Kudos to Mark Levin for posting on Twitter a fascinating piece by Professor Alexander Motyl on a new revelation about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to partition Ukraine way back in 2010. That was long before Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. If accurate, and there’s no good reason to doubt it, the report further underscores the utter absurdity of Putin’s claim that he invaded in February 2022 to halt Zelensky and company’s “Nazification” of Ukraine — an obviously ludicrous pretext strangely swallowed by American defenders of Putin.
As for Alexander Motyl’s analysis, first a few words on his credibility: Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University. An accomplished academic, he specializes in the politics of Russia, Ukraine, and the former USSR. He has published 10 books on topics from empires to nationalism to the horrors of Holodomor, the infamous famine forced upon Ukraine in the 1930s by Stalin. I have Motyl’s 2012 volume, The Holodomor Reader, which is a valuable work. He knows his stuff, and he watches what’s happening on an intimate level as an insider who knows the region, the language, the people, and the politics. He writes for the publication appropriately titled 19FortyFive, a tumultuous year in history.
In his latest piece, Motyl writes this: “Some people still believe that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin had no intentions to conquer Ukraine when he invaded on February 24, 2022. Sorry to be a spoiler, folks, but there is now concrete evidence of his wanting to partition Ukraine after his puppet Viktor Yanukovych became Ukraine’s president thirteen years ago—in 2010.”
That evidence is a March 13 interview with Oleg Tsarev, who Motyl describes as “an authoritarian par excellence and “a rabid admirer of Putin’s fascist regime.” When asked about a Russian scheme to partition Ukraine in 2014, Tsarev offered this information:
This was discussed much earlier. I’ll tell you something that I’ve never told anyone before. I held in my hands a document developed by analysts of the Party of Regions, which considered the scenario of Yanukovych’s lifelong presidency. [Viktor Yanukovych was president of Ukraine from 2010-14.] It was obvious that by building friendly relations with the Russian Federation it would be realistic to achieve economic growth and raise the standard of living. Two presidential terms, a change in the Constitution, two more terms…. And the only threat to the implementation of these plans was seen as Western Ukraine, which would always undermine the situation throughout the country and do everything to prevent such a scenario from being realized. And then a plan was drawn up according to which Tyahnybok [see below], who received money, including from the cash desk of the Party of Regions, would begin to advocate for the separation of a number of western regions into an autonomous entity that did not support the central government. Well, the central government would have to “reluctantly” agree. So, events could have gone like this.
This is quite a claim, the heart of which needs little elaboration. Professor Motyl adds these personal observations:
Several points need to be made.
First, Tsarev knows what he is talking about. As a high-ranking member of the Party of Regions and leading advocate of Russia’s plans to seize Crimea and the Donbas, he would have had access to the kind of document he mentions.
Second, the Party of Regions would not have dared to embark on such a plan without the approval of the Kremlin. The Party’s plan for dismembering Ukraine would have been Putin’s plan.
Fourth, Tsarev states that Oleh Tyahnybok, the head of the right-wing Svoboda (Freedom) party and the bogeyman of the Western left, was on the Party of Regions’ payroll. So much for Russian claims that Ukraine abounds with homegrown neo-Nazis.
Of course, none of this is a surprise. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
In his April 2005 annual state of the nation address to the Russian Parliament, broadcast live on Russian television, Vladimir Putin candidly declared: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” That spoke volumes. It should continue to speak to those odd-bird Americans who once loathed the USSR but today are borderline Putinists, queerly sympathetic to this brute Russian authoritarian trained by the KGB.
Motyl likewise recalls Putin’s April 2005 speech, but goes a step further, with a disturbing warning:
Finally, such elaborate plans aren’t developed overnight in the form of a Pauline conversion. Both Yanukovych and his henchmen and Putin and his surely began hatching their schemes many years earlier—no later than 2005, when Putin claimed that the fall of the Soviet Union was the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century,” and possibly as early as 1999, when Putin assumed control of Russia.
Is it unrealistic to believe that the Kremlin has prepared similar scenarios for Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan?
And perhaps even for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?
Perhaps so. And of course, those Baltic states are NATO countries.
The Tsarev revelation dates Putin’s partition plan to 2010. He moved against Ukraine in February 2014, seeking the annexation of Crimea. Again, that was long before Zelensky came to power. As Mark Levin says of this latest revelation by Tsarev, “but we already knew this.” Yes, we did.
The only people perhaps surprised by this are the weird brand of Putin defenders in the United States. They can’t blame this one on Zelensky and his alleged “Nazi” cronies that they portray as goose-stepping around Kyiv. Again, this long precedes Zelensky.
To be sure, does this mean that the United States should get dragged into a war with our troops fighting the Russkies in Ukraine? Of course not. As Levin further notes, “That doesn’t mean you send American troops willy-nilly into these areas, but it also doesn’t mean you sit on your hands and pretend nothing is going on.”
Precisely.
But it does mean, once again, that Vladimir Putin is the bad guy. He is the aggressor. He invaded a free and democratic country that was not threatening Russia. That’s what has been going on. Mad Dog Putin is a thug. He should have no apologists in the United States. Vlad’s actions in Ukraine in 2022–23 have been part of a long-term plan of annihilation to bring the territory back into the arms of Mad Dog’s Mother Russia.
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