....So he history-revisioningly says:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was ready to put the country's nuclear forces on alert as he sought to annex Crimea last year after the fall of a Moscow-backed government in Kiev....
From extracting and saving fallen p[uppe]t Viktor Yanukovych's life to orchestrating a military intervention, Putin was personally involved step-by-step in the events that were ....an illegal occupation.
And unsure whether the West would intervene militarily to stop the annexation, he was ready to face "the worst possible turn of events."
Asked whether Russia was ready to put its nuclear forces on alert, Putin said: "We were ready to do this."
This is hindsighted melodrama, folks. Remember this about Vladimir Putin: He is Soviet Socialist "old school". The reason why the Evil Empire never initiated a nuclear exchange with the United States is that they never got to a place where they were 100% convinced they could "win" one. Commies are wily and rationalist to the core, and consequently cautious to a fault. If Stalin or Khruschev or Kosigyn or Brezhnev or Andropov or Chernyenko or Gorbachev had thought at any point that they could have taken us with "acceptable" losses to themselves, they'd have done so. None of them ever did, so they didn't.
But recall this also: That was in the context of world conquest. Not a single small peninsula, no matter how "historically Russian" it might be considered over there. So was Crimea so important to Czar Vlad that he was really prepared to escalate to the strategic nuclear level if necessary? Hardly. Any more than he believed that the West truly might militarily intervene on Ukraine's behalf. He took the measure of Barack Obama years ago, don't forget, and that the Euros are impotent poseurs has been universal knowledge for decades. To say nothing of being heavily dependent upon Russian oil and natural gas exports to the Continent, and O being completely unwilling to supplant Moscow as the EU's energy supplier.
So this grave "statesman's boast" is merely the interview equivalent of Putin oiling himself up and wrestling with his Siberian tigers for the cameras again.
He said he fielded many calls from foreign leaders and told them "that this is our historical territory and Russian people live there, they were in danger, and we cannot abandon them."
"It was a frank and open position. And that is why I think no one was in the mood to start a world war."
If Vlad had thought that an actual possibility, the Crimea would still be in Ukrainian hands today. He knew he had a completely free hand to do whatever he wanted, and that's exactly what he did, humiliating Barack Obama in the process, all the more so since the latter is incapable of realizing it. And remember Commissar of State John Kerry's remark a year ago about this being the twenty-first century and Putin's being "nineteenth century behavior"? I beg to differ; he could have sent his guards tank armies smashing across the Ukrainian border and overrun the country in a matter of a few weeks. That would have been "nineteenth century," and even early- to mid-twentieth, for that matter. Instead, Vlad has psy-oped his slow-motion conquest with this "We're only coming to the rescue of ethnic Russians being cruelly oppressed by evil Ukrainians" codswallop. And it's worked like a charm, as he has never been more popular at home while the magnitude of his provocation has never even gotten on the foreign policy radar screen of a West that put that radar screen in mothballs years ago.
But that truth makes for a rather dull interview topic. And so Vlad remained astride his psy-op mount and rode the Narrative "forward".
One other way to look at this whole thing is that the Russian strongman was "testing the waters" for forcibly "getting the Soviet Socialist band back together" in his country's "near abroad," at least the European portion of it. Ukraine would be the first domino (or, rather, the second, but Belarus rejoined the neo-USSR a number of years ago), to be followed by the Baltic States, and then the Warsaw Pact countries, and voila! Vlad is on the Oder River, if not yet the Elbe, the Danube, and the east side of the Adriatic (where resides a large Slavic population, remember). And all it would take to seal the already-existent moribundity of NATO would be rolling up even just Estonia (Latvia and Lithuania would fall in line quickly, kind of like the Chipmunks to Alvin). And with NATO dead and buried, what would stand in the way of Mr. Putin winding up on the Atlantic coast staring across the proverbial pond at his next object of "frank and open position"?
One would like to think that we would drop our stubborn pacifist delusions at some point and begin resisting this neoSoviet march at some place on this continuum before Vlad becomes so emboldened that his use of nuclear weapons actually becomes a possibility. But that isn't for what We, The People twice voted.
And besides, it would make a really dull interview topic.
Exit question: Did Adolph Hitler start off by blitzkrieging across Europe? Or did he begin slowly, one piece of occupied Germany, and then one small, nearby country, at a time, citing the "oppression" of....ethnic Germans? Sounding familiar yet?
UPDATE: The next bona fide escalation?:
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared in public Monday for the first time since March 5th, brushing off speculation about his health a few hours after he ordered nearly 40,000 troops to be put on full alert as part of snap readiness exercises.
The target? Ukraine's tenth largest city and major economic hub of Mariupol....
....which has the misfortune of sitting astride the most direct route of supply and land contiguity with Crimea, to say nothing of being already functionally surrounded.
Depending upon Vlad's timetable, he may content himself with a siege....
....but those forty thousand additional crack Russian troops suggest that said timetable may be about to accelerate - especially if they're not headed for Ukraine.
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