No one should read Vladimir Putin’s order putting his nuclear forces on high alert as meaning anything more than his guff about his invasion’s goal b🗹eing to “de-Nazify” 𒅌Ukraine, or his weeks of pretending that he wasn’t about to invade. It’s all just another absurd mind game.
Putin is finding his latest target a far tougher nut than he expected. He’s surprised by the resistance from the heroic Ukrainian people, the world at large and even his own people. ൲So he tries to change the subject:
If they won’t cower before my troops, I’ll remind them I have nukes. That will get decadent Westerners worrying about what they have to lose instead of making trouble for me.
In short, it’s a Hail Mary move of weakness — a confession that the world isn’t reacting a🐼s he’d planned. The same goes for his warnings to Sweden and Finland now that his aggression has prompted them to express interest in joining NATO: He’s hoping fear can win the day, despite Ukraine’s courage and civilized nations’ outrage.
In fact, he’s the one who needs to fear — fear that his forces will fail, that Ukrainians will keep on resisting him even if his inv🌊asion “succeeds,” that the West has finally realized it can’t keep doing business with him.
Fear that his generals and top cronies are starting to doubt him, and quietly conspiring to replace him with a more reliable, younger, less disastrous leader. As Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted, “it’s pretty obvious to many that something is off with Putin.” That has to be obvious to everyone around him, too.
Former US national security adviser H.R. McMaster called out Putin’s dilemma: “He knows that … Russia, the Russian military, doesn’t look very good right now. He doesn’t look very powerful. And this is going to jeopardize his ability to stay in power.”
Putin and others in power must now fear that the Russian people have had enough: Thousands are risking arrest 🍸to protest his war.
An autocrat seems irresistible … until those he rules decide he’s insufferable. Putin’s miscalculations on Ukraine have at least brought that day closer.
The emperor has no clothes.
