Ukraine
It is quite surreal to even be writing this. A major war in Europe, street fighting in a European capital, old history books suddenly the new reality. Instructions for making Molotov cocktails given by train announcers, advice for using them against tanks on Twitter, people in white collar jobs voluntarily grabbing a gun and defending their homes, their cities against — possibly — their distant relatives from Russia who have come to take their country from them, depose their democratically elected leader and replace him with one of their own.
I am going to stick my neck out and say: I predict Ukraine will hold out. They may lose territory and, in the absolute worst case, even lose Kiev, however I do not see the Russians taking enough big cities to force the government into exile. The base of support for Russia within Eastern Ukraine that Putin counted on no longer exists, if it ever did exist post-2014. There seems to be, by all accounts, no shortage of volunteers to fight for Ukraine’s freedom and the constant flow of arms from the West should keep both those volunteers and the regular army well-equipped for a more prolonged conflict.
Of course, the Russians have the upper hand in the air, superior missiles and artillery, however one cannot help feeling that to capture Kiev they would have to obliterate it like they obliterated Grozny in the 90s and early 2000s, and this should be too drastic for even Putin to contemplate. Already, Russia’s financial system is suffering from the most sweeping set of sanctions since World War 2, leading to powerful oligarchs to cautiously speak out against the war. If civilian deaths mount, there will be more of this.
At the same time, Russia’s armed forces are believed be having problems with morale, logistics, failure of the different branches of their armed forces to work together and overestimation of their own capabilities. More surprisingly, Russia also seems to be losing out in the information war, a type of war they were meant to excel at. Pro-Russian voices are hardly in evidence on english language social media, whilst pro-Ukrainian voices dominate. Videos of burned-out Russian military hardware, of captured prisoners are everywhere — but there are few of Ukrainian losses. (Even Azerbaijan had a far more visible propaganda campaign during the Nagorno-Karabakh war). It seems that after decades of attempting to clandestinely influence Western public opinion, they have decided to take a back step here. Whether this is also because social media companies have become good at finding and banning pro-Russian troll accounts remains to be seen.
Russians rallying behind Putin. On the other hand, public opinion inside Russia thus far seems to be holding up in favour of their president. This is particularly the case among the older Russians, however is not confined to them. They variously claim this is an operation to ‘de-nazify’ Ukraine, to stop civilians being killed in separatist-held areas, that Putin has been provoked by NATO’s expansion and military build-up, that other countries do worse and that only ‘nationalists’ will fight them.
Like with much of propaganda, these are based on real facts, however none come anywhere near being justifications for an invasion. Neo-Nazism and extremism does exist in Ukraine — for instance in the openly neo-Nazi Azov battalion — however the far Right also exists in many other countries, most notably in the US where it is, allegedly, supported by Russia. Pro-Russian civillians in separatist areas do get killed in the conflict on the Donbass. Leaving aside the fact that this conflict had been started by Russia, this argument could, at a stretch, be used to justify militarising the break-away areas and using Russian troops to create a buffer zone behind them to ensure civilians in the DNR and LNR are out of artillery range. It is in no way a justification of trying to seize Kiev.
NATO’s strategy since 1991 has been odd, on one hand goading Russia with military build-ups, on the other refusing to go all the way and admit Ukraine and Georgia. However, it is a country’s sovereign right to join NATO without consulting its larger neighbour. Finally, yes, much of the reaction from the West is hypocritical — regime change being a favourite pastime of the US in particular in the past 70 years. But the US and the other NATO countries, ever since the end of the Cold War, have not attacked a democracy like Putin has done. And besides, Ukraine is not responsible for Iraq or Afghanistan.
However, Putin’s defenders do not see it that way. Propping up all their justifications is a sense of grievance, a sense that ‘everyone is against Russia’, an incredible sensitivity towards any criticism of their world view. They see opposing arguments as almost an attack on themselves, a reason to take offence, to stop engaging.
Putin abandons caution. What has caused Putin to change tack and violently destroy the sandcastle he was so painstakingly building for all these years? Careful investments, soft power, psy-ops, covert operations intending to shore up public support in other countries, personal contacts with powerful figures in the West. His plans seemed cut out. Keep chipping away at the Westerb democratic institutions, wait for the Republicans to win the White House, exploit his relationship with Orban, with Salvini, with Le Pen, with the Austrian Right. Use his online trolls to shape the narrative, to create division, to help swing elections. Propagate financial links to make cutting Russia off as painful for the world financial system as possible, make sure that if a Russian bank collapses, the whole financial system feels the shock. Then, just play the waiting game, wait for new countries to renounce the ‘decadent’ West with its ‘lack of family values’ and see him, Putin, as the man to stand up for the traditional way of life. We already saw, in Poland and in Hungary, how this would work. But it needed time. Much more time.
