Yesterday was quite a day for Vladimir Putin's famous personality of nonchalance, particularly when it comes to international affairs.
In a vertiginous reversal of what his foreign minister and all his little foreign-relations apparatchiks had been saying, yesterday Putin said that "there’s nothing that might concern us in terms of Finland and Sweden becoming NATO members. If they want to then please, go ahead." (CNBC)
As you may recall, his government had maintained that the mere prospect of Finland and Sweden's NATO membership was intolerable to peace-loving Russia. Now, however, Putin is emphasizing intolerability only "if NATO infrastructure and troops are deployed" in the two nations; then "we will be compelled to respond in kind and create the same threats for [those] territories." Added Putin: "Don’t they understand that?"
He then declared that "everything was going fine between us, but now there will be tensions." Putin appeared to forget — correction: he feigned obliviousness to — the five-month-old tensions created by his atrocious war on Ukraine: an illegal invasion, the slaughter of civilians, internationally outlawed cluster bombs, and more.
Yet strangely enough, he may have had a point about "everything was going fine between" the West and Russia before his current, despotic war. But that was only because the West chose to overlook his criminal brutalities in the Russo-Georgian and Chechan Wars. It was the West's obliviousness that likely contributed to Putin's sensation of freedom to kill just that in Ukraine.
Since the rise, threats, and explosive mass-murder of global fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, Western leaders have prided themselves on asserting, Never again. Henceforth the West would be wary, vigilant, and prepared to militarily dismantle the very kind of fascistic, Russian-warmongering web that Putin had been spinning for years and that he's spinning again, in Ukraine, and no differently from how spidery Hitler crept across the country.
And when Vladimir Putin's Ukrainian evils are successfully done — largely because NATO has been tardy and miserly with its weaponry — the West will assert again, "Never again."