What does a country governed by a dictator and his sycophants like Russia do when it is in chaos? Act more chaotically.

 

Reports are that a Russian-made missile zoomed with a horrifying “whoosh” into Poland, landed in a farm causing a huge explosion and a crater, and killing two Poles:

 

There was a rather rapid “investigation” as to who is responsible for launching the missile; it might be a “mistake” and no one on the NATO side wants to get “carried away” with assuming Russia is responsible for a deliberate attack on a NATO member just to see how the West reacts—or not. I mean, arming Ukraine is one thing; but actually taking up arms against the Russians is another thing entirely. Thus it was most "convenient" when it was determined that it was a stray Ukrainian missile, although to be honest if it was, it was headed in the wrong direction, in the same direction as the other Russian missiles in their latest mass attack on civilian targets.

The West doesn't want the chaos in that part of the world to mess-up their lives. I was stationed in West Germany when the James Bond film Octopussy came out, which had a deranged Russian general claiming the West would fall instantly to a blitzkrieg invasion initiated by a nuclear strike on a U.S. Army base, because the West was “decadent and divided.” I can tell you the Reagan administration was perceived as making so much noise about such a “threat” that one of the German news magazine had a cover story of Reagan…

 

…no, that’s not it…

 

…that ain’t it either. but Germans should know one when they see one (Trump's paternal grandfather immigrated from Germany to avoid the military draft)…

 

…well,  I can’t find it, but you get the idea of how people actually on a likely battlefield might be thinking at the time, with Reagan in a fox hole with a helmet and rifle, his Cold War rhetoric at least fanning the embers of  World War III. Still, I didn’t know anyone who wanted to take the possibility seriously, and I don’t think the typical German did either as long as we were providing most of their defense.

Of course today is different. The Russians were certainly embarrassed by the fact that their support of the Serbs was a just a paper tiger as NATO airstrikes  took care of business. But things are different now. Now it is the Russians who are directly the aggressors, and they have nuclear weapons that Putin and his allies have been “teasing” about actually using. It is increasingly clear that there seems to be no real “middle ground” to end the Ukraine war; Ukraine wants Russian forces out of the country and all its territory restored, and of course Putin knows he is finished if he does that. I mean, how is he going to explain to the Russian people that probably a 100,000 Russian troops have been killed or maimed so far for no reason?

Right now there doesn’t seem to be many voices in the Russia government calling for an end to war that was a mistake, although on the ground there are people who are now expressing their anger to military commanders as they see off their loved ones being forced into the meat grinder, or are quite happy to speak to a BBC reporter in English that the war has to stop and the “dictator” removed from power…

 

…although such voices are merely portrayed in Russia as a few “rebellious” youth or those not sufficiently “patriotic.” The people you do hear in public forum are crazed people who come out of the woodwork demanding full mobilization and nuke Western capitals. The warmongers in the government, the military and the media who believed a quick victory was afoot are no doubt frightened of their own hold on their current positions, since they all have deceived or claim to be deceived.

So in Russia people act the way you would expect them to when they know their lives are in in danger—as they have seen many supposed “powerful” oligarchs lose their lives under “mysterious” circumstances. They publicly embrace ever more insane measures to save the situation and thus themselves. What is happening in Ukraine with the latest mass missile attacks could be a way to cause the same amount of damage as a tactical nuke strike, although in practice it seems almost a “subconscious” effort to commit wholesale genocide.

Throw in everything and the kitchen sink to “win” the war seems to be the belief, because the alternative is defeat. So what if that leaves Russia in a shambles if that is what it takes. If it takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers lives—more in literally a few months in Ukraine than in the entire decade of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan—it must be done.

Human life—even Russian life—is expendable, and Putin has been accused of such in the past. In the 2002 theater and the 2004 Beslan school hostage cases, most of the Russian civilians who were killed were by the actions of Russian security forces; 80 percent of the hostages in Beslan were killed by “random” fire from Russian security, which one observer called “a chilling portrait of the Russian leadership and its total disregard for human life.”

Having “the dictator removed from power” unfortunately will not stop the madness, as Lili Bayer recently wrote in Politico, noting that “Vladimir Putin out of power will bring its own brand of chaos: a Shakespearean knife-fight for power; unleashed regional leaders; a nuclear arsenal up for grabs.” Putin started all of this, and as can be expected when chaos results, he is no longer in control of the situation. The only way to stop this is if Russians decide that enough Russians have been killed to no purpose, or they kill all Ukrainians willing to resist—or if the West decides it has done what it can and can’t do more.

Chaos can bring either one of two things: more chaos, or deciding that to stop what is causing the chaos. Either way, nothing that makes any sense could be seen to come out of it.