Why I'm a Putin Apologist
Introduction
I recently declared myself a "Putin apologist" in a heated debate with a friend on the progress of the war in Ukraine. The friend then offered a $100 bet that Russia would be out of Ukraine within a year and Putin would be out of power in Russia. I've had similar conversations with family and friends over the years. I've looked into Putin once or twice and never found him to be the villain that he is depicted as being in the West. On the contrary, he seems to have been remarkably successful in standing up to the West / US. For example, he was on the right side with regard to the 2003 Iraq War. Yet the same people in the West who got that wrong, leading to massive death and destruction, are still running foreign policy in the West.
My friend had said that he was not apologizing for Biden and the people running the US foreign policy -- i.e. he doesn't like the U.S. leadership (either). That's when I said that "I AM a Putin apologist". It just came out. After all, I believe with all my heart the West has been aggressively wrong with regard to Russia and Ukraine and that Russia was justified in standing up to the international bullies. I've read some of Putin's speeches and the Russian justification for the war, and they seem reasonable to me. But when I hear myself saying that I'm a Putin apologist, I feel the need to look into this more closely. After all, there seems to be a dark side to most world leaders and perhaps I am apologizing for some really evil behavior.
Stephen Kotkin and the New Yorker
My friend had mentioned Stephen Kotkin as a relevant Russian scholar, so I looked him up. Among other things, he's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, which I think of as a discredited and corrupt neocon think tank, so I initially let it go at that. Kotkin's name came up again after a couple of months, so I've looked into him again. Lex Fridman recently interviewed both Oliver Stone and Stephen Kotkin, and I watched the Stone interview, agreeing wholeheartedly with Stone on most points. I'm not up for the almost 3 hour Kotkin interview at the present time, so I've sought out something I can read in less time.
A quick duckduckgo search revealed a wealth of propaganda information on Kotkin at the New Yorker. I consider the New Yorker has an untrustworthy propaganda outfit with regard to foreign policy, and I was not disappointed in this regard by what I saw there:
Kotkin describes how and why the Putin regime has evolved toward despotism, and he speculates that the strategic blunders in invading Ukraine likely resulted from the biases of authoritarian rulers like Putin, and the lack of good information available to them.
It looks to me like he/they got this exactly wrong, as the war has developed to Russia's advantage. So I don't want to wade into the depths of Kotkin's and the New Yorker's point of view. It's too jarring a break with my take.
Stephen F Cohen and Context for Putin
I have previously been more of a fan of Stephen F. Cohen with regard to Russian affairs. Both Cohen and Kotkin are experts on Russian affairs, and both taught at Princeton. Some have called Cohen a Putin apologist. I find this particular epithet often counterproductive. It has been used extensively in recent years by the West to encourage disastrous wars such as Iraq 2003 where opponents of the war were often called Saddam Hussein apologists. Similarly, opponents of the disastrous US intervention in Syria were called Assad apologists as well as Putin apologists. With the benefit of hindsight,, Putin seems to have been right with regard to both these wars, while those hurling the apologist epithet were wrong to disastrous effect.
Checking a dictionary, I see apologist defined as follows:
a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial
So being an apologist is not necessarily a bad thing -- just controversial. It's like being queer.
Back to Stephen Cohen, he was interviewed by one of my favorite analysts, Aaron Mate in 2018:
Part 1, Part 2. Some excerpts:
Now, I can give you all Putin’s minuses very easily. I would not care for him to be my president. But let me tell you one other thing that’s important. You evaluate nations within their own history, not within ours. If you asked me if Putin is a democrat, and I will answer you two ways. He thinks he is. And compared to what? Compared to the leader of Egypt? Yeah, he is a democrat. Compared to the rulers of our pals in the Gulf states, he is a democrat. Compared to Bill Clinton? No, he’s not a Democrat. I mean, Russia-. Countries are on their own historical clock. And you have to judge Putin in terms of his predecessors. So people think Putin is a horrible leader. Did you prefer Brezhnev? Did you prefer Stalin? Did you prefer Andropov? Compared to what? Please tell me, compared to what.
