Putin Is A Problem

Russia handles bothersome political problems differently than we do in the United States. Putin just has his enemies killed and does so right in front of everybody on a main thoroughfare near the Kremlin.  Boris Nemtsov was the latest victim. I say latest because there are a string of deaths among the Putin adversaries. Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer, points to the untimely deaths of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko and others which meant that the FSB had returned to the old KGB practice of government-ordered political assassinations. Gordievsky himself was poisoned (but survived) in November, 2007.

But then, political assassinations in Russia are not limited to their current leaders. Leon Trotsky, the first leader of the Red Army and one of the founders of Marxist movement in Russia, fell out of favor with Stalin (always a bad thing) and ran all the way to Mexico to escape Stalin’s wrath. This was to no avail as he was attacked by an assassin with a short-handled mountaineer’s ice axe and died a day later. As a self-serving side note, the gulag where Trotsky was first held in Siberia was at Obdorsk, the location of my opening scene in The Borisov Dilemma.

The almost Rambo-ish tendency of Putin to literally go for the jugular is his distinguishing characteristic as a leader, and one that should always be reckoned with when dealing with him. Whether the task is left to the overstated shoot-down on the street, or the rather deftly orchestrated demise of Alexander Litvinenko who died a slow death due to polonium-210 poisoning, Putin must never be underestimated as to what he will do.  President Obama’s claim that “Putin is on the wrong side of history” is a hollow statement. The wrong side of history (and what does that actually mean when you try and parse the phrase) has no bearing to the people of Ukraine or Crimea. They live in the present and the Russian Army is in their face. Having a man like Barack Obama to face off with Putin really gives you confidence in our future, doesn’t it?