Putin's Ukraine Tea-party (with missiles)

[David Morris]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/07/putin-and-the-crash-of-malaysian-airlines-flight-17.html

Putin has “created an artificial situation in which a ‘pathological
minority’—the protesters on Bolotnaya Square [two years ago], then Pussy
Riot, then the liberal ‘pedophiles’—is held up in contrast to a ‘healthy
majority.’ Every time this happens, his ratings go up.” The nightly
television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about
Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced
“spectacle,” expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks.

“Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be
wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public
opinion and the collective political imagination.

“How can Putin really manage this? You’d need to be an amazing conductor.
Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off
this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and
waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a
dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with
Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are
responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”

Pavlovsky was especially concerned about one of the pro-Russian military
leaders in eastern Ukraine, a former (and possibly current) Russian
intelligence officer known to most by his nom de guerre, Igor Strelkov.
(Strelkov’s real name is Igor Girkin.)

A wildly messianic nationalist who cultivates an air of lumpy intrigue,
Strelkov is now helping to run the separatist operation in Donetsk. Like
the radical nationalists and neo-imperialists in Moscow, who have easy
access to the airwaves these days, Strelkov has a singular point of
disagreement with Putin: the Russian President hasn’t gone nearly far
enough; he has failed to invade and annex “Novorossiya,” the separatist
term for eastern Ukraine. Pavlovsky said that people like Strelkov and his
Moscow allies are as delusional as they are dangerous, somehow believing
that they are taking part in grand historical dramas, like the Battle of
Borodino, in 1812, or “the novels of Tolkien.”

“Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian
military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War
reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like
him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”
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