The Russian hordes have long lived rent free in the fevered imagination of the West. It was the spectre of the Russian hordes overrunning the Balkans that led to the Crimean conflict
in the mid Nineteenth Century. It was
the promise of the Russian hordes overrunning Germany and Austria in the ‘Great
War’ of the early Twentieth Century upon which France and Britain placed their
hopes despite the wretched Russian performance just a few years earlier in the
Russo-Japanese conflict. No one, in
Moscow nor in the capitals of Europe learned the lessons of that conflict. In
1904-05, Russia and Japan had gone to
war. It took 8 months to get the Russian
fleet from the Baltic to the Pacific to engage the Japanese, a year during
which Europe envisioned a quick Russian conquest. It didn’t happen. The Japanese crushed the Russian fleet
forcing the intervention of Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate an end to the
conflict. No one cared to recall the weakness
demonstrated by this conflict, instead the heads of state and their diplomatic
subalterns held that Russian intervention in Eastern Europe 1914 would prove
decisive. For the first two years or so
perhaps the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers held the
conflict in the balance but, alas, in 1917 Revolution came to Russia and the
military campaign in Eastern Europe collapsed.
World War II presented a quite different experience, although
some 30 million Russians died during the conflict. Nevertheless, it was the Russians who won
that war, in no small part to the ruthless determination of the leadership in
Moscow. The Russian Army today is not
the Russian Army of the 1940’s; and Vladimir Putin is no Joseph Stalin.
Stalin and his Commissars would never have allowed the
existence of ‘oligarchs’ much less allow them, beginning under Yeltsin’s
corrupt regime, to abscond with half the nation’s wealth and spirit it away to foreign
destinations like London real estate, Italy and Southern France, the Cayman
Islands and Switzerland as well as, most famously, tRUMP Tower and golf courses.
Much has been said of late that the Gross Domestic Product
of the Russian Federation is less than that of Italy. (1) This is true.
What hasn’t been mentioned is that the Gross Domestic Product of the
Russian Federation is less than that of New York City.(2)
That’s right. New
York City has greater economic resources than the entire Russian
Federation. Compared to the United
States, China, and the European Union, the entire Russian economy stands as a
puny afterthought, hardly strong enough to finance a modern military posture,
much less project it around the world.
The Russian army of today has proven to be a mere shadow of its
former self. This is in no small measure
to the ‘dead souls’, that occupy the Russian ranks. I’m speaking here of paper armies, populated
by fictitious soldiers who are sent their pay which in due course lines the
pockets of the military brass and the oligarchs that constitute their version
of the military-industrial complex.
Tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, aircraft, and other military
hardware not maintained even though billions of Rubles were appropriated and
spent for their maintenance. For instance, tires that should have long since
been replaced rotting on axels so that when pressed into service cannot travel
any great distance. Today the ‘mighty’
Russian army relies upon savage mercenaries like the Wagner Group to bolster its
waning prowess, much as the Americans came to rely upon Blackwater and other
soldiers of fortune in our foreign misadventures. These are the hallmarks of
graft, of incompetence, of rot, and an unwillingness of the people to defend what
has clearly become indefensible.
But the awful truth is that Putin has revealed to the world
that Russia is a paper tiger. He is the head of a military force that has
demonstrated itself to be no more powerful than a third-rate military
power. Shorn of nuclear capability,
weapons that cannot reasonably be used without massive retaliation, Russia is fast
becoming a vassal state.
As the war in Ukraine drags on, the emerging choice the
Kremlin will face is this: will it choose
to become the vassal state of the West, principally the NATO powers, or will it
opt to become a client state of China.
It will have no other choice, for it does not possess the technology,
nor the economy to become an independent world power.
Putin, of course, is hell-bent on reconstituting the “Russian
Empire” as it existed after the Second World War. This is not possible.
It is Putin’s pipe dream, a dangerous hallucination that has
led to serious miscalculations. Ukraine,
as Afghanistan and Syria is ample demonstration. Instead of demonstrating to
the world the prowess of a great nation, the Kremlin must now go begging, hat
in hand, to the least disagreeable patron it can find. This is the legacy of
Vladimir Putin and his blood-sucking oligarchs.
An’ President
Biden, he jus’ laugh and laugh
___________
1.
See List of countries by GDP (nominal) - Wikipedia.
Citing data published by the IMF, World Bank and U.N., the Russian GDP is
listed at a bit over two trillion dollars annually. 2,062,649,000,000 to be precise.
2.
See Economy of New York City - Wikipedia which lists
the GDP of New York City as 2.1 trillion U.S dollars.
