Russia can be driven from Ukraine, but victory over this murderous regime ends only when the murderers are thrown before courts for prosecution. For that, regime change is needed in Russia.
While he didn’t live to see it, hopefully Gorbachev’s dream of a world without nuclear weapons is realized once this regime is gone.
How likely is this? Some are suggesting that Russian conscripts will rebel and overthrow the regime like in World War 1… the problem is they probably read a Wikipedia article or heard some YouTuber tell a very inaccurate story of the events of the Russian revolution. They got many of the details wrong or left out. The situation in current Russia is not close to the same as I the state of Russia in the revolutionary years.
WW1 was far from the only cause of the fall of the Czardom.
The Russian Empire had been fracturing for a century, terrorist groups and violent protests breaking out during the 1800s and up to the world war. World War 1 just intensified the stress: a land of suffering, women running households and supporting the Russian army at home, their husbands dying abroad.
1917, the middle of winter. Food was running out in St. Petersburg, and so the Czarist government implemented rationing of scraps. The February Revolution didn’t break out among the conscripts, but starving and desperate women struggling to get through hours and hours of lines just to get scraps of bread, oats, and potatoes. Strikes broke out across the city, and they quickly turned violent. The garrisoning troops, began abandoning and joining the protesters. What happened in Russia then is more akin to what’s happening in Iran today, rather than what’s happening in Russia today.
The Czar abdicated as a result of the chaos that erupted. Would Putin do the same?
Either way, the provisional government took over: not any better than the Czar.
They eventually made a deal to rule alongside the Communists, but this was unsatisfactory.
It was in October that the Communists rebelled. A five year civil war followed, and unscrupulous leaders murdered and destroyed their opponents in what ways they could. Millions died, tens of millions suffered.
The difference today is that if history repeats itself there are thousands of nuclear weapons at play. Think of those in the hands of unscrupulous rogue commanders. We’ve seen what ISIS did with hammers, AK47s, and homemade bombs.
The best thing to do is hope for sanity to come to Russia. Sanity and a sense of justice. That those ordering and executing the atrocities are thrown into the prisons they deserve to be in. But that’s just the beginning. The only way to end the nuclear threat to Ukraine, permanently, is to end it across the world… and that includes convincing North Korea.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
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