Head on the spike

It’s seldom we hear a desperate call to action, and last week was Lindsey Graham’s voice reverberating all over the world asking for somebody close to Vladimir Putin to assassinate the Russian dictator.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, where innocent children and civilians are dying, justifies the senior US senator’s call if it could stop the other nations from engaging the unhinged Russian leader from his expansionist plan.

The world’s in danger of what could be an unprecedented war in terms of the most powerful weapons that mankind would see, and Putin’s making sure he’s on track of his expansionist nationalist agenda.

It’s bereft of an ideology, though, and not a few are mistaken by comparing Putin’s imperialist dream to the Russian revolution that installed the Bolshevik’s rule in 1917.

Putin is simply a thug, an international bully. He has not changed since his school days as the quiet but ambitious boy who went home with the marks of street battles but has hardened through his years of serving the KGB, whose remnants have benefitted from the Soviet Union’s collapse.

He is an insecure leader, though. Proof is now coming out that, even months before Graham made his call, Putin does not come closer than five meters to his closest advisers. He has a stick to keep them away.

With that, Graham’s call is like a stab in the dark — or in the air — as no one could come near Putin. Or is it?

Putin’s self-isolation could backfire, however. He’s now a pariah, with no world leader — not even China’s Xi Jinping — would touch given the sanctions he and his people now face.

Oh, the Russian people. Them who’d been hardened by decades of hardships — both in the battlefields and in the confines of their

Khrushchyovkas, also do not like this war. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not their war.

It could be among them that Graham is counting for Brutus to rise. Or a Stauffenberg. To get near Putin would be the challenge, but yes cutting off the ego that feeds the Russian war machine would not be impossible, even if the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would prefer to have him tried in court and jailed rather than killed.

Some prefer quick solutions, though, and they believe that killing Putin also quickly stops the Russian soldier’s finger from the squeeze.

Putting Putin’s head on the spike is also a resort for the many Russians who now bravely come out to protest the Russian madman’s occupation of Ukraine. Many of them have been arrested, charged and some of them jailed. That’s Putin using the state’s power to silence his critics.

The world, however, will not be silenced.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will not stay silent.

There will be countless protests, including by Russian citizens, that will press the world to treat and see Putin as a mad man like Hitler. He is, no doubt about it.

Everyone’s angry. Those who are silent as complicit in his crimes.

As Putin keeps distance, Zelensky has survived at least three precision assassination attempts by elite Russian hit squads.

Only tip-offs from Russian spies have averted these.

The Kremlin-funded

Wagner group mercenaries and Chechen Republic leader Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov’s kill teams are fixed on their target Zelensky.

Unfaced, Zelensky wants a faceto-face with Putin, but the Russian dictator has no balls to accept the challenge even if the real threat is against Zelensky and not Graham’s bluster.

Zelensky only has a question to Putin: “What are you afraid of?”

It’s likely Putin would not give an answer. He’s afraid of everything now, including his own people.

“Putin

is simply a thug, an international bully. He has not changed since his school days.