Trump’s interest in rapprochement with Russia and his annoyance with Ukraine, embodied by last week’s Oval Office shouting match, has corporate pundits and politicians freaking out. Trump’s former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said Trump’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky made him “ashamed for my nation”—something he’s never said about Guantánamo or torture or invading Iraq or even racism.
Whenever U.S. support for Ukraine gets questioned, count on militaristic whores to drag out cut-and-paste fearmongering from the Cold War era.
Putin aims to “absorb Ukraine, all of it, and likely the other former states of the Soviet Union, too,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail claimed in 2022.
“Putin’s Ukraine invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” Mitt Romney wrote in 2022. Um—Afghanistan? Iraq? Panama? “It echoes Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia and his lust for Poland. But even more, it reflects Putin’s drive to reconstitute the Soviet Union—or at least its dominant sphere of influence.”
“Putin saw the invasion of Ukraine as a key step toward rebuilding the Russian Empire,” Mark Temnycky of the Atlantic Council wrote in 2023.
Dire warnings of the Russian threat have been around for a while. It’s not just Ukraine! They’re coming for YOU!
“[Putin’s] next move will be to invade the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. When this happens, the United States will need to move armored forces quickly to Europe, via Poland, in order to prevent NATO from being checkmated, and it’s going to have a problem doing that. Note that I said ‘when’ Putin invades rather than ‘if,’” Jerry Hendrix of The National Review wrote.
That was seven years ago, in 2018. We’re still waiting.
No one can predict the future. All we can do is consider data and evidence, calculate the odds of the likeliest scenario and prepare accordingly.
When you consider the issue objectively, without emotion, the odds that the Russia hawks are right—and that Putin is planning to invade Europe or, as Zelensky warns, that he plans to cross our “nice ocean” to attack the United States—are infinitesimal.
The neocons love to say that Putin has said that he wants to reunite the Soviet Union. “Putin has openly declared his ambition to reassemble the Soviet Union, a goal he reiterated in his historical grievances aired before the Ukraine invasion,” Franz-Stefan Gady of the Center for International and Strategic Studies wrote last year in Foreign Policy.
Nothing could be further from the truth. But, as the French social psychologist and philosopher Gustave Le Bon observed, “A lie, when it is repeated often enough, gains a sort of existence of its own, and the effort to destroy it becomes almost futile against the credulity of the masses.” Americans are drowning in propaganda.
We don’t know what’s inside Putin’s brain. We do know what Putin has said. What Putin has said bears no relation to how he’s misquoted in the West.
Putin did describe the 1991 collapse of the USSR as a “a major geopolitical disaster of the century” in 2005 State of the Union address. Considering that between 3 and 7 million former Soviet citizens died prematurely as a result and left Russia under the control of the inept alcoholic Boris Yeltsin, Putin has good reasons for his assessment. But that doesn’t mean he wants to get the band back together.
“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart,” Putin has been saying since at least 2000, paraphrasing Disraeli. “Whoever wants it back has no brain.”
“The West fears the recreation of the Soviet Union, despite nobody planning on one,” Putin mused on RT in 2015.
“There will be no Soviet Union. The past will not come back. Today, Russia does not need this and this is not our aim,” Putin said in September 2022.
I don’t know whether Putin is lying or telling the truth. I do know that government officials and respected, award-winning journalists have been repeatedly lying about what Putin says.
We do, however, have concrete evidence of Putin’s intentions beyond official statements.
If I were the president of Russia, and I was interested in reassembling the Soviet Union, I would start with the low-hanging fruit, the territories that would be most interested in coming back under the fold of Moscow. Belarus, where most citizens believe that life was better under the USSR and is slowly moving toward a union state with Russia, would be an easy lift. Most citizens of the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have a favorable view of Russia and nostalgia for the Soviet period. If Russia were to invade, the reaction would range from joy to indifference. And Tajikistan turns out to have a lot of oil and gas.
Russia has expressed no interest whatsoever in resuming control of these former Soviet spaces.
Why not? Reabsorbing Ukraine, the Baltics and the Central Asian republics would mean subsidizing countries that are poorer and less developed than Russia. Putin’s Russia, reliant on energy exports, doesn’t want to subsidize a new union the way the USSR did. The war in Ukraine is less about recreating the USSR than about ensuring that a buffer state doesn’t become a full-fledged NATO vassal state aligned with the U.S.
Relax.
The Russians are not coming.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)
For this essay, let’s not debate the pros and cons of our new old president. Detailing specific reasons that many Americans are upset with/scared of/annoyed by Donald Trump and the Republican Party would be a distraction from a point that desperately needs to be made. Suffice it to say, millions of people are angry, disappointed and would prefer entirely different political policies and priorities out of Washington.