Timothy Snyder on Ukraine, and the duty for Americans and Europeans: Would you sell them out?

Would you sell them out?

A question for American lawmakers about Ukraine

Timothy Snyder

November 8, 2023

 

Imagine that freedom was in decline around the world.  Imagine that things had gotten so bad that a dictatorship actually invaded a democracy with the express goal of destroying its freedoms and its people.  And yet... imagine that this people fought back.  Imagine that their leaders stayed in the country.  Imagine that this people got themselves together, supported and joined their armed forces, held back an invasion of what seemed like overwhelming force.  Imagine that their resistance is a bright moment in the history of democracy this whole century.  We don't have to imagine: that attack came from Russia and those people are the Ukrainians.  Would you sell them out?

Americans have an alliance in North America and Europe which has existed for more than seventy years, with the goal of preventing an attack from the Soviet Union and then from Russia.  Imagine that, when the Russian attack came, the hammer fell on a country excluded from that alliance.  Ukraine indeed took the entire brunt of the invasion, resisted, and turned the tide: a task assigned to countries whose economies, taken together, are two hundred fifty times larger than Ukraine's.  In so doing, Ukraine destroyed so much Russian equipment that a Russian attack on NATO became highly improbable.  With the blood of tens of thousands of its soldiers, Ukrainians defended every member of that alliance, making it far less likely that Americans would have to go to war in Europe.  Would you sell them out?   

(If there is anyone out there who still thinks that NATO had anything to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, consider this: invading Ukraine made Russia far more vulnerable. If Russia actually feared NATO, invading Ukraine would be the last thing it would do. Russian leaders are perfectly aware that NATO will not invade Russia, which is why they can pull troops away from the borders of NATO members Norway and Finland and send them to kill Ukrainians.) 

For this whole century, American politicians and strategists of all political orientations have agreed that the greatest threat for a global war comes from China.  The scenario for this dreadful conflict, in which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers could fight and die, is a Chinese offensive against Taiwan.  And now imagine that this can defused at no cost and with no risk.  The offensive operation the Chinese leadership is watching right now is that of Russia against Ukraine.  Ukrainian resistance has demonstrated how difficult a Chinese offensive operation in the Pacific would be.  The best China policy is a good Ukraine policy.  Will we toss away the tremendous and unanticipated geopolitical gain that has been handed to us by Ukraine?  There is nothing that we could have done on our own to so effectively deter China as what the Ukrainians are doing, and what the Ukrainians are doing is in no way hostile towards China.  Ukrainians are keeping us safe in this as in other ways.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine, because it's true, that the whole world is watching the war in Ukraine.  From everyone else's point of view, whether they like us, hate us, or don't care about us, Ukraine seems like an obvious ally and an easy win for the United States.  Anyone around the world, regardless of their own ideology, knows that Ukraine is a democracy and America is supposed to support democracies.  Anyone around the world, regardless of the state of their own economy, knows that our economy is enormous, far larger than Russia's, and that economic strength wins wars.  Anyone around the world can easily see that Americans are not at risk in Ukraine, and that Americans draw extraordinary moral and geopolitical gains from Ukrainian resistance.  From the point of view of all observers, in other words, defunding Ukraine would demonstrate enormous American weakness.  Is that the face we want to show the world?  Do we want to tell everyone that we are unreliable and unaware of our own interests?  Ukrainians, with American help, make Americans look sensible and strong.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine that this is a winnable war, because it is. Russia's main strategic objective, the seizure of Kyiv, was not achieved.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kyiv.  Russia was forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts.  Imagine the Russia's campaign to take Kharkiv failed.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kharkiv.  Imagine that Kherson, the one regional capital Russia has taken in this war, was taken back by Ukraine.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kherson.  Snake Island, lost early in the war, has been taken back by Ukraine.  Ukraine has taken back more than half of the territory seized by Russia in this invasion.  Knowing that all is this is true, imagine that Putin knows it too.  Russia's main offensive instrument, the paramilitary Wagner Group, staged a coup against Putin and that Putin had to kill its leader.  Imagine that Putin knows he cannot really take much more Ukrainian land -- not without American help, anyway.  Ukraine has a theory of victory that involves gains on the battlefield. Putin has a theory of victory that involves votes in the US Congress. Putin thinks that he has a better chance in the Capitol than he has in Kyiv.  Should we prove him right?

