By Mahir Ali* – Pearls and Irritations
It would be fairly uncontroversial to describe Ukraine’s recent military advance into Russia’s Kursk region as a deliberate provocation. Kyiv’s claim that it was intended chiefly to prod Moscow towards a negotiated peace, if true, appears to ignore Vladimir Putin’s tendency to stick to his guns in the face of embarrassments.
Emboldened by the initial success of his Kursk enterprise in the face of Russia’s relatively lethargic response, Volodymyr Zelensky has lately been prodding Ukraine’s allies to green-light the use of Western-supplied munitions to strike deeper into Russian territory, ignoring the Kremlin’s purported red lines. The Ukrainian leader appears to ignore the fact that the obvious blow to Putin’s prestige has a corollary: it tends to reinforce the impression that the February 2022 invasion was intended to stave off a NATO-sponsored threat along Russia’s western borders.
That, of course, is the direction from which Russia has historically been invaded, notably by Napoleon’s armies and Hitler’s hordes. The post-war buffer zone disappeared between 1989 and 1991, accompanied by verbal promises to the last Soviet leader that NATO would not expand eastwards. When that pledge was violated within a decade, Mikhail Gorbachev belatedly regretted not having insisted on a written guarantee.
Over the years, leading western European states have expressed doubts about the advisability of encircling Russia. Moscow’s overtures for a place at the table where Europe’s security structure was being devised were deemed unacceptable in the 1990s and beyond, just as they had been around the time of NATO’s inception in 1949. The Warsaw Pact was launched in 1955, when West Germany was inducted into the military alliance – and after Josef Stalin’s proposals for a reunited, but militarily neutral, German republic had peremptorily been rejected.
References to a new cold war are a dime a dozen these days, but it might be more pertinent to wonder whether the old one ever really ended. Even during the years when Washington was helping to prop up Boris Yeltsin, after encouraging the neoliberal “shock therapy” that blighted the lives of most Russian citizens and facilitated the emergence of a handful of oligarchs, Moscow was never quite viewed as an unqualified ally. In 2001, the newly selected US president claimed to have gazed into the eyes of Yeltsin’s successor and glimpsed Putin’s soul. Whatever George W. Bush might have seen didn’t prevent him, towards the end of his presidency in 2008, from doubling down on his determination to induct Georgia and Ukraine into NATO – regardless of predictable Russian hostility, and French and German doubts.
A brief “special military operation” in Georgia was Putin’s immediate response. Six years later, after the apparently popular overthrow of Ukraine’s ostensibly pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, Russia swiftly occupied Crimea, and then aided pro-Russian militias to “liberate” substantial territories in the largely Russian-speaking region of eastern Ukraine.
In July 2021, eight months before launching a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, Putin published an extended essay defending his view of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as “one people”. As a thesis, it’s neither utterly absurd nor particularly profound. It’s hardly controversial to claim that the origins of what became the Russian tsarist empire can be traced to Kyivan Rus towards the end of the first millennium AD, or to suggest that most citizens of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus share common origins. So does all of humanity, if one delves sufficiently deeply into human history. Putin acknowledges, though, that separate nationalities can and do emerge among ethnically coherent (but not necessarily cohesive) populations. Interestingly, he doesn’t make the case for political reunion (which is being attempted in the case of Belarus), but cites the examples of Germany/Austria and US/Canada as instances of ethnically and culturally compatible neighbouring sovereign nation states with close political and economic relations.
The implication is that Russia and Ukraine, too, could co-exist as separate, but fraternal entities. That possibility, it could be argued, was shattered by the February 2022 invasion. However, Putin could have substantiated his argument by asking how Washington might react were Canada or Mexico to contemplate joining a military alliance openly hostile to the US. The closest he comes is in declaring that “Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine” as long as the latter is clearly “defending its national interests but not serving someone else’s”.
On the face of it, that does not sound unreasonable, although his claim that Russia “will never be anti-Ukraine” is inevitably open to ridicule in the face of the death and destruction his troops have wrought in the neighbouring nation since February 2022, not to mention the invasion’s role in turbo-charging NATO’s membership drive. In the absence of any imminent threat to Russian territory, the “special military operation” was a monumental folly from the Russian point of view. But the Western mainstream media’s contention that it was entirely unprovoked ignores the trends in recent decades. Not least among these is Pavlovian response of the mainly US-based arms industry to the highly profitable prospect of replacing the ageing armouries of former Soviet republics and allies.The likes of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were licking their chops as the deeply unfortunate combat unfolded. They weren’t disappointed.
How the endgame, not yet within sight, might play out is open to speculation. The region remains a flashpoint for a wider conflict with unknowable consequences. A negotiated peace involving some territorial concessions — which were not on the agenda during the dissolution of the Soviet Union spearheaded by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in 1991 — might be the least reprehensible solution in the short run, if the priority is to halt the ongoing death and destruction. The contours and predilections of a post-Putin Russia — inevitable sooner or later — remain unpredictable. Putin, the West and a wide range of Ukrainian political factions are all culpable to different degrees in the disasters that have come to pass. The true heroes will be those who put an end to it.
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*Mahir Ali has worked as a journalist in Pakistan, the UAE and Australia across four decades.