My cognitive bias agrees strongly with this! I've been saying that focusing on "Putin" is inappropriate. We should be focusing on Russia. Putin is the leader of Russia, but he's acting within the context of Russia in the first years of the 21st century. So to clarify what I mean in saying I'm a Putin apologist, I'm arguing in defense of what Putin has done as president of Russia.
All world leaders have blood on their hands in one way or another. I was a Bill Clinton apologist back when he was president, and I still am to some extent. But he was engaged in some horrible things (which I didn't know about at the time):
When one thinks back to the now-famous Iran-Contra scandal, names like Ronald Reagan, Oliver North and Barry Seal comes to mind, but former President Bill Clinton also played an outsized role in the scandal — using his home state of Arkansas, where he was then serving as governor, as a sort of rallying point for the CIA’s U.S.-side of the Central American operation.
In fact, during Clinton’s reign as governor a small town called Mena, nestled in the Ozark Mountains west of Arkansas’ capital Little Rock, would be propelled into the national spotlight as a hub for drug and arms smuggling and the training of CIA-backed far-right militias.
Under the close watch of the CIA, then led by William Casey, the Mena Intermountain Regional Airport was used to stockpile and deliver arms and ammunition to the Nicaraguan Contras. The arms were sometimes exchanged for cocaine from South American cartels, which would then be sent back to Mena and used to fund the covert CIA operation.
Though efforts have been made to dismiss Clinton’s role in the scandal, his direct intervention in the Contras’ attempts to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua suggests Clinton had some sort of personal stake in the efforts and was unlikely aloof to the major smuggling operation taking place in his state while he had been governor. In fact, while governor, Clinton split with many other state governments in sending a contingency of the Arkansas National Guard to Honduras to train the Nicaraguan Contras on how to overthrow their Sandinista government. Clinton would also discuss his first-hand knowledge of the operation with now-Trump administration Attorney General William Barr.
If this is true:
It's in keeping with how the U.S. security state has operated during my lifetime.
It doesn't necessarily mean that Clinton was acting badly with regard to Yugoslavia, Somalia, etc.
Of course, we know many other unsavory details about Clinton's personal and political life, just as we do with regard to Vladimir Putin. But, in context, both seem to me to have been relatively successful presidents. Clinton's legacy has taken a big hit since his time in office (when his popularity helped with his impeachment defense), as the path we were on during his administration has proven unsustainable. Similarly, Putin's path may be unsustainable once he is gone from power. Or it may be sustainable. It will depend upon many other people such as Putin's successors, current Russian politicians, the behavior of the West and China, etc. Putin, like Clinton, is a creature of his place and time.
The Ukraine War
So how to distinguish the real Hitlers from the Clintons, and into which camp does Putin fall. Stephen Cohen:
In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily, we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia somehow attacked us in 2016… I didn’t see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 in 2016. This is reckless, dangerous, warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they’ve been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military alliance on the front door. Maybe it’s not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
And that's how I see it. The U.S. would not permit a coup/revolution in Mexico yielding an stridently anti-US government being supplied by Russia with lethal weapons. We would not stand idly by if there were an ongoing civil war in Mexico between an anti-US central Mexican government with billions of dollars worth of Russian supplied weapons against our neighbors and partisans.
Also:
A video, filmed during John McCain’s visit to Ukraine in 2016, shows the senator accompanied by his colleague and friend, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. In this video, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain assure that the United States will give all the weapons necessary for them to succeed in defeating Russia.
Shortly afterwards, President Poroshenko, who had attended the meeting in battle dress, changed the badge of his secret service, the SBU. It is now an owl holding a sword directed against Russia.
Three years later, on September 5, 2019, the Rand Corporation organized a meeting in the US House of Representatives to explain its plan: to weaken Russia by forcing it to deploy in Kazakhstan, then in Ukraine and as far as Transnistria
Starting in 2014, the Ukrainian state began several secret military programs. The first and most well known is its collaboration with the Pentagon in 30 different laboratories… All the results of this research have been sent to the military biological laboratories at Fort Detrick, which once played a leading role in the US biological weapons program.
