Putin barbarianism must be crushed

Totally agree with this frankly accurate assessment by Canadian journalist Terry Glavin*: "You can't talk peace with monsters".

Opinion echo - brutal truth by Terry Glavin

Published in the National Post, a newspaper serving Toronto, Canada. 

Putin has been embarrassed by the Russian military's inept performance. 

Terry Glavin: Putin and his cronies need to be crushed. You can't talk peace with monsters.  His oligarchs need to be hunted to the ends of the earth, and their assets frozen and seized.

Now that Vladimir Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the world’s liberal democracies are engaged in a hodgepodge of last-minute scrambles to give the appearance of doing something serious about it, we might take a moment to consider what “it” is and what we would want the endgame to look like.

So for starters, what it is now is nothing like what it was until that moment on Thursday morning in the hours before dawn when the bombs and the sirens starting going off in Kyiv. Before that moment, and before the early morning skies were being darkened by armadas of Russian attack helicopters all over the country, the whole point of NATO resolve was to dissuade Moscow from doing what Moscow has now done.

The effort failed.

What “it” is now, then, is not the threat of war, and not the imaginary diplomatic conundrum of how to address Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” while at the same time “keeping the door open” to Ukraine’s accession to NATO. What it is now is the full-scale invasion of a democratic European country by a gangland oligarchy that has been allowed to strangle Russian democracy and murder and jail opposition leaders, and is now securely bivouacked in the Kremlin.

It's the full-scale invasion of a democratic European country by a gangland oligarchy

What “it” is now is a war in Europe waged by a decrepit nuclear-armed state with veto power on the United Nations Security Council. What is happening now is the bloody imperialist conquest of a European democracy, a country of more than 40 million people, a country immensely rich in culture and resources, a country larger than France.

What is happening now is something we have not seen in Europe since the Second World War. Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s Sudetenland. It is his Lebensraum. It is not merely Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Chechnya in 1999 or South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, or the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine’s Donbass in 2014. It is all of these things, combined.

But there’s something noticeably absent in all the stirring statements and condemnations and demands coming out of Washington and London and Bonn.

It’s all well and good to ponder the implications of stock-market shocks and gas-price hikes and the implications for ramped-up investment in German wind and solar power infrastructure now that Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline is off the books. It’s all very fascinating, this unaccountable reluctance on the part of certain European governments to shut Russia out of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system, the “nuclear option” that would cripple Russia’s banks in a single blow.

And fair enough, let’s sift through all the complexities of Ottawa’s renewed tranches of Special Economic Measures Act sanctions and Magnitsky-type sanctions targeting Russian legislators who have backed Putin’s barbarism. By all means, put them all on the sanctions list. And it’s a good thing, too, that the Frozen Assets Repurposing Act, a Senate bill that died in the 2019, federal election, is likely to be revived and put to some use.

It should tell you something that as recently as last month, Canada’s federal cabinet ministers thought that a useful way to address Ukraine’s agonies was to pose for photographs holding up sheets of paper with #IStandWithUkraine written on them. But set that all aside.

What is the endgame now?

If there is anything that does not require either highbrow speculation or lowbrow clairvoyance, it’s hindsight. 

Putin will not be stopped. He will not be denied. He will not be hashtag-shamed into civilized behaviour.

What’s the point of all this now, exactly? It can’t be to dissuade Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. That’s already happened, and the multilateral sanctions that have been levied against Putin’s regime, or at least parts of it, did nothing to stop him from bombing Syrian schools and hospitals year after year, and did not stop him from invading Ukraine this week.

Ukraine deserves to be provided with all the aid and materiel necessary to wage what will surely be a long and bloody guerrilla resistance. The government and the people of Ukraine should be given every assistance they request.

Vladimir Putin and all his generals and his cronies need to be crushed. They need to be finished. They need to be brought to an end. Every last one of his oligarchs need to be hunted and hounded to the ends of the earth, their billions of dollars’ worth of holdings in real estate and mining and every other industry and bolthole from Chelsea to Toronto should be frozen, seized and expropriated.

Expel his diplomats. Shutter his embassies. Evict every Russian official from every multilateral and international forum. Bankrupt the lot of them. Diplomacy does not work with these people. You can’t talk peace with these monsters.

The only subject of discussion to be had with any of them is the terms of their abject surrender.

* Glavin's writing covers a wide range of regional and global topics from natural history and anthropology to current politics.