Checkmate. Putin has the West cornered
As 2022 nears, the West is trying to figure out Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next move on a complex geopolitical chessboard — and preparing an “aggressive package” of sanctions, should he decide to make another land grab in Ukraine.
If you’ve any doubt about Putin’s plans to roll back the clock, just read his 5,000-plus-word essay on why Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are doomed without closer integration with Mother Russia. Or his audacious demands Friday for a veto on who joins the NATO alliance and limits in stationing troops and weaponry in any country which joined the alliance after 1997.
Without firing a shot, Putin has managed to send the West into a collective panic — or at least into a position where they feel the need to appease the aging autocrat.
For the past four months, and particularly between September 7 and December 5 according to western intelligence sources quoted by CNN, Putin has been amassing tens of thousands of troops and heavy weaponry as close as 30 miles to Ukraine’s borders. U.S. intelligence reports suggest a build-up of up to 175,000 troops, enough to stage a swift and immediate incursion.
Another land grab would add to the territory seized in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and sent Russian-backed combatants into the heavily industrialized eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
With so much muscle, Putin could be gunning for a land bridge between Russia proper and Crimea — a move which could be designed in part to free-up water resources blocked by Ukraine in the North Crimean Canal, which once accounted for up to 85% of the peninsula’s water needs.
In his book The Prophesied Prince of Rosh, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote:
Back in 2005, the Russian president called the demise of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Given the dozens of millions of Soviet citizens who were imprisoned, persecuted and murdered under that authoritarian system, most of us would say the opposite! Putin not only mourns the ussr’s collapse—he is bent on rebuilding it and restoring the glory of imperial Russia! …
Putin applied all that pressure on Ukraine because that nation is the linchpin of his goal of a renewed imperial Russia! A linchpin is the pin in an axle that keeps the wheel from coming off. Mr. Putin was doing everything in his power to keep the wheels from falling off his dream of a new Soviet empire. And that meant applying intense pressure on Ukraine.
The fact that one man—one man—is responsible for this huge geopolitical shift is deeply significant. It wouldn’t have happened without him using his power and having the will to step out and shake the nations, as Haggai says.
This is the prince of Russia in action.
