Duelin’ Putin:

Duelin’ Putin:

How Vlad the Instigator disrupts peace and security throughout the world.

By R.J. Godlewski

It’s always the little guys that cause the most trouble in the world – Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Kim, Ahmadinejad, and, of course, Putin. Naturally, personal height has no real basis regarding personal strength. My grandfather was all of five feet two inches tall and tipped the scales at a whopping one hundred and twenty pounds. Yet, my diminutive ancestor could also bend spikes in half with his bare hands. Poles are a very tough breed indeed.

My paternal grandparents were born in Russia – what is now Poland – and the stories that passed down from them regarding Russian brutality do, in fact, give me a certain sense of pride that even bare-footed and bare-headed I still inch above the current tyrant in charge of that controversial nation. I’ve always considered myself to be of average height, but in the 21^st century even I feel dwarfed by the people that I come into daily contact with. So what’s does my height have to do with anything? Nothing. It’s just that I realize my own limitations.

Being half Polish (the most obvious half), I tend to zero in on any news regarding the country of Poland and, to a lesser extent, that of Russia as well. It is within this context that I paid more attention than usual to the latest threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the targeting of Europe with nuclear missiles should they go ahead with an anti-ballistic missile defense network. This is exceedingly odd, almost as if someone were to threaten to attack me if I installed a security system within my home. Regardless, I fear that ol’ Vlad has become somewhat unhinged as of late – a definite degradation of character since his chummier days with our President Bush immediately following September 11, 2001.

Like a compass needle that always redirects itself towards north, Putin seems assured that the collapse of Russian-American relations is solely the fault of President Bush’s attack on Iraq and an alleged U.S. policy to prevent the Kremlin from being an equal partner in matters of international importance. Uh, huh. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Before the ‘little man’ from Russia cries about not standing level with President Bush, let’s embark upon a historical hayride and see exactly what it is that Putin’s Russia has done to safeguard international peace, shall we?

For starters, Russia’s own war with Islamic extremists in the largely media-ignored battle in Chechnya has cost Putin’s army tremendously. The estimated death toll of the first (1994-1996) and second (1999 to present) Chechen wars is between 100,000 and 200,000 Chechen civilians and between 20,000 and 70,000 Russian troops with another 500,000 civilians displaced from their homes. Two things come immediately to my mind. First, there’s a fifty thousand soldier discrepancy in the ‘estimated’ dead figure for the Russian army. Wow. I can’t turn on my evening news without knowing precisely how many Americans have died in Iraq and the best that we can come up with for Russia could be off by as much as a small city within the United States? The other thing that saps my mental capability is the consideration of what would be thought of our president if the American casualties in Iraq were ‘between’ 20,000 and 70,000 dead. We suffer three some odd thousand dead and half the country wants our troops home NOW! I don’t think that our culture could deal with a number twenty times that high – even though nearly every other U.S. generation in recent memory had.

It is also worth noting that Putin tried in vain to portray Chechen independence as an al-Qaeda-like jihadist movement – there were no Islamists forces fighting the Russians when the war began, but they quickly started flowing in from Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia to name but a few. Doesn’t this sound a little like Iraq? Yet Putin would have the entire world focused on Bush’s Iraq than his own neighborhood. Fortunately for American soldiers, President Bush is taking his war a tad bit more seriously.

While Russian troops have died by the tens of thousands, the Kremlin has quadrupled its defense spending over the past six years. Ironically, very little of this money is being spent on conventional forces that could actually benefit those fighting the now-emplaced Islamists in Chechnya – the overwhelming majority is being spent to bolster the nation’s strategic nuclear forces. So, doing little thought, Putin’s Russia worried about global prestige while his troops died at a rate twenty times that of our own forces in Iraq. If President Bush had behaved so irresponsibly, I’d be the first one calling for his ouster. Our political-military-industrial complex is bad, but definitely not that bad.

In 2000 when the Kursk sank with all hands, not only did the Russians not have a viable rescue system available to save the twenty or so submariners who had survived the next day or two, but they had to import salvage technology from Norway just to recover the stricken sub. You would think that this quadrupling of defense monies would cover such assets – our first and only one of two nuclear submarine disasters spawned rescue vehicles – but not Putin’s Russia which, incidentally, has the worst underwater disaster record since the inception of the submarine. On April 15^th of this year, the Russians launched the first of eight new-generation Borei-class nuclear submarines – the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I pray that these sailors are better protected than the previous generation Kursk-class, but I fear the worst.

