Putin Wants Alaska Back?!

Around four months ago, during a dreary February, I began writing an op-ed about Putin. What was he up to with Ukraine? What was he doing and why? After studying and considering Russian History and Putin’s probable game plan for restoring his country’s 21st Century royal yet fascist oligarchy, I came up with an interesting theory.

But what I’d concluded was so preposterous, so bizarre, so downright wacky, I couldn’t post what I’d written, I just couldn’t. It was just too scary to read, let alone post on social media with all the other goofy conspiracy theories. After watching and reading various reports from Ukraine, however, it seems my ideas weren’t so wacky. That’s why I’m finally posting it here, dear readers.

Let’s face it: Putin doesn’t just have the demeanor as a displaced and disgruntled Tsar, he’s actually trying to be another one of those mad and unpredictable tsars from Russia’s yesteryear. Forget all those impressions of him as a strongman or evil dictator, he’s really a sociopath trying to channel — then become — Ivan the Terrible. No, he may not be cutting out the tongues of his enemies or gouging out their eyes or impaling them, but he’s certainly been cruel enough to relentlessly wage war on unarmed civilians, especially the young and the elderly.

To my surprise, a lot of other people are now thinking about him in the same way I do. It’s as if the zeitgeist, or spirit of the air, is now undeniably blowing free and clear throughout the world. Now even Fareed Zakaria and I are on the same wavelength…Well, kind of.

While we both believe Putin is trying to restore the Russian Empire to its former glory, he thinks Putin is acting like a Tsar but I think Putin actually believes God and The Russian Orthodox Church want him to be the next Tsar to rule Russia.

No, I didn’t watch Zakaria’s special “Inside The Mind of Vladimir Putin” when it first aired. But I did tune in to CNN when it was repeated (last Saturday, May 21st), AFTER I’d written my op-ed but BEFORE I finally decided to post it online. So Fareed Zarkaria wasn’t telling me anything new about Putin’s personality that I hadn’t already figured out on my own.

Putin is like that mean kid on the playground who keeps beating up smaller, defenseless kids and stealing their lunches. That’s because he used to be one of those smaller, defenseless kids who kept getting bullied — and he came to identify with the bullies and not the bullied. Bullies are strong, but the ones who get bullied are weak — and he didn’t want to be weak. Only now, he’s a grown man and he’s invading(what he considers to be) defenseless countries… all part of his master plan to bring back the glorious Russian Empire, with himself as the little Bully-Tsar.

Let’s not forget that, physically speaking, Putin was and still is a little guy, maybe 5’3” in his stocking feet, without his lifts.

And if anatomy truly is destiny, then Putin’s small size helped him to reinvent himself as a psychotic brawler. Unfortunately, in our society, little guys — the smaller, shorter ones — usually get picked on by the bigger, taller guys. So Putin’s life journey became one of attacking first in order to survive. Then it became his paranoid obsession of self-protection. Now that he actually believes his destiny is to rule Russia until his death, he’s turned into a real cartoony leader — a living parody of mindless oppression that borders on the ridiculous.

What’s next on his agenda? Sending Boris and Natasha after Moose and Squirrel?

If Putin weren’t so dangerous, he’d be downright hilarious. Fortunately, for the rest of the world, he’s trying to rewrite history to suit his own megalomaniac goals. I say fortunately because those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and he forgot all about that little war with Finland. That’s why Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is fast turning into another Winter War, A.K.A. First Soviet-Finnish War(1939-1940).

That’s when Russia — known then as The Soviet Union, or USSR — decided to invade Finland to expand its territory for “security reasons.” The Soviets actually expected to march into this little country and bully their way to an easy land grab. But they underestimated their opposition. They completely underestimated what Finland was capable of doing. Instead of rolling over and letting the USSR take over their country, the Finns fought back. Sound familiar?

Like the Ukrainians would do nearly a hundred years later, the Finns stood their ground and wouldn’t surrender. In fact, the Soviets were losing in a big way as temperatures in Finland dropped to the lower 30’s and 40’s — below zero. Only after the Soviet Union reorganized their attacks were they able to finally break through Finnish defenses. No one saw the actions of the USSR as heroically victorious, though.

Although the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty ended this war three and a half months later, and Finnish territory was ceded to the USSR, the “victorious” Soviet Union still earned the reputation usually reserved for losers. The League of Nations decided the USSR’s actions to be illegal and kicked them out of the organization. Hitler — another land-grabbing bully — believed that the Soviet’s lousy fighting skills signaled he’d be able to invade Russia during the winter time, no problem.(Hitler: another guy who didn’t want to learn anything from history, like Napoleon’s defeat in Russia.)

If Putin’s plan was to restore all honor and glory to the Russia of his dreams by invading Ukraine, then his judgement was sorely lacking in both common sense and reality. But anyone that overzealous in the rewriting of history for such personal glory would also be interested in invading Finland — again — nearly 100 years later. It wouldn’t surprise me at all that Putin was also planning to invade Finland after decimating Ukraine.

I personally believe that NATO or American intelligence had somehow intercepted his plans and warned Finland. Either that, or Finland started paying serious attention to its own history and decided to wise up and join NATO.(No doubt, Sweden wised up and decided to come aboard the NATO express, too.)

After the way Putin has been acting, is it any wonder that I, along with other officials in the state department, are becoming increasingly worried about Alaska? I’m not affiliated with the government or state department, but I stayed awake in history and political science classes long enough to know that the territory that became Alaska used to belong to Russia. And Russia sold America our future 49th state on March 30, 1867, for $7.2 million. Russia wanted to get rid of it because it was considered useless, frozen wasteland. But even Americans ridiculed Secretary of State William H. Seward for negotiating the purchase by calling it “Seward’s ice box” and “Seward’s Folly.”… That was before the big gold rush at the end of the 19th Century and before the discovery of vast oil reserves in the 20th Century.

Of course, Putin has his eye on Alaska. Of course, he wants it back. He wants to reclaim it because he believes it rightfully belongs to old tsarist Russia. It’s all part of his megalomaniac M.O.

Already, Russian ships and submarines coming into US territory have been sighted by their American counterparts, almost as if they’re trying to provoke The United States into firing the first shot so they can justify attacking American ships in “self defense.”

I’m not psychic enough to know for certain what will ultimately happen with Putin’s Russia and the rest of the world. But history has shown that if Russia keeps invading other countries and getting away with it, the invasions will continue indefinitely. At this point in time, The United States can’t afford to get involved in a war with Russia. And yet, The United States can’t afford to not get involved, either. I didn’t want to believe that in this day and age Putin would keep destroying so many and so much with his thug tactics. But there it is: he’s a clear and present danger to himself, to Russia, and to the rest of the World.