Putin regime proxy profiles (paid, voluntary, or unwitting) are alleging Russian active measures talking points that the Putin dictatorship’s attacking Ukraine is only doing what John F. Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis and or the Bay of Pigs invasion. This narrative is false in a number of ways:
1. False Analogy as to Participants and Scale. The Bay of Pigs invasion was carried out by Cuban exiles backed by the United States, not a full-scale invasion by U.S. military forces as Putin’s invasion and war of aggression against Ukraine has been in 2022. At best and worst, the Bay of Pigs was a failed “special military operation.” Putin’s wars of aggression against Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan have been executed by Russian military forces and intelligence agencies to grab land for buffer, resources, and with imperial-ideological intent.
2. False Analogy in Core Facts: The Cuban Missile Crisis was about Soviet nuclear weapons secreted into Cuba, being first strike weapons that were a grave national security threat to the CONUS. The United States nor any NATO defense treaty state has staged nuclear weapons in any of Putin’s sovereign neighbors’ territory. Also, the USA and USSR have developed nuclear powered & armed submarines and other Triad capabilities rendering the geographical buffering and distance arguments partially moot. Putin’s aggressive regime developed hypersonic missilery which are nuclear capable and designed to be first-strike weapons of aggression.
3. NATO nor its member countries have ever attacked Russia post-WW2. Most of its member countries did not attack Russia or the Soviet Union pre-WW2. Some of NATO members were invaded first by the Nazis then by the Soviets who had divided up Poland by agreement and joint invasion with the Nazis before it all worsened for them. After the Western Allies and the Soviets defeated Hitler’s forces, the Soviet held onto some of these NATO members’ states as its East Bloc vassal states, i.e. de facto Soviet satellites, for decades. NATO members’ memory is of the Soviet Union’s then-despotic leader Josef Stalin (whom Putin has elevated in Russia in the 21st Century) keeping the Nazis spoils and reinforcing the Nazis wrongful occupations of once sovereign East European nations.
4. None of the sovereign countries Putin ordered attacked in this century had joined NATO when attacked. What did that tell them? Join NATO or get attacked. All faced heightened hostility from Moscow before Putin attacked and while they were not NATO members. They were fearing attacks, so they inquired into NATO membership. Despite never having gained that membership, however justified it may be from a deterrence and independent sovereignty standpoint, Putin invaded these nations anyway, making his actions more imperialist than anything else.
5. Some of NATO’s member countries helped SAVE Russia from Hitler’s forces when push came to shove, except Germany being under the sway of Hitler’s war machine at the time. Yet Stalin’s USSR agreed with Hitler to jointly attack and split Poland & went easy on Imperial Japan during WW2, thus energizing the Hirohito empire’s reign of terror in the Pacific.
The disinformation levied by Vladimir Putin’s “gray state” of secret police oligarchs, despots, and totalitarians, led by Putin himself, is not far from the vile lying machine of Hitler’s war propaganda ministry. The difference is in the kind of genocide Putin’s regime is willing and actually carrying out against Ukrainians. It is not ethnically based alone, but tribally ethnically based within an implied caste system of assumedly greater slavic castes assumed worthy of rule over assumedly lesser slavic castes. There is also a state religion element to the prejudices of supposedly deserved rule over Ukraine by Moscow that does not square with the history of genocide, mal-managed nuclear facilities, crackdowns, false promises, and a willingness to use Ukrainian human, material, and real estate resources but not reward Ukrainians in any just, fair, or ‘brotherly’ way.
