Saying the unthinkable

I’ve got a bad feeling about what Putin is about to do. There are a couple of ominous news reports today. One says that the Russian convoy that got bogged down on the way to Kyiv has been dispersed and is being redeployed to forests and villages around the city. The second says Putin is ready for his assault on the Kyiv. Also, Russia is striking targets further west. If the convoy isn’t going straight to Kyiv, what is he planning? Various other reports are saying that he could use chemical weapons or tactical nukes inside Ukraine.

The last part of Ioffe’s latest interview with Frontline is chilling because it gives us a sense of what Putin’s options are and how it affects the rest of the world:

We saw with the refugee flows from Syria, they gave us Brexit; they gave us the rise and the empowerment of the far right in Germany and Hungary, in the Czech Republic and France. Is this going to keep emboldening the far right? …

Did anyone else take Problems of Democracy as a senior in HS? We have known for at least a century what elements of democracy that bad actors will use to their advantage. Xenophobia, fear or hatred of anything foreign or strange, is one of the most important arrows in a nationalist’s or demogogue’s quiver. There are two kinds of people this works on: those people who are neurologically wired to be fearful and those people who have been conditioned through a communication in a media source to see foreigners or strangers as “the other”. Others are people whose motives and culture we do not know. Therefore, we can make them seem dangerous. This is how you rally a country against an enemy.

And when Putin threatens the use of nuclear weapons—he threatened it the first time when he declared war on Thursday morning. He threatened again three days into the war, when he saw it wasn’t going well. He threatened it in 2018 when he went to that airshow and he gave that crazy presentation about all the new nuclear weapons he had that could strike the U.S.

If people think that he won’t use them, I think they’re mistaken. Everything Putin has showed us at every step of the last 22 years is that every time we think he won’t go that far, he does. We think he won’t come back for a third term; he did. He won’t annex Crimea; he did. He won’t invade Ukraine; he did. He won’t try to kill Navalny; he did. He won’t try to subvert an American election; he did.

And so why would we believe that this time he won’t do what he says he’ll do? …

I mean, it’s unthinkable. Like, what he has opened up with this invasion is unthinkable. And because he is losing and because the sanctions and the Ukrainians are humiliating him, because he is backed into a corner, he is the most dangerous he has ever been, because it is now existential for him. And if you think he doesn’t know that everybody in the world understands that the only way to end this is to put a bullet between his eyes, he knows. And that makes him also much more dangerous.