This won't end well

Putin is a war criminal who deserves the gallows, but the recent mutiny by Russian mercenaries exposes the insanity of the US-fueled Ukraine War

I was about to publish an article contextualizing the Ukraine War and pro-war left response geopolitically when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of Wagner PMC, launched his stunning mutiny. His mercenaries blitzed more than 400 miles toward Moscow in a single day before he called off his revolt and accepted exile in Belarus in exchange for immunity, but left Putin at his weakest point in 23 years as ruler of Russia.

This episode confirms the analysis I lay out in my article: Russia’s invasion is brutal and criminal, the Ukrainian resistance is completely legitimate, but the US-orchestrated Ukrainian war effort is barreling towards total disaster.

If the “pro-war left” position of blindly backing US/NATO support for Ukraine was folly before Prigozhin’s mutiny, after his attempted coup it is batshit crazy.

Here is why. As Prigozhin’s forces sped toward the Kremlin US, NATO, world powers were freaking out about the status of Russia’s 6,000 nuclear weapons. As the revolt progressed, the number of doomsday scenarios exploded. It is precisely in a situation where a paranoid autocrat like Putin is plunged into chaos, uncertainty, and desperation that the unthinkable becomes possible.

US officials were “nervous about instability in a country with the power to wipe out most of the planet,” concerned that the “professional military remains in control of all of the nuclear facilities,” and confronting a nightmare scenario in which “the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons were under control by bandits.”

Washington was suddenly rooting for Putin to stay in power so he could control the nuclear weapons. They were asking, “who controls the nuclear football” that never leaves Putin’s side. The US feared a successful coup would allow brutal warlords like Prigozhin or Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to seize thermonuclear bombs for political leverage.

The US response was to go quiet, not change its nuclear or military posture, not threaten Putin, not do anything to further destabilize a phenomenally dangerous situation. If nukes were to start flying, Ukraine would be the number one target. Putin might launch a tactical nuke against Ukraine’s US-armed forces or just irradiate Kyiv.

So what did Zelensky do? He called for Putin’s ouster. There is no way to defend this. Zelensky could have kept his mouth shut, given an anodyne remark that Ukraine was closely monitoring the situation, called for calm but nope. He instead threw fuel on the nuclear fireball by saying, “The longer [Putin] is in the Kremlin, the more disasters there will be.” Never mind Prigozhin is even more extreme and violent than Putin, and the Wagner Group openly admires the Nazis.

It is insane to call for the ouster of a brutal paranoid dictator like Putin who has his finger on an earth-shattering nuclear arsenal precisely when he is facing a coup. Zelensky is so unhinged he thought it was a good idea to provoke Putin at the moment there was the greatest risk he might Chernobyl all of Ukraine.

But this is nothing new. Zelensky has never wavered from his calls for Putin’s ouster. He has only shifted from openly saying he wants to see Putin deposed to saying he wants reparations and war crimes tribunals — conditions that can only happen with Putin’s ouster. A few months ago, Zelensky reiterated his maximalist stance, “Rashism must face a total defeat: military, economic, political, legal. The first point is military.” (Rashism is a mashup of Russia and fascism.) Ukraine reportedly calculates taking back Crimea would precipitate a coup against Putin and a collapse of Russia like the Soviet collapse. Ukraine is playing a “very, very dangerous game,” says one expert. On top of that, it’s hard to believe Zelensky did not approve the recent drone attack on the Kremlin, an attempted decapitation strike on Putin. That showed Zelensky is not just talking about ousting Putin, he is trying to kill him and plunge Russia into chaos even though Ukraine would bear the brunt of the fallout.

Zelensky and Ukraine’s government are power mad, emboldened by a staggering amount of US/NATO weapons, aid, training, and direct battlefield support and organization. They forget the most important principle of fighting a far more powerful enemy: just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. As of June 4, 2023, the UN OHCHR has recorded about 9,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine since the war began. The actual number is significantly higher. Say civilian deaths are five times higher, around 50,000, even though that is highly unlikely.

Compare that the U.S. war in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. Civilian deaths were in the millions. North Vietnam never called, proposed, or supported attacks on U.S. soil. In fact, they did the exact opposite. I know people involved in the SDS split that led to the Weather Underground. The Vietnamese knew about it, and called the American LARPers to Cuba. According to my sources, the Vietnamese told the American leftists to focus on building mass support for a campaign of “End the War Now.” The future Weather Underground rejected that, saying their strategy was to “Bring the War Home.” It was a disaster. As much as the Weather Underground damaged left organizing for years, the damage was infinitesimal compared to where the Ukraine war is headed the longer it continues.

That brings up today’s left. The Ukraine War has rotted the brain of the pro-war left (and tankies as well, but they aren’t really leftists). Many leftists rabidly denounce calls for a negotiated settlement. They are more belligerent than Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley who says Ukraine should negotiate because he warns, “you have to be very, very conscious about managing escalation.”

Hate Putin all you want. He deserves it. But he is far less murderous than Saddam Hussein. Apart from drunken wankers like Christopher Hitchens, virtually no one else on the left backed the 2003 US invasion to oust Hussein, and the world is still living with the bloody consequences of a war that may have killed more than 2 million human beings in Iraq alone and destabilized the entire Middle East. Removing Putin would lead to far more disastrous outcomes.

That come in the form of mushroom clouds.