Observations about the Ukraine War. 7 March 2022

it is plausible to Putin as being something other than calculating, but examples of these are few.  As an operative of the KGB, he had much time to patiently observe the apparatus of a police state, and take measured steps to restore the Soviet state after it had failed.  Does Mr Putin risks alienating the Russian population?  Most of his moves have met with the approval of the public–a population that has preferences and priorities far different from those of most nations.

Russia has little experience with representative democracy.  For a short time after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the rise of the Bolsheviks under Lenin, the Duma (parliament) became something more than an advisory group for but a fleeting spate of time.  Russians have always operated under autocrats of varying severity.  Corruption among officials at every level was a part of daily life.  For the general public, personal freedoms do not rank high as priorities.  Not starving does.

Few Russians are alive that lived during WWII, but the war is steeped in every aspect of Russian life.  Russia suffered more casualties during WWII than the rest of the world combined.  Russians have an assumption that the outside world is hostile and not to be trusted.  Strong leaders are respected.  Even well-meaning leaders like Alexander II (who ended serfdom, and ushered in changes to Russian society during the mid-19th century) who was perceived to be weak was murdered by a group whose interests he had well served, and was replaced by his son–who was a severe autocrat that reversed most socio-political progress.

For centuries, Russians have believed in and maintained buffer zones. The Baltic States and Finland (which was part of the Russian Empire) were buffer zones with northern Europe.  The Ukraine and the satellite states of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia were the buffer zone with the West and Kazakhstan, (along with  Afghanistan and the Islamic Soviet states) were the buffer to the south.  To the Russian people, the cultural ties with Ukraine are deep.  A Ukraine with NATO troops and nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep is intolerable.  A total war would be preferable to the Russians over having the Ukraine as a NATO member on its doorstep.  (Russia waged a total war against Chechny…one of its own states.  It wasn’t pretty.)

Slavic spiritualism.  I think that Roman Catholics still be believe in Tansubstantiation…the belief that the sanctified wine and communion wafer are the actual blood and body of Christ.  Science has disproved many, many things that were once considered to be miracles (e.g. eclipses, rainbows, etc.)  But, some people believe that miracles (divine intervention) can exist alongside the scientific method.

To Russians, the contradictions between science and and religion are immaterial.  One can be scientist and champion of empiracal reasoning while at the same time believing everything in the Old and New Testament to be the literal truth.  For many centuries, the Eastern Slavic peoples have believed in a special, devinely designated plan that providence has created and the Slavs must fulfill.  (The Slavic version of God’s chosen people?)

Slavophilism has a few parallels with American Exceptionalism. Practioners of AE believe that the USA is imperfect and has a spotty history when it comes to the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and in Latin America throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  Yet, believers of AE believe…on balance…that the USA will side on the cause of Democracy out of an inherent appreciation of and inclination toward freedom for all that is not common to other cultures.  It is a part of the cultural DNA.

For Russians, Slavophilism is god-given in a big way.  AE is more secular, but religious fundamentalism seems to be a part of it.  So, both the Russian and American inclination to dominate and intrinsically promote their own systems has a religious or at least quasi-religious basis.  But, the Russians have no sense of mission when it came to Tsarism or Communism.  Rather, it has been a spiritual connection with being Slavs that has bound the loyalties of the Russians.

I think back to the news coverage on Soviet TV of America during the Cold War.  American ṕolice would shown evicting poor people from their homes, but instead of inducing a sense of outrage on the parts of the viewers, audiences tended to remark: ‘Wow, Americans have great clothes, great cars and have single family apartments.  I want what they have!’  Russians are among the most politically indifferent people on earth, and mostly want material success.

So, due to their political indiffernce to their autocratic government, do they long for a government steeped in  Western humanitarian ideals?  Not for a second, and with good reason. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the West started pouring consumer goods into Russia and the former Soviet states, along with loans and credits to fund these goods.  Soviet manufacturers could not compete–and sundered.  The positive trade balance that Russia had when it was dealing with the 14 former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact (Eastern European countries) collapsed.

As for American imports of vodka, mineral and technology exports?   Ummmm.  The door was closed to them.  Uhhhhh, we are really sorry, the American trade officials said, but we have this law that says that we can’t give Russia favored nation status because it does allow Jews to emmigrate to Israel fast enough.  Uh, sorry about that.

Quickly enough, the Russians saw the trap of high consumer debt and the collapse of its homegrown economy.  Meanwhile, Boris Yeltsin (the successor to Mikael Gorbachev) through his daughter, took millions in foreign bribes from Western business interests.  If this was what Western consumer culture was about, the Russians wanted little part of it.

