Russian Soldiers Must Not Shed Their Blood for Putin, Asad, and Oil, Basanets Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – Pavel Basanets, a retired intelligence officer who attracted attention in 2007 when he accused Vladimir Putin of violating his oath, is callling on Russian officers to disobey criminal order from the Kremlin leader to attack in Syria so that with their blood, Putin can support his fellow dictator and control the flow of oil.

            In an appeal posted on Kasparov.ru today, Basanets says that at no point during his 17 year career as an intelligence officer was he ever given a criminal order, one that if he had carried it out would have violated his “officer’s honor, oath and conscience” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=565C3279AEB3E).

            And that makes it especially unpleasant for him to admit that “a certain part of the contemporary officer corps … is prepared to fulfill any order of the supreme command,” regardless of their oaths, first in Ukraine and now in Syria, and who thus become cannon fodder for whoever is in power. 

            Don’t these officers recognize that they have been given “criminal orders” and that “the entire world considers Russia an outcast,” with not a single “significant country” recognizing the annexation of Crimea as legitimate? And don’t they see that “the newly declared fuehrer, insteqad of seeking friends and allies, continues to search for ‘enemies’ in the entire world?”

            “Russian officers! Perhaps you support the call of that madman clown ‘to launch a nuclear strike’ on Istanbul? Perhaps your mental capacities do not permit you to understand that the existing regime in Russia is leading the country and the planet to a nuclear catastrophe? And you are prepared to die for Zhirinovsky … or so Putin can stay in the Kremlin longer?”

            The LDPR leader, of course, is being well paid for his madness, “but how much will be paid to the family of an officer who fulfills a Criminal Order? Were you prepared for big money to kill Ukrainians and citizens of independent Ukraine? Are you prepared to give your life for the international criminal Bashar Asad?”

            “In Suria, your blood will be exchanged for oil which will then be told and money which doesn’t smell will be received” but not by you but by Putin and his allies. Russian officers, he continues, “reflect deeply on WHY during the time of Putin’s rule Russia has become impoverished and the entire world has become our potential enemy and opponent?”
            “Are you prepared to shed your blood for the fuehrer, his ambitions and his desire to remain in the Kremlin and in the final analysis for oil?”  If you are, Basanets says, calculate how little your funerals will cost compared to the money that will flow to him and his comrades as a result of your deaths.
            Many commentators in recent days have been discussing how a world war might begin, but Basanets’ article, including in particular its impassioned rhetoric, is an indication of how regimes or at least criminal regime policies in fact do: when those who are called upon to support or implement them begin to ask questions about what their sacrifices are in fact for.