ArcaMax

MOSCOW — Unlike most folks here in Russia, who follow domestic American politics about as much as Americans care about the price of parking in Moscow, I subjected myself to U.S. President Joe Biden’s assessment of the current state of America. Which apparently also now includes Ukraine, Europe, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” Biden said. Just a few sentences earlier, Biden said that, “Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe.” Well, that’s subtle. Might want to just leave Hitler chillin’ on the bench of history right now, guys. If only because as part of the US-backed scheme to train Ukrainians to take on Russians, Canada was already on record as voicing concerns in 2018 about Azov battalion trainees sporting Nazi symbols, as the Ottawa Citizen reported in 2021.

Then the US allies drew attention to a similar inconvenient reality, when Canada’s parliament honored and cheered a bona fide World War II Nazi from Ukraine’s Galicia Division of Hitler’s Waffen-SS last fa ll, in the fist-pumping presence of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, all because he killed Russians back in the day. We’re talking about the same Soviet Red Army Russians who just happened to be our allies against Hitler. But that history has now been erased to the extent that an overtly anti-fascist Russian president who has literally cited “de-nazification” of the West’s trained neo-Nazi fighters in Ukraine as one of his two prime operational objectives in Ukraine, is now being likened to Hitler by the current Oval Office occupant.

The guy who wants to ban TikTok inside the US said that “freedom and democracy are under attack” — overseas. Biden also said that “if anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you: He will not.” Shortly thereafter, Biden said of the NATO military alliance that has expanded right up to Russia’s border since the end of the Cold War, that “we’ve made NATO stronger than ever,” calling it “the strongest military alliance the world has ever seen.” But apparently, Biden figures that it’s not so strong that Putin won’t hesitate to just walk right onto its turf and punch it square in the face. As Biden himself might say, “Pick a lane, man.”

Putin’s still in Russia’s own backyard, actually — unlike Biden, who’s long treated Ukraine like an outpost of the State Department on the other side of the planet. As vice president in 2015, Biden cheered US-backed regime change in Ukraine. “You’ve forced out a corrupt leader to win another chance at democracy,” is how he framed the coup.

“Ukraine is fighting for its future on the battlefields of the East,” Biden said nearly a decade ago of helping Ukraine to gin up conflict with Russia on its own border, and already justifying “security assistance.”

And Putin isn’t really the one making chaos in Europe, either. Rather, Europe is making chaos for itself in an effort to constantly one-up itself with its own pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian virtue signaling. It cut itself off from Russian pipeline gas, but then increased imports of Russian liquified natural gas by 40 percent over pre-war levels, as a Global Witness report found last year.

More recently, Brussels has been paying lip service to Kyiv’s demands to cut itself off totally from the remaining 15 percent of Russian pipeline gas that it’s still importing, all while neglecting to explain exactly how Ukraine — which the EU has committed to financially supporting at its taxpayers’ expense — will power itself, particularly at the same cost, when Ukraine’s own gas supply comes from Russian gas transited across its territory and then reverse-flowed back from Europe.

Also, just last week, the EU’s trade committee voted to extend free trade for Ukrainian farm products being dumped into the EU to the detriment of the bloc’s own farmers. Yet it was Putin himself who gave the heads up as far back as 2022 that the Ukrainian produce that Brussels promised to deliver to the world’s poor if Putin would only let it out of the Black Sea region, was actually just ending up being dumped inside the bloc itself. “Almost all the grain exported from Ukraine is sent not to the poorest developing countries, but to EU countries,” Putin said in September 2022.

It’s a statement which, although now proven true, was dismissed by Kyiv. “The Russians’ fakes about sending Ukrainian grain only to Europe simply do not correspond to reality,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said. Guess all those tractors blocking highways across Europe are “fakes”, too.

“Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons that it needs to defend itself,” Biden said, clearly referencing the Republicans’ refusal of more financing for America’s weapons manufacturers so they can crank out more stuff for the Russians to blow up. US officials assured a year ago that Kyiv had everything it needed for the counteroffensive. But as they say, 25th time’s the charm, right?

“I say this to Congress: We have to stand up to Putin,” Biden said. “Send me a bipartisan national security bill. History is literally watching.” Sounds like a telethon for the American outfits making the weapons that Ukrainians will carry onto the battlefield — at least until they run out of Ukrainians. Forget about what Russians might think, and be more concerned with the fact that this kind of tone-deaf propaganda isn't going to win over any Americans or Westerners still even remotely capable of independent, critical thought.