A personal note.  In 2006, I consulted for a film market event in Moscow and was given a booth to promote my wares and offer for license the screen content of several of my clients.  On the first day, I was visited by mostly younger, well educated Russians who were impeccably dressed, near perfect speakers of English and who…in a no nonsense way…informed me that in order to do business in Russia, I would need them as partners, and told me how much they wanted for my company.  It was a bit heavy handed, and I shut down the booth late that first afternoon.  I felt threatened by these attempts at extortion, which were just normal business to them.

Corruption is a part of day to day life in Russia, where it is a demonstration of power and influence.  In the Ukraine, it has been more pervasive due to a weaker power base.  In Russia, everyone knows that Putin and his team are off limits when it comes to challenging him and his oligarchs…who are uniformly loyal.  In the Ukraine, whether they are pro-Russian or pro-West (like recent pro-Western Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (now doing time for taking very large bribes) make hay while the sunshine, but the Ukrainians…unlike the Russians…challenge the corruption.  In their last election in 2019, their disgust ran so deep that they elected an actor with clean hands from a tiny political party that shares the name of a tv series (Servant of the People) where he played the president of the Ukraine.

I like Vlodomyr Zelensky.  If somehow Russia does not place a puppet of its own choosing to be autocrat, I hope Mr Zelensky can continue as the leader.

It is important that issues be viewed with a sense of proportion, but there is one beef that the Russians have that clearly angered Russians at all levels and should have been given more press.  One might think that pro-Western governments would have been the norm in the Ukraine since its independence in 1991, but this is not so.  In 2004, Victor Yuschenko was the pro-Western president of the Ukraine.  His administration was viewed as corrupt, and while the voting population was pro-West, he was voted out of office, replaced by Victor Yanukovich who also claimed to be pro-West, but took a pro-Russian position once he was in office.

Later that year, the Verkhovna Rada (parliament)–without legal authority to do so and with the support of the military–removed Mr Yanukovich from office.  I remember very clearly at the time that protesters attended massive demonstrations and that a sniper (who was never identified) shot protesters from a government building.

However, was this a legitimate pretext to remove from office a legally elected president–certified as honest by a team of Western overseers?  I would see the equivalent as being if a GOP majority House and Senate were to overturn the election results where a Democratic president was elected.  Is this a fair parallel?

Again, a sense of proportion must be maintained.  This action was egregious, but no where near as unacceptable as a full scale invasion of the Ukraine.  Let me be perfectly clear on this!  However, if one is looking for reasons why the Russians would question the legitimacy of a Ukrainian coup supported by the West, one can point to this coup.

Will the rest of Europe might divvy up the Ukraine in order to neutralize Ukraine as a competing power (the way that Germany and Russia divided Poland between the world wars.).  Yes, large segments of the Ukraine were once parts of other countries.  The West waWs part of Poland and Lithuania; parts of the east were once Russian territories.  21% of the whole country is ethnically Russian. However, the ethnic majority group in all 24 oblasts (states) is Ukrainian.  Even in the oblasts that Russian claims to be inhabited by an oppressed majority of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians are in the majority.

I do not see Russia being satisfied with a Ukrainian statelet surrounded by hostile Ukrainian expats in the likes of Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Moldava seeking reunification with their Ukrainian motherland.  Russia wants the whole country under its dictation–while having the option of hiving off parts for itself–as it did with Crimea.

Speaking of Crimea, it is hard to use them as an example of anything.  It only became a part of the Ukraine during the Khruschev reign during the 1950s.  It was the one part of the Ukraine that was not an oblat (state) but a special administrative region.  It was the only state or SAR that did not have a Ukrainian majority, and when it was turned over to the Ukraine it became a minority that was given little consideration in its own affairs.  After the takeover by Russia–in retailiation for the coup in the Ukraine in 2014–a referendum that may or may not have been fair–endorsed the takeover by the Russians.

So how much do the Crimeans love the Russians?  During the Stalin era, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartars (the ethnic Crimean population) were sent to their deaths in Siberia so that the Russians could repopulate this militarily strategic area with ethnic Russians.  Crimea may have preferred Russian rule to Ukrainian hegemony, but…

Did not anticipate that Russia would launch the attacks as they did without first clearly defining its terms.  However, their foreign policy moves have been clear in recent months.  Russia has been busy.  China and Russia are now on more cooperative terms than they have been for decades.  Russia has supported and restabilized wobby autocracies in neighboring Kazakhstan and Belarus.  Oil-rich Azerbaijan has steered a mostly independent course since separation from the USSR in 1991, but in recent years, it used military aid to recapture the Nagorno-Karabash region from neighboring Armenia.  A conquest of the Ukraine would accomplish most of its remaining objectives.

