Will the GOP's Ukraine Aid Block Kick-Off Another Worldwide War?

Putin's language of escalation highlights the danger that the GOP’s embrace of Trump and Trump’s ties to Putin have put the US and the entire democratic world in…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

On Saturday I published a “breaking news” op-ed here on Hartmann Report about the possible consequences of Putin using Friday’s theater attack in a Moscow suburb the same way Hitler used the burning of the Reichstagsgebäude to end democracy and civil rights in Germany; Bush used 9/11 to attack Iraq and push the PATRIOT Act; Putin used a different theater attack in 2002 to destroy and seize Chechnya; LBJ used the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident to accelerate the Vietnam War; and Netanyahu is using the October 7 Hamas attack to stay in power and out of prison.

In other words, might Putin be preparing to use the ISIS-K attack on the theater as an excuse to do something draconian? Would that mean he substantially escalates his war against democracy in Ukraine? Might that escalation lead to a confrontation with NATO? And where would that take the world?

Given these possibilities, if Republicans continue to block US aid to Ukraine (and, now that Trump has given them marching orders, may block the TikTok divestiture in the Senate), is that convincing Chinese dictator Xi to move up his schedule for attacking and seizing Taiwan?

While the article posited a potentially dire outcome — WWIII — as the most extreme consequence of Putin trying to use the theater attack to justify an all-out war (as opposed to a limited “special military operation”) against Ukraine, there are multiple other possible outcomes if he takes that route and sticks to it, the way, for example, George W. Bush used 9/11 to seize Iraq’s oil fields (second-largest in the world) and sell their drilling rights to various Bush- and Cheney-aligned oil companies around the world.

Since I published that article, there have been multiple troubling developments that we should all be tracking with concern. In my opinion (and that of numerous professional foreign policy experts), much of Putin’s fear is driven by his current weakness in Russia as the result of the Navalny murder and his battlefield failures in Ukraine for over two years.

Western sanctions have also taken a bite out of his economy, which is now fully on war footing, putting over 40 percent of their federal budget, representing 7.5 percent of Russian GDP, into war-making. As the recent headline at The Wall Street Journal succinctly describes, “Russia’s Economy Goes All In on War.”

Putin’s bravado, on the other hand, is driven by the fact that he and Donald Trump have succeeded in blocking the US House of Representatives from taking even one single vote on legislation to aid Ukraine that, without their efforts, would have easily passed with a majority of both Democratic and Republican votes.

This is a massive and empowering victory for Putin, and on Friday Marjorie Taylor Greene took a further step on his behalf: she filed a motion to vacate Mike Johnson from his position as Speaker of the House, explicitly saying that she’ll push the motion and demand a vote on it only if Johnson does anything to aid Ukrainians against Putin’s violence and his ongoing kidnapping of their children.

And we may now be seeing the fruits of Putin’s embrace of his new Big Lie that Ukraine was behind the theater attack.

The past few days have seen a significant increase in the frequency and ferocity of Putin’s attacks on that struggling country. He used cruise missiles to take out a hydro dam and a major power station, throwing over a million Ukrainians and about a fifth of the country into darkness. He rained missiles on Kiev, the capital city.

Yesterday, as Putin declared a “National Day of Mourning” to rally people around his upcoming efforts, Russia poured at least 57 different missile attacks on Ukraine, in addition to the ongoing and deadly mortar- and gunfire that extends hourly along the eastern Ukrainian front.

Saturday morning, when Putin first spoke about the theater attack on Russian state television, he ignored the group that has claimed credit for it (and has a long history of attacking Russian interests), ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, and instead blamed it on Ukraine.

President Zelenskyy immediately denounced the accusation, declaring unambiguously that Ukraine had nothing to do with it and no knowledge of it, but now believes Russian Intelligence either knew about it or played a role in it.

Nonetheless, a few hours later on Saturday, Putin’s official spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told the nation and the world that Russia was no longer pursuing a “special military operation” against Ukraine.

Russia is now fully at war, Peskov said.

This is a major shift in Putin’s characterization of his efforts to seize Ukraine: just a week ago Russians who called the attack on Ukraine a “war” faced prison time. Now Peskov is publicly embracing the word and the Russian military and economy are following suit.

