The Kremlin is intent on displaying the attack on the Crimea bridge wasn’t that severe and that the essential lifeline from the Russian mainland to the illegally-annexed Crimean Peninsula can be again to regular quickly.
The bodily harm could be restored — Russia instantly dispatched a big emergency staff to the positioning — however the harm to Russia’s status and, extra importantly, to the picture of Vladimir Putin, will not be that straightforward to restore.
That is his bridge, his undertaking, constructed with the equal of virtually $4 billion from the Russian treasury. It is a symbolic “marriage ceremony band” uniting Mom Russia and Ukraine, or no less than a area that also legally belongs to Ukraine, essential not solely to Putin’s warfare effort however to his obsession with bringing Ukraine again beneath Russia’s management.
Putin’s February 21st address to the Russian individuals, delivered simply earlier than he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, laid naked his warped view of historical past. Ukraine, he insists, just isn’t actually an impartial nation: “Ukraine is not only a neighboring nation for us,” he claimed. “It’s an inalienable a part of our personal historical past, tradition and religious house.”
That speech, probably the most revealing of his presidency, makes clear that this fratricidal warfare in opposition to Ukraine could be very private to him. For a few years he has been fixated on Peter the Nice, the Russian czar who based St. Petersburg, the town wherein Putin was born and raised. I as soon as visited the town administration workplace wherein Putin labored within the early Nineteen Nineties after he returned from his job as a KGB operative in East Germany. On the wall above his desk was a portrait of Peter the Nice.
In June of this yr, because the grinding warfare in Ukraine entered its fourth month, Putin once more compared himself to Peter the Great, insisting that Peter, who conquered land from Sweden, was “returning” to Russia what really belonged to it.
Putin now, apparently, believes that returning Ukraine to Russia is his historic future. He seemingly sees the galling assault on the Crimea bridge not solely as an assault on the Russian homeland, however as a private affront. And he’s prone to reply viciously.
Already, a day after the assault, Russian forces are bombing civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. Hardline supporters of Putin are urging extra strikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure. Western leaders warn that an more and more pissed off Putin may resort to utilizing tactical nuclear weapons. Army specialists say he might retaliate asymmetrically, placing sudden targets.
For years, Putin has had one other obsession: punishing traitors. One month after his forces attacked Ukraine, he threatened to retaliate in opposition to any Russians who opposed the warfare, calling them “fifth column … nationwide traitors” in thrall to the West.
This Sunday, the day after the bridge bombing, he called it a “terrorist attack” whose “authors, executors and masterminds” are the key providers of Ukraine…and “residents of Russia from international international locations.”
One factor is obvious: because the preventing strikes nearer to Russia, Vladimir Putin sees his “historic mission” in jeopardy. And which means feelings might outweigh cause. For Ukraine, for Russians who oppose the warfare, and for the world, this can be a harmful second.
