Once Tanks Roll It's Beginning Of The End For Putin

Chairman Mao, China’s revolutionary tyrant, declared that “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” That is the pitiless spirit that now motivates Vladimir Putin.

- Leo McKinstry

His increasing aggression against Ukraine is nothing more than a brutal exercise in military might and imperialist ambition. Infused with a sense of deranged megalomania after 20 years in charge of the Kremlin, he is willing to plunge eastern Europe into a bloodsoaked war in his quest to crush his neighbour’s independence.

So deranged is his hatred for Ukraine he has claimed that the country is “an artificial creation” without any “tradition of genuine statehood”, much as Hitler liked to claim that Czechoslovakia was not a proper nation, providing a pretext for his invasion in 1939.

Indeed, just as Hitler fomented the Czech crisis by the mass mobilisation of the German army and whipping up separatism in the Sudetenland, so Putin has undermined Ukrainian sovereignty by placing more than 200,000 Russian troops at the Ukrainian border and by fuelling internecine conflict in the disputed enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk.

His cynical recognition on Monday of these two self-proclaimed breakaway territories served as the precursor to bogus peace-keeping operations, which appear likely to be followed by occupation of Ukraine.