I think that member states of NATO have less to fear than former Soviet fiefdomslike Moldava have.  However, am hesitant to take anything for granted.  My track record for predicting the moves of Mr Putin have been far from sagacious.

What are the prospects for nuclear warfare?  I am not hearing much about limited nuclear war that does not involve the dispersal of radiation via explosion of some sort–a bomb, delivered by missile or aircraft.

What now seems more likely is the placement of small “dirty bombs” containing plutonium (the component used against Russian journalists and defectors in England, and against two politicians in the Ukraine a decade ago.  The same amounts of plutonium (via a more effective delivery mechanism) could kill tens of thousands of people.

That is scary, particularly because a very compact and surreptitiously delivered dirty bomb has a deniability that a major nation cannot have with ICBMs or bomber aircraft.

I am generally impressed by just about all of the key people in key capacities.  Zalensky is the president and leader of the small political party Servant of the People.  He was immensely popular before these troubles began, largely (mostly?) because he was not beholden to a corrupt power base that exacted a heavy toll on whoever was in power.

Biden has been brilliant.  His administration publicly revealed the Russian plan for attack, including Russia’s use of red flag operations (agents provocateurs) and their strategy for blaming the Ukraine for the invasion.  He undercut Putin’s attempt to gain friends in the non-aligned world, and forced Russia’s ally China into commenting on issues they would have preferred to avoid.

He gets further kudos for refusing to give the Ukrainians fighter aircraft.  What for?  So they could be destroyed on the ground, as the airstrips of the Ukrainian airforce have largely been disabled?  Or, that they could be taken by the Russians after successful takeovers of Ukrainian airbases?  No, give them Stinger surface to air missiles (which can be launched from portable devices about the size of bazookas) like the USA gave to Afghanistan during their war with Russia in the 1970s.  And, send them plenty of those portable anti-tank missiles as well.

If Putin is getting a clear picture of how the West is responding, he must be scratching his head.  Where did this sudden unity of purpose and solidarity come from?

The EU has actually taken decisive action, unusual as any single member country can veto most measures–and many have sacred cows they are normally fastidious in serving. (Germany wants Russian oil and trade; Belgium wants Russian diamonds; UK wants to provide financial services and refuge to Russian oligarchs; etc.) Yet, each country has subsumed their individual interests to some degree.

Neither Putin nor his inner circle is likely to have anticipated that Russia would be kicked out of SWIFT.  (It certainly caught me by surprise.)  Is likely that access to Western markets, technology and arms exports will be diminished for some time.  China has reentered the picture as an ideological, trade and defense partner–particularly as a source of investment capital.  But, Putin has always been careful about who he gets in bed with, and this bromance with Xi Jin-Ping looks to be a rocky one.

Perhaps, Donald Trump is the one figure that has come out of this the worst.  However, I gotta give the man credit, at a conference attended by major GOP donors this weekend, he made light of his past words about Russia, casting a “humorous” light (as in he was only joking when he spoke in flattering terms of Putin).

Nonetheless, DT looks pretty bad in all of this.  People largely believe what they want to believe.  His large and loyal following have been willing to overlook his attempts to rescind Obamacare and his personal picadillos.  Out of force of will, they have believed him.  But, if and when they turn the corner and believe him to have betrayed the USA for financial gain…wow.  Just a slight wavering of their pro-Trump fervor can turn them from being voters to fence sitters, and less likely to advocate reforms that abrogate the public good.

So, what is likely to happen in the Ukraine in the near future?  Look at Finland.  During much of the last thousand years it alternated between being a vassal state of its larger neighbors Sweden and Russia.  When it became independent of Russia after WWI,  it didn’t become a Soviet state like the Baltic States to the south, it retained its independence while bound to a military alliance with the newly founded Soviet Union.

In a system commonly called Finlandization, it made policy decisions in almost all areas with an eye as to how the USSR would respond.   So, it joined no economic alliances or military alliances with the West (such as joining NATO or the EU) and enacted few laws that were well outside Communist policy norms.

I see a similar process taking place in the Ukraine, with a few notable exceptions.  Russia will install a parliament of its own choosing (including pro-Russian incumbents willing to take a loyalty oath).  That parliament will select a pro-Russian prime minister.  Relations with the West will be conducted by Ukrainian puppets with Russians pulling the strings.

I do not see a long term military occupation of the Ukraine by the Russians.  But, without substantial Western aid (which would likely be managed by the Russians) I see a slow rebuilding process.

Russia will present the subsumation of the Donets and Lukhanse regions of the Ukraine into Russia–proof of its mission of liberation–as PR gambol.  Ukraine will likely become the new Finland, part of the new USSR.