Tsar Nicholas II, the guy who was shot in a shabby cellar along with his entire family, was warned by his advisers not to assume personal command of the Russian army.
If he did, they said, and the war was lost, he would be blamed. Well, we know how that turned out (watch video here).
Russians have no imagination. Everything they do — whether it’s road rage, resisting the draft, or deposing a leader — they do with guns. Sorta like carpenters who only know how to pound nails.
This brings me to Putin, who’s losing in Ukraine.
Now he’s making “two foolish moves. First, he is now getting personally involved in some of the operational decisions in Ukraine,” just as the late Nick did. Actually, there’s a certain logic to this, because all his field commanders have been picked off by the Ukrainians and are dead.
And “second, he has begun a conscription drive that is supposed to mobilize an additional 300,000 men into the Russian military,” who will be sent to war with little training and rusty weapons.
Apart from the consideration that by running the war himself he’s giving the military somebody to shift blame to (i.e., him), the “mobilization order is so pointless that I am left wondering who in Moscow thought it might be a good idea. It was a decision guaranteed to generate massive protests for no apparent military benefit. As a strategic matter, this measure is pure idiocy.” (Read the article here.)
However, there’s a possible motive so dark it’s not pure idiocy, but pure evil; and annexing parts of Ukraine plays into it.
The idea is to turn Ukraine into Russian soil — his aim from the start — by “taking Russian men from their families, shipping them to Ukraine, getting them killed, and letting their blood soak into the dirt.”
“He could then say, to his own people and to the world, that the buried bones of so many Russian men make Ukraine hallowed ground from which Moscow will never retreat.” In other words, they’re being drafted to be cannon fodder, in order to rally a tepid Russian public behind his war of aggression.
The Russian people, who can jduge their leader at least as well as we can, appear to sense this. You don’t exactly see them rallying around the flag. They’re flocking to the borders, protesting the draft, getting drunk, and going into hiding. Based on how they size up the situation, there may be something to this.
And then there’s the “one last mistake he has not yet made—the use of a nuclear weapon—and we can only hope that all the other clocks run out before he even considers the most dire misstep of all.”
It’s hard to see how he keeps his head when the clocks do run out, and nobody knows that better than he. The world may be about to find out whether a desperate dictator would use nukes to save himself. Given the groundwork he’s been laying for just that exigency, I’m not so sure I’d bet against it.
Related story: The war’s most dangerous moment is approaching (see story here).