STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Putin’s Potential Actions Recall the Battle of Borodino, September 7, 1812  

Then: A Massive Slaughter where both Russia and France Lost the War.
Now: The Ukraine and Russia ditto!

The cry of war wafts through the media like forest fires raging out of control. Everywhere one turns, one hears in the media and from would-be pundits the cry of “Russia Invades Ukraine!” The truth may be better or worse,  depending on one’s perspective.

The fact that heavy artillery is being transported into the Ukraine by ‘lost Russian Paratroopers’ is fanciful,  yet compelling.  Putin is clearly disturbed by the events in the Ukraine in a way that he has not evidenced in any other potential conflagration including the civil war in Syria or the Islamic disruptions in Central Asia.  The Ukraine has touched, as the clairvoyant “idiot-savants”, both Bush jr and Condi Rice, pronounced on that fateful day decades ago, “we have seen Putin’s ‘inner  Russian soul’ and ‘it is basically good’.

Soul or no soul, Putin has recently erupted into a volcanic emotion of bravado, daring and war-mongering.  As America withdraws his financial viability and creates a cauldron of Kremlin discontent,  Putin retaliates by sending in ‘misplaced Russian Paratroopers who have lost their way’….. just like the pathetic little black sheep in the children’s nursery rhyme.

The problem for Putin from my point of view is quite simple.  Every Russian with a modicum of any education, in which I include the Ex-KGB/Stasi Agent, Putin, has read, if not memorized one of the great tomes of world literature—Count Leo Tolstoy’s War And Peace.  As for me, my mother insisted that I first listen to her read the different chapters in Russian when I was a school-boy,  then as I matured,  I began to study the various brilliant insights about war and peace that Tolstoy instilled in the fashion of an epic novel.

One of the most moving parts of the story is when Pierre, the central character of the book, decides to witness the infamous Battle of Borodino, in which Emperor Napoleon  invades Moscow and engages in the most costly battle of his ill-fated incursion into Russia. The Battle of Borodino was so bloody that Pierre was unable to say who was winning and who was losing.  All kinds of human desecrations were committed by both sides compelling Pierre to conclude that war was literally a ‘mad house’ of little, or no value.

In reality, that war involved over 250,000 combatants and incurred 70,000 casualties. As the Russian Army enters into the Ukraine by default or direct intention, the outcome will be the same. The Russian Federation will lose in more ways than it can imagine---financially, politically, morally, and culturally. Asserting one’s prerogative as a leader does not make for an effective function of a state or even comforts those bereft of benefits of the state.

Russia has too many elderly citizens who live on the border of poverty and too many young entrepreneurs whose primary interests are confined not to nationalism but to maintaining themselves as part of a growing consortium of millenials who seek closer and more enduring relationships with the outside world through the wonders and benign intricacies of the internet. The call of the New Russia is not nationalism nor the rise of a new Imperial Czar, be he a Putin or a Stalin.

Russia and the Ukraine beckons for greater integration in a world economy that knows no borders other than profit and loss, and friendships that cater not to national, ethnic or religious identities but to a community that I once called, some twenty years ago—CyberNations [Net Force Series].

It is to this greater transcendent goal that you, Putin, must strive.  The Ukraine in the old argot of the intelligence world is simply a ‘HONEY TRAP’ in which you will be seduced by your own images of perceived strength and fortitude; when in fact, you will see nothing more than a financial and political liability that can be easily resolved through diplomacy, not with America, but with your surrogate ‘father’ – the Germans.

Let not the Battle of Borodino inspire you to reverse history by your invasion of Ukraine as Napoleon had foolishly invaded your country.  Let the clarion calls of peace, negotiations and friendship bring you to a moment in history when you can one day be called a ‘True Russian Visionary and Revolutionary’. The Ukraine tragedy affords you, Putin, that opportunity. Don’t let it slip through your fingers. 

Use those skills of negotiating a fair gas treaty with Ukraine and a concerned approach to your Russian country men located in the Eastern Part of that country, but always remember that Russian History awaits your future actions as Leo Tolstoy had awaited the disaster that Napoleon created in the Battle of Borodino and then in the burning of Moscow.

History is your mistress, Putin. Don’t disappoint her!! She awaits your carefully planned seductive overtures!!