The West should economically ostracize and defeat the tyrannical Putin, like the gangster whom he has become. Putin, who is a squat septuagenarian, blue-eyed former KGB colonel, sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great (6’8”), which is a fantasy. This is in stark contrast to Putin having the stature (5’7″) typical of the Siberian steppe as he rules Russia like an oriental despot or Central Asian “gangland bully.”
Right now, Putin commands a pitiful army of enlistees and draftees in Ukraine, who are former prisoners, unemployed, death row inmates, naïve nationalists, penal colony “volunteers,” ethnic minorities, debtors, foreign fighters, mercenaries, probationers, and those few receiving magnanimous signing bonuses. Compounding the manpower problem is that the officer corps is corrupt. The Kremlin has no choice but to “enlist” these “draftees” because it needs to spare the pampered population of wealthy and middle-class Slavic Russians living in metropolitan St. Petersburg and Moscow.
This core area of the Russian population, especially those living in the oblasts or provinces between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, is a key voting bloc of the United Russia Party. If Putin hopes to remain in power and avoid a possible coup d’état à la Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, who died in a drainage pipe ditch with a bayonet in his buttocks, he cannot anger this segment of the population by invoking a universal draft.
Putin’s biggest subconscious fear is to be overthrown in a coup d’état like Gaddafi while slowly being impaled in writhing agony from a stainless steel, razor-sharp, twelve-inch double-edged butcher knife or bayonet.
It is imperative that NATO just needs to stay the course if President Trump does not foolishly destroy the defensive alliance because of Greenland.
The Times article itself was prefaced by five introductory sentences about the Russian army’s brutality and inhumanity towards its own soldiers in Ukraine, made by parents, relatives, and friends of soldiers during the summer of 2025. The first sentence portrayed how “loved ones [described] a lawless and violent military apparatus that abuses its own troops to maintain its assault in Ukraine.”
The next sentence stated how most likely one or two soldiers ”were barbarically handcuffed undressed [my emphasis] to a tree in January, and held for several hours, some of them until … morning.” The last sentence sadly stated, “his fellow soldiers beat him again, and left him helpless in some kind of pit on the site of a pigsty.”
The Times stated, “more than 1,500 [people] [described] wrongdoing in the ranks that is largely hidden from the Russian public because of a ban on criticizing the military and the eradication of independent media.” The Times concluded that “the complaints of severe abuse [appeared] to be most concentrated in units with troops recruited from prisons and pretrial detention,” and how the “Kremlin [relied] on such soldiers to avoid a broader draft that could generate opposition to the war.”
Thousands of a “vast array of abuses [were] laid out in the documents.” The worst accusation stated, “soldiers are sent to the front despite debilitating medical conditions like broken limbs, Stage 4 cancer, epilepsy, severely damaged vision and hearing, head trauma, schizophrenia, and stroke complications.”
Welcome to Putin’s occupied Ukraine.
Unknown to Russia, this is all good news to Ukraine. An army with such low morale and rampant dysfunction is one facing eventual defeat. Even if the Russian army occupied great swaths of eastern Ukrainian land after a negotiated settlement, the occupational forces might have an extremely difficult time maintaining their conquered territories in peace.
Meanwhile, it is certain that until the overthrow of Putin in Moscow by a democratic politician who respects human rights, Russia’s inhumanity to Russians and their prisoners of war will continue for the foreseeable future.
Now is the time to increase military funding for Ukraine, which Congress did by $50 billion on January 12, 2026, and sanction Russia’s ghost fleet and their customers, along with flooding the world with Venezuelan crude oil in order todecrease Russia’s oil profits. This would be similar to what was done in the 1980s to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In the foreseeable future, Putin, his rubber-stamp Duma, successor, and army are not to be trusted as long as it remains a close ally of Communist China, North Korea, Iran, and Belarus.
Robert L. Maronic