Rafael Grossi of Argentina, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, incidentally said at the Davos Forum on May 25 that Ukraine had stored 30 tons of plutonium and 40 tons of enriched uranium at its Zaporizhia plant… Between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine asked four times for a renegotiation of the Budapest Memorandum… by which Ukraine pledged to transfer all their nuclear weapons to Russia and to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And:
The Dark Side of the Ukraine Revolt, The Nation, March 6, 2014
How a Far-Right Militia Uses Facebook to Train New Members, Time, January 2021
How Zelensky Made Peace With Neo-Nazis, Consortium News, March 4, 2022
Aaron Maté provides a timeline for the build-up to the war that broke out in February 2022, a breakout of hostilities that began in 2014 -- Urging regime change in Russia, Biden exposes US aims in Ukraine:
Biden's declaration that Putin "cannot remain in power" was not an error, but a clear expression of entrenched US policy: using Ukraine for a proxy war against Russia… Months before the US-backed Maidan coup that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US intelligence cutout, dubbed Ukraine "the biggest prize" in the new Cold War with Russia. Pulling Ukraine into the Western orbit, Carl Gershman wrote, could leave Putin "on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
As does Jacques Baud, a Swiss career specialist in intelligence (trained by western intelligence services), UN peace operations, and NATO operations, including within Ukraine after 2014.
But just after signing the Minsk 1 Agreements, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive anti-terrorist operation (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass. Bis repetita placent: poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo, which forced them to engage in the Minsk 2 Agreements.
It is essential to recall here that Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine.
…
So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially composed of foreign mercenaries, often extreme right-wing militants. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities—including Swiss.
…
Since November 2021, the Americans have been constantly threatening a Russian invasion of the Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians did not seem to agree. Why not?
We have to go back to March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea, and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country. At the same time, several NATO exercises were conducted between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border
…
In violation of the Minsk Agreements, the Ukraine was conducting air operations in Donbass using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021
…
In February 2022, events were precipitated… But on February 11, in Berlin, after nine hours of work, the meeting of political advisors of the leaders of the “Normandy format” ended, without any concrete result: the Ukrainians still refused to apply the Minsk Agreements, apparently under pressure from the United States… Ukrainian preparations in the contact zone continued. The Russian Parliament became alarmed; and on February 15 asked Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Republics, which he refused to do… On 11th February, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack the Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this? It is a mystery. But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbass increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show
…
In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun shelling the civilian population of Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed… In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware.
On top of all this, there is the obvious fact that the West has repeatedly invaded countries without UN authorization (Iraq, Afghanistan), resulting in millions of lives lost and wounded along with devastation and emigration. International institutions have been compromised by the U.S. as with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in Syria in 2018-2019, in favor of the United States and against Russian interests.
So, yes, Putin's invasion of Ukraine was controversial, but in my view understandable from the point of view of Russian interests and consistent with what other superpowers would do in a similar situation. No offense to Stephen Kotkin, the Stalin expert, but I haven't seen nor heard him say anything relevant to my understanding as outlined above. I'll keep my eyes open as people I respect seem to respect his work.
Putin, Aside from Ukraine
There seems to be an understanding in mainstream Western society that Putin is evil. There is no need to provide supporting evidence, in general, as this is widely known and accepted. That's part of the reason I'm writing this -- I'm delving into why I do not believe something that is accepted matter of factly by most of the people I know. Among the common assertions regarding Putin:
He's a ruthless dictator.
He kills journalists.
He's the most corrupt, and richest, person in the world.
He's incompetent and destroyed the economy.
He demonizes gay people.
He's an all around saber rattler who wants to restore the Tsarist/Soviet empire.
Putin and Democracy
Whether or not he is a “dictator” is a matter of discussion; but it is worth noting that his approval rate in Russia never fell below 59 % in the last 20 years. I take my figures from the Levada Center, which is labeled as “foreign agent” in Russia, and hence doesn’t reflect the Kremlin’s views.
(It is also interesting to see that in France, some of the most influential so-called “experts” on Russia are in fact working for the British MI-6’s “Integrity Initiative.”)
Stephen Cohen - Who Putin Is Not
In today’s Russia, apart from varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been. (When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an “appalling human rights situation in Putin’s Russia,” they should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?)
