News
Analysis: Putin is likely to take Kerch bridge blast as a personal affront and respond viciously
The Kremlin is intent on exhibiting the assault 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 workforce to the positioning — however the harm to Russia’s status and, extra importantly, to the picture of Vladimir Putin, will not be that simple to restore.
That is his bridge, his undertaking, constructed with the equal of virtually $4 billion from the Russian treasury. It is a symbolic “wedding ceremony band” uniting Mom Russia and Ukraine, or not less than a area that also legally belongs to Ukraine, essential not solely to Putin’s conflict effort however to his obsession with bringing Ukraine again beneath Russia’s management.
Putin’s February twenty first tackle to the Russian folks, delivered simply earlier than he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, laid naked his warped view of historical past. Ukraine, he insists, will not be 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 non secular house.”
That speech, one of the revealing of his presidency, makes clear that this fratricidal conflict 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 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 conflict in Ukraine entered its fourth month, Putin once more in contrast himself to Peter the Nice, insisting that Peter, who conquered land from Sweden, was “returning” to Russia what truly belonged to it.
Putin now, apparently, believes that returning Ukraine to Russia is his historic future. He possible 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 more likely to reply viciously.
Already, a day after the assault, Russian forces are bombing civilian condominium 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 would possibly resort to utilizing tactical nuclear weapons. Army specialists say he might retaliate asymmetrically, hanging surprising 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 conflict, calling them “fifth column … nationwide traitors” in thrall to the West.
This Sunday, the day after the bridge bombing, he referred to as it a “terrorist assault” whose “authors, executors and masterminds” are the key companies of Ukraine…and “residents of Russia from international international locations.”
One factor is obvious: because the combating strikes nearer to Russia, Vladimir Putin sees his “historic mission” in jeopardy. And meaning feelings might outweigh motive. For Ukraine, for Russians who oppose the conflict, and for the world, this can be a harmful second.