Michael Totten - Russia Quotes

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Rather than even considering membership in the European Union, Russia would view it as a sort of surrender, Putin is forging his Eurasian Economic Union instead. It so far consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. The European Union is somewhat decentralized. Germany and France have a lot of influence in decision-making, but no single nation dictates to everyone else. The Eurasian Economic Union, though, has Moscow in the cockpit with everyone else as junior partners or, as Kennan would have put it, vassals.

Michael Totten
Just north of Iran in Azerbaijan, which would be part of Iran today if Russia hadn't conquered it roughly 200 years ago, more than 99 percent of women dress like women everywhere else in the world. I spent a week there and saw fewer Islamic headscarves than I see in Seattle—just two during the entire week. I assumed the young women wearing them were probably foreigners. If they were locals, they were as far out of the mainstream as Zoroastrians are in America. There's a statue in the capital that shows a woman removing her headscarf. It has been there for more than 100 years.

Michael Totten
It's possible that Russia might take even Kiev if Putin thinks the response to seizing Crimea is sufficiently supine. I doubt it, personally, but I don't know that he won't. No one can know that. He wouldn't get much out of it, aside from a violent migraine, that he isn't already getting by invading Crimea. Ukraine can't fend off a full-blown Russian invasion, but it can make an invasion bloody and expensive. And what would Russians back home think? Ukrainians aren't their enemies. There is little hatred between these two closely-related peoples.

Michael Totten
Bullies drunk on power do reckless and unpredictable things sometimes, though, so the possibility of an all-out invasion—even if the odds are against it—can't be ruled out. So now what? The US and NATO are not going to declare war on Russia over Crimea or even Kiev, but that doesn't mean Putin can just barge in wherever he wants. It goes without saying that the invasion of a European Union or NATO country is over the line and would be resisted with force. Putin surely knows that already. Everybody in Russia knows that. What Putin does not necessarily know is whether or not the red line is closer to Moscow.

Michael Totten
Russian civilization was born more than a thousand years ago in Kiev in the medieval state of Kievan Rus. If that city ever gives the finger to Moscow once and for all and joins the EU and NATO, that would be something to see. It's why Russia cares more about Ukraine than the West does and will probably get what it wants. No one in charge of the fate of that country is asking what the Ukrainians want. They should, but they aren't and they won't. Such is the fate of the vassals of Moscow.

Michael Totten
There are various ways to signal a yellow if not a red. Retired Admiral James Stavridis shared a few ideas in Foreign Policy magazine. Michael Barone has more. Parking destroyers in the Black Sea off Yalta might be a good place to start. The U.S. sent ships to that region when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. The Russians didn't withdraw from occupied Abkhazia or South Ossetia, but at least they stopped where they were, withdrew from Gori, and left the capital Tbilisi alone.

Michael Totten
Whether we and the Ukrainians like it or not, Ukraine is still a buffer state within Moscow's sphere of influence. The US has little more leverage there than Russia has in Canada. And since ethnic Russians outnumber ethnic Ukrainians in the Crimea by more than two-to-one, a Russian invasion of that part of the country is a bit like a French invasion of Quebec—troublesome indeed, and infuriating to the capital, but different from, say, a North Korean invasion of Quebec. That's why Russia could take it without firing a shot and why nobody shot at the Russians.

Michael Totten
Trump said Russia and Assad are fighting ISIS in Syria, but it's not true. Russia is fighting in western Syria to prop up the Assad regime against rebel fighters while ISIS territory is in eastern Syria well outside Russia's theater of operations.

Michael Totten
Contrary to popular belief—and propaganda out of the Kremlin—neither the Assad regime nor Vladimir Putin's Russia are fighting ISIS. Their only concern is keeping the Arab Socialist Baath Party propped up in its rump state in Damascus and along the Mediterranean. ISIS still has a free hand to do whatever it wants out in the desert.

Michael Totten
Russia has long been a paranoid land power. It's huge, mostly flat, and wide open to invasion. Just to name a few examples, it was invaded by the Mongols in the 13th century, Napoleon in the 19th, Nazi Germany in the 20th, and has been recently squeezed by NATO expansion in the former Soviet bloc. These events seared themselves into the Russian psyche. They breathe better with buffer states.

Michael Totten
America is tired of being America, so Russia is being Russia again. While an exhausted and burned out United States wishes international migraines like the Syrian civil war would just go away, Russia is energized by the prospect of filling the vacuum and thus once again playing a major role on the world stage.

Michael Totten
Shockingly, only 32 percent of Millennials think it's absolutely essential that civil rights protect people's liberty. What on earth is going on? Partly it's a matter of historical experience. Those born in the 1930s were alive during Hitler's conquest of Europe. Those born a bit later have no memory of World War II, but they do remember Stalinist Russia, a more distant threat, but one that was still frankly terrifying. Those born later still have no memory of the darkest days of the Soviet Union, but they do remember the Cold War and the Berlin Wall.

Michael Totten
Would it be great if we could get along with Russia or reset relations? Of course. But it's not going to happen because there's not a damn thing you can to do change Russia's national interests or its centuries-long hostility toward its neighbors.

Michael Totten
Russia is not Belgium, and it is not Canada. It was one of only two superpowers until the Soviet Union imploded under the weight of its own belligerent imbecility, and it has been wallowing in a post-imperial funk, 'malaise' in Jimmy Carter's lexicon, ever since. It could theoretically regain some of its lost power as the West's partner, but being one of many is not how Russia rolls. Whenever Washington makes a friendly overture to Moscow, Russians interpret it the way Luke Skywalker heard Darth Vader say, between bouts of heavy mechanical breathing, 'Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son'.

Michael Totten
Russia is justifying its invasion of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by saying the ethnic Russians who live there are threatened by a nascent fascist regime in Kiev. The habits of Soviet propagandists die hard. What's really going on here is simple. Vladimir Putin, like most Russian leaders before him, feels he must shove his weight around the near abroad to maximize his power and influence in the thin buffer between him and the West. Now that he's without his vassal—mini-Putin, Viktor Yanukovych, is on the run—Moscow has to do the grunt work itself.

Michael Totten