Joe Biden, once again showing off his keen grasp of world events as our president and alleged leader of the free world, informed reporters the other day that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was clearly losing the war in Iraq.
That’s another Biden utterance showing how much the 80-year-old commander in chief is losing his own war against the ongoing mental and physical deteriorations of his advancing age.
Biden claims he’s running for another term, which would end in 2029 when he’d be 86. No one survives old age, not even multimillionaires who somehow got that way on a $174,000 annual congressional salary.
That also includes most all of the brutal leaders of Russia who need never fear the results of genuine elections. There, as for all despots and dictators eventually, the passing of political challengers and even suspected critics is carefully arranged and often violent, regardless of age.
Tsar Nicholas, wife Alexandra, who was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, and family members were removed by gunfire in the woods in 1917.
Leon Trotsky, a central theorist of the Russian Revolution, died by ice ax. Vladimir Lenin’s cause of death was given as complications after a stroke, whose symptoms happened to resemble poisoning.
When the especially brutal Soviet leader Josef Stalin died in 1953, the official cause of death was brain hemorrhage. Later, experts said his passing was assisted by warfarin, an anticoagulant once widely used in rat poison.
So, Russia’s leadership term limits are extralegal. They’re assessed by party rivals whenever one of them or a consortium of ambitious men believe they’ve acquired enough power to vacate the big chair in the Kremlin.
Thus, Putin had good reason to worry the other day. His “special military operation” in Ukraine, which others call invasion, has not gone well.
There’s been considerable grumbling online and in public about the unexpectedly lethal and successful resistance by Ukraine, which Putin has falsely maintained has always been an integral part of Russia.
The vast, fertile lands of Russia’s southern neighbor – the size of California and Washington combined – were controlled in distant times by Poland and the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Tsar took over in the early 1800s, which Putin is attempting to repeat.
After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ukraine became a founding socialist republic of the Soviet Union, then gained independence when that communist confederation collapsed in 1991.
In 1994, in return for surrendering its nuclear weapons, the U.S., Britain, and Moscow guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Such pledges tend to last as long as sunblock at a holiday beach outing.
In 2011, European powers reneged on a similar pledge to Libya. Joined by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, they attacked and ousted Moammar Gaddafi. He was caught by a mob. He was hiding in a culvert. As a gloating Hillary Clinton put it so eloquently and infamously after breaking the promise to Libya, “We came. We saw. He died.”
In one of those predictable but somehow unforeseen consequences, without a strongman leader, Libya turned into a lawless state with roving militia bands that produced the murders of four Americans in Benghazi.
That country is now the chaotic home to domestic military power struggles fueled by outside nations, plus numerous undisturbed training camps for terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS, seeping into Africa to make trouble.
The recent threat that drew Putin’s undivided attention and threats came from the Wagner private army of mercenaries that’s been more successful in Ukraine than the once vaunted but inept and now discredited Russian military.
Wagner forces, armed and once backed by Moscow, have been useful cutouts for embedding Russian influence abroad in Syria and notably in Africa, where China is doing the same. Ukrainian military officials say they’ve been the most effective and aggressive opponents.
Wagner is run and financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a billionaire oligarch and one-time Putin buddy from St. Petersburg.
He was allowed to form a separate army with Russian tanks, ammo, and troops recruited from prisons with promises of pardons if they survived six months in Ukraine. Many didn’t. But no one cared since it eased prison costs and populations.
Prigozhin has spent the past several months making video statements in battle dress through his own press agency. He severely criticized Russian military leaders and bureaucrats for poor strategy, leadership, and insufficiently supplying his troops.
Prigozhin was careful not to attack Putin directly. But it’s been an amazing scene to witness his unbridled impudence toward Moscow and Putin’s handpicked military team.
Presumably, that’s because it served Putin’s purpose, keeping rival power centers off balance and pitted against each other instead of him.
What’s fascinating these days is the openness of the Russian conflicts played out on social media and even Russian TV.
When I first started studying that secretive place that covets stability, outside knowledge was largely confined to monitoring changes in the lineups of overweight men in fur caps watching passing parades from atop the Kremlin.
Now, Putin was publicly denouncing Prigozhin as a traitor on TV and moving the home guard to Moscow’s outskirts as protection from an armored Wagner column.
Naturally, Putin aides called the mutiny or coup “a minor trouble.”
In one late-night speech, Putin claimed Russians were largely united against the rebellion. But Prigozhin’s men got within about 100 miles of Moscow and were treated as heroes along the way.
This shows the profound changes in post-Soviet politics and power struggles. Just as this May’s World War II Victory Day parade contained one pathetically outdated tank.
The rest of the armor and best-of-the-worst troops were in Ukraine, not winning but still killing civilians and their own Russians with repeated assaults against Ukrainians.
The defenders are out-manned but armed with better Western weapons, training, leadership, strategies, and the motivation of protecting their own country.
Denis Balibouse/Pool Photo via AP
For detailed, informed war accounts, you really must read the regular coverage of my colleague Streiff, an Army veteran.
The potential conflict ended when Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko brokered a deal.
Prigozhin gave up the coup in the absence of large-scale Russian military defections. He, with perhaps some 12,000 of his troops, would enter pseudo-exile in camps next door to Russia.
Putin would drop the treason charges and invite Wagner veterans to join the Russian military in Ukraine, where he’s burning through untrained conscripts at a frightening rate, if you care about such things. (Any conscripts caught retreating are shot by their Russian comrades.)
This deal also gives Lukashenko some military leverage to resist Putin’s drive to absorb Belarus.
But it also reveals Putin’s weakness. In the old days, the rebellion would have been promptly and decisively crushed to show ruthless Putin’s powers. Rebels in Russia always deserve death.
So, the former KGB colonel won this battle. But it also disclosed a surprising weakness in a Putin regime that’s controlled Russia unchallenged for 20 years.
And it showed Putin’s possible rivals and Russians at large that there could actually be leadership choices, sooner or later.
Joe Biden knows everything he wants to know. He’s a terrible listener (see photo above as Putin tries to make a point). So, Biden likely understands none of this.
But the Pentagon is relieved. The goal of supplying Ukraine billions in military weapons, training, and intel is to degrade Russia’s military by proxy.
This could prevent another Putin invasion and subsequent NATO conflict with U.S. lives and blood at risk. And it would allow the U.S. military, no longer capable of fighting two conflicts at once, to concentrate on an assertive China rapidly expanding its military and global influence while threatening Taiwan.
The last thing the West wants is another Russian civil war with unpredictable factions fighting to control their country’s vast stocks of nuclear weapons to show the world how tough they are.
Putin critics, even some abroad, have often ended up dead in recent years from poisoned tea and doorknobs.
Since the invasion began, some three-dozen wealthy Russian oligarchs and business people, often in the energy sector, plus some family members, have suffered what’s been dubbed Sudden Russian Death Syndrome.
Suicides or murder-suicides that friends and relatives find implausible. Several inexplicably fell from high-rise buildings.
Prigozhin is relatively safe, at least temporarily, if he avoids windows. To kill the successful military leader now would martyr him.
So, Putin’s propaganda machine is focused first on assassinating Prigozhin’s character as a corrupt traitor, financial fraud, and probable criminal to the Motherland. Never mind his military successes.
By the time Prigozhin stabs himself fatally in the back, disappears on a boat ride, or shoots himself in the head twice, Putin hopes it will feel more like good riddance to the troublemaker.
And a warning to the next inevitable coup plotter or plotters, one of whom, according to the enduring Russian tradition, will someday succeed while others perish.