I’m in hellish fix. By now, I expected to be crowned champion of the new world order. Instead, this invasion, war, or special operation – whatever you call it – has been a cascading failure. That insipid, smiling, Biden has grown in stature and ambition. And I am stuck playing second fiddle to the stiff avatar who runs China. I wanted to stand tall (for a tiny man) besides Xi and Biden. Now all I have is a collection of hapless, back-biting, generals at home and sets of pretend acolytes popping up out of their own sordid holes in Eritrea, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Plus I have scheming pretenders like Tokayev in Kazakhstan and that two-timing Erdogan in Turkey. But at least I still have nukes, if not much else.
I’m in a fat mess, with no easy escape to a happy refuge. Winning is going to be hard. I can’t give up and sue for peace. If I did, the Russian political meat grinder would turn me into horse meat and happily sell me off to the International Criminal Court, just like the special tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s proceedings drove Slobodan Milosevic to his death. Anyway, letting that fancy Jewish comedian in Ukraine walk over me in any end-of-combat bargaining would be grossly humiliating. I’m meant to be a big man, and I will be!
I’ve always been a scrapper, never ducked a fight. I took Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 fair and square, when no one was looking. I loudly declared that they were inalienable parts of Mother Russia -- a huge and laughable stretch. But it was easy and proved that I was a big man.
Peter the Great was my model. So, in his own merciless way was Stalin, such a macho Georgian potentate he was. I thought after conquering Georgia easily in 2008 and bombing Syria silly to keep that foppish ophthalmologist in power that adding Ukraine to my recreated Russian empire would be easy. And so it was in 2014. Obama objected but did nothing, just as his red lines in Syria turned pusillanimous pink. NATO burbled but was powerless. The UN tut-tutted. Whatever was left of the free world (and especially the un-free, including China) simply said “Poor Ukraine” and imposed some easily avoided sanctions. I lost some international gigs, like the G8, but who cared? I was the big guy.
That made finishing off the conquest of Ukraine appear straightforward. Its people spoke Russian, thanks to the Soviet years. They looked Russian. They had grain and steel making wealth. And don’t forget, they bordered the Black Sea. Most of all, I figured, if I folded Ukraine into my widening empire, I would poke a finger in NATO’s eye. That would help make the appealing case to my own suffering people and world opinion that I was only going to war because nasty NATO had provoked the peaceful Russian people, and me. I wanted to stand tall.
What really bugged me was that my increasingly pummeled and oppressed people might look across our western border and see how prosperous and technologically modern and superior were our former satrapies – Estonia especially, and Latvia, and Lithuania. Even those cheeky Poles and Romanians, useless Moldova, and corrupt Bulgaria. Imagine!
My intelligence operatives agreed with me that marching into Kyiv would be a cake walk. After all, the Ukrainians were stuck with ancient Soviet arms and aircraft, NATO would be too frightened to intervene, and after its ridiculously disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, the U. S. would be too discombobulated to react. I reckoned that my crooked ally and disciple Trump had tied everybody in Washington up in knots with his vainglorious rantings (like mine, sometimes) and that after a long weekend of killings and atrocities that I would be able to add another big notch to my belt of conquests. I could ride bareback into Kyiv as a macho warrior.
But those Ukrainians fought back in ways that I couldn’t easily credit. My generals, following old strategic playbooks, were caught flatfooted. And our miserably paid and miserably motivated soldiers wanted to loot and rape more than to attack and fight. Corruption also played a part since the generals were pilfering, the persons procuring arms and equipment were on the take, and even those who were supposed to feed our valiant soldiers were cheating. I profited, too, but mostly beforehand, through those toady oligarchs and the skimming of natural gas and petroleum over-priced profits. Navalny, that swine, discovered how much taxpayers paid for my small dacha in Sochi. But I finally got him!
So what can I do now to escape? I could get on a plane and flee to Caracas or Managua, I suppose. But who wants to be beholden to those creeps? Xi might tuck me away somewhere safe, but I don’t want to be around him or the Chinese, even though I am at least bigger than many. I could turn myself into the ICC like that fool from Kosovo. Ha! For cash, the Cypriots would take me in. But none of those alternatives is any good.
I think what I have to do is to agree to negotiations that will leave Russia in the Donbas and at least part of Crimea, give me impunity, get the sanctions lifted, and pretend all the while that Russia is only bargaining because we have won. In reality, of course, our army is in tatters, our munitions industry is not able to make artillery shells fast enough, our missiles are in short supply, and those expendable Iranian drones are mostly useless. When Ukraine gets Patriot anti-aircraft batteries, old Russian MIGs, additional Western howitzers, and much more materiel of war, we will fall face first into our borscht.
Look at how poorly we did in Bakhmut, or even farther south and north. Our recruits are all reluctant, and we are using them shamelessly as cannon fodder. Our adversaries, however, excited by that Ukrainian clown, never back down. They took major casualties in Bakhmut and hung on. They pushed us back from Kharkiv. I fear their big offensive, soon, in the south. Those leaked Pentagon secret appraisals give me no real comfort.
Extricating myself from this mess is not easy or fun. And that former smirking chef of mine, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is angling to push me aside and take over. When he founded the Wagner Group he promised me a big cut. But now all we have are deaths in combat and some stolen gold from Sudan and the Central African Republic. I have been trying to slice him down to my size, but he has backers challenging my legitimacy.
If I falter, Prigozhin wins. That Kadyrov bully (like me) in Chechnya also comes back up for air. So, can I keep the war going long enough to extricate myself with some kind of honor, even faux honor? The West and China will be on my side; they won’t want me humiliated. After all, I still have 1,500 long range strategic nuclear-armed missiles at my disposal, plus those tactical weapons that I am foisting on Belarus. I am tempted to shoot off a nuclear missile toward Paris or Washington. But not if I think that they will let me negotiate an exit and retreat back to Sochi. One false move and I’ll give the order to nuke them, and still stand tall.
"...stand tall..." bare-chested, astride my palomino, riding into the sunset, my arms raised in a V for victory (that has still eluded me) ....
Brilliant, professor...you have a big future as a Kremlin спичрайтер [speechwriter] !