Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza
Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022-3
Jubal:
So, Russia has a lot of tanks parked on Ukraine's borders and is demanding that Ukraine abandon any intention of joining NATO and also claiming that Ukraine is attacking Russian-speakers in the east of the country. Ukraine has already had one significant chunk of its territory annexed by Russia within the past decade and is basically bracing for Russian tank columns to start rolling in at the slightest provocation. There are allegations from the US and UK that Russia may be planning to "false flag" attack its interests in some way as a pretext for invasion (Russia has accused Ukraine of planning much the same thing).
It's a mess, and the stand-off increasingly has Europe/US allied behind Ukraine: one of Putin's original gambles, it seems likely, was that Germany would try to take a pro-Russia or neutral stance for as long as possible to defend Nord Stream 2, the Russia/Germany oil pipeline project. The generally very cautious and somewhat more Russia-friendly SPO, however, are now in coalition with the Greens who hold the foreign office and the FDP who are more aggressively liberal on foreign affairs, and seem to be taking a harder stance than Putin might have hoped.
The brinkmanship from Russia is probably part of the point: in part, Putin is forcing the west to not ignore him in order to strengthen his hand across the board. He probably also genuinely believes that Ukraine should be part of Russia, and wants to put back together a Russian influence sphere where surrounding governments are dependent on the Kremlin's goodwill (see also his placing Russia as increasingly the core peace broker in Azerbaijan/Armenia, and his propping up of the Kazakh regime recently). One thing that I think is also under-appreciated is the colonial aspect of all this: Russia very much was an Imperial power, even if for most of the C20th it was an empire run by statist-Communists rather than conventional dynastic imperialists, and the attitude towards Ukraine really feels like that towards an astray province. For the international audience Putin focuses on the idea of defending Russian speakers in a nation-statist form of argument, but AIUI experts on this tend to see the Kremlin as thinking more about Russia's provinces still in that Imperial-colonial mode, as peripheral areas and peoples that are there to be subjugated by the "real" Russian centre.
So that's where we are, we'll see where we go next...
I also wrote a longer piece yesterday on my blog about claims circulating on social media that Ukraine and the US backed a pro-Nazi stance at the UN: one tactic of left wing pro-Russia posters is often to imply that the Ukrainian regime are fascists. Unsurprisingly, the truth about the vote and resolution they're talking about is a lot messier than some of the glib tweets and maps that circulate tend to show: https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/on-fighting-fascist-memories-ukraine-russia-the-us-and-the-un/
dubsartur:
Here is one of Gwynne Dyer's columns on the crisis in 2014.
Hilariously, I am told there are in fact many neo-Nazis in Ukraine and the Ukranian diaspora in Canada. That is as ridiculous as the Greek Neo-Nazis of the Golden Dawn (how many Greeks did the Nazis shoot, starve, work to death, or gas?) but its a mad world. Otto Wächter and his inoffensive son Horst Arthur Wächter in Austria are good names to look up.
Edit: One problem interpreting the jingoism in the US and UK media is that Russia's invasions of Ukraine are exactly as illegal and dangerous as the US and UK's invasion of Iraq. And the US's problems with Russia and China have nothing to do with how they treat their own people (see US policy towards Israel and Saudi Arabia and the dictatorship in Egypt), and everything to do with old-fashioned great power rivalries. So its very hard to find anyone I trust to comment and not just spout propaganda. For what it's worth, Gwynne Dyer has been skeptical that Russia plans to invade Ukraine (although as he warns, you don't get your money back if he is wrong).
Pentagathus:
Caspian Report on youtube had good explanation of the strategic motivations for an invasion of Ukraine. As I recall it's partly that Russia has no hard borders as is, so pushing into Ukraine would allow Russia to use the Dnieper and other major rivers as a defensive western border from potential land invasion whilst also securing fresh water supply to the Crimea, which itself has immense strategic value as a base for naval power in the black sea.
Could be that Putin's just trying to put some pressure on and stir the pot for diplomatic leverage but a large nation without natural borders is always going to be prone to paranoia and trying to strip away it's buffer zones probably hasn't been the smartest move from the West.
dubsartur:
--- Quote from: Pentagathus on February 19, 2022, 06:57:24 PM ---pushing into Ukraine would allow Russia to use the Dnieper and other major rivers as a defensive western border from potential land invasion whilst also securing fresh water supply to the Crimea, which itself has immense strategic value as a base for naval power in the black sea.
--- End quote ---
But who on earth could possibly invade Russia from the west? First, Russia has atomic weapons, and second, Russia has large and well-trained conventional forces. As far as I know, the only power which could do it would be the United States, and first they would never get buy-in from the EU and Turkey, and second they are trying to focus on their long-term encirclement of China by withdrawing from Europe and the Arab world. Gwynne Dyer laid out the issue in the oughties: the USA can see that its position as sole superpower is crumbling as India and China grow economically, so it does what great powers in that situation do and launches a series of far-fetched aggressive gambles. Invading Iraq with a small army was supposed to intimidate the middle powers like Iran, while at the same time the USA was busy building an anti-Chinese alliance around the Pacific rim.
The Russian seizure of the Crimea and de-facto seizure of the Donbas sort of made sense in an old-fashioned kind of way, but invading central Ukraine would just cut off Russia's markets and get it entangled in a giant bloody war.
Jubal:
I think both perspectives may be right - that is, the fact that nobody actually would invade Russia from the west doesn't mean that this isn't something Russian officials aren't treating as if it's still a real threat. In general I think Russia is probably adopting quite an outdated idea of what a Great Power ought to look like (see also its interventions elsewhere). I think the narrative of "NATO expanded east and this was a mistake" is a bit in error though, in that NATO has expanded east far more slowly than Russia's neighbours have wanted it to. Georgia has been trying to join for years. So I'm not sure it's really true that the west has tried to strip away Russia's buffer zones, more that Russia has played the diplomatic game very badly with its former-province neighbours and has consquently left them in a position where they see NATO and the EU as the only route to retain meaningful independence. I'm not sure the alternative, in which NATO explicitly permitted Russia to "grow a sphere of influence" by sitting on its hands, would have helped: it would just have meant Russia running puppet governments in Ukraine and Georgia and the Baltics and then expanding its reach until it was butting on NATO countries again, potentially more willing to engage in a war.
And yeah, it's also true that Russia can't hold Ukraine the way it is now, and the Russians must know this. I'm not sure what their endgame is and I think it may be a mistake to assume that they really know either.
EDIT: Also, may be worth looking more than we have been doing at Russia's actions in Belarus, where its prepared stance on Ukraine seems to have been transferred to a full-scale military presence, and where reportedly today their armed forces chief cited Putin, as well as Lukashenko, as if he was a superior in deciding to keep Russian forces in Belarus with no time limite
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