People keep asking me whether Putin will attack the Ukraine, and I never say anything of substance in reply. There’s no correct answer to a wrong question.
What do you mean by the future tense? Russia launched an attack on her neighbour in 2014, and the war has raged unabated since then, killing 14,000 Ukrainians – and God knows how many Russians. (Only the deity is privy to the precise number. The Russians are always either lackadaisical about keeping such data or secretive about revealing them.)
The right question is whether or not Russia will escalate her war against the Ukraine, and there I can rely on the authority of a German chancellor to provide an answer.
No, not Scholz or Merkel. The chancellor in question is Bethmann Hollweg, who led the German government during the First World War.
On 30 July, 1914, Russia became the first major power to declare general mobilisation. In response, Bethmann Hollweg declared war on 1 August. When the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, demanded an explanation, the chancellor quoted his Chief of the General Staff, Moltke the Younger: “Mobilisation means war.”
This aphorism makes the question in the title even more irrelevant. Not only has Russia been waging war against the Ukraine for seven years, but Putin has already escalated it by deploying an invasion force on the country’s border.
Whether or not he’ll push the button for further escalation is an interesting tactical question but a moot strategic one. The West must respond with equal vigour in either case.
I don’t know whether the Russians will drive deeper into the Ukraine’s territory, as the Ukrainian and US intelligence suggests they will. I’m not sure even Putin himself knows.
If he can get the result he wants without a full-scale onslaught, he’ll stay put for the time being. If not, he may well pounce, the way Russia has been pouncing on her neighbours ever since she coalesced in the 16th century.
Just as consistently the world has played truant whenever history taught its lessons. That’s why it’s pointless talking about Munich, Chamberlain and peace in our time. Western democracies never learned that a stern early response is the only chance of preventing carnage. They do nothing until nothing is no longer a possible thing to do.
Meanwhile Western governments, along with Putin’s fans among the faschisoid faux-conservatives, put on empathetic faces and beg Putin not to kill any more people. The overall tenor is, “we understand your problems, but bloodshed isn’t a way of solving them”.
Exactly what problems are those? The problem of the USSR, whose collapse Putin describes as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” (greater than the two world wars, in other words)? The difficulties Putin faces in trying to restore the Soviet Union to its past grandeur? His fear of NATO’s expansion? His dire necessity of staying the alpha male in the eyes of his impoverished subjects?
Throughout their history the Russians have been bleating about being encircled by hostile nations wishing them ill. That paranoia has been used as a justification for Russia’s own aggressive behaviour, which often included attempts to bait adversaries into preemptive strikes.
For example, Russian historiography describes Napoleon’s 1812 invasion as perfidious and unprovoked. In fact, Russia had fought France in three prior wars as a member of hostile coalitions Alexander I had put together.
Even under his father, Paul I, the Russian general Suvorov had fought against Napoleon’s troops in Italy. What ensued in 1812 was a preemptive strike by Napoleon who felt he had no other choice.
The same happened in 1941. Stalin had built the largest and best-equipped army in the world, outnumbering the Nazis in personnel and especially in planes, tanks and artillery pieces. Having entered the war as Hitler’s ally in 1939, Stalin then deployed his hordes in two unmistakably offensive salients, Lvov and Białystok.
Hitler’s generals, aware of Stalin’s intentions, knew their only hope lay in blitzkrieg, striking at the bases of the two salients, cutting off and routing them pre-emptively. Both Hitler and his General Staff knew the danger of fighting a two-front war. However, they felt they had no choice: if Stalin’s juggernaut had been allowed to roll first, it would have been impossible to stop.
Russia’s unprecedented military build-up in the 1930s turned the whole country into a combination of boot camp, concentration camp and armament factory. This was accompanied by a propaganda offensive depicting the Soviet Union as a peaceful weakling threatened from all sides by ‘bourgeois’ enemies.
For the two years preceding the Nazi strike, such enemies were identified as Britain and France, whose ‘capitalist’ rulers were planning to conquer Russia. The propaganda was mainly used to rally the country’s own starving and enslaved population, although the Comintern’s spies and ‘useful idiots’ spread those lies throughout the West.
The present situation is eerily similar. Putin and his assorted goebbelses feign deep concern about NATO’s eastward expansion. That, they whinge, puts Russia in grave danger.
Perhaps it does at that, but not in the way the Russians claim. NATO was created in 1949 as a defensive bloc against Soviet aggression. It was an attempt to hold the line that separated Europe’s part already raped by the Soviets from the part they wished to rape in a similar fashion.
Never was any offensive purpose part of the NATO doctrine. From its very inception the bloc identified its strategic goal as merely containment.
It was true then and it remains true now. Former slave nations of the Soviet Union, each drowned in blood and starved by its erstwhile masters, took advantage of the first opportunity to break away and declare their independence.
