The time has come for good Russians to evict Vladimir Putin from office.
Russian generals, oligarchs, and the whole Russian citizenry should put him on trial for the crime of waging aggressive war.
Punish him accordingly and move on as a nation.
If Putin orders the use of nuclear weapons, everyone in the Russian chain of command needs to ignore the order, or they will face consequences that will last long after Putin is gone. Russia itself is not under territorial threat and will not be under threat. That will change if it uses nukes or attacks a NATO country — in that event, Russia will be obliterated. The way to avoid obliteration is to refuse to carry out an order to use nuclear weapons.
The situation in Europe is very simple today: Russian forces under the direction of an unstable and evil Putin are invading a peaceful, sovereign nation, a nation that is a cousin to Russia and would like to be friends with Russia, but that itself is not Russian. Putin’s troops are inflicting horrid damage while killing innocent civilians and destroying cultural treasures. These Russian forces, under the orders of Putin, are perpetrating an incontrovertible evil, all to satisfy Putin’s personal bloodlust and dreams of grandeur.
RUSSIA KILLS CHILD AND TWO OTHER CIVILIANS IN UKRAINIAN PRESCHOOL
Putin is acting not for the good of Russia, but for his own imagined place of respect in history books. Even there, he is deluded. Those annals would have rated him as a mediocrity; now they will label him a historic villain along with Pol Pot and Idi Amin. Like Benito Mussolini, he will be the great and apparently strong leader who became a joke — who was unceremoniously hanged by his heels for all the world to mock. The Russian people are better than Putin, and the world knows it. The world will also be much more merciful toward a Russia that defenestrates its tyrant.
Indeed, if the people and the oligarchs and generals force Putin from power and withdraw Russian armies from Ukraine, the rest of the world should reward them for it. If Russia exits Ukraine (including Crimea) and gives up the advanced nuclear weapons capacities it developed in violation of the INF treaty, and if Russia elects a leader who respects human rights and the international order, the free world should respond with generous, targeted aid to help Russia reconstitute and significantly vitalize its nonmilitary economy.
Russia can finally become the economic power it never has been. But that requires first giving up its outdated dreams of military conquest and hegemony. As citizens of an economic power unmoored from corrupt and despotic leadership, Russians can discover in truth the prosperity of the West and the decent life expectancy that so far has eluded them.
Right now, Putin is the most hated man on Planet Earth. He has well earned that enmity. Russians can show that they do not deserve the hatred directed at the bloodthirsty autocrat claiming to act in their name. Instead, they can let the world love them for their centuries of cultural splendor. Freed from the thug who now occupies the Kremlin, the Russian people can thrive.
