickers”.
Ali Khamenei is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian journalists on Twitter noted that protesters said “Down with the supporters of Putin, down with the warmonger”.
The London-based Iran International news organization reported that the protest was launched on social media and some of the chants were “Russian embassy is a den of spies”, “Putin murders, the stupid ones support”, “Long live Ukraine”, and “Long live peace”.
According to Iran International, “Police began dispersing protesters a short while after they began to gather. A woman is seen in one of the videos telling the police, ‘We hate you'”.
In a telephone call with Putin on Thursday, Iran’s president Raisi delivered support to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Raisi said NATO has created “a source of tension” by encroaching on Russia, according to Iranian regime-controlled media.
The Iranian state-controlled Mehr News Agency reported that Raisi told Putin: “The continued expansion of NATO is a serious threat against the stability and security of independent countries in various regions of the world”. Russia and Iran’s regime are allies in Syria where they united behind Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop a revolt against Assad’s regime.
British journalist, broadcaster and author Melanie Phillips in her weekly column for Jewish News Syndicate wrote:
The contrast could scarcely be more glaring. America’s strategy to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is to impose sanctions. But its strategy to deter aggression by the Iranian regime is to lift sanctions.
Not only is this contradictory, but in terms of effectiveness, it’s precisely the wrong way round. Sanctions were pointless once Putin’s assault on Ukraine was already underway, as its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, so bitterly observed.
But sanctions did weaken the Iranian regime as it raced towards achieving nuclear weapons breakout capacity. Sanctions were aimed at encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and topple the regime, the best chance of avoiding a nuclear-armed Iran short of war.
Now the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has reportedly reached an agreement that’s even worse than the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal, lifting all constraints on Iran’s manufacture of nuclear weapons within two and a half years.
If this is so, Biden will have played midwife to the Iranian bomb which his administration has so vapidly pledged to prevent and towards which Tehran has already taken huge strides through America’s policy of appeasement.
Clifford D. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for the Washington Times wrote in JNS:
He [Vladimir Putin] has more money than he can ever spend (his Italianate palace on the Black Sea is valued at over a billion dollars), a much younger girlfriend (a former gymnast and model, if the tabloids are to be believed) and powers unconstrained by any laws. De facto, he has a license to kill, one he doesn’t hesitate to exercise.
What he lacks and wants is a legacy—confidence that he will be remembered as Vladimir the Great or maybe Vladimir the Terrible but, in either case, as a man of action, a shaper of history, a lion. He’s pushing 70. He has no time to waste.
He committed his first serious act of international aggression in 2008. Georgia—an independent nation that had been a Soviet possession and, before that, a protectorate of the Russian empire—was looking to Europe rather than to Moscow. Displeased, Putin went to war. He chipped off two provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They are now, for all intents and purposes, Russian territories.
He then waited to see what the United States, the European Union and “the international community” would do. They did nothing much.
The following year, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red button reading “reset” in English and (misspelled) in Russian.
Although I suspect that gave Putin a chuckle, then-Vice President Joe Biden later bragged that “once we pressed that reset button … we achieved a great deal in cooperation with Russia to advance our mutual interests.”
In a 2012 debate, Mitt Romney told then-President Barack Obama that Russia was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Obama shot back: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
In 2014, with the blessings of the International Olympic Committee, Putin was given the privilege of hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, just north of the Abkhazian border. The Games were held in February. The following month, Putin orchestrated pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea, Ukrainian territory on the Black Sea. He then sent in troops. On March 21, he formally annexed Crimea.
In April, pro-Russian militias began to storm buildings in Donbas. Over the years since, an estimated 14,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the simmering conflict.
Again, no serious consequences ensued. Within days of the Crimean takeover, the president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, declared that the 2018 “World Cup has been given and voted to Russia and we are going forward with our work.” Nord Stream 2, a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, moved ahead, too.
In December 2017, as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, I visited Ukraine and reported on Russia’s repressive policies, not least toward Crimean Tartars, a Turkic Muslim people indigenous to the peninsula. The “international community,” very much including the United Nations and its so-called Human Rights Council, turned a blind eye.
In 2019, I returned to Ukraine as an election observer for the International Republican Institute. I noted in a Washington Times column that there had been Russian meddling in the election but that “the impact was minimal,” with the pro-Russian party receiving less than 14% of the votes. I suspect Putin was both disappointed and angry.
I disagree with those who contend that Putin is motivated primarily by fear of NATO, a strictly defensive alliance that Ukrainians want to join because they feel threatened by Putin.
Ukraine is not a NATO member, and American and other allied troops will not deploy there. But the United States and the European Union do have a vital interest in preventing fledgling democracies from falling under despotic jackboots. It puzzles me that so many people, both on the right and the left, fail to grasp that…