Unlike the tried and true capitalism of the West, Russia has embarked upon a return to Putin’s “old school” chekist mentalities of the Cheka secret police established during the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Among the first of his grandiose plans to return modern, ‘democratic’ Russia back to the communist glory of his KGB buddies is the consolidation of the nation’s aerospace industry under control of the government-owned United Aircraft Corp. – a rather innocuously sounding state-run firm that is set to absorb twenty of Russia’s aerospace companies. Sadly, this isn’t the only strategic industry that Putin has the Kremlin’s sights on. On March 22, Putin ordered the creation of the United Shipbuilding Corp. – I really need to teach the man how to create names for businesses – to consolidate an industry that accounted for more than 27 percent of Russia’s military exports in 2006. While the efficient West is privatizing industries, Russia is reversing the trend and absorbing companies from the private sector like mad. And what, exactly, is Russia’s military juggernaut exporting?

Well, let’s run through a sampling. On September 28 of last year, the Severnaya Verf plant in St. Petersburg handed over to the Chinese a fourth Sovremenny-class destroyer armed with supersonic Moskit missiles possessing a range of 240 kilometers. This is the same shipyard that is majority-owned by Mezhprombank – controlled by Sergei Pugachyov, a financier with close ties to Putin himself. Cozy. Despite all of this consolidation in Russia’s state-controlled defense industry, it has thus far failed to achieve that one benefit such consolidations offer: efficiency. Makes one wonder about the true reason that Putin’s administration has gone on a power-grabbing spree, doesn’t it?

Normally, I could care less if Putin did have his filthy little hands in the ruble jar, but Mother Russia’s economy is in a death spiral while Vlad and his cohorts use their newfound power to clash with Norway over Barents Sea energy and stifle Ukraine’s progress by shutting off oil and natural gas to that nation’s decidedly pro-Western government. In fact, the Kremlin is no longer using its corporate muscle to compete with the West, it is using it to confront the West and a continual examination of its customers is most telling.

Besides significant arms sales to China – itself a nation destined for war with the United States – Russia’s customers are a virtual who’s who of regimes that are hostile to America. Despite sanctions, Rosoboronexport has sold more than $5.3 billion to foreign clients including $3 billion to the likes of Hugo Chavez which will soon have a new Kalashnikov assault rifle factory and Su-30MKM jet fighters. This company is also headed by an ex-KGB buddy of Putin, Sergei Chemezov, and regularly takes in a 5-15% commission on all foreign contracts. Nice.

Russia has also supplied Iran, Syria, and their Hamas and Hezbollah fanatics with tanks, aircraft, missiles, and small arms; Indonesia with $1 billion in military loans to acquire, among other things, Kilo- and Amur-class submarines and military training; discussed aiding Saudi Arabia with small arms and support for a nuclear program; and a division of Rosoboronexport has an established arms trade with Putin’s buddy King Abdullah II of Jordan. Not a decent regime in the lot, but the plot thickens as we consider Russia’s diplomatic policies.

In January of this year, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali-Hoseini Khamenei caused quite a stir by proposing that Russia and Iran create a gas cartel that cold be used against the West for “energy blackmail”. Putin reportedly welcomed the idea on a recent visit to the region. This seems to fit in with historical precedent; Russia has already expanded into a $7.5 billion arms deal with gas rich Algeria. Controlling gas is one thing, but the people that brought us Chernobyl exporting nuclear power to the Middle East is downright scary.

The direction that post-Soviet Russia had first taken in regards to the West – that of an equal, civilized nation – has rapidly dissipated. Vladimir Putin has obviously decided that anything hostile to the United States and our Western allies is of paramount importance. In September of 2006, bowing to pressure from Russian Communist Party chiefs who protested U.S. troops on their soil, the Kremlin postponed an annual joint military exercise with America – called Torgau-2006 – which would’ve involved nearly 400 Russian and American troops practicing peacekeeping missions in hostile territories. Instead of using this time for ‘peacekeeper’ training, Russia shifted to testing sub-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Oh, that aids global peace.

They say that a person’s actions reveals their character. I suppose that this works with administrations too and from what I learn from the television news and my own sources; Vladimir Putin has no character whatsoever. His foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, meets in February with Hamas Leader Khaled Meshaal in an attempt to lessen isolation of the radical Islamist group that is today fighting both Israel and Lebanon. When the United States and its allies began to discuss the deployment of anti-ballistic missile programs in Central Europe, Moscow hatches the harebrained scheme to install missile tracking radars atop its global embassies – essentially moving away from passive interception antennas, that all nations use to eavesdrop, into active transmission of electromagnetic radiation into others’ sovereign territory. They are also competing with U.S. companies to provide Turkey – a long-time U.S. ally whose on the threshold of the Islamist world – with a $1 billion missile defense system.

Vladimir Putin has widely criticized the Bush Administration for not considering Russia as an equal partner on the global stage, but addressing how this ‘friend’ behaves when scorned; one can only assume that their past friendship was a ruse. Putin’s every action has been to deny his struggling people a chance at a better life while simultaneously sacrificing global security for the sake of profit. Within the ranks of history’s worst – Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Kim, and Ahmadinejad – only Vladimir Putin could make the Sopranos seem desirable.