Putin Moves into Ukraine: Trump Says Putin Was a “Genius, Smart, and Savvy"

 

Trump on Mar-a-Lago Podcast: Feb 22, 2022

(With Hosts Buck Sexton & Clay Travis)

Interesting history look at Putin today from a former WSJ reporter who spend years in Moscow vis-à-vis Putin’s recent incursion into Ukraine seen here from Market Watch with this headline and emphasis on the “boxed” portions to highlight part of this fine article:

“Don’t let Vladimir Putin fool you: Russia’s war in Ukraine is only about one thing.”

[As towering skyscrapers rose in Moscow atop a pile of oil cash, Putin’s government became more backward-looking and more isolated]

Putin has spelled out a nationalist rationale for his country’s military incursion into two restive provinces in eastern Ukraine largely controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists, but it is primarily about protecting Moscow’s energy interests. 

That was true in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and I was a Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, for which I wrote dozens of stories about the insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk that Russia helped foment. And it remains true now.

To understand the Kremlin’s motivations in regard to its smaller, and relatively impoverished, neighbor, the key fact to know is that Russia supplies 40% of Europe’s heating-fuel supplies — namely, natural gas.

To get it there, Russia relies mostly on two aging pipeline networks, one of which runs through Belarus and the other through Ukraine. For this, Russia pays Ukraine around $2 billion a year in transit fees.  

Russia is a petro-state and relies on oil and natural-gas sales for about 60% of its export revenue and 40% of its total budget expenditures. Any crimp on Russia’s ability to access the European market is a threat to its economic security. 

In the Kremlin’s view, a switch of allegiance by Kyiv — be it an economic association agreement with the EU like Ukraine was on the verge of signing in 2014, or even the hint of joining NATO — is close to an act of war.

In my three years covering Russia, I watched as the country slowly withdrew into itself after Putin returned to office for what was then his third term as president. Gone were prior efforts to intertwine Russia’s economy and the global system and encourage foreign investment. As towering skyscrapers rose in Moscow atop a pile of oil cash, Putin’s government became more backward-looking and more isolated.

In Ukraine, meanwhile, many were growing increasingly ill at ease with the impoverished state of their country and highly corrupt political system as it languished, locked in a kind of Soviet-era limbo under Russian domination. As Ukrainians looked to rising living standards in places like Poland and Latvia that had joined NATO and the European Union, many wondered why they couldn’t have the same for themselves.

This is where Putin’s nationalistic impulses kick in. He views the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the past century and the rush of former Eastern bloc countries into the embrace of the EU and even NATO as a great humiliation.

He has drawn a line in the sand with countries that border Russia, invading Georgia in 2008 when it hinted at joining NATO, and moving to destabilize Ukraine when it moved to establish closer economic ties with Europe.

Domestically, Putin has sold the incursions into Ukraine on purely nationalistic grounds — even going so far this weekend as to dismiss Ukraine’s history as an independent country as a falsehood.

While Ukrainians and Russians share religions and ethnicities, they speak different, albeit similar, languages, even as there are pockets of native Russian speakers in some Ukrainian regions, as there are in other former Soviet republics. And while Russians have seen their quality of life improve awash in petro-rubles in the decades under Putin’s rule, Ukrainians have been mired in poverty and bogged down by misrule.

While it is no wonder many Ukrainians yearn to be unmoored from their bigger, imperialist neighbor, for Putin and his cohort of oligarchs Ukrainian self-determination is not really on the table. Not when it puts at risk the flow of money that has kept them in power. 

Related lookback in history:

1. Putin calls for international recognition of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine

2. G-7 rebukes Russia over annexation of Crimea

My 2 Cents: There you have it. Putin’s real reason for his actions right now are based on three simple things that I have said for years about people like him, even like Trump, Kim Jung-un, Xi Jinping, and most other world dictators with their primary their goal, aim, purpose, and method to get and stay in power: Name, fame, and fortune.

Good article and I think very true based on what actions we see right now unfolding before the whole world to see in Ukraine that to a great extent, we should be very worried about.

Seeing irrational people like Putin in power and Trump wanting to copy him just as Trump called Putin’s move in Ukraine genius and very savvy (Trump heard on this podcast from his Mar-a-Lago interview).

Also, recall these tidbits of praise from Trump to/for/on Putin: 

Remember when Trump invited Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the Oval Office the day after he fired FBI Director Comey for pressing forward on the Russia probe? 

Remember when he met with Putin in Helsinki and then emerged at their press conference to take Putin’s side on Russia’s 2016 election interference? 

BFF’s @ Helsinki in 2018 (remember that Presser)

Remember Trump‘s repeated insistences that he thought it was important to get along with Russia, by which he meant it was important to get along with Vladimir Putin — someone who was not his enemy but might still turn out to be a friend?  

Remember when Trump said that Putin said that he was brilliant, (which Putin didn’t really say) but which helped fuel months of Trumpian enthusiasm about how he and Putin might end up as pals?  

Remember, too, how Putin was just one of a contingent of authoritarians (Turkey, China, North Korea) who Trump enjoyed being around, preferring being stroked by America’s enemies to being challenged by our allies?  

Without even being asked to take sides in the power struggle between our country and Russia, Trump took Putin’s side.  After all, Putin is clever and wily, while Biden is inept and toothless.  

Let’s face it, there are ways to criticize Biden without explicitly praising the Russian authoritarian actively seeking to reorder democracy in Europe.  At another point in that interview Trump reiterated his claim that Putin wouldn’t have entered Ukraine were he president.  The impression he hopes to give is one of strength; that Putin feared his response. There’s no evidence for that, of course.  

What was the point in Trump’s presidency when Putin might have felt intimidated by Trump’s exercising of American power? The sanctions he didn’t want to apply? 

If American politics played any role at all, Putin would want to move when he could expect the political right to criticize Biden more than himself. That includes the former president.  

After all, Putin’s so savvy.  

Thanks for stopping by.