Putin isn't Kidding

 

I'm not sure why people think you can negotiate with Putin like he's regular people. I'm not a foreign policy expert, I just read people, and he has the personality of someone who people don't talk to but listen to. So, listen. Because talking to him isn't going to work. There's some men you just can't reach, etc. 

Looking at the Russo-Georgian war or the invasion of Crimea in 2014, it's clear that Putin says whatever he wants and then practices aggression. His security concerns are pretenses (hello--what is Russia, anyway, militarily, etc.) so he can fuck around like he has a reason to do what he wants to do. The only answer to his willingness to fuck around is a policy of assured finding out. You don't look for the thing he "actually wants" when he sniffs around territorially. He wants territory. And the people living on that territory have valid reasons to not want invaded, or a war, or anything but normal unfucked lives.

So why is Putin like this? Bullshit, mostly. Believing in a world that was already rotten and falling apart when he was schooled to try and defend it. That doesn't strike me as a mindset dissimilar to people right here in the US, but there's no use in letting his worldview affect ours: sovereign nations like Ukraine are sovereign. They are a democracy. We, the US, supposedly, are supposed to support free nations. 

I'm in. Here's why: he hasn't just fucked with Ukraine. He's been fucking with the US, the UK, Canada, Italy, France, etc. He's been using influence campaigns wherever he can to destabilize our belief in what it is to be a free nation. We are lousy with disinfo. But what we can know is if Putin has mobilized the sheer amount of troops he has at this moment, it isn't for nothing. He isn't doing it for shits and grins. he means it. 

And we need to mean to say no. We need to in fact hand him his ass in two halves and let him sit uneasily for the whole of time. You don't do that half-heartedly, or without belief in what it means to be a free nation. You do in full consideration of what it means to the world if people think you can have a petty petrocrat oilily gaslight you into getting his way. 

You sanction his partners just enough that they stop supporting him, because it gets them where they feel it. You let him know force will be met with force. And let it be known he lives in a world of unstable windows and is in danger of being yeeted as he has yate. (This is the only reasonable past-tense form of yeet my brain will allow. Please make this a thing.) In other words, he isn't joking, so don't joke, don't posture, don't make some millennial photo op of it, just let him know he will get altogether reamed if he does it, until he doesn't want to do it anymore.  Offer him the exact nothing his bullshit deserves, and tell him to fuck off forever. 

And the right wing quislings who somehow support Putin over the understanding of what our historical post WW2 alliances have been should get schooled in how they absolutely have got it wrong. It isn't about right vs left, but right vs wrong. It isn't ideology, it's just about sovereign nations and freedom vs invasion, occupation and tyranny. When, say, Fox News idiots are on the wrong side of the flag, they deserve to get burned for it. It's not that I think jingoism is a great look, but I'd actually like it if Democrats tried it on for a hot minute while we were doing something vitally important like preserving western values and whatnot. We have values. They should be preached.