…
Whatever Putin’s failings, the “fascist” allegation is absurd. Nothing in his statements over nearly 20 years in power are akin to fascism, whose core belief is a cult of blood based on the asserted superiority of one ethnicity over all others. As head of a vast multiethnic state—embracing scores of diverse groups with a broad range of skin colors—such utterances or related acts by Putin would be inconceivable, if not political suicide. This is why he endlessly appeals for harmony in “our entire multi-ethnic nation” with its “multi-ethnic culture,” as he did once again in his re-inauguration speech in 2018.
Putin and the Press
there are human rights reports, and it’s just sort of taken as a given fact that Putin is responsible for killing journalists… I have never seen any evidence whatsoever, and I’ve been- I knew some of the people who were killed. Anna Politkovskaya, the famous journalist for Novaya Gazeta was the first, I think, who was- Putin was accused of killing. I knew her well. She was right here, in this apartment. Look behind me, right here. She was here with my wife, Katrina vanden Huevel. I wouldn’t say we were close friends, but we were associates in Moscow, and we were social friends. And I mourn her assassination today. But I will tell you this, that neither her editors at that newspaper, nor her family, her surviving sons, think Putin had anything to do with the killing. No evidence has ever been presented. Only media kangaroo courts that Putin was involved in these high-profile assassinations, two of the most famous being this guy Litvinenko by polonium in London, about the time Anna was killed, and more recently Boris Netsov, whom, it’s always said, was walking within view of the Kremlin when he was shot. Well, you could see the Kremlin from miles away. I don’t know what within the view- unless they think Putin was, you know, watching it through binoculars. There is no evidence that Putin ever ordered the killing of anybody outside his capacity as commander in chief. No evidence.
There’s an organization called the Committee to Protect American Journalists. It’s kind of iconic. It does good things, it says unwise things. Go on its website and look at the number of Russian journalists killed since 1991, since the end of the Soviet Union, under two leaders. Boris Yeltsin, whom we dearly loved and still mourn, and Putin, whom we hate. Last time I looked, the numbers may have changed, more were killed under Yeltsin than under Putin. Did Putin kill those in the 1990s?
So you should ask me, why did they die, then? And I can tell you the main reason. Corrupt business. Mafia-like business in Russia. Just like happened in the United States during our primitive accumulation days. Profit seekers killed rivals. Killed them dead in the streets. Killed them as demonstrations, as demonstrative acts. The only thing you could say about Putin is that he might have created an atmosphere that abets that sort of thing. To which I would say, maybe, but originally it was created with the oligarchical class under Boris Yeltsin, who remains for us the most beloved Russian leader in history. So that’s the long and the short of it. Go look at the listing on the Committee to Protect Journalists…
Putin and Corruption
Stephen Cohen - Who Putin Is Not
Nor did Putin create post–Soviet Russia’s “kleptocratic economic system,” with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin’s shock-therapy “privatization” schemes of the 1990s, when the “swindlers and thieves” still denounced by today’s opposition actually emerged.
Putin has adopted a number of “anti-corruption” policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin’s oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But branding Putin “a kleptocrat” also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing.
A recent scholarly book finds, for example, that while they may be “corrupt,” Putin “and the liberal technocratic economic team on which he relies have also skillfully managed Russia’s economic fortunes.” A former IMF director goes further, concluding that Putin’s current economic team does not “tolerate corruption” and that “Russia now ranks 35th out of 190 in the World Bank’s Doing Business ratings. It was at 124 in 2010.”
Putin and Competence
Stephen Cohen - Who Putin Is Not
Viewed in human terms, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost even modest legacies of the Soviet era—their life savings; medical and other social benefits; real wages; pensions; occupations; and for men, life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the “kleptocrat” Putin had mobilized enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin “Vladimir the Savior.”
The War in Ukraine Marks the End of the American Century
“The Russian ruble is the best-performing currency in the world this year….
Two months after the ruble’s value fell to less than a U.S. penny amid the swiftest, toughest economic sanctions in modern history, Russia’s currency has mounted a stunning turnaround. The ruble has jumped 40% against the dollar since January.
Normally, a country facing international sanctions and a major military conflict would see investors fleeing and a steady outflow of capital, causing its currency to drop….