Yet unlike the West those countries attended class when history was taught. They knew that what Russia relinquished she could later reclaim at some propitious moment. Hence they sought the protection of the West by joining either NATO or the EU or both.
They hoped that, should the Russians decide to remedy “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, Article 5 of NATO’s charter would keep them at bay. If any of them harboured any illusion that such protection was unnecessary, Russia disabused them of that notion by her aggression against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014.
NATO and the EU opened their doors, partly for ideological reasons but mainly for strategic ones. But, contrary to the lies spouted by Putin’s geobbelses, the strategy isn’t to use those countries as a beachhead from which the bloodthirsty West could attack Russia.
Anyone whose mind is in working order, and whose knee doesn’t jerk in Putin’s direction, should be able to appreciate the amount of brainwashing it takes for people to believe such malignant nonsense. Just paint a mental picture of Messrs Biden, Scholz, Johnson and Macron deciding to launch a massive offensive against Russia, which, as Putin never ceases to boast, is a nuclear power. The picture doesn’t quite add up, does it?
The danger NATO’s eastward expansion presents to Putin lies in making his expansionist plans harder to execute. Hence the rattling of Russia’s sabres at the border – indeed hence the non-stop war on the Ukraine Russia has been waging since 2014.
The present strategy may include further escalation or merely an attempt to blackmail the West into concessions first, submission second. My point is that it doesn’t really matter which. The response should be exactly the same in either case.
In his Skype chat with Putin, Biden stupidly ruled out any possibility of NATO’s military involvement. That option should have stayed on the table, even if everyone knew it was unrealistic. However, even a remote possibility of NATO’s direct action could have provided a sufficient deterrent.
Yet the stern economic response Biden threatened should come now, not when Putin’s armour drives at Kiev. The escalation is in the present tense, not the future. So should be the punishment.
Biden promised economic sanctions the likes of which Russia has never seen. The reports have been vague on specifics, making one suspect that the gaga president indeed talked in nebulous generalities. Yet specific measures that could make Putin see the error of his ways are essential.
Russia must be cut off from SWIFT, impoverishing her banks and making the ruble worthless outside the country. The assets that Russian officials, oligarchs and other gangsters keep in the West must be impounded and, if that fails to deter Putin, confiscated. A temporary embargo on Russian hydrocarbons must be introduced, with the threat of making it permanent.
All such sanctions are a whip dialectically linked with the carrot of future withdrawal if Russia’s behaviour improves. Yet I’m afraid the West’s response will amount to a slap on the wrist – at a time when only a bang on the head could possibly work.
Would that you were the Tsar of the West!
No such ambitions, I’m afraid. But if I were, I’d make you my First Minister.
“Mobilisation means war.”
Correct. Troops [10,000 or so] disembarking from a train at the border according to a carefully planned schedule could not just stand there milling about. Needed to move forward to make room for the next 10,000 who were just about a hour behind the first bunch. Repeat that process over and over and you have war.
Western leaders have little or no interest in what Russia is doing (other than providing fuel). They are all too busy destroying civil liberties in the name of public health, gender fluidity, and climate change. War against a foreign power? Tosh! They’re waging war on their own citizens!
Given Biden’s mental state, how effective would it have been had he gone into some hysterical rant and threatened war (nuclear or conventional)? Perhaps an unpredictable madman with his hand on the button would help keep Putin in check. Biden and staff should use his lack of reason as a negotiating weapon.
An interesting point, that. That’s the trick I used when I was bullied at school. Being smaller than the bullies, I always pretended to be unhinged. As often as not, they left me alone (“What if he’ll really stick a pen in my eye?”). I wonder if this trick could work on a larger scale.
No doubt I’m ignorant and foolish, but as far as I understand, Krushchev made the Ukraine a separate SSR for administrative convenience, not because it had any history as an integrated independent state. Why should we care about it any more than we care about the various other artificial former SSRs further east?
I could imagine volunteering to fight for Poland or Lithuania, but for Ukraine? Probably not.
The Ukraine belonged to Russia during exactly the same period (give or take 10 years) that India belonged to Britain. Should be land the Royal Marines there?
I have no appetite for either a British annexation of India or a Russian annexation of the Ukraine, but the former would be cultural and geographical nonsense, while the latter wouldn’t. The Egyptian annexation of the Suez Canal in 1956 or the Indian annexation of Goa in 1961 are perhaps better analogies to Putin’s plans.
I’m no fan of the crooked tyrant Putin, but I think his opponents ought to pick their fights. Poland and the Baltic states ought to be defended whatever the cost. Ukraine? I’m not so sure.
Quite. A quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. Where did we hear that before? And do we remember what happened then?