Thomas Friedman, an international columnist for The New York Times, published an op-ed titled “Vladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous idiot.”
Thomas Friedman has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times, including for reporting on the Israeli-Lebanese war and the first Palestinian intifada. Since 1995, he has written his own foreign policy column for The New York Times. Friedman’s materials appear in the newspaper on Wednesdays and Sundays. In the last of them, he studies the military strategy of the President of the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
Desperate situation
The journalist wrote that Putin was hoping for a quick takeover of Kyiv, without a backup plan, and now, engulfed in battle, he has pushed himself into a hopeless situation.
“Putin has pushed himself into a situation where he can’t win, can’t lose and can’t stop. He can no longer seize control of the whole of Ukraine. But at the same time, he can’t win, after all the wealth and lives spent. Therefore, he cannot stop,” the journalist wrote.
That Putin never had a backup plan in mind, according to Friedman, is indicated by the current debilitating war of attrition, namely rocket attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. These strikes are intended to bleed Ukrainians and wear down the Western Allies so that they “give him a big enough piece of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that he can sell to the Russian people as a huge victory.”
No backup plan
Putin’s Plan B is to cover up that Plan A has failed. If this military operation had a name, it would be called “Operation Save My Face”. It makes war one of the most pointless wars of our time: The leader of one country destroys another country’s civilian infrastructure until it gives him enough cover to hide the fact that he’s a big fool.
Judging by Putin’s speech at the Victory Day parade on May 9, Putin now clings to any explanation to justify the war, which he completely invented in his head, Friedman continued. Thus, Putin said that Russia’s aggression was provoked by “Western elites who divide people and divide society, sow Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional values that make a people.”
“Wow. Putin invaded Ukraine to preserve Russian family values. Who can understand? And this is a leader who is struggling to explain to his people why he started a war with a weak neighbor, which, according to to him, is not even a real country,” the journalist wrote.
According to Friedman, two things scare Putin the most right now: arithmetic and Russian history. “He knows that even if he gets a few more kilometers in eastern Ukraine and keeps Crimea, as soon as he stops the war, his people will start brutal arithmetic calculations on his plan “B” – starting with reduction,” said Friedman, with in view of Russia’s military losses in Ukraine. “That’s a lot of casualties, even for a big country, and you can see how Putin is concerned about what people say about it. Putin doesn’t get away if he’s not afraid that, despite his best effort, everyone in Russia was muttering about how bad the war was and how not to get into it.
End of story
When a Russian leader ends a war with clear defeat or no victory, there is usually regime change. We saw it after the first Crimean War, after the Russo-Japanese War, after Russia’s setbacks in World War I, after Khrushchev’s withdrawal from Cuba in 1962, and after Brezhnev’s Afghan campaign, which accelerated Gorbachev’s perestroika. The Russian people, with all their famous patience, will forgive a lot, but not a military defeat.
Another American journalist, Leon Aron, believes that the conflict in Ukraine is far from over and could get worse. Putin has two ways to end the war. The first is to continue until Ukraine runs out of blood and/or the West tires of Ukraine. The second is to provoke a direct confrontation with the United States to bring the world to the mutual use of nuclear weapons, and then withdraw and offer a fearful West a deal in which Ukraine becomes neutral and disarms, and Russia keeps Crimea and Donbass.
“It’s impossible to get inside Putin’s head and predict his next move, but it worries me,” Friedman concluded. “Because we know that his Plan A failed. And now he will do everything to develop a plan “B”. He will have to find an excuse for these terrible losses in a country where defeated leaders do not abdicate peacefully.”
The reaction of the Office of the President
The adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Mykhailo Podolyak, who commented on Fridman’s article on Twitter, noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never capable of analyzing and assessing the situation, as well as also the planning of actions. “An extremely important article by Thomas Friedman for The New York Times. It finally destroys the massive image of the Russian Federation and Putin personally, which allows them to actively dominate world politics. In fact, Putin is not has ever been capable of qualitative analysis of the situation, scenario development, flexible planning or an objective assessment. He always relies on a dangerous bluff. It is time for a final reassessment,” wrote Podolyak.
Source: korrespondent
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.