The Russian president against the world
Putin announced his attempt to lay claim to eastern Ukraine with his most unhinged speech yet, intending to terrify the rest of the world into submission. We should instead continue to show courage and steadfastness.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a speech at a ceremony to incorporate partially Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, finally and explicitly declared an end to more than seven decades of international order. During a meandering rant, Putin defended raw Russian imperialism while he spooled off about a number of topics, including the fall of the U.S.S.R., the power of Western hegemony, and the American use of nuclear weapons on Japan. But his underlying goal was to warn the rest of the world to cease its opposition to his war of conquest in Ukraine.
Putin’s incorporation of these areas into Russia is a major escalation in his seven-month campaign against Ukraine, and it raises the same question that has haunted many in the world regularly since the first days of the invasion: How worried should we be about this war becoming a larger European conflict and eventually a global cataclysm? My initial reaction: We should be worried, but we should also stand fast and tell Putin that if he means to destroy peace and order across the entire planet, we will oppose him just as we have helped Ukraine oppose him in Europe.
Putin’s rant was meant to make the world quail in fear. In reality, Putin is likely more terrified than anyone right now: He’s a Russian dictator losing a war of aggression, and he knows how that could end for him. In his speech, he justified the war in Ukraine using everything from the boundaries of ancient Russia to what he sees as the illegitimate dissolution of the Soviet Union. With sheer brass, he then complained about Western colonialism and human-rights violations—this, from the leader of a country with a long and bloody history, from the tsars to Stalin and beyond, of enslaving and murdering millions.
Most of Putin’s complaints are merely warmed-over Soviet-era cant—evidence yet again that Putin, whatever his former goals as a supposed reformer, has never been able to dislodge the hammer and sickle from his political DNA. More to the point, however, Putin said today that this Western decadence was, in fact, the foundation of the global order and thus needed to be overthrown:
Of course, the current international system was constructed after World War II with the participation of the Soviet Union itself, and the Russians have been beneficiaries of that order—and its economic rules and stability—for decades.
