Vladimir was white, clammy, bleached out as if under the curse of a fever. Putin’s eye movements did not match the objects of his words, and his tenor was comically and paternally strict and unhinged. His agitated body language spoke volumes, especially considering he was speaking to his own ministers and secretaries, at a bizarre distance of some 30 feet, in Moscow, on Feb. 21. Whatever caused that performance should alarm us all.
If that did not initiate the red lights on diplomatic registers, I guess the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk did, or maybe it took the actual invasion of Ukraine, and if not that, then proceeding to high nuclear alert most certainly engaged not only diplomatic concern, but a unified global spirit aligned against the violence in Ukraine and its broader ramifications. We now face the specter of nuclear winter for all humanity.
We cry and unify in support of Ukraine, as we should, but a corrupt Putin, armed with at least half of all of the thousands of nuclear missiles in the world, has raised the stakes, increasing the likelihood of an Extinction Level Event. Even if the worst predictions of even a limited nuclear attack, which foretell the extinction of mankind, are not true, the least of any predictions involve a level of pain and privation that will change culture, maps, and societal norms.
I hope that all negotiations are successful in placating Russia and saving an independent Ukraine, but the given reasons for the war are so bizarre and so crudely fabricated that the real goal of Russia’s naked and expensive aggression may be sub rosa, possibly something they cannot declare. That could include a naked desire to plunder Ukraine for treasure and resources, or possibly a geopolitical reason related to potential NATO membership for Ukraine, and as a puppet state buffer zone against NATO forces, something that we haven’t thought about, but that is unlikely because we have analysts, operatives, contacts, and military experts thinking about this kind of stuff all the time, right?
Like Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes said in The Two Jakes (1990) “You can follow the action, which gets you good pictures. You can follow your instincts, which’ll probably get you in trouble. Or, you can follow the money, which nine times out of ten will get you closer to the truth.”
In this case following the money might entail following the food, which money can stand for, unless you are under sanctions preventing food from being imported. Ukraine’s nickname is the “bread basket of Europe” for a reason — It grows lots of grains, accounting for 12% of global wheat exports, 16% of corn and 18% of barley. According to the CIA World Factbook, Ukraine produced 25% of all agricultural output in the former Soviet Union.
Nobody wants to go hungry, and autocratic leaders fear a hungry populace more than almost anything. (I say “almost” because more frightening may be a little friendly fire, a la Claus von Stauffenberg of the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler. That might be helpful here.)
How does suspecting, or even knowing, that food might be a key factor help? Well maybe we could take food out of the equation by guaranteeing an exclusion from sanctions for food. After all, we really do not want to see starving Russians any more than we do starving Ukrainians. The people who suffer food insecurity as a result of violence or wrong-headed policies driven by madmen leaders should not so suffer. But in the case of a madman the suffering sometimes precipitates the downfall of the madman. So what do you do?
If it comes down to it, err on the side of making sure everyone has food. That is the decent course of action because it alleviates suffering and death. Putin will get his comeuppance when the time is right. They always do.
Putin will kill Ukraine this year, though, and we can do no more than the bystanders of George Floyd’s murder; watch in horror as a fellow human being, or an honorable independent nation, is murdered; hopefully the real Ukraine, with the courageous Volodymyr Zelensky at the helm, can come back, with a unified world’s help. Godspeed, people of Ukraine.
Warren D. Tochterman, Esq. is a resident of Bensalem.
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: We unify in support of Ukraine but, in the end, we can only watch
