I ask readers’ pardon that I do not, now, dig back into newspaper history to confirm my memory of some things said on the Gazette’s opinion page.
I wrote, Vladimir Putin has not been coping well, which would indicate psychiatric difficulty. Terry Mollner wrote that people around Putin might help out. Someone else then wrote that Putin is not amenable to a “social intervention” (I think that was the term) and will only respond to a use of force.
It is always our response, to fight force with force. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked and asked for military help, and we are obliging; but when the Putin group digs in as I think they are doing then it becomes a question of how far will we take this thing? Will it become World War III? Must allied troops defeat the city of Moscow? And a question looms, of when would Putin think he had to carry through with his threats to use nuclear weapons?
I think we can’t really depend on people around Putin to help, any more than we could rely on Donald Trump’s cabinet to help with him. Putin has long surrounded himself with people who do things his way. In an effort to avoid imprisonment for war crimes, the Kremlin crowd could give Putin a taste of his own medicine by poisoning him; but then we might just get Nicolai Petrushev.
Let no one be impressed, I do not have these people straight; but Catherine Belton gives a good report of them in her book, “Putin’s People.” The book is a couple of years old, but the cast of Kremlin characters is still very largely the same.
My current hope is we might help in a positive way by countering a very cruel Russian strategy of seeking to coerce Ukraine into opening its ports to Russian attack.
Somehow, unbelievably, Ukraine’s farmers have product they need to get to market. I submit it is well worth the expense to us to make that happen. I suggest we start with airlifts.
Mary Hayden Hall
South Hadley