Back when I was around 7 or 8 I stumbled, you might say crashed into, a certain remarkable discovery that never left me. Over a certain period, I don't remember how long, I was contending with an extremely frustrating phenomenon that, to my childish imagination, threatened to plague me for the rest of my life. It was this: as I rode down the street on my bicycle it seemed to take on a life of its own and insist on heading straight for the curb, and no matter what I did I couldn't get control of it, so over the curb I'd go. What was this weird magnetic force in the curb continually reeling my bicycle in? Or was the problem in the bike itself, some bent in the wheel inclining it hopelessly to the right? (It was always the curb on the right side of the street, never the left.) It was bewildering and exasperating to me, something on the order of poor Charlie Brown's kite-eating tree.
One day as for the umpteenth time I found myself heading toward the curb, something preternaturally prompted from within, "Look the other way," and I turned my away gaze from the curb. Lo and behold, my bicycle changed its mind and decided it didn't like curbs anymore.
Of course the problem the whole time was, I was fixing my gaze on precisely where I didn't want to go, and fixing my gaze on it guaranteed I'd go nowhere else but there. I learned at that moment that I steered my bicycle as much with my eyes, my focus, as with my hands. A child's Eureka!-moment.
I find the exclamation of suffering Job obliquely resonant with this: "The very thing I feared has come upon me." Now the Job story doesn't suggest that calamity befell Job because he had been fixating on it; all the same there's a certain parallel, isn't there. I leave it to you to speculate on the relationship between Job's fears and their materializing in his life.
Vladimir Putin has been ranting for ages now that poor, long-suffering, surrounded (by the way, what country in the world isn't "surrounded"?) and, one might even imagine, defenseless Russia faced an existential crisis posed by the expansion of NATO and, most immediately, by Ukraine's obstinate resistance to Russia's "security concerns" (translate: submit to Russia's "sphere of interest" or we consider you an aggressor to be destroyed). And as the war's dragged on way, way past Putin's delusional two-week game plan, he's only ramped up the hysterical propaganda how this is, and has been all along, a battle for Russia's very survival.
Which it wasn't. Not when he started this. Ukraine wasn't going to swallow up Russia any more than a chihuahua would swallow an elephant. But, like Job's "The very thing I feared...," and like me riding straight into a curb I tried to escape, it looks like Putin has succeeded in conjuring up, like some demented sorceror's apprentice fooling around with magic infinitely beyond his acumen, exactly the existentical crisis and battle for "survival" that he never dreamed (PR aside) this adventure could ever become.
Putin feared the expansion of NATO? Well, congratulations, Putin, you just doubled NATO's border with Russia, after Finland joined (as Sweden will almost certainly do as well, once Turkey's political quibbles, or for that matter its current president, is out of the way).
Putin feared an increasingly Western-oriented Ukraine? Well, congratulations, Putin, you single-handedly transformed the largely ambivalent Ukrainian population into a monolith of hatred toward you and the entire Russian psychopathy of messianic megalomania.
Putin feared the downfall of the Russian state itself? Well, congratulations, Putin, you have now virtually guaranteed it. You squandered the past 22 years you had, in which you could have developed Russia's incredible potential and set your country on course for a century of economic and geopolitical renaissance. Instead you subjected your country to the classic, crushing psychopathy of Russian paranoia-imperialism, constantly fueled by the delusion that "those who don't submit to us...threaten us."
Meanwhile Putin and his oligarch cronies turned into billionaires while the Russian peasantry--and that's really what the people have always been to the Russian nomenklatura, whether in the Czar's day, the Soviet days, or the present kleptocracy (plus ça change...)--went precisely nowhere, as mired in mud, corruption, incompetency and cynical triumphalist manipulation now, out in their villages across all those time zones, as they've ever been.
So that now, funny enough, Putin's strident screeching about Russia's survival turns into a reality entirely of Putin's own making. "The very thing I feared...." Because now there is no way out of this war for Putin but death. Even victory cannot be victory. The end, any end, to this war, is Putin's ruin, because no end to it can make a hero of this creature who insanely blew his country's geopolitical capital, military vitality, national will, on this desperate scramble to salvage by whatever subterfuge, lies and barbarism necessary the last pathetic shreds of the once-upon-a-time Russian/Soviet glory.
What is the most he could get out of this? A small chunk out of southeastern Ukraine? That would be "victory," and then everybody goes home and gets on with things like nothing ever happened? Don't be ridiculous. The end to this war, whatever end that is, is Putin's end. There's no ending to this that makes him a hero, and no ending that leaves him any further worlds to conquer. He knows it, surely. This was supposed to be a glorious two-week walkover, one that signalled to the the rest of Europe, "I'm in charge now." That never happened, and it never will. And without that, Putin cannot survive. He faces the abyss.
The supreme irony, then, is that all the cynically manipulative propaganda about a battle for Russia's survival...turns out to be true in a way the Kremlin propagandists could never have in their worst nightmares have anticipated. They created their Frankenstein monster, in reality, out of the fetid depths of their soulless machinations.
Because, now, this war is almost surely the end of Putin. And if the end of Putin...whither the Russian state? "L'état c'est moi," and "après moi, le déluge...." Even now Russian oligarchs are recruiting their personal militias to beat back the deluge once the state crashes. They know in their hearts what's coming. China's been craftily, patiently, cold-bloodedly playing Putin for its useful idiot, exploiting Putin's desperation to make both him and Russia their lapdog, even as, I well imagine, they assess what real estate to appropriate first when the Kremlin crashes.
And none of this had to be. Except that a delusional fool wouldn't have it any other way. He couldn't avert his gaze from the edge of the abyss, in the psychopathic obsession that just over the edge of that abyss lies glory.