The ruble’s resiliency means that Russia is partly insulated from the punishing economic penalties imposed by Western nations after its invasion of Ukraine…” (“Russia’s ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year“, CBS News) …
Russia is pulling in nearly $20 billion a month from energy exports. Since the end of March, many foreign buyers have complied with a demand to pay for energy in rubles, pushing up the currency’s value.” …
Yep, and it’s the same deal with Russia’s trade surplus. Take a look at this excerpt from an article in The Economist:
“Russia’s exports… have held up surprisingly well, including those directed to the West…
analysts expect Russia’s trade surplus to hit record highs in the coming months. The IIF reckons that in 2022 the current-account surplus, which includes trade and some financial flows, could come in at $250bn (15% of last year’s GDP), more than double the $120bn recorded in 2021. That sanctions have boosted Russia’s trade surplus, and thus helped finance the war, is disappointing
“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday.
And with regard to Russia's military (continuation of politics by other means):
Russia Isn't Getting the Recognition It Deserves on Syria (Scott Ritter)
At a time when the credibility of the United States as either an unbiased actor or reliable ally lies in tatters, Russia has emerged as the one major power whose loyalty to its allies is unquestioned, and whose ability to serve as an honest broker between seemingly intractable opponents is unmatched.
If there is to be peace in Syria, it will be largely due to the patient efforts of Moscow employing deft negotiation, backed up as needed by military force, to shape conditions conducive for a political solution to a violent problem. If ever there was a primer for the art of diplomacy, the experience of Russia in Syria from 2011 to the present is it.
Like the rest of the world, Russia was caught off guard by the so-called Arab Spring that swept through the Middle East and North Africa in 2010-2011, forced to watch from the sidelines as the old order in Tunisia and Egypt was swept aside by popular discontent. While publicly supporting the peaceful transition of power in Tunis and Cairo, in private the Russian government watched the events unfolding in Egypt and the Maghreb with trepidation, concerned that the social and political transformations underway were a continuation of the kind of Western-backed “color revolutions” that had occurred previously in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004).
When, in early 2011, the Arab Spring expanded into Libya, threatening the rule of longtime Russian client Moammar Gadhafi, Russia initially supported the creation of a U.N.-backed no-fly zone for humanitarian purposes, only to watch in frustration as the U.S. and NATO used it as a vehicle to launch a concerted air campaign in a successful bid to drive Gadhafi from power.
By the time Syria found itself confronting popular demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar Assad, Russia—still struggling to understand the root cause of the unrest—had become wary of the playbook being employed by the U.S. and NATO in response. While Russia was critical of the violence used by the Assad government in responding to the anti-government demonstrations in the spring of 2011, it blocked efforts by the U.S. and Europe to impose economic sanctions against the Syrian government, viewing them as little more than the initial salvo of a broader effort to achieve regime change in Damascus using the Libyan model.
Moscow’s refusal to help facilitate that Western-sponsored regime change, however, did not translate into unequivocal support for the continued rule of Assad. Russia supported the appointment of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to head up a process for bringing a peaceful resolution to the Syrian crisis, and endorsed Annan’s six-point peace plan, put forward in March 2012, which included the possibility of a peaceful transition of power away from Assad.
At the same time Russia was promoting a diplomatic resolution to the Syrian crisis, the U.S. was spearheading a covert program to provide weapons and equipment to anti-Assad forces, funneling shipments from Libya through Turkey and into rebel-controlled areas of Syria. This CIA-run effort, which eventually morphed into a formal operation known as Timber Sycamore, helped fuel an increase in the level of violence inside Syria that made it impossible for the Assad government to fully implement the Annan plan. The inevitable collapse of the Annan initiative was used by the U.S. and its European allies to call for U.N. sanctions against Syria, which were again rejected by Russia.
While Russia continued to call for a political solution to the Syrian crisis that allowed for the potential of Assad being replaced, it insisted that this decision would be made by a process that included the Syrian government, as opposed to the U.S. demand that Assad must first step down…
While in Ukraine:
The report then pivots to the reality of an undertrained, poorly commanded and equipped, rag-tag force of mostly volunteers in the East who find themselves increasingly surrounded by the numerically superior Russian military which has penetrated almost the entire Donbas region.
