WHAT PUTIN WANTS

Forty-eight hours after Russian armored forces crossed the border into Ukraine and were supposed to be rolling into Kyiv, the Russian state newswire RIA Novosti briefly published an article prematurely proclaiming the capture of Ukraine’s capital.

The column, written by Pyotr Akopov - who is commonly thought to “mirror” Putin’s thoughts - announced “Ukraine has returned to Russia.” Which he insisted did not mean that “its statehood will be liquidated.”

“Without a drop of exaggeration, Vladimir Putin assumed a historical responsibility, deciding not to leave the Ukrainian question without a solution for future generations.”

The article reflected the Kremlin’s belief that its enemy was a thin layer of pro-Western elites, who would be quickly swept away. The war was simply a matter of Ukraine being “returned to Russia,” with its upper echelons being “denazified.” The country would then simply be nudged back toward Moscow.

As Ukrainians defended Kyiv and Russian progress stalled into the famous 40-mile traffic jam, the article was quickly taken down from the internet.

Last Friday, Akopov said: “Putin cannot come out and directly say that we are liquidating Ukraine as a state,. But in reality, nothing is changing for us.”

Akopov’s column was followed up with a more complete explication of that new tone in a column published this past Sunday at RIA Novosti, a lengthy article titled "What Russia should do with Ukraine,” written by Timofey Sergeytsev. This manifesto of hate provides a chilling glimpse into the minds of the man who has created this war of genocide.

It calls for every Ukrainian who has taken up arms to be eliminated. “De-Nazification” means the destruction of the idea of Ukraine and its national identity. It means the elimination of the country’s political elite and the infliction of all of the horrors of war on Ukraine “as a historical lesson and atonement for their guilt.”

The following is a translated excerpt of Akopov’s article. You should read it.

“The Nazis who took up arms should be destroyed to the maximum on the battlefield. No significant distinction should be made between APU and the so-called national battalions, as well as the territorial defense that joined these two types of military formations.

“All of them are equally involved in extreme cruelty against the civilian population, equally guilty of the genocide of the Russian people, do not comply with the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis should be exemplarily and exponentially punished. There must be a total lustration.

“Any organizations that have associated themselves with the practice of Nazism have been liquidated and banned. However, in addition to the top, a significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty. They supported and indulged Nazi power.

“The just punishment of this part of the population is possible only as bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system, carried out with the utmost care and discretion in relation to civilians. Further denazification of this mass of the population consists in re-education, which is achieved by ideological suppression of Nazi attitudes and strict censorship: not only in the political sphere, but also necessarily in the sphere of culture and education…

“Denazification can only be carried out by the winner, which implies (1) his absolute control over the denazification process and (2) the power to ensure such control. In this respect, a denazified country cannot be sovereign.

“The denazifying state - Russia - cannot proceed from a liberal approach with regard to denazification. The ideology of the denazifier cannot be disputed by the guilty party subjected to denazification. Russia's recognition of the need to denazify Ukraine means the recognition of the impossibility of the Crimean scenario for Ukraine as a whole. However, this scenario was impossible in 2014 and in the rebellious Donbass. Only eight years of resistance to Nazi violence and terror led to internal cohesion and a conscious unambiguous mass refusal to maintain any unity and connection with Ukraine,

“The terms of denazification can in no way be less than one generation, which must be born, grow up and reach maturity under the conditions of denazification. The nazification of Ukraine continued for more than 30 years, beginning at least in 1989, when Ukrainian nationalism received legal and legitimate forms of political expression and led the movement for "independence" towards Nazism.

“The name "Ukraine" apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity in a territory liberated from the Nazi regime...

“Denazification will inevitably also be a de-Ukrainization - a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component of self-identification of the population of the territories of historical Little Russia and New Russia, begun by the Soviet authorities. It must be returned to its natural boundaries and deprived of political functionality.

“Unlike, say, Georgia and the Baltic countries, Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation state, and attempts to "build" one naturally lead to Nazism. Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content, a subordinate element of an alien and alien civilization.

“Debanderization [the elimination of Ukraine’s current government] itself will not be enough for denazification - the Bandera element is only a performer and a screen, a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.

“The Bandera elite must be eliminated, its re-education is impossible. The social "bog", which actively and passively supported it by action and inaction, must survive the hardships of the war and assimilate the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for its guilt.

“Historical experience shows that the tragedies and dramas of wartime benefit peoples who have been tempted and carried away by the role of an enemy of Russia.”

So now that you have read this, you can see that Vladimir Putin is an insane person.

It’s one example of a broader feature in Russian rhetoric from Putin, from high-ranking officials, and from propagandists, that has shifted over the past six weeks. What started off, in Putin’s telling, as a battle with a limited number of people at the top has turned out to be a showdown with the Ukrainian people as a whole.

The irony is that - as a result of Ukraine’s staunch defense - Russia’s narrative has now become even more violent, going from casting Ukrainians as a pliant people controlled by Western puppets to something more akin to the German people under the Third Reich: brainwashed, active participants in evil who, at best, must be defeated and re-educated.

The shift reflects a total lack of understanding of Ukrainian society before the war, and suggests increasing rage on the part of the grandson of Stalin’s cook as the reality of the country’s attitudes towards both him and Russia becomes clearer.

With the redeployment of troops away from Kyiv, the invading force has more or less made official what’s been obvious for weeks: It doesn’t have the capability to overrun the Ukrainian capital or overthrow its government. But the manner of the withdrawal and the emergence of sickening evidence of war crimes perpetrated against civilians have likely also taken some outcomes off the table. Ukraine is now far less likely to agree to major concessions to stop the bloodshed. And its allies in the West are far less likely to lose interest in supporting its resistance.

With its actions, Russia is making clear that it is settling in for a long and even more brutal war. And the evidence of atrocities will almost certainly change the course of that war. It can be expected that the Russians will act more in line with what was published above as regards what they see as their role.

Bucha is likely not alone. The nearby town of Borodyanka may have suffered an even worse massacre, according to the Ukrainian government. A newly released Human Rights Watch report documents, in harrowing detail, multiple cases of rape, summary execution and threats against civilians in Russian-controlled areas. And the full story has yet to emerge from the city of Mariupol, in the southeastern Donbas region.

Adding more grim historical resonance, reports of Bucha emerged on the anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, the killing of 20,000 Polish officers who were Prisoners of War by order of Stalin in 1940. Long denied by the Soviets, the crime was proven after the fall of Communism, when the mass graves were unearthed in Belarus.

Just days ago, it was possible to imagine what a negotiated political settlement for a ceasefire would look like: Ukraine would agree to forgo NATO membership in exchange for still-to-be-defined “security guarantees” from Western countries to deter future Russian aggression, while most of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine would remain under the de facto control of the Russian-backed “people’s republics,” their final status punted to future negotiations.

After Bucha, it’s much harder to imagine the Ukrainians agreeing to leave any part of their territory under Russian control. Zelenskyy conceded as much during a televised address from Bucha on Monday, saying, “It’s very difficult to talk when you see what they’ve done here.”

The Kremlin’s interest in peace talks may be just as low.

The best available polling suggests that Putin’s popularity inside Russia is growing as the war drags on. Not surprisingly, the Russian media claims the massacre at Bucha was a faked “provocation” by the Ukrainian authorities. The grisly revelations from around Kyiv seem unlikely to move the needle much in terms of Russian support for the war.

I can confirm the growing support, from conversations with Russian friends. It’s as shocking as conversations with friends now newly-converted Trumpers was in 2016.

In past conflicts, the massacre of civilians has prompted even the most hardened skeptics of military intervention to change their tune. The revelations from Bucha will create more pressure on NATO states to provide Ukraine with “long-range capabilities” such as rockets, artillery, tanks and high-altitude defense systems. Ukraine may also need significant Western intelligence support as the war moves into its next phase in the south and east.

At present, the Biden administration is blocking Slovakia from providing the S-300 long-range anti-aircraft missile system, and Poland from providing their MiG-29s. Any escalation by Russia will likely change this.

Faced with the fact that what was published Sunday in RIA Novosti is clearly what we are dealing with, this war is even more existential than it originally appeared. With Putin having torn the mask of civilization off Russia, it is now impossible to deny that the threat is to more than Ukraine. Bucha is proof.

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