“You are a humanitarian,” was the gushing praise Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy, heaped on Russian President Vladimir Putin when they met in St. Petersburg Oct. 21. Putin had just released from prison Stephen Hubbard, a retired schoolteacher, to return to the U.S.
In 2022, Hubbard was arrested and framed up on false charges of being a Ukrainian mercenary several weeks after Putin launched Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Ihor Shishko, a former Ukrainian prisoner of war jailed alongside him in western Russia, said Hubbard was beaten, given electric shocks and subjected to humiliating physical and sexual abuse. He was sentenced to almost seven years in a penal colony and used by Putin to demand concessions from Washington.
Witkoff’s praise for Putin is at one with Washington’s efforts to win Moscow as a U.S. ally.
Within hours of Witkoff’s fawning meeting with Putin, Kyiv was hit by missile strikes. Three ballistic rockets with cluster warheads designed to maximize human casualties over a wide area were among the missiles. Two people were killed and over 30 injured.
“We thought this was a war and the destruction of Ukraine, but it turns out to be an act of ‘humanity,’” Nataliia Stativko, a former journalist, told the Kyiv Independent, on a street devastated by one of the missiles.
Ukraine’s war to defend itself targets Russian military and infrastructure sites, while Moscow is targeting Ukrainian working people. Recent Russian attacks have been more deadly than previously, as Washington has held back in providing Ukraine with defensive Patriot missiles. Civilian casualties have reached record levels but have failed to force working people in Ukraine to submit.
Putin’s “humane” regime sacrifices the lives and limbs of Russian workers in uniform without compunction in its drive to try to seize more Ukrainian territory. Overnight Oct. 21-22, Russian forces suffered a staggering 2,250 combat casualties, mostly on the Donbas front, a gruesome new 24-hour record.
Putin’s rise from KGB agent to autocrat
For 15 years Putin was an officer of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. He was stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, setting off the disintegration of the Soviet Union. As a capitalist-oriented economy and government emerged from the Stalinist police-state regime, he began his rise to power.
Elected president in 2000, he acted as an arbiter between political rivals in the newly emerging capitalist class that looted the former state-owned enterprises.
He said he would stop Russia from being “relegated to the second or even third tier of global powers.” In the quarter century since, he’s acted on a Russian chauvinist course, seeking to reestablish Moscow as a dominant power worldwide.
In 2000 he waged war against Chechnya. In 2008 he ordered Moscow’s invasion of Georgia. Several years later he sent forces to intervene in the civil war in Syria to prop up the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad.
In 2014 working people joined a mass uprising in Ukraine known as the Maidan, which toppled the bloody pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych. Alarmed, Putin seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Then he mobilized forces to lead pro-Moscow separatists fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Since its 2022 invasion failed to conquer Ukraine, the Putin regime has continued a war of attrition that has become the biggest bloodbath in Europe since World War II.
Opponents jailed, exiled or killed
In his nearly 27 years in power, Putin’s anti-working-class regime tightened repression to quell mass protests and shut down political rights.
A long list of mysterious deaths is attributed to his rule. Prominent opposition leaders targeted include Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who died suddenly in 2024 during his incarceration in a harsh Arctic prison.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, another Russian opposition leader, survived two poisoning attacks by Putin’s agents and was imprisoned for challenging Putin and his war.
Kara-Murza, who was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2024, pointed to his fellow political prisoners and the “millions of people in Russia who reject Putin’s dictatorship, who are against his aggression in Ukraine,” in an interview with Time magazine after his release. These are the people, not Putin, “who are the future of our country.”