1,000 Days Of War: More Than Ever, Putin’s “Evil Empire” Must Be Vanquished

-OpEd-

WARSAW — Negotiating with Russia will not cause Vladimir Putin to renounce his imperial ambitions. The Russian president’s goal is the destruction of the Ukrainian state and nation, and to redivide the world into spheres of influence, with a privileged position for Russia.

Exactly 1,000 days ago, the Kremlin criminal gave the order for a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and wounded — both on the front lines and in the barbaric attacks on Ukrainian cities and villages. Millions have fled their homes abroad or to the west of the country.

The war in the name of Putin’s imperial project and his entourage has been going on for 10 years. Yet it was only on Feb. 24, 2022 and in the following months that the world saw the Kremlin warlord’s goal and the methods he will use to achieve it.

A plan of extermination

“Russkiy mir,” the neo-imperialist concept of a “Russian world,” means mass bombings of civilian infrastructure and apartment blocks, the complete destruction of places like Avdiivka or Bakhmut, mass graves in the occupied areas in Mariupol or Izjum, and taking criminals and murderers out of prisons to send them to the front. It is the forced Russification of Ukrainian children deported to the imperial center of Russia and given to new families to be raised.

The main goal is not to gain territory — although that is also important in the Kremlin’s plans — but to destroy the Ukrainian elites, culture and language, to destroy an independent state that dared to break away from the Kremlin’s tutelage and boldly head West.

After all, as Putin himself claims, there is no such thing as a Ukrainian nation or language; it is Little Russia, which should be a Russian colony. That is why proscription lists were prepared in Moscow, on the basis of which selected Ukrainians were to be arrested and exterminated in 2022.

We must provide all possible assistance and weapons and allow them to be used in full.

Yes, Putin failed to blitzkrieg and occupy eastern Ukraine, from Kyiv to Kharkiv and Odessa, in three weeks. I myself wrote just before the 2022 invasion that the dictator would not send tanks because he knew that Ukraine was a completely different country after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

That it believed in the possibility of joining the world of full democracy and integrating with the European Union. That it had had enough of corrupt elites paid with Moscow’s petrodollars. That in spite of its many problems, among which corruption is still a huge factor, it had strengthened its own statehood and armed forces. And that if Putin decided to invade, it would be bogged down in the Ukrainian steppes for years.

I was wrong about the outbreak of war, but I was right that Ukraine would not be swallowed by Russia. It is still putting up effective resistance, and we — Poland and the entire Western democratic world — must do everything to support it. We must provide all possible assistance and weapons and allow them to be used in full. We can’t put Ukraine in the position of a man being attacked in a dark alley by a bandit with a gas pipe and demand that instead of defending himself, he keeps both hands behind his back.

Pipe dream

Only through decisive action can we stop Putin’s new “evil empire.” In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union, which had invaded Afghanistan and wanted to destroy the country, turning it into another colony, an “evil empire”. Ultimately, the Afghan war was one of the nails in the coffin of the communist colossus.

Back then, the world was divided into spheres of influence and bisected by the Iron Curtain. Putin would like to return to that.

He has repeatedly proposed a new arrangement to the West, led by the United States, in which Moscow would decide the fate of not only Ukraine, but also the Baltic states and Poland. In which it would impose whether a given country could be a member of NATO or not, or how large an army it should have and what it should be equipped with. The Kremlin argued that then peace would reign and the empire would not demand new conquests for itself.

Putin’s “evil empire” will fall if Ukraine is not defeated.

This is a pipe dream. Putin and his circle of power dream of rebuilding the “evil empire.” In 2005, the dictator called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. And he announced the “defense” of the Russian-speaking diaspora, which did not end up within Russia’s borders.

Look at his allies

Let’s not be naive; this is not about any “defense,” because no one is harming these people in Ukraine. This is just a pretext to justify aggression.

Today, Putin hopes that a new world order can be negotiated with players such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, future U.S. President Donald Trump, or the growing populists – Marine Le Pen in France and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). That it will be possible to persuade many weak and unstable politicians at the helm of power to do so.

Putin’s “evil empire” will fall if Ukraine is not defeated and no agreements are made to end the war over the heads of Ukrainian citizens and politicians in Kyiv. Because if it doesn’t, the empire will — sooner or later — come for us, too.