Some advocate negotiating with Putin. They are hopeful: it’s not Putin who put the babies to death. Maybe NATO, whatever NATO is. That Finland wants to join NATO demonstrates it.
How does one negotiate best, with the devil? Long fork? Faustian bargain?
Very, simply, to negotiate with Satan, for the best, one should expect the worst from one’s interlocutor, and believe only the worst.
Putin will make war until NATO and Ukraine get tired. Or so he seems to hope. This is probably not going to happen: too many in NATO and Ukraine have realized the evil of Putin’s tyranny. Too many remember Hitler and know they are next… because Putin explained his ruscist vision of history. So then what if NATO and Ukraine, which have more than a billion citizens, all living in democracy, that means, thinking in parallel and most of the most creative thinkers of the planet do not get tired? Putin’s Russia at some point, ravaged by war and sanctions, will stop being a Great Power, for all to see, having lost treasure, manpower, clout, its army and economy… while exhibiting its lack of smarts, and experiencing consequences thereof. Putin will then just feel powerful because of his nukes.
We have to get ready for that day… and it will come all too soon.
Ever since Ivan I “moneybags”, the Kremlin empire has stabilized itself with foreign wars which enabled it to call all opponents traitors to the fatherland, thus kill or exile them. This mentality of expanding abuse was inherited from the Mongols who had invaded and destroyed Kievan Rus. Inner peace by terror through subjugating outer war created the world’s largest durable empire… and an entire civilization entangling war with a church.
This mentality of expanding abuse contradicted the earlier quasi democratic traditions of Russian Kyiv. War regimes invite dictatorship, which became the Russian form of governance… or even civilization. In many ways Lenin was similar, yet more authoritarian than all the Czars before him (and he massacred more Russians). Many revolutionaries, for example Rosa Luxembourg, saw this and opposed it.
Ukraine was subjugated by the Kremlin with various tricks and invasions in the last three centuries. Between Stalin and Hitler, Ukraine suffered up to 14 million citizens killed in as many years.
This war is between the democratic principle and and the principle that terrorizing nuclear dictatorships, monarchies with unbound power, the fascist principle, now with quasi divine power, should guide humanity. This is the moment when civilization has to save itself… by destroying the fascist principle. So this is an existential situation. Either we bring enough artillery, or we don’t.
Some will object that Putin is so deranged, he will use nukes to avoid losing. The potentiality of that abomination gives us even more reason to vanquish him. This is a world war, and like WW2, it is starting slowly. Hitler was easier to oppose early on, before he unleashed his terror society. Same situation with Putin.
The Kremlin has more than 2,000 “small” nukes (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). The US has a few hundreds, and France discontinued its “Pluton” tactical nuke system. The smallest French strike now is 300 Kt, from supersonic bombers (twenty times Hiroshima)… that’s “strategic”.
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As Putin has plenty of small nukes and NATO mostly only has big nukes, Putin apparently believes he can exploit the baby nuke gap as part of his unscrupulous doctrine of “Escalating to De-escalate.” “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon,’” Secretary of Defense, ex-top general Mattis told Congress in February 2018. “Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.” The commander of the US nuclear forces acknowledged in 2021 that no one knows if using low-yield or tactical nuclear weapons will trigger a full-scale nuclear war. Yet, as I said, this is irrelevant: the Putinists and rucists believe that using nukes… de-escalate!
Thus we need to persuade the rucists that such is not the case: using nukes will escalate… otherwise we will end, in the best possible case, as their slaves and toys.
To prepare for a nuclear war, which will come if a coup doesn’t come first, plans for evacuation of cities and massive prompt construction of anti-missile systems is a must. Also there will be no other choice than threatening to provide Ukraine with similar nuclear devices
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A coup would be better… Generals and colonels who may have engaged in war crimes should be told, laws should be passed, that they can’t be prosecuted if they neutralize the crazed idiot who gives them insane criminal orders now… in a war we have to persuade all influential Russian, terroristic nuclear tyranny can’t win.
In any case, the more than 40 military allies of Ukraine, it’s a world war, remember… have to get ready for the worst, and this is why Finland has decided to apply to NATO, and entered, with Sweden in a military alliance led by the UK, involving many of the countries which were immorally and idiotically neutral in WW2 (Netherlands, Danemark, etc…)
Getting ready for the worst means scrambling the construction of new weapons… But those to fight nuclear war should get priority (in particular ABM systems). This is what getting ready for the worst means.
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Please do not believe I love war, just because I don’t want to please Putin: I had known, and written, that Putin was capable of this, for more than twenty years. Why was I so sure of Putin’s depravity? Fundamentally because he is a hater, smart at being an idiot, with a completely biased ethno view of history. And this was clear in how he got elected to start with, becoming popular thanks to engineering a genocide in Chechnya. This was already as dirty as it gets, and the Russian population falling for it, made it worse. Having risen through a genocidal plot makes Putin an illegitimate president from the start, another argument that putschists could exploit.
Biden, Senator Graham, and others, maybe following what was recommended here first, were right to call for Putin’s removal. That would be best.
Putin Delendus Est!
Patrice Ayme
The 280 mm gun in front fired a shell with a Hiroshima size bomb (15Kt) exploding 10 kilometers away after 11 seconds:

