Is Putin’s Soft Approach Bringing War in its Train?
“If Mr. Putin genuinely wants to save the lives of his soldiers and of his civilians then he should end the war conclusively and dramatically right now. This, I believe, is well within his power if he has the will and the vision to act as the situation requires.” — Gilbert Doctorow
I am pleased to see Gilbert Doctorow’s concurrence with my longstanding position that the greatest threat to peace is Putin’s reluctance to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a quick decisive end. Putin’s ongoing war is a direct road to wider war.
In his ever-widening war Putin has done nothing to prevent the Kiev government from continuing the war. I have suggested that Putin hoped to use peace negotiations to achieve a wider understanding with the West. Others have attributed Putin’s inaction to his concern that if Russia acts decisively, the result will be to unite the West to more hostile action. Still others attribute the never-ending conflict to Russian weakness. Whatever the cause, the longer the war continues the more it spins out of control. Although dismissed by Putin, the attack on Russia’s triad is a very serious matter.
Gilbert Doctorow and John Helmer are commentators, analysts, whatever you want to designate them, who seek out the facts instead of pushing official narratives. They don’t always see eye-to-eye, but I read them as a check on my own thinking. The fact that most so-called experts are pushing narratives instead of correct explanations is why we are in danger from such reckless actions as attacking Russian strategic nuclear forces. As I have said, that attack should scare the world to death.
Gilbert Doctorow
I note with some satisfaction that my last two essays questioning Vladimir Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach to conduct of the war in Ukraine attracted particular support from the Community. In what follows, I intend to take this logic one big step further for the sake of argument. Let us do what Herman Kahn famously proposed in his controversial book of 1962 and think about the unthinkable.
I do this in the knowledge that a fair percentage of readers in Alternative Media, including this web platform, may be pacifist minded. My intention is not to offend them, but to allow them to consider other positions on how this war can be prosecuted to bring it to a close sooner rather than later and to spare the lives of combatants and civilians on both sides of the conflict. All the while, my first concern is to avoid escalation to nuclear exchanges, which is what the Community surely believes to be the underlying motive of Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach.
In a world of demented politicians occupying highest office, as in the case of Joe Biden, assisted by wholly irresponsible, insane assistants like Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, ‘softly, softly’ may have made sense. In a world dominated by Realists like Donald Trump it no longer makes sense.
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As readers of yesterday’s essay here will be aware, the Russian government is presently pretending that the attack by Ukrainian drones on its strategic bombers last weekend never happened. Mr. Putin spoke about the Ukrainian attempts to sabotage the peace talks the day before they were scheduled to resume in Istanbul on 2 June by staging terror attacks on civilian rail infrastructure in the Kursk and Bryansk oblasts. This allowed him to attach the ‘state supported terror’ label to the Kiev regime and to prepare the world community for a possible decapitating strike some time in the future. But in time present, Russia’s response to
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