The old KGB tactics
What I’m wondering though is what on earth is in this for Putin? I could see what’s in it for him when it’s the slow creeping whittling away, but a full-on invasion? Isn’t that awfully risky? Doesn’t it remind him at all of Hitler’s big mistake going in the other direction?
Looking to see who is explaining, I find again Anne Applebaum three weeks ago.
But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?
Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game?
Well at least we can eliminate that last question from our inquiries.
Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. Indeed, many of his tactics—the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea—are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II; sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918.
And just a few years later Stalin was deliberately starving Ukraine.
The crucial thing about Putin, it seems, is that he’s an oligarch. He and his cronies use their government roles to steal everything, and pro-democracy uprisings are a threat to them.
All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar.
Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness.
This is why he favored Trump, and used Facebook to help him win.
Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail.
So he’s thrown in all his chips.
One of the many reasons that it’s good I’m not a world leader – as Putin was going on television to declare war on Ukraine, my old military background came into play. Here were all these images of masses of Russian equipment parked bumper to bumper a few KM from the border posed to intimidate. It was amazing example of creating a target rich environment by bunching all their units into close proximity. It’s as if they discarded any reasonable notion of dispersal of forces. A coordinated barrage on those assembly areas would have been devastating to the invading forces who clearly weren’t prepared for that. What Puti would have done in response is the question. He has to win quickly, and relatively cleanly otherwise this could turn into a nightmare for Russia. Having an enemy country on your long border, that knows your capabilities and can blend into the population seems like a recipe for an ungodly terrorist campaign.
It is also instructive to think of Putin as JFK when the USSR was positioning nuclear weapons in Cuba. Putin sees Ukraine’s admission to NATO the same way Kennedy saw nukes in Cuba – an existential threat on your border. Had the USSR not backed down, do you think Kennedy would have shrugged his shoulders and said “Oh well. I tried”?
Not that this makes Putin’s actions either reasonable or correct, but illustrative of the paranoia of national leaders.
The real question now is what is the appropriate response.
UK and EU have announced sanctions, but kleptocratic Russian’s yachts are still tied up in European ports. They should be confiscated, probably sunk.
Australia has marched in lockstep and announced sanctions against a few Russians, but has not ceased exports of alumina and aluminium products to Russia.
The choice is clear – either a hot war which will result in far too many deaths of the innocents or to treat Russia as the criminal enterprise it is and to immediately seize all Russian assets and starve the kleptocrats of their money.
Pliny:
My guesses are:
1. Putin has lost the plot completely, and is doing the first thing that comes into his head, AND/OR
2. Putin sees himself as the natural successor to Genghis Khan, who only stopped his westwards rampage when he reached the gates of Vienna, AND/OR
3. Putin senses an imminent palace coup being hatched in the Kremlin (with or without empirical evidence) and is heading it off by the old tried and true means of getting into a foreign war. (He is perhaps unaware that General Galtieri tried that in the Falklands, and came seriously unstuck in the process.)
Didn’t Putin once have his portrait done with him riding bare-chested on a horse? That really explains it all.
Sadly, yes (that is, he posed for photos).
Further to my comment above, this is from a speech by former PM Paul Keating, 4 September 1997 in the Robert Schumann Lecture.
http://www.paulkeating.net.au/shop/item/a-prospect-of-europe—4-september-1997
Emphasis mine.
Prescient as ever, what meeting spoke about some 25 years ago has now come to pass. Russia feels threatened, NATO is impotent in the face of Russian aggression, and Ukrainians are paying a heavy price.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horse look so embarrassed.
Anne Applebaum writes very well on these subjects. It makes sense to think of Putin’s motives in terms of a mob boss willing to do anything to cling on to his position. It’s no comfort to the people in Ukraine who are going to suffer, but things rarely end well for shits like him.
@Rev David Brindley
All good points. Another I would make would be about perhaps the biggest missed foreign policy opportunity (IMO) the USA is ever likely to see being squandered. The Marshall Plan after WWII was unprecedented – a victorious country putting its resources into rebuilding former enemies. You can be cynical about some of the motives in light of the threat posed by the USSR, but it was still an enormous change from any other victory in history. The fall of the USSR was an even bigger opportunity. Everyone was crowing about winning the cold war when in fact what we should have been celebrating was that we all, East and West, had managed to survive it. We were all the winners. Reaching out and trying to make the Russian Federation a true partner and assisting it during its critical transition might have made a difference. It’s hard to know. Creating stable democracies is a hard thing. It took us a century and a Civil War to get close.
Nothing I can disagree with there, Pliny. Two big problems Russia faced after the fall was the amount of money the KGB had squirrelled away around the world, money that Putin had access to (“Putin’s People”, Catherine Belton) and the rapid arrival of US carpetbaggers to aid the KGB and other Kleptocrats loot the Russian people and establish the world’s only truly Capitalist country where there are no restrictions on those with the gold.
The kleptocrats win here as well. The new A.G. Is pulling back on the Trump case. He will completely skate. Our only hope now is a massive coronary.
When this kicked off and Putin was saying that Ukraine wasn’t really a country, was historically part of Russia etc I thought “Ireland”. A country that was part of Britain, whose history has been tangled with Britain (or rather England at the time) from 1169. That speaks the same language . That finally extricated itself after hundreds of years of bitterness, established itself as a separate state and now the two countries are on very friendly terms. What if we justified an invasion of Ireland by our long history and former rule?
I was glad when the The Rest is History duo made the same comparison with their potted history of Ukraine.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzLzAzMWMyZGNiLWM2NmMtNDJiNS04MTllLTI0NTIwMzFmZTRmOQ/episode/NjIxNTM0NGE3OWUwM2YwMDEzZmUzMWI4?hl=en-GB&ved=2ahUKEwip7bPPuJr2AhWjoXIEHUfRAbcQieUEegQIUhAF&ep=6
Another example is the attempted secession of the southern states of the US. The reason there was slavery.
Brian @ 10 – what new AG?
Guy, the horse is thinking “I’m the one that’s supposed to be bareback, you putz.”
I’ve rarely seen anyone look less at home on horseback.
And holding the reins in his fists – that’s not how it’s done. Poor horse’s mouth must have hurt for days.
Ophelia @ 13, Brian @ 10
The New York County District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, was elected this past November. He (not the AG) is the official at the center of the conflict.
Pliny the In Between #8
“Creating stable democracies is a hard thing.”
Yes
It seems to me that the reasonably stable democracies now existing, went through at least one bloody failure, before getting democracy approximately right.
See: Britain’s Civil Wars of the 1640s. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ set up something imperfect, but good enough that peaceful reforms sufficed to improve matters
The French 3rd republic was preceded by 2 failed republics.
The US had what I prefer to call ‘The War of the Slaveholders Treason’.
A country that started as a colony of a country that was already reasonably democratic doesn’t *need* another bloody failure. Cf: Canada Australia. I think India counts, though definitely not Pakistan. No country should be a Christian nation or a Muslim nation or an Atheist nation… except in the limited sense that the majority of the population happens to be Christian or Muslim or Atheist.
So in the short term I am pessimistic about any country that is currently not democratic, but optimistic in the longer term.
Sackbut @ 17 – meanwhile the state AG is going right ahead. There are two NY cases so we need to specify which one we’re talking about,