I admit to having been entirely wrong about him. I believed him to be a cautious, incremental schemer, one to boil a frog alive rather than squash it flat. Take a baby step forward, establish a ‘new normal’, then carry on. A week ago, I fully expected him to send regular troops to the breakaway ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, possibly push the Ukrainians on the line of contact back a little, but not to do anything rash. That would be consistent with how he had acted for the previous 22 years. Instead, he went for broke.
He chose the wrong target however, and not just because of the fierce resistance the Ukrainians have put up. One of the other reasons, ironically, is Western prejudice. If the US could invade Afghanistan and Iraq, bomb Libya and Syria and suffer little in terms of real consequence, if their ally could create famine in Yemen, Putin thought he could get away with a little ‘regime change’ of his own. If it were, say, one of the central Asian former Soviet republics or Azerbaijan, he might have been accurate in his estimation. He did pretty much get away with a brutal crackdown in Syria. Just last month, he intervened to brutally suppress a revolution in Kazakhstan. But Ukraine is a ‘white’, ‘respectable’, ‘European’ country. Suddenly, this was headline news everywhere in the world. There were other reasons of course. Ukraine is a democracy whose leaders do not commit the extreme human rights abuses of Saddam, Assad or Gaddafi. It is unlikely to remain one if Putin’s army were to take it over.
Ukrainian courage has created a powerful narrative. For the first two days of the war (Thursday the 24th and Friday the 25th), Putin looked to be getting away with it. NATO was stunned and struggling for a unified response. Countries were dragging their feet on meaningful financial sanctions, conscious of hurting their own economies. Little seemed to be forthcoming beyond thoughts, prayers and lighting up buildings light blue and yellow. This changed on Friday night, thanks to Volodymyr Zelenski’s charismatic leadership. Seeing him refuse to leave Kiev when in danger, seeing ordinary Ukrainians swap keyboards and pens for guns and Molotov cocktails to defend their capital, their President captured the world’s imagination. Suddenly, what used to be unthinkable became reality. What used to be unspeakable — like, for instance, kicking Russia off the UN security council — was spoken. Ukraine scored a massive propaganda victory on its larger neighbour, on the people who were considered the propagandists par excellence.
Since that first, desperate defence of Kyiv on Friday night, even the openly pro-Russian regimes such as Hungary caved in and fell in line under pressure from public opinion. Finally, measures people have demanded for years — restrictions on Russian propaganda outlets in the West, exclusion of Russia from the transactions system SWIFT, freezing of Russian assets abroad, sanctions against pro-Putin oligarchs and so on — look like being on the table. Bodies that were considered neutral, avoided taking sides, are taking sides. Even Switzerland is taking sides. Even Germany have broken a habit of 75 years and sent weapons to Ukraine. It is (quite rightly) seen as a clear case of right vs wrong, black vs white, with no need for neutrality whatsoever.
Russian isolation. Russia can still win on the battlefield. The West’s rescue act could be too little too late. The Russians could re-evaluate their tactics, fix their logistics and turn air superiority into results on the ground. Today’s bombing of Kharkiv with Grad rockets suggests a certain number civilian casualties will not stop them. Their natural gas is still vital for Europe and will not be easily replaced in the near term. China might step in and ameliorate the worst effects of the sanctions. Zelensky might yet decide to spare his citizens’ lives and sign an armistice on terms that flatter Putin. But the damage has been done. Russian soft power, the networks Putin has painstakingly built over the last 20 years are in tatters. Putin’s own image, that of a manly, rational leader, one that so appealed to certain fringe figures in the West has been dented irreparably.
Yet, he will not go willingly, meaning a period of total isolation for Russia will be forthcoming. At this moment in time, it is even not clear how one might travel to the country from the West in the foreseeable future: all flights are suspended. This is what Putin’s most loyal supporters are expecting and welcoming, a period of autarky of the Russian-speaking world (Russia, parts of Ukraine and Belarus) in which oligarchs will be forced to move their vast wealth back into Russia, possible embargoes will, supposedly, boost local production and capital controls severely restrict in- and outflows of money. A Russian-speaking Utopia where the supposedly oppressed people will be able to live free from liberal values, from the influence of ‘Gayropa’ and democracy, embracing their traditional values, whatever these might be.
Clearly, there are many problems with that unlikely vision. The main one is in Ukraine, where the rift between the Russian and the Ukrainian people has widened into a chasm. The gap in how people on both sides of the divide see the world, in how they see each other, in what they accept as true and false, was already vast, and will now be reinforced during the war, the occupation and the inevitable resistance. Wounds from a fratricidal war will take decades to heal.