Putin believed taking Ukraine away from Ukrainians would be a cake walk. Now. It is just yellow cake on Putin's agenda.

October 4, 2022

By Eliot A. Cohen

Tehran – Iran said (click here) on Monday London’s lack of “political will” has thwarted a deal with Kazakhstan on import of 950 tons of yellow cake, an acquisition that would not violate the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. 

Margarita Simonyan, (click here) the editor in chief of RT and one of Russia’s top propagandists, has in the space of seven months gone from supreme confidence that Kyiv would fall in days to something like despair at Russia’s shambolic mobilization and battlefield defeats. In addition to confessing to “terrible grief,” she admits that she now sings Russia’s national anthem using the old Soviet lyrics. That choice is appropriate, because Moscow now specializes in Soviet-style bluster and hysteria. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nuclear threats issued by President Vladimir Putin.

In his speeches announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts that his battered army does not fully control, Putin raised the specter of nuclear war. In the finest tradition of Soviet whataboutism, he spoke of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calling them an American precedent for … what, he did not exactly say, but the meaning was clear. Since then, the menace has been amplified by subordinates like Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s security council, as well as panicky tub-thumpers like Simonyan’s colleague Vladimir Solovyov.

It is impossible for the USA (click here) to sit out any nuclear threat and exchange. No one believed Putin would lead according to a five year calendar that included invading Ukraine. He is now playing his hand as he planned it. The nukes are next. He has always stated he would use whatever it took to protect the Russia people. In his mind this is the time for such nuclear measures. No one has invaded Russia and partly that is the problem. Putin isn't rational in a way that most international relations play out, he is enamored with his 

Any threat to use nuclear weapons by a country that possesses them has to be taken seriously. That’s particularly true of Russia, a country whose military doctrine has always entertained the deployment of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons in a war. To be clear, low-yield can mean a detonation equivalent to 5,000 or 10,000 tons of TNT. When Soviet war plans for Europe were revealed after the Cold War, analysts blanched at the magnitude of the nuclear assault the Soviet general staff had contemplated as the preparatory bombardment for a potential drive to the English Channel....

Putin is not demented, his plans are demented and woefully bad in preparation and deployed. Putin has practiced brinkmanship and gotten away with it for far too long. He is convinced he is invincible. 

June 9, 2022

By Anton Trojanovski

Among President Vladimir V. Putin’s motives (click here) for invading Ukraine, his view of himself as being on a historic mission to rebuild the Russian Empire has always loomed large. On Thursday, Mr. Putin went further, comparing himself directly to Peter the Great.

It was a new, if carefully staged, glimpse into Mr. Putin’s sense of his own grandeur.

Mr. Putin on Thursday marked the 350th anniversary of Peter’s birth by visiting a new multimedia exhibit about the czar in Moscow. He then held a town-hall-style meeting with young Russian entrepreneurs and opened it by reflecting on Peter’s conquest of the Baltic coast during his 18th-century war with Sweden.

Mr. Putin described the land Peter conquered as rightfully Russian.

“He was returning it and strengthening it,” Mr. Putin said, leaning back in his armchair, before hinting with a smile that he was now doing the same thing in his war in Ukraine. “Well, apparently, it has also fallen to us to return and to strengthen.”...