Putin is taking all necessary steps to make Moscow Polish again

During the Polish-Russian War (1609-1618) an event occurred that the Russians remember well but apparently not enough.

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In July 1610, 5,000 Polish winged hussars, the finest heavy cavalry of their day, destroyed a vastly superior Russian army at the Battle of Kłuszyn. As a result of the defeat, Tsar Basil IV of Russia was dethroned, and eventually, the army of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth under King Sigismund III Vasa entered Moscow, with the Polish prince Vladislav IV Vasa being appointed the new Tsar, but he never actually took the Russian throne.

On Thursday, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin threatened NATO with war once again if NATO countries authorize Ukraine to use long-range conventional missiles to destroy Russian military bases from which attacks are being launched against Ukrainian civilians. This is not the first time that Putin has threatened NATO: he made similar threats when Western countries began helping Ukraine's defenders at the start of the Russian invasion, when the coalition was formed to donate tanks to Ukraine, and more recently when donations of F-16 fighter jets began.

Years ago, Putin's threats seemed like those of a dangerous attack dog capable of destroying any rival who stood in his way. However, two and a half years of the Russian invasion of Ukraine have greatly changed that image of Russia. The Russian army is being humiliated by Ukrainian forces that are vastly inferior in number, which have not only managed to prevent Putin from achieving the objectives he set for himself with this invasion, but have even intruded into Russian territory, specifically in the Kursk and Belgorod regions. A Ukrainian offensive that Putin has still not managed to expel from Russian soil more than a month after it began.

During this time, Russia has lost more than 3,000 tanks in Ukraine, having to resort to obsolete models (T-54, T-55 and T-62) to make up for the enormous losses of more modern tanks that the Russian industry is unable to replace due to Western sanctions. In these two and a half years, the Russian army has proven to be a corrupt and very ineffective machine on the battlefield, suffering enormous losses in order to advance a few kilometers, immersed in a conception of war that is typical of the years of the World War I. After this humiliation, Putin's barking no longer sounds like that of a hunting dog, but rather like that of a poodle.

Of course, Putin has it very easy if he does not want Ukraine to launch missiles at Russian territory: he just needs to stop firing his missiles at Ukraine and withdraw from Ukrainian soil, a soil that the Russians have been treading on since 2014 (with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the seizure of some parts of eastern Ukraine). Both the Russian military actions since 2014 and the invasion that began in 2022 are proof that Putin acts as an imitator of Adolf Hitler, becoming a threat to peace in Europe. His constant threats to NATO only serve to confirm this, even if they are the barking of a poodle.

The Russian dictator should think for a moment about an obvious fact: if Ukraine has been able to humiliate the mighty Russian army, what would happen if Russia were to face the full force of NATO? The Atlantic Alliance not only has vast quantities of much more modern weapons than Russia's, but also a technologically superior military industry. Moreover, Russia is not the only one with nuclear weapons: the US, France and the UK also have them, and Putin should know that using them only guarantees that Russia will be wiped out in response. Putin is a bad person, but he is not crazy or stupid, even if he sometimes seems that way, and he knows that if he wants to start a war against NATO, he would have to use conventional weapons.

Given the current state of the Russian army and the degree of military power Poland is reaching, if Putin were to declare war on NATO, the action of the Polish Army would probably be enough not only to stop the aggressors, but also to put them in serious trouble. Suffice it to say that today Poland is much stronger than it was in 1920, when the Poles defeated the Red Army in the Battle of Warsaw. Thus, with his threats, his bullying attitude and his disastrous way of leading his armies, Putin seems to be taking all the necessary steps to make Moscow Polish again.

If Putin were not so blinded by his imperialist fanaticism, he would right now order the withdrawal of his troops from Ukraine until there was not even the remnant of a Russian soldier’s sole left on Ukrainian soil. Russia should be the least interested in starting a new war, in which it has everything to lose and which could not only end Putin’s mandate, or even his physical life (which would be an act of justice, given the crimes he is committing in Ukraine), but Russia could also cease to exist and explode into a bunch of small republics, given that the glue that holds that country together, which is its military force, has turned out to be a cheap army.

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Photo: Mikhail Svetlov.