1 November 2022
1. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A PUTIN APOLOGIST TO...
You don't have to be a Putinist to believe stories of covert CIA operations to defeat Russia - just read America's own official archive:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292
One interesting point coming out from reading that and similar doc.s - such as RAND_RR3063.pdf - is to realise that not simply will America refuse all negotiation with Russia, but that America in the first place will never permit Russia to have any zone of influence in Eastern Europe. This is non-negotiable and has been so going back decades.
In days of yore, before the GFC, Trump and populism, Covid, this war, we used to begin by answering the question "where are you coming from?". These days, rational, calm, objective debate has been shut down; to be replaced with "likes", emotionalism, "fake news", short term "one-step thinking", group think, propaganda from once-fair-minded respectable institutions. Proof we are at war.
1. We need to understand nazi history and German-Russian history to understand how the people of Russia and Donbas feel.
Let us remember that 27 million Russians died at the hands of German nazis, that 13 million Russian soldiers were killed, that 1.8 million Ukrainians from the West of that country died fighting Russians on behalf of the nazis.
And we should try to imagine how Russians feel today when they see these parades of Ukrainian soldiers wearing makeup German Nazi uniforms and flying German type swastikas and burning the Oriflame. That is not the Ukraine imagined by the people from the east of the country.
We should not forget either the "Holocaust by bullet", as it's called.
2. Ukrainians from the east of the country, over the period 2005 to 2008, were prepared and happy to go along with the idea of being Ukrainian, though they also had feelings for Russia, which after all built and established and populated the Eastern provinces in the late eighteenth century.
If it was Catherine II who built the East of Ukraine, Novorossiya, it was the West, the Americans, the CIA, who interfered with the Orange Revolution and the Maiden coup and this turned the people of the East against Kiev, particularly when the shelling started in 2014, because here was a a German-sympathising regime that was trying to bounce them into joining NATO, and an EU led by Germany, when all they were really interested in was peace and neutrality.
But then these later events have changed them from being ready to play the game and stay with Ukraine, to now a preference for Russia, because at least things would be clear. And this is evident in the referendums that have been held recently.
So to understand where are a reasonable person's point of view would come from, there is no need to go back to the very beginning, just set the clock at the last world war, as background; and roll it forward, through 1991, through 2008, through 2014 and 2015 and now to late 2021, January and mid February, to 24th February 2022, to know how the people fee today in their relations with Kiev. I'd imagine, given the shelling and 14,000 deaths, none too happy.
Not forgetting the many many speeches that Putin has made trying to explain to western decision makers that NATO entering Russia's "near abroad", despite promises made to the contrary; and the utmost strategic importance of Ukrainian neutrality; were perceived as real threats to the security and very existence of Russia.
3. Then it is also worth remembering that at one time, at the beginning of his office, Putin was expressed interest in being part of Europe, NATO and the EU. Perhaps he was the last Russian leader to be ready to turn towards the West because young Russians are very much against the West, for the West's suspicion of Russia after 1991. But he was rejected by The West.
In fact and in reality, Russia - at least as concerns Moscow and St. Petersburg and indeed 80% of the population, is in Europe. So when we talk of Europe, we are not talking of the same thing as "the West" or "Eurasia". Europe is Europe from from the Urals to the Atlantic. Too many historians Europe is a 17th century construct intended to harmonise the different powers in the face of Protestant and Catholic conflict and war.
The West is that part of Europe which developed particular philosophical ideas on sovereigty, liberty and freedom of the individual, the "social contract", democracy; and sowed those ideas across the Atlantic to America and also to Australia and on to Japan, South Korea...
If we talk of Eurasia, this is Russia part of which is in Europe, but also that part which stretches out 4,000 miles and 11 time zones away to Vladivostok in the East. Here we are talking of the Russian Steppe which stretches through to the west of Russia and, it could be argued by some, past the Carpathians and on, into the European plain.
2. GRIMMEST CONCLUSION TO DATE
Russia resists attempts to bounce Ukraine from neutrality into NATO*. America can permit no Russian zone of influence along along what it sees as a geopolitical fault line in Eastern Europe. So this conflict can only really deliver one result: the defeat of one side by the other. And if that in turn implies a war of existential importance, last-man-standing, probably requiring nuclear weapons.
Plus, I guess that any delay by America in achieing its objective is simply the time it takes for America to catch up with Russian nuclear technologies and to develop a means to knock out all these Russian systems, before they can be fired. (Russia has thousands of nuclear and some must be working, not dummies...but which ones?)
3. WHY THIS WAR
Donbas is to Ukraine as Transnistrie is to Moldova (Bessarabia). The Carpathian mountains are one of nine gateways along the "fault line" described by Mackinder, and adopted by George Kennan as the basis of his containment policy, the Marshall Plan, the refusal to help Russia in 1991, the Cold War, the creation of NATO, the support for the creation of what was to become the EU, its duplication on China.
Russia has been invaded through these gateways over 50 times. So Moldova takes care....Russia is taking care.
And America's relentless aggression continues, the last piece to fall being Donbas.
Point being, Russia has no natural defences within its own territory. This - geography and the history of invasions, the advance of NATO, its encirclement - is what drives Russia to be "an expanionist power" ... or always on the defensive, you could say.
Maybe the best way of dealing with Russia is to include it in Europe - on pure economic grounds, this is enough justification, best for Europe, but the EU would need to remove America....seems unlikely though tensions with Germany are mounting.
And this of course is what America fears the most, for a "Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic", as per de Gaulle, would wipe the floor with America.
* or at least Eastern Ukraine, Germany having "stayed behind" in West Ukraine from summer 1944 to the present.
The reasoning behind this policy - which I believe goes back to Halford MacKinder's famous lecture "The Geographical Pivot of History" and book, published in the same year that Kennan was born, 1904 - needs to be understood if any counter arguments are to be developed.
Counter arguments, based on cooperation rather than conflict could be inspired by De Gaulle's phrase, " Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic", and consequent ways and means found, if we are to avoid another world war. Worth noting that Kennan himself argued for a co-operative stance in his later years.
Kennan argued that Russia is condemned to be an inherently expansionist regime. It is mostly flat open steppe, whose only natural defences (mountains, rivers, seas....) against multiple invasions by Western "imperialists", lie to its West, over Mackinder's fault line in other words.
Russia's influence must be "contained" as it is a threat to Europe which is, or was, America's most strategically important area of the planet.
So although towards the end of his life he repudiated his earlier writings, Kennan did play a major role in the development of the Cold War, the Marshall Plan for Europe and what today is called the European Union.
***Here is some reading on The Heartlands Theory.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2019/01/halford-mackinder-father-geopolitics
https://youtu.be/MkrLUFAcjH0
(view from place 4'27")
The right-wing ideologue Aleksandr Dugin
https://youtu.be/TrafXfDL2CA
Peter Zeihan
https://youtu.be/rkuhWA9GdCo
Mackinder saw Russia as Britain's adversary (this was 1904...Br handed over to the States).
His famous sentence which has resonated down through the decades, to be picked up by Alexandr Dugin in the 80s (Dugin who lost his daughter to a car bomb from Kiev earlier in 2022):
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island;
Who rules the World Island commands the World.
For a cooperative stance is perhaps best argued today by Jeffrey Sachs.
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