Imagine a world food system with Ukraine as a major node.  In normal times Ukraine can feed four hundred million people, and usually the UN World Food Program depends upon Ukraine.  Ukrainian exports feed some of the most sensitive parts of the Middle East and Africa.  Much of the instability in those regions is related to shortages of food.  Russia has destroyed a major dam to destroy Ukrainian farmland.  And mined Ukrainian farms on a huge scale.  Russia targets ports and grain storage facilities with its missiles, and claims the piratical right to stop all shipping on the Black Sea with its navy.  And yet...  Imagine that Ukrainians resist here as well.  Ukrainians farmers are hard at work.  Ukraine still supplies food to the World Food Program.  Ukrainians, through their own innovative weapons and clever tactics, managed to intimidate the Black Sea Fleet and open a lane for commercial shipping.  That they are feeding the people who needed to be fed.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine that we were a country that cared about war crimes.  And imagine that there was a law, an international genocide convention, that defined five actions that constitute genocide, and that Russians have committed every one of these crimes in Ukraine.  I cannot keep on writing about "imagining" when I have seen some of the death pits myself.  I cannot say "imagine" when writers I know have been murdered because they represent Ukrainian culture.  I cannot stay with my device when I read that the Russian state boasts of having taken 700,000 Ukrainian children to be russified, when every day Russian propagandists make clear that Russian war aims are exterminationist.  And yet Ukrainians resist and persist.  This is a genocide that can be stopped, that is being stopped.  We are living within the scenario, the one we say that we have been waiting for, when American actions can stop a genocide, simply by helping the people who have been targeted, simply by paying their taxes.  Whenever the Ukrainians take back land, they rescue people.  This is how they think of their liberated territories: as places where no more children will be kidnaped, no more civilians will tortured, no more local leaders will be murdered.  Would you sell out a people to a genocidal occupation?  A people that has done nothing but good for you?

I have heard the excuse that Americans are "fatigued."  I have been in Ukraine three times since the war began.  I have been in the capital and in the provinces.  I have seen almost no Americans, fatigued or otherwise, in the country.  And that is for the simple reason that we are not in Ukraine.  How can we be fatigued by a war we are not fighting?  When we are not even present?  This makes no sense.  It causes no fatigue to give money to the right cause, which is all that we are doing.  It feels good to help other people help themselves in a good cause.  

If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster: across all of these dimensions: food supply, war crimes, international instability, expanding war, collapsing democracies. Everything that the Ukrainians are doing for us can be reversed if we give up. Why would lawmakers even contemplate doing so?

If you happened to know lots of Ukrainians, as I do, you would know people who have been wounded or who have been killed.  You would know people who get through their days with dark circles around their eyes, because everyone has dark circles around their eyes.  You would know people who have lost someone, because everyone has lost someone.  You would know people who are grieving and yet who are nevertheless doing what they can do.  You would not know anyone in Ukraine who believes that fatigue is a reason to give up.  Would you sell such people out?

I have heard the other excuse: that we need to audit the weapons we send to Ukraine.  The expenses are minimal and the gains are great: a nickel on our defense dollar, achieving what we cannot ourselves do with all the rest.  And here's the thing: the weapons we send to Ukraine are the only ones in our stockpiles that are being audited.  They are being audited not by accountants in suits and ties but by men and women in camouflage.  They are being used and used well by people whose lives are at stake and whose country's future is at stake.  Ukrainians have used American air defense more effectively than anyone knew that it could be used.  

Ukrainians are using American missiles that we consider outdated to destroy the most advanced Russian assets.  Ukrainians are taking American weapons built in the last century and using them to defend themselves and the rest of us in this one.  In large measure they are literally using arms that we would otherwise be paying to disassemble because we regard them as obsolete.  

If that battlefield audit done by the Ukrainian army is not good enough: well, then, by all means, American lawmakers, come and visit Ukraine and see for yourself.  You and your staffers would be very welcome.  Ukrainians want you to come. It would be a very good thing if more of us visited Ukraine.

I will tell you what I witnessed in Ukraine: when Ukrainians see American weapons systems, they applaud.  Would you sell them out?

The Empire Strikes Back: Putin’s Drive To Revive Soviet Borders Is Doomed - Barry Gander (Medium)

The Empire Strikes Back: Putin’s Drive To Revive Soviet Borders Is Doomed

 

https://barry-gander.medium.com/the-empire-strikes-back-putins-drive-to-revive-soviet-borders-is-doomed-faf588929d03

 

Barry Gander

Medium, March 26, 2023

 

Thousands flee Putin’s Russia into Georgia as part of a million-person refugee tide.

We have been here before.

History gives us a way to forecast Russia’s future, as the reign of state control again erodes the country’s ability to move forward.

These events have happened back in 1991, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was faced with a coup by Soviet security forces. But the coup’s leaders had no popular support, and the ruling bureaucracy was also split. Boris Yeltsin climbed aboard a tank, the people of Moscow rallied for freedom and democracy, and the coup leaders surrendered within days.

The coup by the security forces actually accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union. It gave the people of the USSR a stark choice. Yes, independence was frightening, but it could not be worse than the totalitarian alternative. In turn, republic after Soviet republic tumbled towards independence. In Moscow a jubilant crowd tore down the statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, right in front of the KGB headquarters.

That revolution for freedom was extinguished in the heartland, a bit at a time, by Putin, through assassination, mass bombings and military occupation.

Now however Putin’s overlay of dictatorship is also fraying, and the pattern of freedom is reasserting itself again. This is “Overthrow 2.0”.

