Romanian television is full of images of refugees crossing from Ukraine into Romania from its northern border – some of them Romanian-speaking since the border a hundred years ago under the Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be much further north and towns like Czernowitz part of Romania. Gregor von Rezzori based his famous trilogy there.
Like most people, I’m constantly refreshing the news to get updates about the horrific events occurring there and trying to make sense of it all. One of the things I realise is how little I can trust the commentators for whom the war seems little more than a spectacle – with roles of goodies and baddies too easily assigned. Only the likes of Paul Rogers (Professor of Peace Studies and respected military analyst) and Lawrence Freedman (Professor of military history and author of the recent amazing “Strategy – a history”) seem able to rise above this - although I reference some others at the end of the post
Anthony Barnett
is someone I can rely on to articulate most clearly our hopes and fears –
whether on issues of democracy, nationalism, Brexit or the pandemic. So it’s
not surprising that it is a typically nuanced
piece of his which has spurred me into a few words about what a Moscow
historian has courageously called “the
most senseless war in history”
I have never been so wrong
about a major event that was so clearly forewarned. I was convinced that
Vladimir Putin would not be so reckless as to launch a full-scale conquest of
Ukraine, if only for the simple reason that he would lose. I had assumed he was
a cunning dictator who hated democracy, was smart enough to play on the corruption
of a West enamoured of rentier capitalism and therefore had a cold measure of
realities. I also thought he felt profoundly threatened by last year’s uprising
in Belarus. The possible contagion
of a democratic revolution there would threaten him personally, and the West’s
sanctions, while not enough to undermine Lukashenko’s regime, were a close
call. So I reckoned – perhaps I should say hoped – that the huge mobilisation
of Russian military forces around Ukraine was a feint, whose real aim was to
consolidate Russian control over Minsk, not Kyiv. This, it seemed to me, was
bad enough.
It is important to hold onto one’s disbelief and the reasons for it. There is a danger in defaulting to self-regarding huff and puff, especially if you are British, with righteous declarations of how dictators must not be appeased. Putin should – and more importantly, will – be defeated. Now is the time for war, given that he has chosen it. It will be fought and suffered by the people of Ukraine, and we must extend to them solidarity and support. In the spirit of such solidarity, this also means it is time to begin to plan the peace that follows when the would-be conqueror is vanquished, and Russian forces withdraw. Ukraine’s heroic President Zelensky is right to put his country’s neutrality on the table in any negotiation. For if we do not wish to return to the old cycle that has led to this war, we have to acknowledge where we are coming from.
There were, Barnett argues, two reasons why Putin’s invasion was ‘unbelievable’. “First, Ukraine is a large country with a proud people and long borders. It cannot be successfully occupied against determined patriotic resistance. Even if the Russian forces can completely subdue Ukraine’s professional army, which is not yet clear, they cannot withstand a long insurgency fed with the latest infantry weapons, night-vision rifles and drone technology, supported by US surveillance and cyber-warfare. The premise of Putin’s assault, as set out in his historically insane address, is that the people of Ukraine are really Russian. As his troops will learn, this is untrue. Nibbling off part of an oblast is one thing – seeking the conquest of an entire, functioning country that borders NATO does not make sense”.
Putin is a product of the disastrous way that the US replaced the Cold War. As I write in ‘Taking Control!’, then-president George H W Bush expressed 30 years ago “the joy that was in my heart” at the way America had “won the Cold War”. He was thrilled that “a world once divided into two now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America”.
But America’s solo hegemony was responsible for a period of unrestrained unfairness. Its wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq were indecent disasters and its insatiable financial system exploded in the great crash of 2008.
Nowhere was more indecently and unfairly treated than Russia. After 1992, the US could have supported its transformation into a relatively uncorrupted democracy as its people wished. Instead of extending an updated Marshall plan to a defeated enemy, as the US had so successfully done with Japan and Germany after 1945, Russia was ravaged by economic ‘shock therapy’ and bankrupted. Putin is the foster child of Washington’s greed and myopia, determined to take revenge on the forces of the capitalist family that also orphaned him even while he has been personally enriched and empowered by it.
Other useful analyses
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war-foretold/
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/remembrance-of-nuclear-things-past
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power
Just added - Rebel Wisdom – sensemaking Russia and Ukraine A recent find, this website gives original insights. This long post is the most amazing assessment of useful commentaries and very much reflects my own feelings
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
An interview with Fiona Hill, the Brit in the US Foreign service who is a good Russian
analyst
https://samf.substack.com/p/russias-plan-c?s=r
Lawrence Freedman’s post of 2 March
https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/01/on-humiliation-and-the-ukraine-war/ 1 march
Ukraine and the art of strategy;
Lawrence Freedman (2019) in which the military historian links the events of
the past 8 years to the lessons from his great opus on “Strategy – a history”
https://indi.ca/white-empire-is-playing-russian-roulette-with-sanctions/
https://unherd.com/2022/02/vladimir-putins-reckless-gamble/
https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/24/what-happened-in-kazakhstans-january-rebellion/
https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/18/waiting-for-the-russians-in-ukraine/
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii87/articles/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukraine-s-fractures of historical interest
(the mood in 2014)
https://warontherocks.com/ a US security website “with
a Realist” lens.
Its not clear to me that Putin actually is trying to occupy the whole of Ukraine, which is the narrative that the Ukrainian government and NATO and the Eastern media is and always has pushed. For the reasons outlined in the article above, it would be daft for Putin to try to do so, but also, for what actual end? Surely we should ask Cuo Bono? Its a bankrupt country, huge, and as stated pretty impossible to keep occupied, certainly without huge financial and military cost.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, Russia's forces ranged around Ukraine, amounted to around 150,000, whilst Ukraine has around 300,000. Given that military strategists say that an attacking fore needs a superiority of around 4:1 to have any chance of success, Russia would have needed 1.2 million troops not 150,000, even before considering the high tech weapons, the unseen satellite and intelligence support etc. given to Ukraine by NATO.
It seems to me that given the facts and not all the NATO and media hype, Putin's goal was to peel away the PDP/LPR, and to do what NATO did in Kosovo and elsewhere, which is to denude military, strategic capacity with air and missile strikes, whilst limiting ground incursions to a minimum in border and strategic locations. That appears to be what they have done, whilst NATO is claiming they have a wider agenda for propaganda purposes.
“Cuo bono?” may (or may not) be a useful question to pose about the invasion – but how Russia extracts itself with any advantage from this criminal mess requires a different set of calculations.
ReplyDeletePulverising civilians into the earth has earned Russia the hatred of Ukrainian survivors and will make “regime change” possible only via a continued massive Russian military presence – at least in those areas Russia continues to occupy.