Putin's Folly

Not since Nikita Khrushchev pounded the sole of his shoe on the podium at the United Nations, has any Soviet or Russian leader had such a public international temper tantrum, until Vladimir Putin.

But rather than pound his shoe, Putin is pounding Ukraine, an independent and sovereign state. Pundits are scratching their heads trying to figure out what has really motivated Putin to launch a war over mere speculation versus actual concrete threat. Even the murderous tyrant XI JinPing of China has called on Putin to “negotiate” through talks with Ukraine. Putin isn’t listening.

Putin is pushing ahead, even going so far as to threaten Sweden and Finland with military threats should they attempt to join NATO. Sweden? Finland? Two countries that are arguably among the “happiest places” on earth. When is the last time you saw the Swedes or Finns exhibit aggressive saber rattling?

These threats have people asking “Is Putin losing it?”

I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the evolution of the former Soviet Union over the course of my lifetime. Between 1989 and 1990, the Soviet Union began collapsing with incredible speed. And it all was televised. Those of us who grew up with the Cold War and Duck and Cover Drills, couldn’t believe our eyes. The Berlin Wall fell, and countries began liberating themselves from the Communist Bloc; East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Words like perestroika and glasnost entered our American vocabulary. President George Bush and President Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and declared the “Cold War” had been buried in the Mediterranean.

I was a thirty-two year old mother of two young children at the time. Often I would watch the news and cry. I had spent nearly a decade having “nuclear nightmares” as the arms race had heated to a level beyond imagination, over 40,000 nuclear warheads pointed at one another, enough to destroy the planet.

I jokingly referred to the cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse with “all it took was rock and roll and black market jeans.”

There’s a kernel of truth in that joke, the Russian people yearned to be part of the free world. A free world they had come to learn about due to an increased flow of information, information that even Communist dictators couldn’t stop.

And here we are, more than thirty years later and a man named Putin seeks to reconstitute the former Soviet Union in his own image. However, he is clumsily overplaying his hand.

This is not post World War 2, this is post World War anything.

In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc of countries, there's been a great deal of immigration from Soviet controlled countries to parts of the free world. The Baltimore area has one of the highest concentrations of immigrant Ukrainians and other Soviet bloc countries. These “new” Americans still have family in their respective motherlands and they communicate and visit frequently.

Unlike the 1960’s, when people in Russia had no idea what was going on in the free world, they have instant access to information through friends and family in that free world.

Demonstrations have broken out in over two dozen cities in Russia. And while their number are small, they're growing.

I’ve heard interviews of Russian parents who had no idea their sons were being deployed to Ukraine. And they’re not happy.

Putin decided he didn't want dead soldier bodies being returned to Russia, so with a complete lack of social awareness, he has deployed portable “crematoriums” to the front lines.

The primary religion in Russia is the Russian Orthodox Church and to this day they view cremation as not keeping with the Bible’s teaching. The belief is a cremated body cannot be resurrected to heaven. As these cremated remains begin to return to the families, the demonstrations will surely grow as families consider their sons’ cremated remains an abomination, if not an eternal damnation, of their sons’ souls.

The bulk of Russia’s wealth is vested in a small group of people known as the Oligarchs. The Oligarchs have watched their stocks tumble downward forty-five percent. They’ve made a modest regain, but the Oligarchs are on a roller coaster and it seems now their highly educated, world travelling children are protesting the war and speaking out loudly on social media such as Twitter.

Sofia Abramovich, the daughter of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, wrote on Twitter: "The biggest and most successful lie of the Kremlin's propaganda is that most Russians stand with Putin". #Ukraine #UkraineUnderAttack #StopPutin #StopRussia

Yet, there’s Putin pretending this is the1960’s Soviet Union.

And that is pure folly. It’s how kings and leaders end up in the ash heap of history as failures, deserving to be forgotten.