Putin has just been betrayed by China, which is about to tear out Russia’s Asian heartland.

Russia’s other dependencies are attracted to Western values, and are seeking independence — just like 1991.

Once an area has tasted independence from a dominating power, it will not go back into its box.

This is the problem facing Putin as he fumbles to put back the pieces of the old Soviet empire.

He has denied that he has a goal of re-establishing the Soviet Empire. His denials lost credibility after he ordered Russian troops to be sent to eastern Ukraine. We have been here before with this man.

He has continually questioned Ukraine’s sovereignty. In 2008, Russia supported two Georgian separatist regions and has backed a breakaway region of Moldova, Transnistria, since the 1990s. He annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. He became the first person to annex sovereign foreign territory by force since Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. He cut off Europe’s energy supplies, threatened the use of nukes, and ran a fascist propaganda campaign around the world.

Last year his militia took over eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk rebel republics and he recognized them as “independent-with-Russian-troops”.

Weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he was insisting that he had no intention of attacking Ukraine and accused the U.S. and NATO of stoking the tension by refusing to accept Moscow’s demands for “security guarantees” from the Western alliance.

Ukraine wants to be part of Europe. There is no guarantee Putin could get that would change that perspective. It also wants to be part of NATO. Both organizations are voluntary bodies — no one is forced to belong and no “security guarantees” can be part of an equation where the people have picked the path to democracy.

Putin actually wants guarantees against freedom, not NATO.

The desire for freedom is hard to detect in Russia itself, because the people are so muffled.

But it can be seen more clearly in Russia’s fringe of reluctant puppet states, where the control is less. They are able to make the choice that faced the Russians themselves in 1991: do you want freedom or do you want to be ruled by a gong show run by a poisoning dictator and his five gangs of thieves.

It is not really surprising that the West “let” Putin turn Russia into a concentration camp. At any step where a change could be made, it would mean fighting a world war. That is what kept the allies from stopping Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland. In a democracy, could the French President have gone to his people with a motivating rationale for war against Hitler?

Dictatorships have it easy; democratic countermeasures are hard. We need to have some sympathy and understanding for the bewildered democracies in Europe in the 1930s.

But we have learned from that era.

In the build-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s definition of appeasement, we are feeding the crocodiles, hoping they will eat us last.

(And I will keep calling this “Putin’s War”, not “Russia’s War”. The Russians were never asked for their approval. That would have meant the need for a reason for the war…beyond ego-driven empire-building)

Instead of standing on our principles about the universal values of human rights and human life, we quibbled with Russia’s propagandists about whether Russia’s feelings were being hurt. Is it uncomfortable for you to have NATO so close? OOPS — our fault!

But it has never been about NATO. Russia has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO. Taking NATO off the table will not quell his insecurity; what he fears is democracy. In fact, up until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO had been drawing down resources in Europe, not increasing them.

Our focus therefore has to be the final triumph of Western-style democracy over bygone dictatorships. NO appeasement or apologies will be possible, because this is a binary game: democracy or dictatorship.

And in the process, we cannot promote democracy while treating the leaders of the world’s most repressive regimes as equals, advises Garry Kasparov, former chess champion turned activist. His mother had hung a sign above his bed — a saying of the Soviet dissidents — “If not you, who else?” We are all responsible for seeing that justice is done.

We have a lot on our side.

Almost every nation in the world that matters today is democratic. There was a time in the 1940s when dictators ruled from the English Channel to the Bering Sea. Now there are only TWO meaningful hold-outs: Russia and China.

I may be wrong, but I sense that China can evolve; we don’t need to shake a spear at them. Their biggest existential threat anyway is India, not America: India is poised to take their jobs and industry.

Our goal in Russia would ideally be to provide the citizens with hope and possibilities for a brighter future.

They exist right now in an increasingly fraught environment. The war is going badly. Russia currently controls only 17 percent of Ukrainian territory, which is the least amount of area that its forces have occupied since April. Russian leaders can see that the walls of their tents are coming down, and the light is getting in.

And sadly, Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. Russia is not really a nation-state but a premodern multiethnic empire living for 300 years on geographic expansion and resource looting.

Russia’s influence in the region has waned and citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape Moscow’s grasp. Subservience to Putin is now required. If the regions could be free, why could not the Russians themselves?

This almost happened, in the elections in 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since the Soviet collapse. Ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten his grip on power.

With this fear of democracy as his overriding motive, Putin will remain committed to undermining Georgian, Moldovan, Armenian, etc. democracy and sovereignty.

Russia has gotten so good at quelling regional aspirations that the government of Iran asked Russia for help in suppressing a popular uprising.

The former USSR. All the states not marked “Russia” will become independent as soon as they can. The central Asia group is now being courted by China, in a display of breathtaking hypocrisy by President Xi.

In Kazakhstan, for example, there were nationwide protests against fuel prices last year. The protests morphed into a working-class grievance campaign. The President could not get a response from his own security forces and called on the Russians. The crowds were brutally crushed and 238 people died. The former defence minister has just been jailed for not doing enough to protect the government.

