By Gábor T. Rittersporn  TELOS

I was completely wrong when I opined on February 9 that the Russians would not invade Ukraine. I mistakenly took them for more rational than they turned out to be. Mea maxima culpa. For the rest, I was not mistaken at all when I enumerated the reasons that militated against a martial adventure. The course the war took shows that the Russian leadership neglected them or, what is worse, does not read the Telos blog. Here are some obstacles to a successful operation I indicated and the consequences we can see today.

With the exception of the inhabitants of the separatist regions, no one greeted the Russians as liberators. The invaders crossed the border at provinces with a sizable Russian population, at regions where a significant proportion of people claim Russian as their mother tongue, no matter the ethnic group their ancestry happened to belong to. At the 2019 elections, all these regions voted overwhelmingly for current president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish origin, not necessarily an advantage in Eastern Europe. The comedian-turned-war-leader won more than 73 percent of the voices against his rival, billionaire and outgoing president Petro Poroshenko, who can boast Ukrainian forefathers. The Kremlin bosses apparently believed that only ethnic, religious, and linguistic affinities define political allegiances in Ukraine, or they simply did not take the trouble to have a look at the relevant statistics.

Manifestly, warlord Putin and his underlings hoped that Ukrainian politicians were going to vie with each other for the honor of serving as the head and the members of a collaborationist government. To no avail. Shortly after the attack, Putin launched an appeal to the Ukrainian military and its high brass and urged them to topple Zelensky’s government. Not even a private has volunteered so far. The Ukrainian army is heavily outgunned, but it managed to brake Putin’s blitzkrieg. It has hardly any chance to win the war. However, its bold resistance scored a moral victory in a couple of days.

Putin carefully refrains from addressing the Ukrainian people. Maybe he would sound credible if he could raise miserable living standards, finish with the rule of corrupt oligarchs and their protégés among politicians and in officialdom, and open brighter perspectives than the present regime. All things he does not do at home. Why would he or his eventual puppets do them in Ukraine?

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