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Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.
Once again, the talking- and typing-heads are filling our news screens with double-doming about building an “off-ramp” Vladimir Putin will be willing to take to get out of the Ukraine war.
But Putin still doesn’t seem to be looking for an off-ramp. He’s frantically watching out for a trapdoor. It may well be his most likely exit from the Ukraine war he now knows he can’t win.
A now panicky Putin fears he might stumble or strut onto an unseen trapdoor that could instantly become his (how to say) downfall. A yank of a lever — by an unseen hand of a military hard-liner (or even thousands of clenched fists of fed-up ordinary Russians!) — could suddenly send Putin plummeting out of power, faster than he can say “Nikita Khrushchev!” or “Mikhail Gorbachev!” It could be his only exit.
Millions of stunned ordinary Russians now see Putin for the con artist he really has been all along. He assured the citizens he ruled that the war he started in Ukraine wasn’t a war — but was being won. Right up until his ground war collapsed and his troops fled rather than fight Ukrainians. Then Putin announced his mucked-up mobilization. For the first time since 1941, Russia began rushing young and middle-aged men, husbands and fathers to fight and maybe die in a war they don’t give a rat’s patootie about.
“The war has come to Russia, and it’s a termination of the social contract,” Oleg Ignatov, a senior analyst with the Brussels-based Crisis Group think tank, told Newsweek. Hundreds of thousands of Russian men fled rather than fight. Hundreds of thousands of courageous Russians began protesting Putin’s war in city streets. Many were jailed, but their antiwar message spread.
Half a world away, Americans of a certain age know too damn well the antiwar rage Russia’s millions are now feeling. We felt it six decades ago, when America began drafting men to fight a war they didn’t understand, in a place called Vietnam they couldn’t even find on a map. America’s antiwar crusade eventually helped end that un-won war.
So ordinary Americans get what ordinary Russians are feeling. And Putin, who is arrogant but not stupid, gets where this debacle of a war he started in Ukraine can end up — in Ukraine and even in the power corridors of the Kremlin. His on-the-ground generals screwed up militarily. Their unmotivated troops ran out of supplies and fled. Putin took charge and things got even worse. Unable to defeat Ukraine forces on the ground, Putin chose instead to use high-tech missiles and artillery from far away to indiscriminately slaughter the very civilians he had just told the world were really his fellow Russians. Ukraine troops, fortified by U.S. and NATO high-tech offensive and defensive weaponry, are taking back Ukraine eastern and southern territory Russian-backed troops have occupied for several years. Now Putin has turned the war over to an infamous air force commander who earned his infame by slaughtering innocent Syrian civilians from afar.
Putin has shamed his own Russian people, as the world watched his war crimes with disgust. Putin’s military has almost run out of its high-tech weaponry. He has no good next-step option. Indeed, he’s fearing his next step could be atop one of those unseen trapdoors.
“If the Russian armed forces continue to lose on the battlefield, the only way to end this war might involve putting someone else in power in Moscow,” former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, wrote most perceptively in a recent Washington Post commentary.
“To date, the hawks in Russia are loud and public. But if the war continues to go badly, the voices quietly supporting suing for peace will grow. Tensions between the Russian military and intelligence services are already spilling into the open. These tensions will only grow if Russia’s soldiers continue to die and retreat in Ukraine.”
On Oct. 10, in France, the respected Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize was awarded by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to a courageous Russian who was otherwise occupied and unable to accept it in person. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, is in a Russian prison awaiting trial for the crime of reporting “fake news” about Putin’s Ukraine war that Putin insisted cannot be called a war.
“With the start of this brutal invasion of Ukraine, Putin also launched another war — a war on truth in our own country,” Kara-Murza said in an acceptance speech read, in France, by his wife. “… in today’s Russia of Vladimir Putin, speaking the truth is considered a crime against the state….
“I look forward to [the day] … when a peaceful, democratic and Putin-free Russia returns … [and] we can finally start building that whole, free and peaceful Europe we all want to see.”