Kremlin Declares "Land Bridge" Complete From Western Russia To Donbas To Crimea
The Tuesday Russian military statement said that "roads and rail lines between western Russia and Crimea are operational," which marks that "the land bridge is complete."
"Conditions have been created for the resumption of full-fledged traffic between Russia, Donbas, Ukraine and Crimea on six railway sections," Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said.
Read all about it: Final days of the battle for Mariupol
Whatever the level of destruction may be, the pending Russian victory over Ukrainian forces in Mariupol is anything but Pyrrhic. It is a full-blooded victory with great strategic importance insofar as it gives the Russians full control of the Azov Sea littoral. It seals the land bridge connecting the Russian Federation mainland with Crimea. It also is a key piece in ensuring water supplies to Crimea, which had been cut off by Ukraine in order to inflict maximum pain on Russian Crimea. With water now flowing once again from the Dnieper, there is a solid basis for resuming farming on Crimea in its traditional levels and also to support tourist inflows, a key source of income for the region. Add to that the likelihood that with some time and investment, Mariupol will reassume its important economic role as seaport and industrial town.
And with regard to advanced weapons:
THE U.S. DILEMMA–PRICEY WEAPONS THAT MAY NOT WORK
the weapon systems the United States is spending money to develop and deploy are obscenely expensive and completely vulnerable to Russia’s weapons created to defeat the American threat… Until recently the United States leaders and policy experts assumed that Mutual Assured Destruction would keep nuclear powers from killing each other. But what happens to that assumption/calculation when one side develops and deploys an advanced missile system that can shoot down the missiles launched from land, air and sea? Guess what? Russia’s S-500 air defense system does exactly that.
The Disintegrated States of America
the arrival of hypersonic missiles “has changed warfare forever.” The Kinzhal, deployed way back in 2017, has a range of 2,000 kilometers and “is not interceptable by existing US anti-missile systems.” The 3M22 Zircon, a scramjet-powered maneuvering anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile, “changes the calculus of both naval and ground warfare completely.” The US lag behind Russia in air defense systems is “massive, and both quantitative and qualitative.”
Putin the Homophobe
Russia and Putin are middle of the road with regard to gender roles and relationships in comparison with most countries, including Islamic and Catholic countries as well as liberal western countries. He may not be as empathetic as I would like with regard to homosexuality, but he is consistent with his culture and that of much the world. [This is my recollection of Stephen Cohen's take on the subject, which I can't find at the moment.]
Putin's Cold War
Putin came to power almost accidentally in 2000. He inherited a country whose state had collapsed twice in the 20th century.the Russian state, Russian statehood, had collapsed once in 1917 during the revolution, and again in 1991 when the Soviet Union ended. The country was in ruination; 75 percent of the people were in poverty.
Putin said- and this obsesses him. If you want to know what obsesses Putin, it’s the word ‘sovereignty.’ Russia lost its sovereignty- political, foreign policy, security, financial- in the 1990s. Putin saw his mission, as I read him, and I try to read him as a biographer. He says a lot, to regain Russia’s sovereignty, which meant to make the country whole again at home, to rescue its people, and to protect its defenses. That’s been his mission. Has it been more than that? Maybe. But everything he’s done, as I see it, has followed that concept of his role in history. And he’s done pretty well…
I’m not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you’re talking about the 2008 war, the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and Obama’s best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So that- Russia didn’t begin that war. And it didn’t begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen…
all the conflicts we’ve had with post-Soviet Russia, after communism went away in Russia, all those conflicts, which I call a new and more dangerous Cold War, are solely, completely, the fault of Putin or Putin’s Russia… we’re not permitted to ask, did we do something wrong, or so unwise that it led to this even more dangerous Cold War? And if the debate leads to a conclusion that we did do something unwise, and that we’re still doing it, then arises the pressure and the imperative for any new policy toward Russia. None of that has been permitted, because the orthodoxy, the dogma, the axiom, is Putin alone has solely been responsible…
There was talk about cooperation on nuclear weapons, possibly renewing the New START Treaty. We know that Putin offered that to Trump when he first came into office, but Trump rejected it. There was talk about cooperating in Syria…
Stephen Cohen - Who Putin Is Not
In the three cases widely given as examples of Putin’s “aggression,” the evidence, long cited by myself and many others, points to US-led instigations, primarily in the process of expanding the NATO military alliance since the late 1990s from Germany to Russia’s borders today. The proxy US-Russian war in Georgia in 2008 was initiated by the US-backed president of that country, who had been encouraged to aspire to NATO membership. The 2014 crisis and subsequent proxy war in Ukraine resulted from the long-standing effort to bring that country, despite large regions’ shared civilization with Russia, into NATO. And Putin’s 2015 military intervention in Syria was done on a valid premise: either it would be Syrian President Assad in Damascus or the terrorist Islamic State—and on President Barack Obama’s refusal to join Russia in an anti-ISIS alliance. As a result of this history, Putin is often seen in Russia as a belatedly reactive leader abroad, not as a sufficiently “aggressive” one.
