“Dear Mr. President!
Dear Donald!
As the author of fifty books and a dozen films about Russia, I consider myself entitled to inform you before your meeting with Putin.
You should know that he cannot stop the war with Ukraine, even if you give him your Mar-a-Lago villa on Palm Beach, Trump Tower in New York and a dozen of your golf clubs.
And not because he doesn’t want to take a break from the war, but because he can’t.
Because he knows Russian history not from Medinsky’s textbook, but from real life:
The return of Russian troops from Europe to Russia after the victory over Napoleon led to the anti-tsarist uprising of the “Decembrists” in 1825.
Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War led to the 1905 revolution.
The flight of a million Russian soldiers from the Russo-German front during World War I led to the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the February Revolution of 1917.
The peace signed by Lenin with Germany allowed the Bolsheviks to shoot the entire royal family.
The collapse of the USSR began with the return of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989.
Knowing this, Putin cannot end the war with Ukraine and bring his troops home.
Only the opportunity in May 1945 to leave almost his entire army in Europe as occupation forces helped Stalin avoid a post-war putsch.
So Putin dreams of occupying Ukraine, as well as the Baltics, Finland, Poland, etc., in order to keep his army away from Moscow.
He remembers how 525 thousand soldiers who returned from Afghanistan in 1989 turned into “Afghan” bandits who terrorized the entire population of the USSR.
And he knows what will happen if one and a half million soldiers who are professional killers, robbers and rapers return home from the Ukrainian front.
The war with Ukraine allowed Putin to get rid of two million of the most active opponents of his regime, whom he forced to flee Russia, and he either drove the rest of the young Russian men to the front or recruited them into punitive services.
Today, any war – with Ukraine, with the Baltics, with NATO – with anyone, is the best way to force Russia to submit to Putin and his junta.
Unfortunately, none of your advisers will explain this to you before your meeting with Putin, but you can check my arguments with Jack Matlock and Michael McFaul.
I don’t want Putin, a KGB agent, a thief and a murderer of millions of people, to continue to brazenly fool you, lie and deceive my President.
Of course, I am not a military expert or a political scientist, but I am a writer with a good memory.
I remember how Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II managed to drop the price of oil to $9 a barrel, gave the Afghans Stingers and thereby stopped Moscow from taking over Afghanistan and destroyed the USSR.
If you want to stop Putin and the imperial ambitions of at least half of Russia’s population, you need to do the same thing – lower the price of oil to at least $25 a barrel and give Ukraine the weapons that will help it crush the aggressor.
As for your desire to establish American-Russian business partnerships, not just in words but in deeds, this may happen in a hundred years or never at all.
If you are interested in why, call me and I will explain.
Sincerely,
EDWARD TOPOL, citizen of the USA and Israel.”
P.S. The generated image shows the only way that will help Russia.
