Putin A Tool? Double Machiavellianism Festering In Russia

Putin is a virus, and its vaccine is called Ukraine. To get rid of Putin, and foster democracy, one had to encourage him to attack Ukraine. What better to fight a tyrant than full war with a powerful democracy? Nothing else would do, the tyrant was too well installed, with towering popularity. So his internal enemies had to convince Putin that invading Ukraine would be a walk in the park, shooting off Nazis. 

How that popularity was won is itself a measure of how evil Russia became. In 2014, Putin wanted to invade Crimea. His two most powerful collaborators, Shoigu, minister of defense and a personal friend, a native of poor and isolated Tuva, in the mountains of Siberia, and Gerasimov, the commander in chief of the Russian army, apostle of hybrid warfare  

Who had an interest in getting rid of Putin? Putin’s kleptocracy has stolen Russia, to invest the stolen wealth in the West, overpaying while purchasing Western oligarchs’ properties, making all oligarchs happier. What was stolen by Russian oligarchs made Western oligarchs even wealthier..So Western oligarchs loved Putin and its wealth-transferring-to-the West oligarchy. Now, of course, the Western oligarchs are frustrated as Putin’s unraveling is threatening to dismantle the entire exploitation contraption.

Distinct lack of enthusiasm in some French and German circles of power has everything to do with the fact Franco-Germania organized much of its economy around Putin. It was not just getting gas from Putin; the French Total oil giant provided the Putin Reich with vast and ultra expensive installations similar to those provided to Qatar, to put on méthanier boats liquefied Siberian gas heading to Asia. These boats are some of the largest in the world, and pack several times the explosive power of Hiroshima.  

European ecologists and the likes of Merkel, were financed, or controlled, from the Kremlin. At least so say retired heads of French secret services. So the ecologists were anti-nuclear, and even anti-Western European gas (France has one century of gas reserves; so the ecologists, pushed by the Kremlin, had France pass a law outlawing the extraction of gas… in France. If the gas was provided by the Kremlin tyrant, that was fine).

So the only remaining hypothesis is that elements inside the FSB misled Putin about Ukraine, in the hope of having Putin destroy his regime there. Instead, it’s Russia which may end up destroyed. 

This is not the sole mechanism at work there. In the 1990s, Western advisers (Harvard, etc.) persuaded Yeltsin that Russia needed to be led to prosperity by an oligarchy. As the oligarchy was bound to steal Russia and make it stupid, the very origin of the Putin regime may not lay just in Alexander Nevsky’s sick ideology of ruling inside with brutality by allying oneself with evil (the Mongol invaders). 

The war may look insane, and it is. But it developed because of deep manipulations from very dark minds… who may have hoped that this sort of madness would develop as the intricate mess it has become… precisely because it could be exploited. The FSB may have incited Putin to commit a terrible mistake, so that he could be brought down. And the West certainly long collaborated with Putin, inciting him subtly to become ever worse. 

Now the ongoing existence of the largest land empire, by far, is being called into question, and democracies themselves can’t let Putin win. Anything at all. 

If Putin is a tool, does that mean that there are even more evil forces out there? Indeed! The cause of an evil is, in a sense always a greater evil. And causes work best when unexplained, undetected, and unexpected. This is why it is important to understand Machiavellianism, the art of making people do something while believing that there are doing the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

P/S 1: The first part of the essay above was censored by the Wall Street Journal, which delayed its publication by several days (the italic part was allowed in another comment; in the italic I carefully avoided the notion of Western oligarchy, which may be a banning offense according to the obsequious lemmings). So the WSJ’s readers were made blissfully unaware that:

1. Putin could have been manipulated into invading Ukraine
2. That the plutocratic universities (Harvard, etc.) and other influencers (US and European politicians) were instrumental and perhaps primordial in setting up the Russian mess which later brought up Putin. The same sort of enabling-disabling, bait and switch was used prior and during WWI and WWII. The US power circles are very good at it, their institutions, traditions and mentalities having trained with American natives for centuries. For example, claim that “black lives matter” while making sure that, under the pretext of freedom, blacks live in terrible conditions (bad education, bad housing, bad health care, bad food, sugar billionaires being subsidized, etc…) All this the very dark deep state organizes with mental terror….Don’t say this, don’t think that, etc. And that is enforced by the media, an example being the preceding comment which the WSJ banned. That was after a very interesting article on:

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers

Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war

MOSCOW—Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.

It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.

The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.

The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. 

Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news…

And now for one of Putin’s war planes going down in flames: a SU 25…

PS 2: Tyrant Vladimir Putin also indirectly attacked Russian oligarchs on December 22, 2022, along lines similar to those I drew above (and in many of my essays prior). Putin stated that Russians who drain Russia’s money from abroad and do not have a connection with Russia “represent a danger” to Russia.Putin claimed that while the majority of Russian businessmen are patriots, there are some who are not. Putin had nationalized many non-compliant oligarchs from a similat logic 20 years ago.

Tags: Machiavellism, Putin, Ukraine