Putin's war against Ukraine will ruin Russia
Fox News
Vladimir Putin is pondering the impacts of his war against Ukraine. But there is no chance for redemption.
Robert Wilkie served as the tenth Secretary of Veterans Affairs and as the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. He currently serves as Distinguished Fellow in the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute.
Putin believes he is the reincarnation of Russia’s Imperial and Soviet past. There is no crime, no matter how horrible, that warrants reflection much less redemption when that crime is committed for the advancement of the Russian state. Rodion saw himself as Bonaparte; Putin believes he is the reincarnation of Peter the Great, Alexander I, and Stalin. Peter the Great built cities and opened his country to European thought and mores. Tsar Alexander marched into Paris after vanquishing Napoleon. Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe and terrorized the planet. Putin’s ethno-messianism however may be putting Russia on the road to oblivion.
Review the bidding. Putin has blown up apartment buildings in Moscow, shot down planes, waged numerous wars on his neighbors, engineered the assassinations of rivals across the globe including dozens of oligarchs last year who kept falling out of hotel and hospital windows. Like Stalin he has turned the Russian Orthodox leadership into flaks for the state so much so that Pope Francis admonished the Patriarch of Moscow for being Putin’s "altar boy." The Russian economy is wrecked and unlikely to recover for decades.