Dagestan is a mountainous republic within the Russian Federation. There have been confrontations between police and crowds of mothers who were infuriated that their sons were being drafted for the war in Ukraine.

Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics, as well as other far-flung territories, or krais, even majority ethnic Russian ones, have seen anti-mobilization protests in recent weeks — as far afield as the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic and Vladivostok in Russia’s far east.

While they have died down for now they have left sullen anger and resentment, which is compounding long-standing economic and local political grievances in the Russian Federation’s periphery.

Russia’s ethnic republics and far-flung territories will not remain quiet and subdued for much longer, suspects Russian-born political scientist Sergej Sumlenny, a former chief editor at Russian business broadcaster RBC-TV.

“The republics have long chafed under Moscow’s imperial rule — so too territories in the far east and parts of remote northern Russia.” The seeds of potential rebellion, especially in the North Caucasus, the Sakha Republic and the Middle Volga, are being sown, he thinks. Increasing economic distress and impoverishment, the exploitation of natural resources only for the benefit of Moscow, the failure to drive development and investment, a reckless attitude to pollution and environmental degradation, and governance swinging from repression to negligence are all stoking simmering grievance.”

What could trigger real revolt? “It could be a small spark,” he says. “Look at what triggered the Arab spring — a Tunisian fruit vendor setting himself on fire over injustice. Or look at Iran now: it can be something [like] … the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Revolt is often be sparked by perceived insult.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a comparison to Yugoslavia, warning external pressures combined with internal threats risk breaking up the Russian Federation along ethnic and religious lines. At the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in 2019, Shoigu said: “Chaos and the collapse of statehood are becoming the norm.”

When the Soviet Union dissolved it wasn’t only the big constituent republics of the Soviet Union — like Ukraine, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan — that sought independence. Many of Russia’s smaller republics and even some far-flung predominantly Russian territories, cities and regions used the political turmoil to claim or to try to grab autonomy.

In 1990, fourteen of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation declared themselves sovereign and when a Federation Treaty was being negotiated the heads of several republics, including Tatarstan, demanded the new post-Communist Russian constitution recognize their “state sovereignty” as well as a right to secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused to sign the Federation Treaty and declared independence, triggering an 18-month war of liberation.

Putin decided that the sovereignty of the Russian Federation would override any declaration of sovereignty by the republics or other federal subjects. Provincial authorities have been weakened.

Any candidate in a regional election who wants to register must have Kremlin backing and Putin can sack and appoint regional heads at will.

In 2021 the Russian justice ministry suspended the activities of Tatarstan’s All-Tatar Public Center “due to its extremist activities.”

Last month, retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the West should prepare for the Russian Federation breaking up within the next four or five years. “We were not prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to be prepared for this possibility,” he told Times Radio.

Regional elites may start calculating that Moscow isn’t able to stop them breaking away, he says. “Once it starts, it could unravel fast.”

Western policymakers seem unnerved by the possibility of a break-up of nuclear-armed Russia,

That was also the case with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Western leaders preferred the status quo and frowned on Ukraine and others breaking away. “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred,” President George Bush said in an infamous 1991 speech in Ukraine nicknamed the Chicken Kyiv speech.

Bureaucrats will always prefer the status quo to a social revolution — no matter that it is justified.

Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in September that the process of Russian dissolution “has already begun and will accelerate.” He said he obtained and analyzed the results of a social survey conducted in Russia. Danilov said the focus was on separatism in the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan and the southern Chechen Republic.

Tatarstan and Chechnya have large Muslim populations, and had declared their independence at the end of the Soviet Union. Chechnya fought two wars with Russia. Failure in a war of aggression without cause could spur the fires of separatism throughout the Russian Federation.

Moldova is a tiny nation of just 2.6 million people that borders Ukraine to the southwest. Russia has 1,500 troops there supporting separatists, just as it did in Ukraine. Moldova’s government has opposed the Russian presence since it gained independence in the Soviet breakup in 1991, but has no way of forcing the Russians to leave.

Georgia, on Russia’s southwestern frontier, remains in a state of dispute. If Russian occupation forces left, there is no doubt it would swing West.

At the United Nations in March of 2022, six former republics voted in favor of a resolution condemning Russia and calling for its immediate withdrawal from Ukraine. Seven more abstained or were conveniently absent. The only country to take Russia’s side, aside from Russia itself, was Belarus. Which has Russian troops on the ground.

It is not only a geographic fragmentation that Russia is facing, but a horizontal war-of-the-dukedoms. Different factions within the government have their own armies. They could fight for power because they have their own supplies of weapons. Even criminals have weapons. Chechens have weapons. The Internal Ministry has weapons. The Defence Ministry has weapons. The security forces — KGB/FSB — have weapons. Everybody has weapons. It could be chaos in the streets. It will be the same situation as 1917–18.

Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann told The Economist that “the Russian Federation as we know it is self-liquidating and passing into a failed-state phase.” Its administration, she continued, is unable to carry out its basic functions:

“This includes the most basic mandate of any government, which is the protection of its citizenry. But Putin’s regime now presents the greatest threat to that citizenry by threatening to forcibly conscript them in the hundreds of thousands and send them into battle with almost no proper equipment and even less training.”

The Kremlin’s decision to build its army by having each region of Russia create battalions of soldiers is unbelievably stupid. At least eight regions have created such units. Leaders of these regions have ready-made battalions under their command to enforce a separation.

Western governments should prepare a response to this rule of disorder.

It was to Russia’s extreme misfortune that Yeltsin handed over power to Putin.

It was Russia’s misfortune before that, to have Stalin take power from Lenin.

And before that, to have Lenin take power from the Tsar.

If Russia were a car on a highway, it would be veering off-course every few hours, pulled to the right or left. Anywhere there is a sign that says “Higher Power Here”.

I would feel sorry for them, but I’m impatient to see what a democratic Russia — stripped of the trappings of empire — could do for the world.

They deserve better than they’ve got, for sure.

Barry Gander

A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I'm a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry

 

 

Russia: não mais um império, nem um Estado nacional - Barry Gander (Medium)

 The Empire Strikes Back: Putin’s Drive To Revive Soviet Borders Is Doomed

Barry Gander

Medium, March 31. 2023

Thousands flee Putin’s Russia into Georgia as part of a million-person refugee tide.

We have been here before.

History gives us a way to forecast Russia’s future, as the reign of state control again erodes the country’s ability to move forward.

These events have happened back in 1991, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was faced with a coup by Soviet security forces. But the coup’s leaders had no popular support, and the ruling bureaucracy was also split. Boris Yeltsin climbed aboard a tank, the people of Moscow rallied for freedom and democracy, and the coup leaders surrendered within days.

The coup by the security forces actually accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union. It gave the people of the USSR a stark choice. Yes, independence was frightening, but it could not be worse than the totalitarian alternative. In turn, republic after Soviet republic tumbled towards independence. In Moscow a jubilant crowd tore down the statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, right in front of the KGB headquarters.

That revolution for freedom was extinguished in the heartland, a bit at a time, by Putin, through assassination, mass bombings and military occupation.

Now however Putin’s overlay of dictatorship is also fraying, and the pattern of freedom is reasserting itself again. This is “Overthrow 2.0”.

Putin has just been betrayed by China, which is about to tear out Russia’s Asian heartland.

Russia’s other dependencies are attracted to Western values, and are seeking independence — just like 1991.

Once an area has tasted independence from a dominating power, it will not go back into its box.

This is the problem facing Putin as he fumbles to put back the pieces of the old Soviet empire.

He has denied that he has a goal of re-establishing the Soviet Empire. His denials lost credibility after he ordered Russian troops to be sent to eastern Ukraine. We have been here before with this man.

He has continually questioned Ukraine’s sovereignty. In 2008, Russia supported two Georgian separatist regions and has backed a breakaway region of Moldova, Transnistria, since the 1990s. He annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. He became the first person to annex sovereign foreign territory by force since Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. He cut off Europe’s energy supplies, threatened the use of nukes, and ran a fascist propaganda campaign around the world.

Last year his militia took over eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk rebel republics and he recognized them as “independent-with-Russian-troops”.

Weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he was insisting that he had no intention of attacking Ukraine and accused the U.S. and NATO of stoking the tension by refusing to accept Moscow’s demands for “security guarantees” from the Western alliance.

Ukraine wants to be part of Europe. There is no guarantee Putin could get that would change that perspective. It also wants to be part of NATO. Both organizations are voluntary bodies — no one is forced to belong and no “security guarantees” can be part of an equation where the people have picked the path to democracy.

Putin actually wants guarantees against freedom, not NATO.

The desire for freedom is hard to detect in Russia itself, because the people are so muffled.

But it can be seen more clearly in Russia’s fringe of reluctant puppet states, where the control is less. They are able to make the choice that faced the Russians themselves in 1991: do you want freedom or do you want to be ruled by a gong show run by a poisoning dictator and his five gangs of thieves.

It is not really surprising that the West “let” Putin turn Russia into a concentration camp. At any step where a change could be made, it would mean fighting a world war. That is what kept the allies from stopping Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland. In a democracy, could the French President have gone to his people with a motivating rationale for war against Hitler?

Dictatorships have it easy; democratic countermeasures are hard. We need to have some sympathy and understanding for the bewildered democracies in Europe in the 1930s.

But we have learned from that era.

In the build-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s definition of appeasement, we are feeding the crocodiles, hoping they will eat us last.

(And I will keep calling this “Putin’s War”, not “Russia’s War”. The Russians were never asked for their approval. That would have meant the need for a reason for the war…beyond ego-driven empire-building)

Instead of standing on our principles about the universal values of human rights and human life, we quibbled with Russia’s propagandists about whether Russia’s feelings were being hurt. Is it uncomfortable for you to have NATO so close? OOPS — our fault!

