Putin is an asshole.

And everything else you need to know about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

FUKRs,

I was asked last week by a few different people when I would be writing about the Russia-Ukraine situation.  My initial reaction was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the subject.  “What’s there to say?” I thought to myself.  Putin is an asshole.  That’s really all you need to know, and it’s not a particularly enlightening insight.  It’s not very controversial either, and you know how I like to write things that will piss off at least somebody.

I’ll come back to the “Putin is a dick” angle in a bit, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue since last week -- mostly because it’s been wreaking havoc on my stock portfolio, which seriously threatens the future expansion plans of my sweater vest collection – and I’ve realized there’s a lot more to say than just “Putin is a dick.”

Let me start with the unpopular part, and get it out of the way.  I know you all think we are the good guys in this story.  If there’s one thing liberals and conservatives can usually agree on, it’s that the U.S. has never done anything wrong in international matters.  Our leaders fuel this myth, since it’s political suicide to be honest and critical about the bad things we have done in the world.  Our media doesn’t help much either.  They thrive on ratings, subscriptions, and re-tweets, so you aren’t likely to hear a mainstream news outlet telling you something you really don’t want to hear.

I guess you could say that we are the good guys here, in the sense that we are better than the assholes who invaded a sovereign neighbor – unprovoked – and started the most dangerous European land war since World War II.  In all fairness, you’re right – we are a lot better than the Russians.  But The Krich Report isn’t going to blow smoke up your ass and tell you that the U.S. is entirely without blame.

I’ll quickly summarize. 

Did the U.S. Secretary of State “kind of sort of” tell the Soviet Union, in 1990 when it was on the verge of collapse, that we did not plan to expand NATO eastwards beyond Germany?  Yes.  Was it a promise?  I guess that depends on who you ask.  We would say it was part of an informal diplomatic conversation.  We would also say that even if it were a promise, it was a promise to a country that, a year later, ceased to exist.  But it’s not hard to understand how Russia, the recognized successor to the defunct Soviet Union, would feel otherwise, and easy to see how they would feel threatened by having NATO troops in several newly-admitted member countries right on their border.

More importantly, has the U.S. been meddling in Ukrainian politics for at least the past decade?  Undeniably yes.  It’s debatable to what extent our efforts have actually influenced elections there, but it’s not debatable that we’ve been trying.  And if you’re asking yourself “So what?” just imagine if one of our neighbors, say Canada or Mexico, all of a sudden had a government that was cozy with Putin.

By the way, in case you’re getting all uppity about how it’s the “other party” that is guilty of all that… you’re wrong.  It’s both parties.  Obama, Trump, Bush, Clinton.  Our State Department meddled in Ukrainian politics under all of them.

Did we get greedy and overplay our hand?  Perhaps.  It’s hard to say what would have happened if we had left NATO the way it was and played more of an honest broker role in Eastern European politics.  My guess is that Putin, being the ruthless realpolitik that he is, would have seized that vacuum as an opportunity to expand his influence in the region, and we’d be in the exact same spot we’re in now.  Nonetheless, there’s an argument to be made – albeit a shaky one – that we brought this mess upon ourselves.

Ok, send the hate mail to no-reply@krichreport.com.

More tomorrow on what an asshole Putin is.