Putin rattles his saber

From The Washington Post:

MOSCOW, April 26 -- President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that he was suspending Russia's obligations under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, ratcheting up a tense standoff with the NATO alliance over U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

The CFE Treaty dates from the last days of the Cold War and limits the deployment of conventional arms, including tanks and other heavy weapons, on either side of the old Iron Curtain. Putin linked his decision, which he said could lead to full withdrawal from the treaty, to the U.S. missile plan.

NATO countries are "building up military bases on our borders and, more than that, they are also planning to station elements of anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic," said Putin, delivering his annual state of the nation address to both houses of parliament, the cabinet and regional leaders. "In this connection, I consider it expedient to declare a moratorium on Russia's implementation of this treaty."

Western governments have contended for years that Russia has not fully complied with the treaty and amendments to it, pointing to force levels it keeps in the Chechnya region and the continuing presence of its troops in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova. The missile defense plan has raised disputes over the treaty to a new level of intensity.

The Kremlin has expressed deep hostility to the American system despite repeated assurances by the Bush administration that the planned 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and radar station in the Czech Republic would pose no threat to Russia.

I am tempted to think that Putin is simply politically tone deaf. That he just doesn't realize that nations that slaved for decades under the iron bootheel of the USSR have the deep fear that the Russians will come back and abuse them some more. For nations like Poland and the Czech Republic as well as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia NATO membership is a guarantee of their continued existence as free and independent nations.

The Russians, however, seem incapable of seeing things that way. There is a streak of paranoia and xenophobia in the soul of the Russian nation which dates back to the time they suffered under the Tarter Yoke (and was not helped Hitler's invasion of the USSR either).

There is also the fear, natural to any oppressor, that a people which were once brutalized will seek vengeance when the opportunity presents itself. Putin, as a former KGB officer, knows all too well what life was like for the Soviet Union's formerly captive peoples.

However as reasonable as Russia's leaders might think they are being all men need to realize that they live in the world as it is, not as they might prefer it to be. Or as the maggot said to the king of France, "we live not as we wish to, but as we can". Putin and whatever puppet he installs to be his front-man while he runs the country from the shadows need to realize that the Soviet Union was the focus of evil in the world during all the years of its existence and that all the peoples who were enslaved by it or menaced by it have every right to take steps to ensure that it will never come back in some mutated form to harm them again.

Putin should just be grateful that Poland and Hungary and the other former Warsaw Pact nations aren't building nuclear weapons and targeting them at Russian cities.