But it has never been about NATO. Russia has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO. Taking NATO off the table will not quell his insecurity; what he fears is democracy. In fact, up until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO had been drawing down resources in Europe, not increasing them.

Our focus therefore has to be the final triumph of Western-style democracy over bygone dictatorships. NO appeasement or apologies will be possible, because this is a binary game: democracy or dictatorship.

And in the process, we cannot promote democracy while treating the leaders of the world’s most repressive regimes as equals, advises Garry Kasparov, former chess champion turned activist. His mother had hung a sign above his bed — a saying of the Soviet dissidents — “If not you, who else?” We are all responsible for seeing that justice is done.

We have a lot on our side.

Almost every nation in the world that matters today is democratic. There was a time in the 1940s when dictators ruled from the English Channel to the Bering Sea. Now there are only TWO meaningful hold-outs: Russia and China.

I may be wrong, but I sense that China can evolve; we don’t need to shake a spear at them. Their biggest existential threat anyway is India, not America: India is poised to take their jobs and industry.

Our goal in Russia would ideally be to provide the citizens with hope and possibilities for a brighter future.

They exist right now in an increasingly fraught environment. The war is going badly. Russia currently controls only 17 percent of Ukrainian territory, which is the least amount of area that its forces have occupied since April. Russian leaders can see that the walls of their tents are coming down, and the light is getting in.

And sadly, Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. Russia is not really a nation-state but a premodern multiethnic empire living for 300 years on geographic expansion and resource looting.

Russia’s influence in the region has waned and citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape Moscow’s grasp. Subservience to Putin is now required. If the regions could be free, why could not the Russians themselves?

This almost happened, in the elections in 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since the Soviet collapse. Ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten his grip on power.

With this fear of democracy as his overriding motive, Putin will remain committed to undermining Georgian, Moldovan, Armenian, etc. democracy and sovereignty.

Russia has gotten so good at quelling regional aspirations that the government of Iran asked Russia for help in suppressing a popular uprising.

The former USSR. All the states not marked “Russia” will become independent as soon as they can. The central Asia group is now being courted by China, in a display of breathtaking hypocrisy by President Xi.

In Kazakhstan, for example, there were nationwide protests against fuel prices last year. The protests morphed into a working-class grievance campaign. The President could not get a response from his own security forces and called on the Russians. The crowds were brutally crushed and 238 people died. The former defence minister has just been jailed for not doing enough to protect the government.

Dagestan is a mountainous republic within the Russian Federation. There have been confrontations between police and crowds of mothers who were infuriated that their sons were being drafted for the war in Ukraine.

Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics, as well as other far-flung territories, or krais, even majority ethnic Russian ones, have seen anti-mobilization protests in recent weeks — as far afield as the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic and Vladivostok in Russia’s far east.

While they have died down for now they have left sullen anger and resentment, which is compounding long-standing economic and local political grievances in the Russian Federation’s periphery.

Russia’s ethnic republics and far-flung territories will not remain quiet and subdued for much longer, suspects Russian-born political scientist Sergej Sumlenny, a former chief editor at Russian business broadcaster RBC-TV.

“The republics have long chafed under Moscow’s imperial rule — so too territories in the far east and parts of remote northern Russia.” The seeds of potential rebellion, especially in the North Caucasus, the Sakha Republic and the Middle Volga, are being sown, he thinks. Increasing economic distress and impoverishment, the exploitation of natural resources only for the benefit of Moscow, the failure to drive development and investment, a reckless attitude to pollution and environmental degradation, and governance swinging from repression to negligence are all stoking simmering grievance.”

What could trigger real revolt? “It could be a small spark,” he says. “Look at what triggered the Arab spring — a Tunisian fruit vendor setting himself on fire over injustice. Or look at Iran now: it can be something [like] … the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Revolt is often be sparked by perceived insult.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a comparison to Yugoslavia, warning external pressures combined with internal threats risk breaking up the Russian Federation along ethnic and religious lines. At the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in 2019, Shoigu said: “Chaos and the collapse of statehood are becoming the norm.”

When the Soviet Union dissolved it wasn’t only the big constituent republics of the Soviet Union — like Ukraine, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan — that sought independence. Many of Russia’s smaller republics and even some far-flung predominantly Russian territories, cities and regions used the political turmoil to claim or to try to grab autonomy.

In 1990, fourteen of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation declared themselves sovereign and when a Federation Treaty was being negotiated the heads of several republics, including Tatarstan, demanded the new post-Communist Russian constitution recognize their “state sovereignty” as well as a right to secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused to sign the Federation Treaty and declared independence, triggering an 18-month war of liberation.

Putin decided that the sovereignty of the Russian Federation would override any declaration of sovereignty by the republics or other federal subjects. Provincial authorities have been weakened.

Any candidate in a regional election who wants to register must have Kremlin backingand Putin can sack and appoint regional heads at will.

