"War and Punishment" is not just a great novel by a great Russian author Tolstoyevsky; it is also Russia's foreign policy. Suppose you ignite a war on Russia's border with the hopes of destroying Russia — and lose it. What do you suppose will happen to you next? Peace? No, you will be punished. Your punishment, for didactic purposes, could be separated into five categories: financial, economic, political, social and cultural:
• Financially — your banking institutions will be shunned and your currencies will be excluded from international circulation, depriving you of banking profits, the benefits of seignorage and the continued ability to run structural trade and fiscal deficits and to run up debts.
• Economically — you will pay double or quadruple for key resources without which your industry will be unable to function — resources such as natural gas, enriched uranium, titanium for aircraft manufacturing, rare earths and noble gases for semiconductor manufacturing and much else. This will cause your industry to shrivel up, in turn making it impossible to maintain your civilian and military infrastructure.
• Politically — your politicians will become so vastly unpopular that they will get voted out of office. The entire political elite will crumble and be replaced by random people off the street who will proceed to make things worse — much worse. With each next iteration, demagogues will be replaced by charlatans, charlatans by mafiosi and mafiosi by monsters.
• Socially — your societies will splinter into those who can't stop lying and those who can't stand listening to any more lies, resulting in social strife and conflict. A constant low-intensity civil war will periodically flare up to a conflagration, engulfing this or that once great city until only ruins and ashes will remain of it.
• Culturally — your culture will come to be regarded as based on lies and therefore degenerate and toxic and will be excluded by much of the rest of the world as a dangerous, contagious disease. Your cultural scene will come to be dominated by freaks, from morbidly obese beauty queens to "musicians" whose art consists of shouting out streams of obscenities. Your very language will become so vulgar that the rest of the world will bleep out your every attempt to communicate.
Shifting from the general to the specific, let us talk about the former Ukraine in light of Putin's recent speech before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The full text of it is available here [
Meeting with Foreign Ministry senior officials] and I very much recommend that you read it in its entirety. In this speech, Putin gave specific instructions to his colleagues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, detailing what it is that they are authorized to communicate to their counterparts in other nations.
What these MFA officials have been tasked with is to break through a chorus of lies endlessly repeated by Western media and officials. The staggeringly huge lie at the center of it all is the assertion, endlessly repeated, that Russia's Special Military Operation (SMO) to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukraine is "an unprovoked act of aggression." As Putin explained, it is, in fact, a police action to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.
In February of 2022, Ukrainian troops were massed on the border of Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, shelling civilian districts and getting ready to invade. Russia's timely response prevented a full-blown humanitarian disaster. Since Donetsk and Lugansk are inhabited by Russians who are scarcely different from those living across the border in Rostov, Belgorod and Voronezh regions, Russia was saving the lives of its own people.
Please don't confuse SMO with the Washingtonians' favorite ploy which they call "responsibility to protect" or R2P, championed by the world-class hypocrite Samantha Power. This ploy generally involves using a fake humanitarian crisis to unleash unprovoked aggression such as against Serbia, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Also note that the Ukraine had lost its sovereignty in the violent government overthrow of 2014 and its military was operating under remote control from Washington, so that the over 6000 civilians murdered and the over 13500 civilians wounded in the Donbass by the Ukrainian military since 2014 are America's genocide.
The first task is for Russia to win on the battlefield — then will come the punishment. War crimes have no jurisdictional boundaries and no statutes of limitations. Each war crime has a name, a rank and a serial number. Each war crime is punishable by life in prison or (local legislation allowing) execution. There is at the moment a moratorium on capital punishment in Russia, but in the future, by popular demand, it may be lifted for war criminals.
Execution by firing squad is considered the honorable way to die. A simple pistol shot to the head (what the Russians call a "control shot") is relatively quick and painless. Public hanging was the fate of convicted war criminals after World War II. But what, pray tell, is to be done to the murderers of this young woman, Christina, who's been called the Madonna of Gorlovka, killed using artillery or mortar fire? Why not be just a bit more creative?
As always, there may exist extenuating circumstances. Suppose you were a poor semi-literate Ukrainian lad (Ukrainian primary and secondary education is rather dismal) who's been relentlessly brainwashed by American propaganda to irrationally hate the Russians to the point of insanity? Being assessed to be non compos mentis would make the poor lad a poor candidate to stand trial for war crimes.
Or how about a father of a family who had been gang-pressed into the Ukrainian military while his family was being held as hostages by the Kiev régime and would have been badly mistreated should he have refused to follow the régime's criminal orders? A prosecutor would argue that a war crime is still a war crime, whether committed under duress or not, and that following criminal orders is itself a crime, but a jury might vacillate on rendering a guilty verdict.
Well, then, how about the US officials who thought up the brilliant plan to turn the Ukraine into an anti-Russia and to use the poor unwitting Ukrainians as cannon fodder to throw at Russia in a failed attempt to fatally weaken or, ideally, to destroy it? For them, truly medieval methods of torture and humiliation unavoidably spring to some people's minds.
This may seem like a self-indulgent digression from the serious topic of Putin's speech before the MFA, but I believe it is important to understand the mindset of the average hard-working Putin supporters who made Russia great again.
On Russian television, talk shows discussing the use of nuclear weapons to destroy America have become noticeably more popular of late. Destroying America, experts tell the viewers, is just not that hard.
All you have to do is take out four major seaports using relatively tiny tactical nukes... and then just wait a month or two. Since the US no longer makes even half of what it needs to survive, including food, it wouldn't persist too long after that. That is, it will still exist, as many truly miserable countries do, but not as a country for Russia, or the rest of the world, to worry about, or so these experts assure the audience. But there is still some unease about the danger of starting a big bad nuclear war.
Other experts are happy to report that the US is on its last legs in any case and a combination of factors, some financial, some physical, will deal it a coup de grace soon enough without having to risk starting a big bad nuclear war. The terminal malaise of the US is about much more than the obvious incapacity to govern being demonstrated by the geriatrics that supposedly govern it, or the fact that each next generation of Americans is less capable than the previous one. Rather, it is about the numbers; specifically, about trillions of dollars. Interest on the federal debt now amounts to a trillion dollars a year. Federal budget deficit has reached two trillion a year. In order to maintain solvency, the US federal government has to borrow another trillion every three months.
Putin seems to be in agreement with the second camp; he delayed starting the SMO for as long as possible and is in no hurry to finish it, quite possibly to time that event to coincide with the US going down for the count after knocking itself out with a feather. A large majority of Russians trust his judgment and have sufficient patience to wait the US out.
