Europe's history is rife with examples of national leaders walking a fine line between normal relations and open hostilities. As someone once said, these are fine lines, but they aren't invisible, and most national leaders are all too aware of where those lines are.
If a report out of Poland on Thursday is accurate, the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has put his toes right up on that line. That latest event involved an alleged Russian-sponsored hit on an American of Ukrainian background in Warsaw. Poland, of course, is a NATO ally. The target of the alleged hit was "inconvenient" to Putin.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk revealed Thursday that his country arrested a Russian man hired by Moscow to kill a Ukrainian-American citizen who was "inconvenient to the Putin regime."
Tusk said the suspect was taken into custody Friday, with the alleged target being a man in Poland’s capital of Warsaw, according to a report from Reuters.
"Thanks to the truly brilliant action of our services ... we detained a Russian citizen recruited by Russian intelligence services," Tusk was quoted saying, adding that the target held both Ukrainian and U.S. passports. "At the last minute, thanks to the action of the Internal Security Agency and the police, we managed to prevent this execution, this attack."
Note that this isn't an anonymous account. This isn't a matter of "sources familiar with" the affair. This was reported by the Prime Minister of Poland. A national leader. And Tsar Vladimir's hit was, according to him, to have taken place in Warsaw, on NATO soil, as it were. Not even Russia has attempted something this blatant, until now.
Tusk also said Thursday that it was the first time that "someone on the order of Russia" sought to attack an American citizen on the territory of another NATO country, The Associated Press reported.
The operation was carried out in cooperation with U.S. services, Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s minister overseeing intelligence services, told the AP.
The assassination of an American in a NATO country may not be an overt act of war, but it is an act of unfounded aggression, and that's for sure and for certain. But Putin's Russia, we might recall, is rather notorious for the sudden and often inexplicable deaths of people who are inconvenient to the regime. This predates Vladimir Putin; at some point in the 1950s, cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew a comic that portrayed the inside of a dank, dismal jail cell at night. Seated on the bunk was an old, old man with a long white beard. Two KGB guards in uniform were standing in the cell, one holding a noose. The other was reassuring the old man: "Don't worry, Excellency, Comrade Popov and I have committed hundreds of successful suicides."
Vladimir Putin, remember, is an old KGB apparatchik himself, and odds are excellent that he's not above ordering something like this. But ordering a hit on someone who is on NATO soil, that's just a whole new level of stupid. And, yes, if this report is accurate, if Tsar Vladimir I did in fact send someone to try to whack an American of Ukrainian background in Poland, it may be a sign that either 1) Putin is growing desperate and is starting to flail about, or 2) Things are about to get very spicy in Eastern Europe, or 3) Both.
Stay tuned!
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