by Jayasankaran KK
Vladimir Putin must be worried. When the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a blast from the past, the USSR – invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it cost the union perhaps 15,000 lives, nine years and an empire.
The war’s cost, its pressures, brought about the disintegration of the union: it broke up in 1991.
When Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2022, he thought it would be a cakewalk, a couple of weeks at best. It’s going to be three years next February and Russia, according to Western intelligence, may have lost as many as 200,000 men.
All in all, the Wall Street Journal estimates at least a million people have been killed or injured on both sides.
Military analysts estimate it costs Russia US$500 million a day or more to keep its war machine going.
That’s a lot of terrifying and needless waste. Putin might be well advised to claim victory and retreat.
That’s not happening either. Instead, the war seems to be ramping up and Putin is getting himself some new allies notably his new bestie, North Korea’s tubby tyrant Kim Jong-Un.
The multi-chinned Kim was so grateful that he’d found a new friend that he thought it perfectly reasonable to offer 10,000 able-bodied North Korean troops to Vlad’s meat grinder, to fight a war they’d no business doing.
Even so, the dumpy despot thought it best to offer his departing troops these words of advice: “Do not needlessly endanger yourselves until I say so.”
It was no wonder he was hailed publicly as Glorious Leader. Privately, however, he was called something else less glorifying.
There was no disPutin the Russian leader knew how to push Kim’s buttons. Earlier this year, he presented the ample autocrat with 24 pure-bred horses, reportedly as thanks for artillery shells provided by North Korea.
To underline Russia’s gratitude for the North Korean troops, Moscow recently gifted Pyongyang’s Zoo with 70 animals including a lion, a couple of brown bears, two yaks, five cockatoos and dozens of pheasants of different species.
The menagerie also included a couple of antelopes, the oldest of which was immediately dubbed Vlad the Impala.
That he would consider trading people for animals only served to underscore Kim’s love for endangered fauna and highlighted why his countrymen think he’s The Wrong ‘Un.
Meanwhile, an unperturbed Glorious Leader was kept busy with work, usually reported as Very Important Duties: if he wasn’t threatening South Korea, the US or Japan with nuclear annihilation every four days, he was exhorting the faithful to float balloons filled with garbage over to Seoul.
He was the quintessential big-picture leader, never sweating the small stuff like the occasional famine or sky-high food prices.
Instead, he concentrated on the really important stuff like his nuclear arsenal or sending assassination squads to Kuala Lumpur to eliminate potential enemies.
Here was certitude for you: Vladimir Putin knew he had to win. Only the victors decide who the war criminals will be.
In the end, God supports the bigger army, the larger country. That is why the big loser in the conflict’s epilogue will be Ukraine, dismembered and in dire need of economic aid.
It would have a memory too, an anthem both haunting and desolate. Crimea River always sounded that way.
(The views expressed here are solely those of the writer)
WE