PARIS—What does NATO’s most sought after specialist on Vladimir Putin expect to happen after the despot wheedles his fifth six-year term as the president of Russia on Sunday?
“An ocean of tyranny and bloodshed,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda told The Daily Beast, before echoing his prognosis to some 1,300 military officers and policymakers assembled for the Paris Defense and Strategy Forum. The two-day gathering was faced with the unenviable task of finding a way to cripple Putin’s jackboot march on Western democracies without launching nuclear weapons.
Nausėda’s verdict: “Russia will not stop,” he says. “It can only be stopped.”
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But who’s going to do the stopping?
That question has resonated throughout Putin’s 24-year reign of malignance. Those Russians with an answer are either dead or in exile, trying to avoid liquidation. The Kremlin continues to strictly enforce Z Culture. Fighting Putin over social media is a troll fest. And let’s face it: As we enter a third year of Putin’s Ukrainian onslaught, we’ve run out of words to describe the casual and caustic ghoulishness of his butchery, which Nausėda describes as “genocidal.”
The annihilation of an ethnic group? That’s against the law. Alert the legally frazzled prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and they’ll quote Cicero: inter arma enim silent leges—In times of war, the law falls silent.
So, however you’d like to put flesh on the Putin phenomenon—now mostly guaranteed to last until 2030—there is nothing new here.
If the current Russian presidential polls are reliable—and even if they aren’t, the sheer size of the margin makes the numbers themselves unimportant—Putin will grab between 70 percent and 80 percent of the rigged vote in a country that’s never had a free or fair election.
If President Joe Biden had a campaign staff half as sophisticated as those managing the Kremlin account he wouldn’t be fluttering in the backwash of Putin’s winged monkey corps of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, ultra-right Dutchman Geert Wilders, fascist Marine Le Pen, and MAGA mob boss Donald Trump. There is a new Axis of Weasels ready to seize the world stage.
Indeed, numerous NATO officers here speaking off-record voiced no surprise that Putin’s chief television propagandist Vladimir Solovyov recently persuaded millions of people that Trump and Putin, once respectively re-elected president, will jointly gift Hungary the Ukrainian Carpathians as soon as Kyiv falls under Russian control.
Putin’s and his cronies remain stinking rich. The ballyhooed Magnitsky Act of 2012 and 2016, designed to sanction and freeze the funds of human rights offenders in Russia, was a flop, but “Navalny” won an Oscar in 2023 for Best Documentary. Ukraine is rationing guns and ammo, and the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community concludes: “Moscow has successfully diverted most of its seaborne oil exports.”
The fiendish pattern of Putin’s Russia does not change. It’s a corrupt and incompetent mockery of a political system, but that’s what great rackets are made of.
Libraries of books have been written on how Putin spent more than two decades assassinating his rivals at home and abroad with impunity. Film vaults are filled with footage of Wall Street and its global regulators allowing Kremlin quartermasters to execute blooded financial transactions on sanctioned world markets. Indeed, the U.S. Congressional Record contains volumes of testimony on Putin’s efforts to destabilize American elections, bribe officials and weaponize immigrants and other displaced people in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
“Imagine a Putin foreign policy strategy session; I do on a regular basis for training purposes,” says a veteran CIA operative, who spent a decade mostly undercover in Russia. “Deceive, disrupt, distract, disturb, divide and create distrust, suspicion and conspiracy theories. Sell vranyo; peddle the bullshit. The public buys it.”
And you don’t have to be Russian to swallow the product. Nearly half of Americans believe the U.S. is spending too much money fighting Putin. Even Pope Francis is preaching that Ukraine should have the “courage” to raise the “white flag.”
Carlos Galán, who’s spent the past decade studying the Kremlin’s techniques of hybrid warfare and information manipulation at the University of Nebrija in Madrid, told NATO’s top brass they’d better come to grips with the fact that the West has yet to find a way to beat Putin off the battlefield.
“Putin maintains hundreds and hundreds of domestic and global propaganda outlets,” Galán explains. “The number of these groups actually increases day by day.”
“Putin’s propaganda operation is the Hydra of the 21st century,” Galán adds, referring to the mythical multi-headed beast finally slaughtered by Hercules. “Cut off one of its heads and two new heads grow back. The Hydra is poisonous and it’s not going to disappear.”
Stopping reelected Putin remains a heinously complicated endeavor and, as NATO commanders tell it, impossible without giving Ukraine inconceivable amounts of weapons to do the job for them. That, too, is nothing new. Putin will be back in the Kremlin on Monday morning, maintaining the madness that everything is right when it’s wrong. Galán says a lot of folks will be eating it up.