Saturday evening a Russian missile crossed through Polish airspace, a violation of Polish and NATO territory, leading to headlines and articles wondering out loud if this was the beginning of an escalation that could involve NATO, or was simply a screwup in the Russian military.

For the moment, Poland and NATO are going with the benefit-of-the-doubt scenario, trying to avoid further inflaming the situation, although the Polish government scrambled jets and has since protested the intrusion, demanding an explanation.

Late Saturday night things got far darker: BBC TV announced that Russian television was playing a deepfake video of  Ukraine’s chief of security, Oleksiy Danilov, essentially claiming credit for the theater attack. The two clips of Danilov that were used to create the deepfake are still available on YouTube, as the BBC documents.

That drumbeat of “Ukraine did it”persisted in Russian media throughout the day Sunday and is continuing this morning. The big question is if Putin is simply using this to distract people from his own intelligence failure (he was warned of the attack by the US, among others) or if he’s trying to use it to justify a significant escalation in his war — particularly now that he’s openly calling it a war — to seize Ukraine and finally rid himself of the bad PR coming with his failure to “win” the war, and an estimated 300,000 Russian military deaths.

I’m not the first to point out the possible sequence of events if Republicans continue to block any US military aid to Ukraine. Putin has pledged to seize the entire country, saying it’s not even a legitimate nation but has always been part of Russia, and now Trump-following Republicans are pledging to support his efforts.

That is emboldening the Russian dictator in ways difficult to overstate: the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for example, recently called the GOP’s obstruction of Ukraine aid “a gift to Putin.” Europe’s leaders are scrambling to build their defenses in the event Putin’s poodle Trump takes over the White House this fall and pulls America out of NATO.

Combine that with Donald Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok/ByteDance divestiture following a meeting with a China-aligned billionaire who’s the largest American investor in ByteDance as well as one of the major investors in Trump’s Nazi-infested social media company (that he hopes will bail him out).

As the GOP shuts down America’s defense of a foreign democracy, President Xi must be thinking his opportunity to take Taiwan is getting closer and closer.

Putin’s people are already talking about taking a bite out of Poland to reunite Russia with Kaliningrad, as well as seizing Moldova to “guarantee the safety” of the breakaway Russian-aligned region within Moldova’s borders, Transnistria: there are already Russian troops stationed there. And Russia is in a constant state of low-level non-military conflict with the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, who are all NATO members.

Odds are that Putin’s cranking up his efforts to destroy and then seize Ukraine won’t immediately lead to a confrontation with NATO that could touch off a world war, or at least a major European conflict. So far he’s been relatively careful, putting much of his effort into information warfare via social media and recruiting far-right and far-left allies and advocates in our country and across Europe.

Nonetheless, his language of escalation highlights the danger that the GOP’s embrace of Trump and Trump’s ties to Putin have put the US and the entire democratic world in. While nowhere near a certainty, Republicans freezing aid to Ukraine along with Putin claiming the theater attack was a Ukrainian provocation certainly could lead to a more widespread European war.

As the British tabloid Daily Mail noted yesterday:

“Exiled journalist Dmirty Kolezev — editor of Republic media — said: ‘The Russian security forces are leaking photos showing that detained terrorist attack suspects are being tortured with electric shocks by tying wires to their genitals.

“‘I have no doubt that after this there will be admissions that the order to kill people in Crocus was given to them personally by Zelensky.’”

All of it is providing Putin with what he claims is an excuse to slaughter more Ukrainians.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous moment in world history.

And this legislative freeze by House Republicans is not only un-American, it’s the most stupid way imaginable to deal with a dictator threatening America’s allies. Neville Chamberlain disastrously tried something like this with Hitler, but apparently Republicans don’t read history.

Even though the House is on vacation this week and next — so Putin has at least two more weeks of a largely defenseless and running-out-of-ammunition Ukraine to attack — the staffers who answer legislators’ phones are working.

Let them know, via the congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121, that it’s time to get Ukraine aid done so Putin will be constrained and the world can again breathe a sigh of relief.