A Brief Anatomy of Ukraine. Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

Why Did Putin Invade Now? (Continued)

We have seen why Putin did not trust Trump to be silent if he invaded Ukraine. Here are ten reasons why Biden assured him of a flabby response to an envisioned invasion.

• Biden appeared doddering, non compos mentis, and mentally enfeebled. His diminished state suggested (to a similarly physically ailing) Putin that Biden would not be a strong leader when challenged by an existential crisis.

• Biden had fled from Afghanistan in ignominy. Putin agreed that it was unwise for any major power to be there, given the Russian debacle years earlier. But he also knew Russia had still left in order and on its own terms. Biden simply scrammed, humiliating America and its NATO allies who were cast adrift to fend for themselves. If he was scared of the medieval Taliban, would he not be terrified of a nuclear Russia? If he treated friends like enemies, would he not treat enemies like friends?

• Biden abandoned some $70-80 billion in military equipment to the terrorist Taliban, a $1-billion embassy, and a $300-million-retrofitted huge Bagram air base. Then Biden blamed his own generals for his own self-created debacle—the humiliating flight predicated on Biden’s own planned 20^th-annivesary of 9/11 boast that he alone got America out of Afghanistan. Putin assumed that if the U.S. cared nothing for billions of dollars’ worth of its own equipment, its honor, its name, its loyalty to its allies, and the dangers of a rearmed Taliban, why then would he care about Ukraine?

• Biden, Putin concluded, had commissared his military in a way all too familiar to the old Soviet Putin himself. But whereas Putin felt he had militarized the Russian armed forces with new weapons and nationalist ideology, Biden, he conjectured, had “awakened” the Pentagon to chase phantoms of “white supremacy,” to pay for transgendered surgeries, and to promote on the basis of diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than military lethality. Putin thus envisioned the once feared U.S. military as a fast-track agency of social change.

• Biden begged Putin to rein in his hackers and to put 16 U.S. “entities” off-limits to such attacks. A mystified Putin no doubt assumed that if Biden did not mind some hacking of U.S. agencies and institutions, then he would not mind some Russians going into some parts of Ukraine. Or as Biden himself would later put it: a “minor incursion” would likely earn only a muted response.

• Biden had earlier begged Putin to pump more oil. Putin again likely concluded that if the U.S. would not pump more from its own huge natural gas and oil reserves and instead would beg its ostensible enemy to do what Americans would not, why then would they care if he invaded Ukraine and the world oil price spiked?

• Biden dropped Trump sanctions against the Nord Stream II pipeline into Germany from Russia. Why would Putin fear Biden’s response to his invasion, if he had earlier greenlighted Crimean-occupying Russia making billions off German and American green mania? In Putin’s mind, Western greens were both crazy and in control of the energy policies of the West, to such a degree that he willingly had sent greens money to oppose fossil fuel development.

• Biden sought to block the EastMed natural gas line into southern Europe, a joint Cypriot, Greek, and Israeli pipeline project. In the same fashion that Biden had cancelled the Canadian–American Keystone pipeline, so too he tried to obstruct EastMed. Putin must have rationalized that if Biden treated his enemy Putin’s pipeline projects better than he did his own pipelines and those of his allies, why would he care whether Russians went into Ukraine?

• Biden as Vice President had demanded that Ukraine fire a prosecutor looking into his own son Hunter’s illicit grifting with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Such skullduggery is, of course, second nature to Putin, one of the world’s most corrupt and richest leaders. Just as he had experience with those cronies who had tried to leverage him for their beneficence, so too he assumed that Biden too was compromised—a fact likely known by Moscow’s own Russian intelligence services. Accordingly, Biden might, Putin must have wagered, be afraid to respond forcefully against those who knew the extent of his own family’s corruption.

• Biden’s team right from the start had been humiliated by China during the Anchorage American–Chinese mini-summit in early 2021. Biden’s family syndicate was profit-mongering with the Chinese in the fashion that it had with Ukraine. To Putin, appeasing China, being compromised by the Chinese, and hating Trump who had gone to economic war with the Chinese all cemented the portrait of an American president every bit as unprincipled and opportunistic as himself. And thus Biden, Putin thought, would not see any reason to deter Putin in the manner that he had never thought of deterring China.

Add it all up. The only mystery is why Putin did not invade Ukraine even earlier. Far from being reckless, Putin was a known conniver who acted boldly only when the odds were clearly in his favor. Thus, he patiently waited for 13 months until the entire, nearly unbelievable portrait of Biden’s full appeasement and weakness emerged.

After all, when did Putin ever receive—or even dream of—such an unsolicited gift from America?

To be continued with why and how Putin misjudged the Ukrainians…