I know what I’m rooting for, and it’s definitely not a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Beyond that, I don’t claim to know how to get past the current tensions on the border with the least damage.
(I’m actually kinda relieved that so many smart people with solid insights into the region, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, are telling the most alarmed people in Washington to calm down, at least a bit.)
But I’ve benefited from the insights of a smart, funny op-ed piece that ran a week ago in New York Times by political scientist Ivan Krastev, who has developed his insights and presumably his views of Russian-ness from neighboring Bulgaria, where he grew up. (He is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an expert on international politics, according to the Times.)
Read the whole piece here. But if you’re in a hurry and need a grin to tide you over, I offer the first and last paragraphs of the op-ed:
First paragraph: “In the final weeks of World War I, a German general sent a telegram to his Austrian allies summarizing the situation. It was, he wrote, ‘serious, but not catastrophic.’ The reply came back: ‘Here the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.’”
Last paragraph, quoting a Russian proverb: “If you invite a bear to dance, it’s not you who decides when the dance is over. It’s the bear.”
Short form:
Putin’s game is bluffing; bluffing is only effective if you can convince your opponent that you can and might carry out the threat. So Zelensky is saying, don’t push Putin into a corner where he has to prove his credibility. I’m sure that Putin remembers both his and our experiences in the Afghan Briar Patch, and would just as soon stay out of it. Ukraine would be a lot worse than Afghanistan; it’s less a tribal conglomerate and more a unified country with common customs, interests and goals.
It’s rather perverse that Czar Putin has the largest country on earth to manage and govern, yet he spends all his time spinning his foreign policy webs and schemes and (supposedly) sees Western “invasions” of all absurdities. There’s no doubt that most of Putin’s stratagems revolve around destabilizing Western democracies, such as his documented efforts to aid the “election” of an unqualified ignoramus to the Oval Office in 2016. His intelligence apparatus is routinely revealed to be interfering in election after election, and hack after hack. I guess that’s more interesting and rewarding than, say, working to stop Siberia from melting underfoot.
If Putin wanted to recreate “historic Russia”, that presumably meant somehow locking-up the new post Cold war country of Ukraine within the Russian sphere of interest. Unfortunately for him, Ukraine hadn’t really enjoyed being a part of Russia for the past 3 centuries, apparently. And many Ukrainians definitely hadn’t been fans of the Soviet period, given Stalin’s decision to engineer a famine which killed millions of them. When you’ve got large segments of Soviet citizens viewing Hitler’s Wehrmacht as “liberators”, you’ve gone badly awry somewhere!
One analyst recently pointed out that Putin’s 2014 seizure of the Crimea “lost” Ukraine for Russia. That makes sense, and you’d think a Russian leader who had wanted to recreate “historic Russia” would’ve seen that coming. So forging closer ties with Ukraine through voluntary association is now probably off the table for politicians in Ukraine.
That leaves involuntary association. Usually if a military is actually going to invade a country, they attempt to have some element of surprise. Especially when they share a common border. Obviously that’s not happening here with this laborious, slow-motion “build-up” of forces all around Ukraine. And it’s doubtful that even these 100,000 or so troops could really successfully occupy Ukraine. And a mini-invasion/occupation of the much smaller industrial Donbas region (which may be majority Russian) would just further alienate the great mass of Ukrainians against Russia, as well as bringing down all the Western sanctions without even recreating “historic Russia”. So would that cost really be “worth” the operation? Plus, keeping all these Russian troops fully mobilized and ready to invade is expensive as well.
All this leads one to believe that the Europeans are correct, and that this is just another Putin web being spun, a fit of frustration, ala Kim Jong Un. You’ve got a huge nation to run, Vladimir, how about looking into the actual welfare of Russians (for once)?