Vladimir putin

Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine is coming up on its eighth month, and the costs to the Kremlin’s military have been immense. Increasingly isolated on the world stage, Vladimir Putin has joined the world’s club of pariah states, the only group willing to give him support. Chief among his allies is the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state with similarly imperialistic designs and global isolation. This axis has been brewing for some time — the two nations worked together extensively in Syria, for example — but the relationship has reached new heights as the Russian armed forces buckle under the strain of war. Perhaps the most potent symbols of this relationship are the hundreds of Iranian drones flooding into Ukraine to fill a gap in Russia’s weapons inventory.

What’s more alarming than President Trump trying to frighten Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury”? President Biden trying to frighten Americans with Putin. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” the president riffed at a New York fundraiser, while fretting to supporters about his need to find that elusive off-ramp for the Russians. Biden’s loose talk about Putin’s formidability contrasted with US handwringing fits a pattern. Pervasive throughout Putin’s war has been far too much focus on what the United States should do to help Putin find these mythical off-ramps, and on how to restrain Ukraine to prevent it from getting nuked.

Vladimir Putin is mad: not in the cognitive but in the emotional sense of the word. He is an odd mixture of the cold, the plotting, the calculating, and the bloodless; the emotional, the impulsive, the hotblooded, and the sentimental. He is mad, in other words, in precisely the way that Adolf Hitler was mad. And like Hitler, Putin is disconnected from the world of fact but not of logic. This is a fundamental truth about the man that I think the West had never experienced before February. His condition became apparent in the diatribe against the West that he gave on Friday, which corresponded almost exactly to Hitler’s customary rants.

At a swanky fundraiser in Manhattan, President Joe Biden alluded to the prospect of “Armageddon.” The biblical reference was not intended to woo the Christian evangelicals who form part of the base of the Republican Party, but to alert bien-pensant liberal opinion that something a trifle more threatening than global warming looms large in world politics. For the “first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going," Biden said. For anyone with lingering memories of the Cold War, his remarks about the prospect that Russian president Vladimir Putin might reach for the nuclear button was bound to stir alarm coupled with — dare I say it? — a smidgen of pleasure.

Here is one fact about the war in Ukraine you need to understand: the longer it goes on, the more advanced Western arms will flow to Kyiv. And that could mean that Russian president Vladimir Putin will feel he has no choice but to use tactical nuclear weapons to even the odds — no matter what happens as a result. You think that sounds crazy, right? Well, let me ask you this: did you ever imagine Putin would invade Ukraine? That action alone casts doubts on how rational an actor he really is. But let's take a step back for a moment. In order to understand why Putin may very well consider using tactical nukes, let's get a sense of where he thinks he stands in this war.

As the world wonders what happened to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, many suspect that Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind the sabotage. At first glance, it appears strange that Russia would damage pipelines that its own companies run. But Putin has several possible reasons for carrying out the attack. One reason could be that Gazprom (the Russian state-owned gas giant) wants to avoid paying penalties for failing to fulfill its contractual obligations. Since August 31, Russia has halted gas exports via both Nord Stream pipelines, which follows a similar move in July where the Kremlin cited erroneous maintenance issues as the cause of the short shutdown that month.

British prime minister Liz Truss’s speech at the United Nations this week was spot-on. It was clear, concise and left no question that the UK would do everything in its power to lead in the defense of the West and its values. President Biden’s address, by contrast, left you feeling overwhelmed and unsatisfied. That's not to say he failed to speak about Ukraine — he spent a reasonable amount of time on it — but the substance just was not there. Truss made a clear commitment to continue to “sustain or increase... military support to Ukraine, for as long as it takes,” a concrete and actionable statement. Though Biden issued a ringing condemnation of Putin’s war, he only made a vague pledge to “stand in solidarity against Russia’s aggression.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Uzbekistan during this week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — and a lot had happened since their last meeting. With the Russian Army on the back-foot in Ukraine and its economy forecasted to contract by over 4 percent in 2022, Putin is in a far worse position. Whether this impacted the meeting is hard to tell, though Putin indicated that Xi had “questions and concerns about [Ukraine].” Nevertheless, both countries expressed support for one another, touching on their respective concerns. Xi stated that China wanted to work with Russia “to set an example of a responsible world power,” a jab at the Western powers that both countries are positioning themselves against.

With the stunning, rapid advance of its military against the Russians, Ukraine has shot back into the headlines. The focus is, understandably, on the battlefield, but the happenings behind the lines deserve attention too. Since the first weeks of the war, information has trickled in about Russia’s massive, criminal attempts to relocate Ukrainian civilians. While much of the situation in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine remains murky, what is known provides a rough outline. Russia’s attempt at social control in Ukraine consists of two key elements: filtration and forced relocation.