On the war in Ukraine
I'm not qualified to have an opinion, just sharing my current thoughts
As I was chopping and stacking wood the other day, I was reflecting on the simple pleasure of getting yourself ready for the coming winter. But how long will next winter be? Nuclear winter is a prospect we are closer to now than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union. How could this have happened? It took most of us by surprise. We have been laser focused on the pandemic and on our own perceived cultural failings. We have been lulled into a false sense of security with thirty years of US cultural and geo-political dominance. I was one of those people who did not think Russia would invade Ukraine. I was wrong.
Consequently, I have spent the last few weeks reading articles and books as well as listening to podcasts from across the spectrum all the while keeping an eye on the mainstream news outlets. Having lived through a rush to consensus over Covid, I wanted to make sure that wasn’t happening again. I’m not convinced that it isn’t as I think a good chunk of the story is being left out. The following will be my humble attempt to understand what is going on. It is not meant to be a definitive statement on the matter but a first step in coming to grips with a new reality.
I want to start with Russia. I have had an unexplained fascination with Russia since I was a teenager. Its history and literature has been a fairly constant companion in my spare time ever since then. If I have taken anything from these studies, it is that the western world does not understand Russia or the Russian people in the slightest. I’m not claiming that I do, but at least I am trying, which is more than I can say for those who are now boycotting Russian vodka, composers or authors. How Russians see themselves and how they see the world can only be understood by knowing their history. This is true of any country. An attempt to understand the current situation has to be done by viewing the conflict through the eyes of the ‘other side’ even if that is to try and defeat them.
What happened to Russia in the 1990’s was nothing short of catastrophic. The USSR had been a fifteen nation union with Russia as its biggest and most important member. The dissolution of the union came on Christmas Day, 1991 and still more regions of Russia itself threatened to break away. This was an unimaginable change from only a few short years before. Russia’s economy had been completely state run but would now undergo economic ‘shock therapy’. Keeping with the therapy analogy, this treatment should have been guided with care and attention by a qualified professional. Instead it was left to its own devices. Russia went from being one of the two superpowers in the world to a bankrupt state that had its wealth stolen by gangsters, former Communist and KGB apparatchiks and foreign banks. The result was a noticeable decline in life expectancy and an increase in lawlessness. Try and imagine what would have to happen to your country for male life expectancy to drop ten years in a decade. Vladimir Putin offered an end to this.
Putin had been a KGB member stationed in East Germany and then rose to the top of its successor organisation, the FSB. He was plucked from this relative obscurity to be Boris Yeltsin’s replacement because he was everything Yeltsin was not. Where Yeltsin was big, bombastic and often booze ridden, Putin was measured, compact, physically fit and young. Yeltsin’s approval ratings had fallen below ten percent at some points and he had even seen off a coup attempt. He needed the help of the oligarchs and their media companies to get reelected in 1996. He was ever after associated with the corruption of these figures. Putin would soon banish or imprison those oligarchs who did not acquiesce to state power from here on out which was a very popular move in Russia. He launched a war in Chechnya soon after coming to power which was brutal but successful. To a country like Russia which had felt humiliated and small since the early 90’s, this felt like getting back on track.
How does Putin see Russia’s role in the world? It seems to me that he first and foremost wanted to restore dignity and strength to the Russian state and therefore the Russian people. He then wants to restore Russia to great power status. The very least he can do here is not tolerate any foreign intervention or meddling in what he views as Russia’s sphere of influence. There is evidence of American involvement in the Maidan revolution which started this conflict in 2014. This is the part of the story that has been overlooked in the current narrative. Or it is simply dismissed as Russian propaganda. Putin probably shares the fear of invasion or encirclement from the west that Russians have felt throughout their history. They have faced invaders from that direction several times. (They’ve also done some invading of their own, meaning that Eastern European NATO members can feel paranoid too) With missiles stationed in Poland and Romania that could be aimed towards Moscow, is he unjustified in feeling threatened? At best he can use their existence as a justification for his actions.
Successive American administrations were warned against the expansion of NATO ever eastward by foreign policy experts and CIA analysts. Here is George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War containment policy against the Soviets, talking in 1998:
''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''
Unfortunately he was ignored. Talk of Georgia and Ukraine being admitted to the organisation are simply intolerable to Russia. Why then, when many in the know have advised against any talk of further NATO expansion does it keep coming up as a policy? Scott Horton of antiwar.com has some ideas.
“Why is the U.S. government taking such risks? It’s the money. As Richard Cummings did such a great job of explaining in his 2007 article "Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," the 1990s-era U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was a project of Lockheed Vice-President Bruce Jackson. The whole thing was just a racket for selling jets either directly to the eastern European states, or failing that, to force the American taxpayer to pick up the tab for them.”
He goes on to query whether or not the Russian invasion of Ukraine was something that the US might actually have wanted. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons will be sent into Ukraine for the foreseeable future and who knows how much their military will be built up and trained after the war is over. This despite the worrying presence of the Azov Batallion, neo-Nazi fighters amongst the Ukrainian armed forces. The hypocrisy of the west on this issue is fairly stunning even for a jaded cynic like me. Western media has gone from branding Canadian truck drivers protesting vaccine mandates as Nazis and transphobes to actively advocating arming real life violent neo-Nazi’s. Yes, there are actual Nazi’s in Ukraine. There’s definitely a case to be made that arming every Ukrainian you can get a rifle to is the only decent thing to do. It’s the complete about face on this that shows how unprincipled and completely captured by limbic capitalism so many people in the west are. Russians have become the new anti-vaxxers, the new group to hate.
