Mike
MikeIt’s not because Putin doesn’t want to take a break from the war, it’s because he can’t. Why? Because he knows Russian history not from school textbooks, but from real life.
For example, in 1825, the return of Russian troops after their victory over Napoleon led to an anti-tsarist uprising known as the Decembrist Revolt.
In 1905, Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War sparked the first Russian Revolution.
The mass desertion of Russian soldiers from the Russian-German front during World War I led to the February Revolution of 1917 and the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II.
Lenin’s March 1918 peace treaty with Germany allowed the Bolsheviks to execute the entire tsarist family.
The return of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 marked the beginning of the USSR’s collapse.
Knowing this, Putin cannot end the war with Ukraine and bring his troops home. Only the opportunity in May 1945 to leave his entire army in Europe as an occupying force helped Stalin avoid a postwar coup. Putin, Stalin’s heir, dreams of occupying Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Finland and Poland, to keep his army away from Moscow. He remembers the 525,000 soldiers who returned from Afghanistan in 1989 and turned into “Afghan” bandits who terrorized the entire USSR population. Recently, in June 2023, just 5,000 rebellious Wagner Group soldiers left the Ukrainian front. Led by their commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin, they nearly stormed Moscow.
