Putin implements Russian oil ban to countries that capped prices
Fox News correspondent Nate Foy has more on Putin's latest move and Russia's ultimatum ahead of potential peace talks on 'Special Report.'
In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a young St. Petersburg student, Rodion Raskolnikov embarks on a murder spree to validate his pride. His motivation is simple—he seeks to be exceptional in the same way that Napoleon was exceptional. But, after confessing to his crimes and being dispatched to Siberia, Rodion experiences a spiritual metamorphosis and repents for his sins.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Kremlin, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, KGB killer and former Mayor of Dostoyevsky’s own St. Petersburg, is pondering the impacts of his 300-day special military operation. But there is no chance for a Rodion-like redemption here.
Putin believes he is the reincarnation of Russia’s Imperial and Soviet past. There is no crime, no matter how horrible, that warrants reflection much less redemption when that crime is committed for the advancement of the Russian state. Rodion saw himself as Bonaparte; Putin believes he is the reincarnation of Peter the Great, Alexander I, and Stalin. Peter the Great built cities and opened his country to European thought and mores. Tsar Alexander marched into Paris after vanquishing Napoleon. Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe and terrorized the planet. Putin’s ethno-messianism however may be putting Russia on the road to oblivion.
Review the bidding. Putin has blown up apartment buildings in Moscow, shot down planes, waged numerous wars on his neighbors, engineered the assassinations of rivals across the globe including dozens of oligarchs last year who kept falling out of hotel and hospital windows. Like Stalin he has turned the Russian Orthodox leadership into flaks for the state so much so that Pope Francis admonished the Patriarch of Moscow for being Putin’s "altar boy." The Russian economy is wrecked and unlikely to recover for decades.
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR: MORE BLOODSHED TO COME WITH NO END IN SIGHT
He has waged a war of human extermination on Ukraine and in so doing lost twice as many troops in a year than did America in a decade in Vietnam. Six million refugees have flooded the borders of Eastern Europe and perhaps three million Ukrainians—primarily women and children—have been dispatched to Russia for reeducation. The Ukrainian War has left behind trails of crimes not seen on this scale in Europe since 1945.
Putin has been outfought and outgeneraled by a smaller nation led by a man whose profession was once the comic stage. Moscow’s depots of tanks and artillery are gone, and Putin’s planes dare not fly over Ukraine’s battlefields. His penal colonies have been emptied and the "freed" criminals told to charge into battle or be shot by the security services. Putin has let loose two mercenary armies—the Wagner Group and Chechen killers—who operate free from the orders of the Russian General Staff and international Geneva norms. His regular soldiers are deserting. They have no winter gear. The Russian people know this, and Putin’s "Holy Russia" propaganda is no longer believed. One visual that captures this is Russians seeking to leave Russia during the mobilization
The Russian high command is exposed as gangsters, racketeers, and yes-men. This is a cabal that with each defeat resembles more and more the cast of psychopaths and dead-enders who stuck it out with Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Bunker. Like Hitler, Putin now seeks refuge with the world’s pariahs—in this case Iran and North Korea. Shockingly for him, China has not come to his rescue, and he has received the back of the hand from the leaders of India and Turkey.
Once dismissing Europe as a spent force, Putin’s brutality has rearranged the continent’s map. Russia’s northern forces are now staring directly across at the modern and highly capable armies of Finland and Sweden, whose countries have emerged from a neutral slumber to challenge their ancient enemies. He will have a hard time defending decisions to Russian posterity that led to the revitalization of NATO with Poland now assuming a leadership role once coveted by Germany and reinforced the primacy of the Anglo-American alliance (no matter how indifferent the Biden Administration is to the historic ties between Washington and London as the most reliable lasting bulwark against global tyranny).
Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels famously called the Russian Empire a "prison of peoples." Ronald Reagan pointed to the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world." If the West stays the course and that is not a given with the Biden administration and an appeasement chorus in Berlin and Paris, Putin’s legacy will be an impoverished third world Russia. It is ironic the imperialist dreams of the small-time policeman might lead to the final death knell of the Russian/Soviet Empire. Dostoyevsky would have known the type.