A carefree rampager who doesn’t give a shit about stings from a thousand raging bees or even cobra venom....

Vladimir Putin, Russian Honey Badger

The West can throw whatever it wants at the Russian autocrat. He doesn’t care.

Opinion by JACK SHAFER

The honey badger became a popular meme a decade ago after a wise guy named “Randall” narrated old National Geographic footage of the animal doing his business on the savannah and posted it to YouTube. The honey badger, intoned Randall, was a carefree rampager who didn’t give a shit about stings from a thousand raging bees or even cobra venom. At some point since the video became a sensation, Vladimir Putin appears to have adopted the creature as his role model. Like the honey badger, Putin doesn’t care what you think or have to say about his Ukraine invasion or anything else he does.

Putin doesn’t care that you poured your Russian vodka down the drain or banned its sale from your state liquor stores in protest. He doesn’t care that arts institutions have retaliated by canceling performances by Russian artists or that McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and scores of other Western companies have ditched his country. The banishment of Russian soccer teams from international competition matters not at all to him. Scaling the don’t-care ladder, Putin doesn’t care that his army fired on the Zaporizhian nuclear reactor site, risking a radioactive accident. He doesn’t care about the United Nations General Assembly denouncing the invasion. The sanctions that have blocked Russian planes from Western skies and unplugged Russia from financial markets? No le importa! The same goes for the indiscriminate bombings that are on pace to kill thousands of innocent Ukrainians. And from the way he’s dispatched thousands of unprepared conscripts into Ukraine to die, he doesn’t even seem to care about his military.

He just doesn’t give a fig. He’s like the kid who soaked the neighbor’s cat in motor oil, torched it, and laughed when they punished him by tossing him into a cold, wet basement filled with broken glass and spiders. The sort of deprivation and universal opprobrium that would break an ordinary dictator doesn’t reach Putin. Threats to isolate him and Russia from the world community don’t faze him. Quite the contrary, an isolated Russia sounds like paradise to his ears. The sticks and carrots that drive others to the negotiating table are useless when deployed against him and his disregard for world opinion has made him a pitiless and nearly impossible foe. Ukraine’s surprising military might is all that has mattered. But making peace is beyond a honey badger like Putin, because doing so would show that he cares. That’s why U.S. officials are deeply skeptical about negotiations to end the war; they know Putin won’t be satisfied until he gets what he came for.

Additional evidence that Putin doesn’t care what anybody thinks can be found in the way he has waged his “information war” over Ukraine. The Western press can’t stop marveling about how badly Putin has lost that particular battle (Guardian, CNBC, Defense One, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, Washington Post, Time, et al.). But how hard is he fighting? He’s shipping nothing but unbelievable lies to the West to justify his war — tall tales about American bioweapon factories, drug-addicted Nazis and self-bombing Ukrainians. His ambassador to the United Nations has falsely claimed the pictures of the Mariupol mother and infant from the bombed hospital are fake. These are all perfunctory fibs, propaganda placeholders in a skirmish he refuses to invest in because in order to be invested he would first have to care. As Putin has lectured the world for a decade, he regards the “Euro-Atlantic” world as decadent and flabby, an “infertile and genderless” place beyond redemption. As far as he is concerned, Western public opinion, be it expressed by think tanks, newspapers, diplomats or even Ashton and Mila, is barely worth swaying.

Putin does, however, care very much about Russia, or at least Russian opinion and his ability to stay in power. That’s why he decapitated independent and foreign media and stokes state-sanctioned media with Kremlin-flattering war propaganda about “rescuing” Russian speakers from genocide in Ukraine. He craves total control of his nation, and if that requires the arrest and jailing of thousands of protesters or the staging of a WWE-like pro-war stadium rally, so be it. Everything must advance Putin’s goal of restoring the Russian empire, with him as its architect, even if it means the slaughter of Russian soldiers and the impoverishment of his own people. Bring on the bees, bring on the cobras, just as long as honey badger Putin can snuggle with Mother Russia, far from the West’s corrupt precincts.

Putin’s suicidal love for Russia expressed itself earlier this month, when he went completely Strangelovian by placing his nuclear arsenal, the world’s largest, on “alert.” “Fine”, his actions seemed to say. “You want to resist my absorption of Ukraine and scuttle my economy? Well, I’ll just broil you in nuclear fire.” What’s his logic? Nuclear war would leave both the United States and Russia in glowing ash and millions would die. Maybe he figures that his beloved Russia, being 1.8 times larger than the United States, is too big to nuke completely and that his regime could retreat and survive in a Siberian bunker? Nothing says you don’t give a shit like taking your chance on winning Armageddon.