Embedded in the “aggressive Putin” axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia’s neighbors. He is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was “a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” as it was for most Russians.
Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation, naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians: “Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has no head.”
The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been “anti-Western,” specifically “anti-American,” has “always viewed the United States” with “smoldering suspicions.” A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in 2000 in the still-prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin—in hope of a “strategic friendship and partnership” with the United States. Hence his abundant assistance, following 9/11, to the American war in Afghanistan. Hence, until he believed Russia would not be treated as an equal and NATO had encroached too close, his full partnership in the US-European clubs of major leaders.
Context Revisited
Western Intelligence & Propaganda
As I've reviewed the evidence, I've been overwhelmed by the extent of the western propaganda used to demonize Putin, while the U.S. has been the bull in the china shop, rumbling around the Middle East with little regard for international law and diplomacy. It's blindingly obvious (to me) that the demonization has resulted from the fact that Russia, led by Putin, is one of the only countries that will stand up to the United States, militarily as well as politically.
I've been opposed to U.S. foreign policy, for the most part, since the 2003 Iraq War. Thus, I've been leaning to Russia's side as one of the few to take a principled stand again U.S. aggression. But it was the Russiagate conspiracy of 2016 that led me to realize the extent of the anti-Putin propaganda. I was able to verify and document that the mainstream media has no interest in the truth with regard to Russia, but rather works with the (17!) intelligence agencies to achieve the desire political effect.
Patriotism
My world view sees this as part of the Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium as described by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri. Thanks to the miracle of automated language translation and the Internet, I'm now able to find out much more about the facts underlying news stories such as those describing the supposed hellhole that is Russia, and the alleged crimes against humanity by Russia and China. It turns out that, as written by American poet Lloyd Stone,
This is my song, O God of all the nations
A song of peace for lands afar and mine
This is my home, the country where my heart is
Here are my hopes and dreams, my holy shrine
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations
A song of peace for their land and for mine
At a time when Americans are divided and respect for our government is low, it seems that in Russia love of country is on the upswing. Check out this rendition of the Russian National Anthem, which was sung by Grigory Leps on May 29, 2022, with 80,000 people singing along.
I've been following Gilbert Doctorow's writings on international relations and Russian affairs. There is much more to Russia beyond the stereotypical "dictatorship / Putin hellhole" caricature we see in the West. Doctorow recently traveled to Russia (and Estonia), and his take is that Russia is doing well economically and culturally. There are lively discussions about the Ukraine war in the Russian media. The people, like people everywhere, are intelligent and caring. Perhaps Russia under Putin's leadership can even serve as a model for the West in some regards, as we struggle with our crises of authority.
What It Means to be a Putin Apologist
The accusation that Stephen Cohen was a Putin apologist was accurate, in the sense that an apologist is a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial. Defending Putin is one of the most controversial things one can do these days in the West. I've found myself doing that on a couple of occasions and the reaction was shock. I feel good about having raised some controversial points in defense of Putin. I've never received a response that shows more than a knee jerk contempt for Putin and what he has done as the leader of Russia, and I believe with all my heart that this is desperately needed in the West today. Our future depends upon peaceful coexistence, and we are more likely to be successful in this regard if we understand the "enemy".
