Success. Am putting the world back in order. I have everyone’s attention. Yes, the West howls. It (yet again) threatens sanctions. But when it comes to the choice between money and principle, we in Moscow know that the commercial interests in the West make politicians there dance like puppets. The daily stream of finger-wagging pronouncements is proof of the West’s impotence in the face of facts (and tracks and boots) on the ground.
We are used to sanctions and have prepared for more of the same. We have built up our foreign currency reserves to $650 billion. Our banks—likely the first to be hit with sanctions—have been diligent since December in bringing $5 billion back to Russia. And the world will continue to buy our oil and gas. Sanctions mean little. They won’t deter Russia from its far more important task, which is to right an historic wrong. Even the former US president agrees with me on this.
What next? I enjoy it when the world guesses as to where I will make it respect Russian might next. It will be no surprise to those who listen to me carefully that our recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics is the beginning, not the end. I note with satisfaction breathless media speculation as to whether our forces will take the rest of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. To protect Russia’s security, the need to cross the line of contact is self-evident.
But to secure Donetsk and Luhansk will never, by itself, be enough to teach the criminal fascist-revanchists in Kiev the lesson they need to learn, which is that, to the extent a Ukraine exists at all, it is at the discretion of Russia. To ensure that that lesson is imprinted on the consciousness of every living Ukrainian, history compels Russia to act decisively in defending itself and restore to it its ancient lands and the Russian people who live there.
For that reason, I have instructed the Russian military to dust off plans for liberating Ukraine from its lawless bandits. Those plans call for the seizure of all Ukrainian territory east of the Dnepr, including the eastern half of Kiev. One obvious benefit is to bring the Sea of Azov entirely within Russian territory. Another, which amuses me, is that Ukraine will no longer have to break its head over how to get around our control of the Kerch Strait.
However, even those plans are weak tea. History favors the bold. Accordingly, I have asked my military leaders to prepare plans to reduce Ukraine to the nine western oblasts. This will reduce that entity from 603,00 sq. km (233,000 sq. mi) to 181,000 (70,000 sq. mi), and from 42 million people to 13 million. A month after we have evicted the revanchists from Kiev, the West will no longer care in any meaningful way. It will be business as usual, no matter the rhetoric to the contrary.
The new border between Russia and Ukraine will be the line running north/south between the oblasts of Kiev and Zhytomyr/Vinnitskaya, Cherkasy and Vinnytskaya, Kirovograd and Vinnytskaya, and east/west between Odessa/Vinnitskaya. This will protect Russia’s south by cutting off Ukraine from the Black Sea. We will retain Russian forces in Belarus (and infiltrate others into Moldova if the fascists force us to do so). The world will accustom itself to this new reality as it did with Crimea.
Some of my military leaders dare to express doubts about this. They argue (mildly) that it goes too far, that it will make Russia a pariah state. My response: the world has disrespected Russia since the end of the USSR. It only respects force. Did the Americans heed Russia’s advice against the invasion of Iraq? Yet decades after they created enduring madness in the Middle East, it is Russia, not the US, who is said to be violating international law?
Some also insist that the forces we have placed in readiness along Russia’s border with Ukraine are insufficient for the mission I propose. All the more reason to be bold. Our Speznaz will take Kiev easily. Why? Because our people have long been in place in government institutions there. And because Ukrainians will not want mass civilian casualties. Certainly, there will be the foolhardy few whom we’ll need to extinguish. But the rest will go quiet and resign itself, or flee westward.
Once we have Kiev, all that’s left is mopping up. We have the means to liquidate from the air whatever opposition our forces encounter outside the cities. By mid-year, our forces will have destroyed all meaningful partisan activity precisely because we will not have taken half-measures. The more territory we take, the greater our freedom of operation and the fewer places for the terrorists to hide. In one stroke I will have undone decades of Russian humiliation.
