Putin fears everyone close to him. Just look at the recorded videos of him where he sits alone at his ridiculously long briefing table at one end and supposedly listens to other people yards away at the far end of the table. Remember the recorded session in which he ordered two generals in charge of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces to the raise the country’s readiness level to its highest level. Do you think those generals will tell Putin the truth if it contradicts his known wishes? No; all the people near Putin tell him what he wants to hear, not the truth.
Moreover, Putin fears his army generals the most as they have the forces to replace him. After the death of Stalin, the victorious World War II Russian Army General Georgy Zhukov arrested intelligence chief Laverntiy Beria after Zhukov’s army units overwhelmed Beria’s secret police units, which had seized control of the Moscow region. Beria later was tried for his crimes.
The dismayed looks of the two Russian generals in charge of those strategic nuclear forces were reassuring. They know it is not the time to make such a threat. They know the mutually assured destruction (MAD) strategy is the last-ditch tit-for-tat military strategy that has been successful, in their minds, in keeping the peace and was successfully used in reverse to defuse a crisis many years ago. In ordering those generals to raise the readiness level of their nuclear forces, Putin may have triggered his own removal.
Tit-for-tat is a mutual exchange of equal retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A reverse tit-for-tat gives up teeth-threatening weapons or people-armies on each side.
For MAD to work as a deterrent for the United States, U.S. enemies past and present musk know U.S. strategic systems work well, and the nation does not keep that a secret from them. Indeed, the United States was one of the 32 nations from the old Warsaw Pact and NATO that participated in the Open Skies Treaty, which was signed in 1992 an allowed reconnaissance aircraft to fly over each signatory countries’ military facilities. There have been plenty of opportunities to fly over United States. They know how good U.S. military forces are.
There is Russian precedence for a reverse tit-for-tat. Many years ago, during the Cuban missile crisis, aircraft from an U.S. carrier dropped weak explosive charges, probably hand grenades, on a Russian submarine—not to sink it, but to try to get the sub to surface. The captain of the submarine was unaware of this strategy and wanted to use a nuclear-tipped torpedo to sink the carrier. Sink my ship? I’ll sink yours. Tit-for-tat. But the Russian captain needed his subordinate commander and the political commissar officer to concur with used of the nuclear weapons, and they did not. The Russians on that sub understood that shooting that nuclear-tipped torpedo would start a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange that could easily escalate to destroy the world.
Instead, the Soviet Union and the United States negotiated a reverse tit-for-tat solution in which the Soviet Union removed its missiles from Cuba, and the United States removed its missiles in Turkey.
Putin, a former Russian intelligence chief, may start connecting the dots. His Russian generals better get a move on. No doubt none of them told him the truth about the lousy readiness of his army to invade, or of its poor logistics support, or that it is too small to occupy a country as big as Ukraine. That is why the generals are being so brutal in Ukraine. They fear Putin as much as Putin fears them. The generals did not tell Putin the truth about Russian army’s readiness and now Putin has been embarrassed. When he tries to ruthlessly punish his generals, his generals may surprise him again. Not with the truth nor with Putin’s own ruthless ways, but by following Zhukov’s example—by arresting Putin now for trial later for his crimes, a reverse tit-for-tat.