In 2021 the Russian justice ministry suspended the activities of Tatarstan’s All-Tatar Public Center “due to its extremist activities.”

Last month, retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the West should prepare for the Russian Federation breaking up within the next four or five years. “We were not prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to be prepared for this possibility,” he told Times Radio.

Regional elites may start calculating that Moscow isn’t able to stop them breaking away, he says. “Once it starts, it could unravel fast.”

Western policymakers seem unnerved by the possibility of a break-up of nuclear-armed Russia,

That was also the case with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Western leaders preferred the status quo and frowned on Ukraine and others breaking away. “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred,” President George Bush said in an infamous 1991 speech in Ukraine nicknamed the Chicken Kyiv speech.

Bureaucrats will always prefer the status quo to a social revolution — no matter that it is justified.

Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in September that the process of Russian dissolution “has already begun and will accelerate.” He said he obtained and analyzed the results of a social survey conducted in Russia. Danilov said the focus was on separatism in the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan and the southern Chechen Republic.

Tatarstan and Chechnya have large Muslim populations, and had declared their independence at the end of the Soviet Union. Chechnya fought two wars with Russia. Failure in a war of aggression without cause could spur the fires of separatism throughout the Russian Federation.

Moldova is a tiny nation of just 2.6 million people that borders Ukraine to the southwest. Russia has 1,500 troops there supporting separatists, just as it did in Ukraine. Moldova’s government has opposed the Russian presence since it gained independence in the Soviet breakup in 1991, but has no way of forcing the Russians to leave.

Georgia, on Russia’s southwestern frontier, remains in a state of dispute. If Russian occupation forces left, there is no doubt it would swing West.

At the United Nations in March of 2022, six former republics voted in favor of a resolution condemning Russia and calling for its immediate withdrawal from Ukraine. Seven more abstained or were conveniently absent. The only country to take Russia’s side, aside from Russia itself, was Belarus. Which has Russian troops on the ground.

It is not only a geographic fragmentation that Russia is facing, but a horizontal war-of-the-dukedoms. Different factions within the government have their own armies. They could fight for power because they have their own supplies of weapons. Even criminals have weapons. Chechens have weapons. The Internal Ministry has weapons. The Defence Ministry has weapons. The security forces — KGB/FSB — have weapons. Everybody has weapons. It could be chaos in the streets. It will be the same situation as 1917–18.

Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann told The Economist that “the Russian Federation as we know it is self-liquidating and passing into a failed-state phase.” Its administration, she continued, is unable to carry out its basic functions:

“This includes the most basic mandate of any government, which is the protection of its citizenry. But Putin’s regime now presents the greatest threat to that citizenry by threatening to forcibly conscript them in the hundreds of thousands and send them into battle with almost no proper equipment and even less training.”

The Kremlin’s decision to build its army by having each region of Russia create battalions of soldiers is unbelievably stupid. At least eight regions have created such units. Leaders of these regions have ready-made battalions under their command to enforce a separation.

Western governments should prepare a response to this rule of disorder.

It was to Russia’s extreme misfortune that Yeltsin handed over power to Putin.

It was Russia’s misfortune before that, to have Stalin take power from Lenin.

And before that, to have Lenin take power from the Tsar.

If Russia were a car on a highway, it would be veering off-course every few hours, pulled to the right or left. Anywhere there is a sign that says “Higher Power Here”.

I would feel sorry for them, but I’m impatient to see what a democratic Russia — stripped of the trappings of empire — could do for the world.

They deserve better than they’ve got, for sure.

O novo Hitler europeu: Putin, o psicopata russo - Uwe Bott, Stephan Richter (The Globalist)

Europe’s New Hitler: Another Psychopath at Work

 Vladimir Putin is a murderous despot: Why the West’s response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine matters. And why we must deal firmly with his European enablers.

By Stephan Richter and Uwe Bott 

The Globalist, February 24, 2022 

https://www.theglobalist.com/europes-new-hitler-putin-invades-ukraine/

Let there be no doubt, Putin is cunning and brutal. He is an abuser, a killer, an assassin. He completely lacks any shred of human decency. He is Europe’s new Hitler.

A bad leader, even by Soviet standards

Under his reign, the fatal Dutch disease has only spread further, piling hardship over hardship on the Russian people. Putin’s only skill has been consolidating power by eliminating all those opposed, all the while offering a steady diet of making empty promises population at large.

There is a darkness to Putin’s personality that is unsettling even to many Russians who certainly had their share of leaders with dark souls.

A sociopath in a clinical sense

Now, it is critical to understand the underlying pathology of Vladimir Putin. Putin is a sociopath in a clinical sense, with strong tendencies towards paranoia and narcissism.

His actions are driven by the deep insecurities of his own personality, by his constant need for external affirmation.

Putin constantly has to publicly prove his own virility, which – in his mind – is done by displaying violence and cruelty (and getting away with it).

In this vein, Putin is a very simple man. He is also, if one is willing to understand his personal profile, a very predictable man.

