Putin Has Offered His Exit Strategy to the World

Is Ukraine (are we) willing to accept it?

(Originally published in October 2022)

As I stared out the window of the train this evening, I tried to imagine myself in Putin’s place. I asked myself, what does he really want?

I asked myself, does he really want the end the world with nuclear war?

I am going to answer for Vladimir Putin. No. He does not want to end it.

Putin is clinging to power because he wants to live as long as possible. If Russia is destroyed by U.S. missiles, then Putin loses what he loves the most — being a beloved and untouchable czar surrounded by millions of sycophants.

As I recently wrote in “Deconstructing Putin,” Vladimir Putin is addicted to their love and so, at this moment, to regain some of the lost mystery of his all-knowing guidance, he is letting them guide him a bit.

The extreme sycophants on the political talk shows demanded mobilization and he gave them a “partial” version. Now, those, weakling shitheads are demanding nuclear war but Putin won’t give them that unless we in the West force him into it.

The thing is, tyrants like Putin, and authoritarian wannabes like Trump, are actually very cowardly people and they fear more than anything death and pain. Paranoia overtakes their thoughts and they end up isolating themselves to stay alive. Sadly, Trump hasn’t isolated but Putin certainly has — just take a look at how he lived during COVID and his comically long tables.

And so, as I melded my mind with Putin’s, it suddenly dawned on me that he was communicating the end of this war but we haven’t been listening. We are only paying attention to Ukrainian President Zelensky. We are all so outraged by Putin’s repeated disrespect for everything we hold dear that many of us are willing to let this thing spin further and further out of control blinded to an answer that we have to reluctantly accept.

The exit

The Russian army is a joke. We all get it. Had the Russians been able to stay inside of Russia, they probably would have been a wee bit more effective because of the resource of Russia’s vast rail system. It is the largest system in the world and is amazingly well-run.

Russia’s problems began the moment they crossed into Ukraine and their troops became unserviceable by the army’s logistics. The trucks that we were supposed to supply them simply ran out of cash and were in many cases abandoned. From that moment, the Russian army ceased to effectively function. The rest is history which recently became the present when Russia’s army was devastated in the east.

With the Russian army in shambles, the strategy to annex the territories that will sooner or later be lost to the rolling Ukrainian army comes to the fore. Annexation stops the inevitable attacks.

By annexing the lands of eastern Ukraine and parts of the south, Putin makes them part of Russia. The Russian nuclear umbrella extends outward over those lands. While the world pauses to consider just how serious Russia is about starting a nuclear war should Ukraine invade these freshly stolen lands, Putin begins to fill them up with hundreds of thousands of troops — 300,000 to be exact.

The inexperienced and poorly trained boys and men who last week were harvesting gardens and heading off to work in the morning don’t go to these lands to fight but to occupy. They construct walls and borders. They create demilitarized zones between Ukraine and Russia’s new territories.

They install defensive towers and sensors and mines and tank obstacles. Their work becomes less the work of an aggressive, invading army and instead the work of “builders” creating security for the newly stolen territories. They lapse into a “war on hold mode” and as a result, the rate of deaths slows.

As the death rates slow, and Russia’s media praise Putin for so effectively having “saved the peoples of those territories,” the war in Russia moves from being the end of Putin and Russia and the beginning of the new, authoritarian Russia.

The new Russia will be the fascist state we see today but a state with the support of most people — or with most people totally under control. The new, and less improved Russia accepts its isolation and life goes on.

In Ukraine, due to the lull of the “nuclear moment,” hundreds of thousands of troops are in place. Experienced or not, they are nevertheless present. Dislodging them requires strength and because the territories now belong to Russia, the West may be less than willing to provide the offensive weapons needed to fight on — Germany is already refusing to give tanks. The U.S. refuses to give long-range missiles. Dislodging becomes harder.

The war stops. The demilitarized zones are established. The next move is the crucial one: The world needs to make it clear to President Zelensky that it is not ready for nuclear war over two republics that since 2014 seem to want to be a part of Russia — who knows the truth here? I have heard from Ukrainians over the years since 2014 from those eastern areas of Luhansk and Donetsk that they consider themselves more Russian than Ukrainian.

These territories become the “agree to disagree” moment; they become the DMZ as we see between North and South Korea. The next move is up to the West. “Ukraine proper,” as it is minus Crimea, the Donbas, and any other annexed territories, becomes a member of NATO. If Russia wants to extend its security umbrella over those stolen territories, then the West extends its umbrella over “Ukraine proper.”

Going forward

The West declares that it will never accept those illegally annexed territories as lands of Russia. They remain forever the disputed territories and the world waits for Putin to die — for a regime change. The sanctions against Russia become permanent.

The world moves on and Russia goes its way: a pariah, denied technology, and denied all of the privileges of a modern and civilized nation like Iran.

For any of this to work, Volodymyr Zelensky needs to be convinced that this is the only way this is going to play out. The world is not going to risk nuclear Armageddon, but it will defend Ukraine forever. It will put all of the necessary structures in place to prevent Russia from ever again invading “Ukraine proper.”

This is the exit that Vladimir Putin is communicating to us. This is an exit he seems willing to accept. It is an exit that permits him to retain the love of the Russian slaves and also live out his life sipping on tea near a big, crackling fire at his favorite palace tucked in the woods somewhere between St. Petersburg and Moscow.

And then, when he passes, the world can readdress the Ukrainian-Russian DMZ problem and perhaps even solve this dilemma that right now seems to only be leading us to a fiery end.

Or maybe it wasn’t Putin I was melding my mind with, and all of this was just hearsay.