Vladimir Kara-Murza, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, is in a Russian prison awaiting trial for the crime of reporting “fake news” about Putin’s Ukraine war that Putin insisted cannot be called a war. 10, in France, the respected Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize was awarded by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to a courageous Russian who was otherwise occupied and unable to accept it in person. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, wrote most perceptively in a recent Washington Post commentary. “If the Russian armed forces continue to lose on the battlefield, the only way to end this war might involve putting someone else in power in Moscow,” former U.S. Indeed, he’s fearing his next step could be atop one of those unseen trapdoors. Putin’s military has almost run out of its high-tech weaponry. Putin has shamed his own Russian people, as the world watched his war crimes with disgust. Unable to defeat Ukraine forces on the ground, Putin chose instead to use high-tech missiles and artillery from far away to indiscriminately slaughter the very civilians he had just told the world were really his fellow Russians. Putin took charge and things got even worse. Their unmotivated troops ran out of supplies and fled. His on-the-ground generals screwed up militarily. And Putin, who is arrogant but not stupid, gets where this debacle of a war he started in Ukraine can end up - in Ukraine and even in the power corridors of the Kremlin. So ordinary Americans get what ordinary Russians are feeling. America’s antiwar crusade eventually helped end that un-won war. We felt it six decades ago, when America began drafting men to fight a war they didn’t understand, in a place called Vietnam they couldn’t even find on a map. Half a world away, Americans of a certain age know too well the antiwar rage Russia’s millions are now feeling. Many were jailed, but their antiwar message spread. Hundreds of thousands of courageous Russians began protesting Putin’s war in city streets. Hundreds of thousands of Russian men fled rather than fight. “The war has come to Russia, and it’s a termination of the social contract,” Oleg Ignatov, a senior analyst with the Brussels-based Crisis Group think tank, told Newsweek. For the first time since 1941, Russia began rushing young and middle-aged men, husbands and fathers to fight and maybe die in a war they don’t give a rat’s patootie about. Then Putin announced his mucked-up mobilization. Right up until his ground war collapsed and his troops fled rather than fight Ukrainians. He assured the citizens he ruled that the war he started in Ukraine wasn’t a war - but was being won. Millions of stunned ordinary Russians now see Putin for the con artist he has been all along. A yank of a lever - by an unseen hand of a military hard-liner (or even thousands of clenched fists of fed-up ordinary Russians) - could suddenly send Putin plummeting out of power, faster than he can say “Nikita Khrushchev!” or “Mikhail Gorbachev!” It could be his only exit. It may well be his most likely exit from the Ukraine war he now knows he can’t win.Ī now panicky Putin fears he might stumble or strut onto an unseen trapdoor that could instantly become his (how to say) downfall. He’s frantically watching out for a trapdoor. Once again, the talking- and typing-heads are filling our news screens with double-doming about building an “offramp” Vladimir Putin will be willing to take to get out of the Ukraine war.īut Putin still doesn’t seem to be looking for an offramp. Columnist Martin Schram is a Tribune News Service op-ed writer.
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