Twice dangerous

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in September declared Kherson’s residents were “becoming our citizens forever” following a referendum in the region largely seen a sham by geopolitical analysts.

This weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave Putin, who has made himself scarce in the past few weeks fueling speculations he’s seriously ill, an apparent shout-back.

“Kherson is ours,” Zelensky said as Ukrainian troops rolled into Kherson City, the only major Ukrainian regional capital to be occupied by Russian forces since they started their invasion in February. Kherson is strategic both for Russia and Ukraine as a gateway to the Crimean Peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014.

Moscow’s top generals, who had seen fellow star-ranked officers killed in deadly strikes by Kyiv or dying mysteriously away from the battlefront, were left to handle announcing the debacle to the Russian public, the pullout of their troops from Kherson before they can be encircled and decimated.

For Russian supporters, the withdrawal was peddled as a tactical one arising from the present difficulty being faced by Putin’s generals to supply the troops at Kherson amid of the very accurate artillery strikes being thrown at them by Ukrainian soldiers using commercial China-made drones as spotters.

Retreat to fight another day, and what has been invaded can always be reinvaded. That’s one well-used line coming from Moscow apologists.

Still, even the loudest Kremlin partisans could not picture the troop pullout as anything but another serious blow to Russia’s floundering campaign that has seen its conventional army, in battle after every battle, proving inferior to Kyiv’s own supplied by the West with war materiel.

Former Putin adviser and staunch supporter Sergei Markov may have seen the handwriting on the wall when he drew a parallelism between the Kherson pullout as a defeat as catastrophic to Russia as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when his idol was still a junior officer of the spy agency KGB.

Kherson, whose residents have welcomed Ukrainian troops with flowers in scenes reminiscent of V-E Day with the end of World War 2 in Europe, stands at the moment as a humiliating defeat for Moscow and Putin.

As expected, the United States and the United Kingdom could barely disguise their gloating in describing Kherson’s return to Ukraine as a momentous victory, no doubt with the underpinning that it would not have been possible without western-supplied arms.

On cue, Gen. Mark Milley vowed that America will continue to supply Ukraine with the equipment to beat back Russia. Generals, indeed, think that way — that logistics, in most cases, hold the key to winning battles, with a nary a thought that in wars there are no real victors, only bodies for burying from all sides.

Amid the celebrations at Kherson, it must be posited that a losing and reportedly sick Putin (he may have cancer, according to US intelligence) becomes twice as dangerous if forced into a situation where in the use of tactical nuclear weapons becomes the only viable option for him to save face.

When nukes, even tactical ones, are brought into the equation, all bets are off for a peaceful resolution to conflicts.

A tactical nuclear exchange can always escalate into a population-decimating conventional nuke confrontation. If at all, world leaders must now double efforts to open a window for talks between Russia and Ukraine to prosper to the point of reaching an agreement.

Retired British army officer and House of Lords member Richard Dannatt have told Sky News that, as seen from Putin’s last public appearance on video, his “hands are looking pretty black on top, which is a sign of injections going in when other parts of the body can’t take injections.”

The world cannot afford to push a sick 70-year-old Putin, if indeed he is, into a corner, as sick men cannot think straight. Now is the time for doves and not hawks.

“A losing and reportedly sick Putin becomes twice as dangerous if forced into a situation when the use of tactical nuclear weapons becomes the only viable option for him to save face.

“Retreat to fight another day, and what has been invaded can always be reinvaded. That’s one well-used line coming from Moscow apologists.