Putin should remember, oppressors don’t fare well in the end
It’s one thing to seize Vladimir Putin’s yacht; it’s another to seize Vladimir Putin and then put him on trial for war crimes.
While the multi-milliondollar yachts of Russian oligarchs are being confiscated at various ports around the world, the $100 million mega-yacht believed to belong to Putin is currently safe in Kaliningrad.
The Graceful sailed there from Hamburg, Germany, where it had been docked for repairs, just before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is too bad it was not torpedoed along the way.
Now it is safe from sanctioned seizure as Putin continues to wage his Hitleresque, genocidal, scorched earth attack on Ukrainian civilians.
But it is only a matter of time before Putin gets what he deserves. And that is a war crimes trial before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
The court is already gathering evidence of genocide, especially after the latest round of atrocities against civilians — men, women and children — committed by Russian soldiers in the suburbs of Kyiv.
Mass murderers like Putin have been brought to trial in the past. It happened at Nuremburg at the end of
World War II, when Nazi war criminals were brought to justice and hanged.
It happened again in 2000, when Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic was arrested and brought to the court to face war crime charges after conducting a brutal ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs in the breakup of Yugoslavia.
His killing spree included the systematic murder of 8,000 young men in a concentration camp in Srebrenica in 1995. Milosevic died during his trial in a prison cell in the Hague in 2006.
Putin must be aware that it was the Serbian people who, tired of the killing, turned against Milosevic and forced him out of power. He was arrested by fellow Serbians and turned over to the ICC for prosecution.
The Russian people, especially the mothers receiving the remains of thousands of their undertrained and underequipped sons killed in a senseless war, could rise up and turn on Putin.
It happened in Russia before. It happened to Nicholas
II, the last Romanov czar of Russia, who was executed along with his entire family by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Before that, Nicholas was forced to abdicate as the Russian people turned on him for sending their boys to fight in a poorly managed and ill-equipped Russian army locked in a losing war with the Germans in WWI. Some 2 million Russians were killed.
The Russian working class, fed up with the war, rising inflation, low wages and joblessness — and stirred up by the revolutionary Communist Party — took to the streets to protest.
Some 90,000 women, many of whom had lost their sons or husbands, or both, in the war, marched on St. Petersburg to confront Nicholas. The czar’s army, instead of stopping the protesters, joined them.
With the city in the hands of the revolutionaries, and Russia falling apart, Nicholas stepped down. The Bolshevik wing of the Communist Party took control of the country and sent Nicholas and his family to Siberia, where they were murdered.
Nicholas’s abdication ended the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty.
Now, all these years later, Vladimir Putin, richer and more powerful than any czar, is in charge.
He is a dictator and rules Russia like the czars of old. While the people are as poor and oppressed as always, Putin and his oligarch friends have looted the country and are filthy rich.
These one-time anti-capitalist communists, these share-the-wealth revolutionaries, have homes along the Adriatic and in London and New York. They have yachts and private jets. They own casinos and resorts around the world. They send their children to Harvard. Like Putin, they send their families to Switzerland when war breaks out.
And like in WWI, they send an ill-trained, illequipped and uninformed army of Russian boys to Ukraine to get slaughtered.
Nicholas II was the last Romanov czar of Russia. Putin is the first communist czar of Russian. He too may also be the last.