We know that Putin has almost complete narrative control in Russia. I recently finished ‘The Invention of Russia’ by Arkady Ostrovsky. It’s a very detailed book that deals in large part with how the Russian media landscape has shifted from the relatively free era of the Yeltsin years to slow but sure progress towards complete control by the Kremlin. I’ve seen snippets of the kind of propaganda that passes for news and it is scarily aggressive and anti-American. I’ve heard Russian dissident Masha Gessen say before that ‘there is no public opinion in Russia’ meaning that people are not allowed to think about things that would challenge the state. They wrote a good article in the New Yorker recently about this topic.
Given the Orwellian state of affairs in Russia, it is so disappointing to see such a hysterical and censorious reaction from some quarters in our area of the world. Russia Today and Sputnik are state owned and surely need to be read with a healthy dose of salt, but to ban them completely? Are their ideas so dangerous that one literally cannot be exposed to them? Fighting censorship with censorship does not seem like the type of example a culture would want to set if it was confident in its position. Facebook have allowed calls for violence against Russians and Putin himself and are even allowing support for the Azov Battalion. Is this really who we are striving to be? Also, if Putin is assassinated or otherwise removed from office as some have called for, how do we know that what comes after will be better? Russia may completely fall apart or get an even more extreme version of Russian nationalism. If Russia falls apart, what happens to all their nukes?
It will be unavoidable here to avoid some what-aboutery but I can’t breeze over this. I’m not sure where those of us in the western, liberal, democratic world have suddenly found so much moral authority that they can develop anti-Russian feeling so quickly. Put the shoe on the other foot. Should American billionaires who donated money to any US political parties have their assets frozen? Perhaps the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen plus many other low level conflicts around the world, directly or indirectly involving the US or NATO are less important than the one in Ukraine. Perhaps their relative distance from us both culturally and geographically make them qualitatively different from the latest awful invasion. Perhaps having rediscovered our moral centre more western corporations will soon withdraw from China given the concentration camps said to exist there for Uighur Muslims. Are Newcastle United fans shaking in their shirtless boots about their Saudi owners being divested of their club just as Roman Abramovich has been at Chelsea? Presumably the World Cup in Qatar is canceled now since there has been much reporting on their use of slave labour building the infrastructure for the event? I won’t be holding my breath. The Middle Eastern countries are our allies and China is too important to the global economy for anything like what is happening to Russia to happen to them. We all know it too. There is nothing wrong with being outraged at the brutality that Putin has brought to Ukraine, nothing inherently wrong with choosing not to be associated with a thug like him. But why not take the opportunity to hold ourselves to the same standard?
While it seems that the conflict has reached a bit of a stalemate as I write this, the risk of escalation still remains. Thankfully, it seems that there is no appetite for a NATO enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine. This must be incredibly hard for Ukrainians to take but we can’t afford to save them at the expense of potentially killing literally everybody else. The threat of nuclear war is not to be taken lightly. My friend and podcast host Ciaran O’Regan wrote this article in November last year. Here he is quoting Toby Ord on the danger of nuclear winter
[in a] nuclear winter … nuclear firestorms loft smoke from burning cities into the upper atmosphere. High above the clouds, the smoke cannot be rained out and would persist for years, blackening the sky, chilling the Earth and causing massive crop failure … Millions of direct deaths from explosions could be followed by billions of deaths from starvation, and—potentially—by the end of humanity itself.
Think of the above quote whenever you hear someone advocate for a no-fly zone.
It appears that Vladimir Putin has made a serious miscalculation. Russian propaganda may have worked on him too. He surely expected to have taken Kiev by now, probably assumed that President Zelensky would have fled the country and that he would have been welcomed as liberators by the Russian speaking population of Ukraine. None of those things have happened. Four of his generals have been killed and thousands of his soldiers are dead. Zelensky is now a household name and seen as a hero in the western world. This invasion seems to have done what had not been possible before, uniting the entire Ukrainian nation as one in opposition to Putin. And not just the Ukrainian nation but almost the entire world. Many eastern European men have traveled to Ukraine to fight. This is their chance for revenge. The Poles remember the Katyn massacre, the Hungarians their uprising in 1956, the Czechs, theirs in 1968. Lithuania remembers the events of January 1991. Ukraine cannot forget the Holodomor. Putin may have been prodded and poked by NATO expansion but he has kicked a hornets nest.
Ukraine is now playing the part of the extras in a geo-political movie starring Russia and the United States. It joins a cast including Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Iran and more. As usual, the innocent will suffer most. Women and children will die. And for what? To sell a few more missiles and jets? To prove to a propagandised populace that Russia is a force to be reckoned with again? This war is an opportunity for the western world to reaffirm its vows to real liberal and democratic values. It has stood up for a country which has been invaded by an aggressive neighbour. Will it stand up for others around the world? It remains to be seen.
I can’t say if this invasion would have happened without NATO expansion. Putin may very well have decided to invade Ukraine for all kinds of other reasons besides the ones he gives now. To restore Russian imperial territory, to assuage critics at home, for natural resources etc. We will never know. Russia is now a rogue state. Its people will suffer for it. They have suffered for a long time, through two world wars sandwiched between years of Communist rule. I still hope to visit there someday, just as I hope to visit Japan and Germany. I will still read my Russian books. Still trying to understand Russia and why it does the things it does.