Of course, he craves the opposite. He craves to be admired for his smarts and for his vision, but deep inside he knows that he possesses neither.

Enter Western enablers

For more than ten years after the “end” of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the American part of the Western world was inebriated by its sense of complete and utter superiority.

And the European – especially German – part of the Western world deluded itself that there was no more reason to have an army.

Germany’s pro-Russian fifth brigade

Initially, all the rage was talk about a “peace dividend.” Subsequently, Germany’s pro-Russian fifth brigade (including a significant segment of the SPD, now the majority party in the German government) shifted its empty-headed rhetoric.

Ever eager to please Putin, the SPD’s demand was that, any time Putin’s Russia acted in a despotic fashion, the West should not engage in “escalation”.

The big error

Falsely assuming that the Russian Bear had been put to sleep at the burial of communism, Western leaders took their eyes of the growing, incrementally mounting threat that Vladimir Putin built.

Western leaders closed their eyes to Russian attempts to intimidate Georgia and the Baltic states and other former states of the Soviet Union.

Western money hustlers

Instead of keeping the eye on the ball, the Western world got all enamored by the – almost always illicitly gained – riches of Russian oligarchs.

London, in particular, became a major money laundering center for their dirty profits, with Germany being a close second aider and abetter.

Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder top aide-de-camp

That Angela Merkel ever dared to claim that the North Stream 2 pipeline was strictly a “private sector project” is the height of conceit.

It leads one to wonder which side, the Russian or the Western one, the long-time German Chancellor was actually working on.

After the beginning of the (continued, now massive) invasion of Ukraine, her legacy is forever tarnished.

Self-prostituting sports teams

Sports teams got lucrative sponsorships especially from Russian fossil fuel giants to cement their own legacies, particularly on the European soccer stage.

European soccer stadiums are soiled by Russian oligarchs who occupy the owners’ suites. Europe’s soccer pitches are soiled by players running around in Gazprom jerseys, all in pursuit of grabbing a piece of that deeply human-despising Russian cake of criminal wealth.

Mere spinelessness – or active collaboration?

All of this normalized continuous Russian abuses to such extent that the reactions to Russian “overreach” such as Putin’s annexation of the Crimea region or murders or attempted murders of dissidents on foreign soil received little more than a shrug of the shoulders.

This stance was so engraved in the lazy heads of Western electorates that they voted or kept in power the forces that idly stood by the mounting atrocities of the serial killer, Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump, Russia’s very active, ex-sleeper agent

Putin-puppet, Donald Trump, was even elected President of the United States with the help of Russian intelligence.

While none of this has gone unnoticed and some of it has been – at least temporarily – reversed through the “unelection” of Donald Trump, who just a couple of days ago praised Putin as a “genius” for his Ukraine actions, it is mystifying, to a degree, how it was and is possible.

But is it too late now?

The invasion of Ukraine is in full effect. It is difficult to imagine that it will be reversed or stopped because only a NATO military response could bring that about. The risks of a nuclear war would seem too great for that to happen.

But by understanding the key takeaways from how we got here and why, we ought to be able to design the kind of actions that would contain Putin’s westward drive.

Four main principles

Without delving into a detailed list of sanctions/actions that the West must take (the list is long), these sanctions/actions should be guided by a set of four main principles.

1. The long-term goal of these actions must be to contain Russia beyond Putin. This implies, for example, that Europe must develop a detailed long-term plan to completely and permanently end energy dependence on Russia.

Obviously, an aggressive (and credible, meaning executable) move towards renewable, clean energy sources would not only meet that goal but also help saving the planet.

2. Europe must understand that self-defense, credible self-defense is the most effective weapon in preventing war.

To discard ill-advised pacifism or to overcome reasonable historic guilt does not equate imperialism. Rather, it is in full recognition of all historical lessons ever learned. It’s the best guarantee for peace, we have.

3. While fully aware of the unlikelihood of Russian adoption of democratic values anytime soon, Europeans and Americans must launch a full-fledged effort to highlight that Putin’s aggression, or the aggression of future Russian leaders will only further impoverish the Russian people.

And they must directly address the Russian people to drive this point home. Social media are an excellent medium to promote such campaign. Radio Free Europe played a role during the Cold War, but it was a bit player when compared to today’s social media.

4. Everything has a price. Nothing comes for free. These are not catch-phrases. These are “unconventional truths”.

Conclusion

We are all creatures of comfort. The recent pandemic should have steeled us though, teaching us that the unexpected does happen and that we must take sometimes controversial and always painful actions in order to protect the greater good.

In following these principles, the actions/sanctions against Putin and – yes, Russia itself – become fairly self-evident.

Our response will determine not only how Russia’s flappy wings will effectively be clipped, but also how we are going to address the looming threat of China.

More on this topic

• The Transatlantic World is Falling Apart 
• Ukraine and the Return of Geopolitics 
• Russia and Globalization

About Stephan Richter

Director of the Global Ideas Center, a global network of authors and analysts, and Editor-in-Chief of The Globalist.

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