What should we do about Putin?

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin used to run the KGB.  This means he has blood on his hands.  Lots of it.  After the destruction of MH17 over Ukraine he has another bucket load to rinse them in.

He can say as much as he likes that it’s Ukraine’s fault because it happened in their airspace.  Watch his body language making that statement: looking down at the desk, his eyes straying all over the place but never looking at the camera.  All classic indicators of bare faced lying.  The man would not know the truth if it kicked him in the crotch.  The statement – no, let’s be clear here: the LIE - ignores the fact that in many respects the Ukrainian government’s hands are tied.   Tied by the massed ranks of the Russian army, tanks, fighter planes and all, lined up just across their border, ready to move.  The forces have been there since Russia illegally annexed Crimea.   The LIE also ignores the fact that Russia is helping the rebels (sometimes I hate that word) by providing arms and assistance and training.

Look at pictures of the rebel militia men.  Despite the fatigues and the Kalashnikovs, they are not soldiers.  For a start, most of them are overweight.  Serving soldiers don’t normally wear ski masks to hide their identity either.  They are, quite simply, poorly educated petty crooks and thugs, the kind of person proliferating throughout eastern Europe.  They usually supply the muscle that helps organised crime flourish, and the oligarchs amass their fortunes.   The majority of them probably do not care about whether they are in Ukrainian or Russian territory, their main concern being who is lining their pockets with the largest amount of hryvnia or roubles.  Given a free rein, the Ukrainian police and armed forces could probably mop them all up in a week or so, with it must be said many casualties on both sides. 

But of course, the Ukrainian government does not have a free hand.  The Russian presence along the border assures that.  And of course, the thugs know it and are happy to strut around, posturing for the BBC and CNN cameras, fire off the odd round and intimidate any outsiders having the gall to enter their territory.  They clearly possess better armaments than the average criminal gang (for that is what they are), and know how to use it – the Ukrainian casualties, including military planes shot down, so far proves that.  Which raises the questions of where they have obtained the hardware, and who has provided the training required to master its use?  There can only be one answer, and it lies a few kilometres away across the border.

 

 

Which leads us back to Putin.  If, as seems certain, the arms and training have been provided by the Russian armed forces – and for the life of me I can’t see any other alternative theory that makes any sense – it is surely inconceivable that it would have been done without his knowledge and indeed approval.  Given the fatalities in the conflict so far, on both the rebel and (mostly) Ukrainian side, here is yet more blood on the man’s hands.

The downing of MH17 is now providing these gangs with their (I use the term at its loosest) finest hour.  The eyes of the world are on the wheat and sunflower fields of the border regions, and the smouldering wreckage and twisted decaying corpses of nearly 300 innocent souls, children and infants included, that disfigure the landscape.   Ignoring the human tragedy (and that is nigh on impossible to do), the downing is giving the rebel forces a power over events they can only have dreamt of.  Clearly, they are making no attempt to secure the site for the necessary investigation.  This ensures that anybody can wander into a field and pick up a piece of wreckage or someone’s pitiful belongings, as a ghoulish souvenir – though why anyone in their right mind would want to do such a thing is beyond me.  And yet there are many reports of this happening.  Instead of securing the site, the militia are actually hindering the efforts of investigative teams to reach the site at all.  There are reports of crash evidence being stolen or destroyed, the whereabouts of the flight recorders is disputed (some reports say they are in Ukrainian hands, some say in Russian and en route to Moscow, and others that they haven’t yet been found), and that the missile battery that allegedly brought the plane down has already been spirited away, back onto Russian territory, within hours of the incident.

It’s an appalling situation.  There are 300 odd families in this world, most of them in peaceful Holland and all of them thousands of miles away from a conflict that has nothing to do with them, trying to grieve for their loved ones, and understand why and how this was allowed to happen.  These poor people don’t even know when the bodies, or what’s left of them, are likely to be returned for a decent burial.   My heart breaks for them as well as the victims.

 

 

Back to Putin.  Over the whole period of this crisis in Ukraine, he has insisted on the right to protect the “rights of Russian citizens”.  We’ll leave out the fact that the people in Crimea and eastern Ukraine are actually legally Ukrainian citizens but of Russian ethnicity.  He has provided assistance to the “government” of Crimea and visited the province within hours of its proclamation, thus nailing his colours firmly to the rebel cause.  When the conflict moved on to the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, he made the same statements of support, and the gangs took over.  Russian forces moved up to the border, and despite denials from the Kremlin troops helped with equipment and training.  The situation remains thus today.

Western governments and the UN have made their usual statements of condemnation.  The US and the EU have imposed a number of economic sanctions and travel bans on Russian businesses and individuals “close” to Putin, and Russia itself has been expelled from the G8.  Its economy has been damaged, but not enough.  Obama and Merkel and Cameron have urged Putin to do something to rein in the rebels, pull back the Russian troops and engage in meaningful dialogue with the Ukrainian government to bring a peaceful conclusion to the conflict.  For the cameras and the world’s press he has appeared contrite and conciliatory and promised to do so.  More lies – nothing has changed, no troops have been pulled back and more arms and assistance have been provided.  His word is worth nothing.  He is a liar.  More blood…..

 

 

In the wake of MH17, more sanctions are being proposed, stronger ones.  There has been a fractious debate in the UN Security Council, but as usual the Russians have protested their innocence, the Chinese have sat there inscrutably saying nothing (thus tacitly supporting Russia) so the required unanimity for action is never going happen.

The US and the EU, if they are going to impose more sanctions, should no longer tread lightly.  They should impose financial sanctions and travel bans on one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  They should take similar action against his lapdog Dmitriy Medvedev and every other member of the Russian cabinet.  For good measure, do likewise to the heads of the Russian Army, Navy and Air Force.  While they are about, they should make public how much these financial sanctions amount to – the offshore bank accounts where Putin’s ill-gotten wealth is gathering interest, and the amounts in them – I’m assuming of course that the CIA and MI6 have been doing their job properly and have this information.  The whole sorry gang should find itself persona non grata outside of the Russian borders.  For their complicit support of the rebels in eastern Ukraine, they should be declared war criminals and indicted.

The UN, meanwhile, supported by the US and EU governments, and its entire membership, should announce that under UN treaties national borders are sacrosanct and the citizens living within those borders are citizens of that country.  In the case of eastern Ukraine, anybody who does not wish to live in Ukraine is free to cross the border into Russia, leaving their home and belongings behind them, and make a new life for themselves there.  Anyone remaining in the Ukraine is deemed a Ukrainian citizen and may be subject to investigation for war crimes, including the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, and/or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by hiding or destroying evidence at the crash site.

 

These measures, of course, run the real risk of spreading the conflict across the Ukrainian border and onto the world stage, but frankly the murderous downing of flight MH17 has done that already.  The victims of that terrible event, and their grieving relatives, deserve justice.  The US was quick to react after 9/11, even if a little misguided in launching a War of Terror that 14 years later has arguably failed and made the world a more dangerous rather than a safer place.  Obama, for all his faults, comes across as a more thoughtful and less gung-ho individual than Bush, but with a determination to seek and bring about the sort of justice required here.  I sincerely hope he has the courage to act strongly in this situation too. 

Putin, no matter what he and his apologists may say, is behind all that is happening in eastern Ukraine, including the downing of MH17.   The rest of the world must stand clearly against him and his regime, and stop the bloodshed. 

It must bring him to justice.