Speechless Incredulity, Putin!

"It's unbelievable but true. We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks."

"Those who hope to defeat Russia on the battlefield do not understand, it seems, that a modern war with Russia will be very different for them."

"We are not sending our tanks to their borders, but we have the means to respond. It won't be limited to the use of armoured hardware. Everyone must understand this." 

"Now, unfortunately, we see that the ideology of Nazism, already in its modern guise, in its modern manifestation, again creates direct threats to the security of our country."   

"Again and again we have to repel the aggression of the collective West."

"It's incredible, but it's a fact: they are threatening us again with German Leopard tanks with crosses painted on their armour."

"And they are again going to fight Russia on the territory of Ukraine with the hands of Hitler's followers, the Banderites [WWII-era Ukrainian nationalists/Nazi collaborators]."

Russian President Vladimir Putin

President Putin laid a wreath at the Mamayev Kurgan memorial complex in Volgograd   Reuters

"Now Russia is concentrating its forces. We all know that. It is preparing to try to take revenge, not only against Ukraine, but against a free Europe and the free world."  

"We must do everything we can together so that next year - on the first Thursday of February - we will be able to pray simply with thanks for the obtained salvation from evil."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Russian service members drive a tank during a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the victory of Red Army over Nazi Germany's troops in the Battle of Stalingrad during World War Two, in Volgograd, Russia February 2, 2023. REUTERS/Kirill Braga

When the German command was given its orders to launch a surprise attack against its erstwhile member of the German Axis it took Russia by surprise. Russia, after all, had signed a pact with Nazi Germany bringing it into the orbit of fascist Germany to fight against the West. The German march on Russia changed its order of business, taking Russia over to the Allied side of the Second World War. Russia's friendly relations with Germany came to a scudding halt. And its resistance against the German invasion led the Allied war effort on Europe's Eastern Front.

 

At an enormous cost of human life; millions of Russians and Germans both perished in their monumental and bloody conflict. So do we now consider Russia to have back then been a fascist nation allied with Nazi Germany? Communism, after all, and fascism do have much in common; both degrade the human spirit. Germany's National Socialism German Workers Party had much in common with Communism, both purporting concern for the welfare of their people, both oppressive dictatorships, both historically irenic. 

It's just that Germany had larger plans than Russia in its quest for domination. Russia was content to subjugate Eastern Europe; Nazi Germany's plan was the complete subjugation of the entire continent -- for starters. Nazi Germany fell first. It took quite a bit longer for the Cold War to conclude with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Hot War with Germany was dispensed with at an enormous cost of human life on a wider scale, not confined to the Russian interior.

A T-34 Soviet-era tank drives during a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the victory of Red Army over Nazi Germany's troops in the Battle of Stalingrad during World War Two, in Volgograd, Russia February 2, 2023. REUTERS/Kirill Braga

 

Germany has learned its lesson well; its state infrastructure, culture, and political system having undergone a massive helping hand mostly by the United States toward full recovery where its economy now leads that of all Europe; its ambitions to lead all of Europe forgotten. Whereas Russia at the split-up of the Soviet Union was unable to pull itself together and Moscow dreamed of returning to Soviet glory with Vladimir Putin at its helm.

Still a Communist state, still a fascist ideology. With Mr. Putin's throwing that detested word around as a dagger to smear any country that he believes has Russia's downfall in their to-do itinerary. So now Ukraine, anxious to join Western Europe in the European Union, and eager to become part of NATO, has become the Nazi state that Communist Russia must defeat lest its near presence infect Russia with fascist ideological threats and violence.

Pre-empting that paranoid illusion the Kremlin joined ranks with Vladimir Putin's ambitions to invade Ukraine just as Germany once did to Poland and France, spreading its occupation throughout Europe, while scheduling a bit of racist recreation in rounding up Jews, Roma, Seventh Day Adventists, Gays, the mentally and physically handicapped and political dissenters into slave labour camps and finally death camps. It was a gory, busy campaign for ambitious Aryan/Nordic-admiring Germany.

And here is present-day Russia accusing Germany of striving to re-visit history by once again invading Russian territory -- none other than the vast reaches of Ukrainian territory that Vladimir Putin has claimed as Russian territory. Of course this is strictly metaphorical; German battle tanks gifted to Ukraine to give it the opportunity to match occupying Russian tank numbers with an aim to shove the Russian military back into Russia. Aggressive, vicious Russia, relentlessly bombing Ukrainian infrastructure  and civilian enclaves.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Volgograd Region Governor Andrei Bocharov in Volgograd, Russia February 2, 2023. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS

 

Even Volga boatmen must be laughing at their histrionic president, calling out a country desperately attempting to defend itself from Russian drones, missiles and rockets hitting Ukrainian cities, apartment blocks, hospitals, kindergartens, shopping centres and power stations while Ukrainian citizens young and old freeze in the dark of winter and bewail the lack of clean, potable water, desperate medical shortages and growing food scarcity.

 

But there it is -- the hero of Russian aggression against former Soviet satellite states, envisions himself the second coming of Stalin-the-butcherer. He's made a good start by producing 8 million Ukrainian refugees scattered throughout Europe. Vladimir Putin the liberator of Ukraine. And his opponent,the Jewish President of Ukraine whom Putin labels fascist, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Nazi who heads a cabal of fascists threatening Russia.

 

Putin, who hisses to his European and North American detractors that this is a new era, and Russia is no pushover; threaten Russia and  you risk seeing its nuclear arsenal in action. Conventional warfare is a thing of the past; push Moscow too far, he sneers -- and risk the reality of a post-conventional conflict that will sear the world in bleak, black simmering ashes of destruction. Get the picture?

 

Russian nuclear missile Topol-M near the Kremlin