Putin Should Be Stopped Essay Example

The world’s favourite topless, tardy, thieving, Kalashnikov-toting president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has brought the European continent on to the brink of war, with the crisis in the Ukraine being the culmination of decades of machinations and manoeuvrings by the Russian president. Troubling diplomats and antagonising neighbours, Putin has relentlessly pursued and enacted his doctrine of Pax Russica, seeking to empower his beleaguered, post-Soviet state by expanding its sphere of influence and, more contentiously, its borders. And, with the enigma orchestrating an outrageous invasion poised to restore his motherland to its status as the West’s foremost foe, many in the West have pondered- should Putin be stopped in his exploits, and if so, can he be?

To comprehend the future Russia’s modern-day Tsar wants to forge for the world, we must understand Putin’s past. Before his shirtless horse-riding and his systematic imprisonment of political dissidents, Putin endured a challenging childhood: the only surviving child of his conscripted father and his factory worker mother, Putin experienced first-hand the fractious society of Soviet Russia in the aftermath of the Second World War. Inspired by the “The Shield and the Sword”, a novel series about a Soviet secret agent who thwarted the Nazis, he joined the elusive Soviet intelligence community, the KGB, working as an operative in Dresden, East Germany for 5 years, where he impersonated a translator to secure state secrets from Stasi officials. His duties there informed the convictions that guide him today, with Putin deriding the then USSR as “ailing” and seized by a “paralysis of power”, a conundrum he would never want to see the nation return to. After a successful run for deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin began the rapid rise to power that would forever change Russia and the globe: after a series of high-profile Kremlin roles, Putin was appointed prime minister under the colourful Boris Yeltsin, and succeeded him after his resignation in 1999. Except for a strategic move to the premiership of Russia from 2008 to 2012, Putin has remained president of the superpower, and has been unabashed in his manipulation and outright rewriting of the Russian constitution to secure his presidency, which has allowed the 69-year-old to stay in power until 2036. 

Putin’s unshakeable grip on the Kremlin has not been for the avaricious, megalomaniac aims of the archetypal autocrat. Even if he has amassed a reported fortune of $200 billion, according to Hermitage Capital Management CEO Bill Browder, Putin’s project transcends appeasing oil-rich oligarchs and sustaining his own vanity. After 21 years of economic malaise and population decline and the ceding of world dominance to the United States, Vladimir Putin is jingoistic in his approach to the West, a sharp contrast from the earlier stages of his presidency, where he sought to join NATO, according to George Robertson, the 10th Secretary General of NATO. However, with Russia’s indefinite suspension from the G8, in the aftermath of the Crimean annexation, Russia’s relations with the Western world have soured, but this does not mean Putin is losing. 

The 2016 United States presidential election is notorious, not just for its partisan theatre, but for the egregious collusion of the Donald Trump campaign and Russian surrogates. Putin funnelled millions in dark dollars into his campaign, to install a leader that would sow discord in the US and isolate the nation from its allies. Appallingly, Putin’s conspiracies were successful, even if Trump’s claims of “no obstruction, no collusion” fooled no one. Vladimir Putin proved that even the world’s leading superpower was not safe from Russia’s reach, and that he would break every diplomatic norm and courtesy to achieve his ends, and Putin’s leverage on the West did not stop when Trump begrudgingly left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Gazprom, which controls the essential Nord Stream and Yamal natural gas pipelines, provides 40% of European gas imports, and just so happens to be controlled by bureaucrats in St. Petersburg, loyal to the Russian President. Even if Europe’s gas supplies were to be meddled with, it could be devastating to major Western economies, such as Italy, France, and particularly Germany, who has been limited in their condemnations of Russian troops advancing on the Ukraine border, out of fear of the logistical catastrophe that could follow the closing of Nord Stream 2. Putin has not just been striking out at Ukraine in some patriotic fervour. The imminent invasion of the Ukraine is the realisation of 23 years of shadowy foreign policy and Machiavellianism, and Putin’s project will not stop at acquiring Ukraine. Putin is setting his sights on the Baltic nations, all members of NATO, and even if Russia returns its forces from the Ukrainian border, the schemes Putin has put in motion will continue to wreak havoc in Western politics, stock markets and intelligence operations. 

Putin poses an undeniable risk to the West and its democracies, and sanctions, condemnations and pleas have done little to mitigate Russia’s aggression. Such negligence is only fuelling Russia’s ascendancy, and it must be ended. NATO and its cronies need to completely detach Russia from its allies and resources, with militant financial confiscations and embargos on every person and institution supporting Russian endeavours. However, lives are not dispensable, so every step must be exhausted before any conflict in the Ukraine is initiated. Western governments are walking a perilous tightrope over a canyon of chaos, but expediency must not trump what is imperative: stopping Ukraine from being the first sovereign nation to be annexed since 1939. The people of Ukraine do not deserve to be Putin’s pawn on his path to rebuilding the Russian Empire. Russia can be stopped, and it should be, as sovereignty, democracy, and liberty should be available to all the people of Europe and the world, and it’s the West’s responsibility to defend it.