1.
Fear of Appeasement
In September 1938, the then British Prime Minister, Neville
Chamberlain, led a delegation to Munich to negotiate a peace treaty with Adolf
Hitler, in which the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia was
ceded to Germany. This act of ‘appeasement’, as it is always called, has since
been almost universally ridiculed as an act of cowardice and folly in that, in
the long term, Hitler had no intention of honouring his end of the bargain.
Indeed, it was only a year later that the Germans invaded Poland. There is
another school of thought, however, promoted by Robert Harris in his 2017 novel
‘Munich’, which holds that Chamberlain knew exactly what he was doing and that he
deliberately sacrificed both his reputation and career in order to buy Britain
another year in which to prepare for war. As such, his act could therefore be
regarded, not just as a prime example of pragmatic ‘realpolitik’, but as one of
the most selfless and noble acts in British history.
Unfortunately, that is not the way we British see it, having
generally adopted the rather more Churchillian view that one should never
appease tyrants and dictators in that, to do so, only encourages them to demand
even more. So it is that, for the last three and a half years, we have steadfastly
adhered to the principle that we must never give in to the demands of Vladimir
Putin and the Russians with respect to Ukraine, even though, had we known what
these demands were and fully understood the Russians’ reasons for making them,
we would probably have agreed with them.
After all, the first of Russia’s two main demands, that
Ukraine remain neutral –
as is actually stipulated in its constitution – is as much in our interests as it is in those of
the Russians. For were Ukraine to join NATO, it is at least possible and,
indeed, highly probable that the Americans would place missiles on Ukraine’s
Russian border, just as they have placed missiles in both Poland and Romania. Unlike
those launch sites, however, it would only take five minutes for ballistic
missiles fired from Ukraine to reach Moscow, which is simply not enough time for
the Russians to retaliate should the Americans launch a nuclear first strike.
In fact, it would be just like the Cuban missile crisis, only in reverse, with the result that the Russians
would be forced to destroy the missiles before they could be launched.
Of course, it will be argued that just because Ukraine joins
NATO doesn’t mean that the Americans will place missiles on its border with
Russia, let alone that these missiles will have nuclear warheads. Once Ukraine
joins NATO, however, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty means that the Russians could
not intervene militarily to prevent such missiles being installed without
starting World War III. What’s more, because they would not know whether the
missiles had nuclear warheads or not, they would have to assume that they did,
making a nuclear war almost inevitable. Indeed, if the British public knew what
was at stake here, there would be protests outside parliament demanding that
this suicidal policy of bringing Ukraine into NATO be reversed.
Similarly, if the British people were fully apprised of the
facts, they would also probably support Russia’s second demand, which, originally, was merely that the rights of
Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population be respected, principally their right to
speak their native language. Now, of course, after eleven years of war, matters
have gone a little further than that. For with so much hatred on both sides, there
is no way that the majority Russian-speaking populations of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia,
Kherson and, of course, Crimea are going to accept being taken back under
Ukrainian rule. Nor can those who would force this on them argue – as they often do – that this is what is
required under international law. For while the United Nations Charter may
support the territorial integrity of sovereign states, it also supports the right
of people to self-determination, especially in cases where the people concerned
are from different ethnic, linguistic or religious backgrounds and are being
persecuted as a result. More to the point, forcing people to be part of a
country to which they do not wish to belong never solves the problem; it merely
causes it to fester.
Of course, it will be argued that there is a right way and a
wrong way for a regional majority population to secede from a country of which
they do not wish to be part. And having another country simply annex them
because they speak the same language, in the way that Hitler annexed the Sudetenland
because the people there spoke German, is decidedly the wrong way. But that is
not what happened with respect to any of the five Ukrainian provinces listed
above, including Crimea, which most people in Britain believe the Russians
invaded. This, however, is not literally the case. In fact, the Russians didn’t
need to invade Crimea because they were already there, guarding their naval
base at Sevastopol, which they had leased back from Ukraine under the 1997
Treaty of Kharkiv, to which the Ukrainians had agreed in return for a lucrative
trade deal and extremely generous transit payments for allowing Russian natural
gas to pass through Ukraine on its way to eastern Europe.
In fact, at that point, relations between the two countries
were actually quite amicable, or as amicable as they could be given their
shared history. It is that shared history, however, that we really need to
understand if we want to understand how things could have now gone so wrong.
2.
A Brief History of Ukraine
In his interview with Tucker Carlson, President Putin famously
spent the first half hour talking about the close historical relationship
between Russians and Ukrainians which he characterised as almost fraternal. While
he didn’t say anything that was actually untrue is this lengthy disquisition,
however, he conveniently left out huge swathes of history which tell a slightly
different story. For although the Kievan Rus’ Empire may have been born in 9th
century Ukraine, as it expanded, not only did its centre of gravity move
eastward, away from Kiev and towards Moscow, but it was then broken up by the
Mongol invasion of 1237 to 1241, which effectively rendered both Kiev and
Muscovy separate vassal states of their Mongol overlords. In the 14th century,
moreover, Ukraine was then conquered by the Poles who ruled it for the next 250
years, giving it a distinctive cultural and linguistic identity of its own,
which, while still essentially Slavic, was no longer Rus’. It wasn’t until the
17th century, in fact, that an ascendant Russia began to absorb Ukraine once
again, and even then it wasn’t done in a particularly fraternal manner.
It started during the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648), which
began as a religious war between the Holy Roman Empire and its protestant
German Electors, but quickly spread all across Europe as a war of territorial opportunism,
reaching Poland in 1621, at a time when Poland’s Catholic king, Sigismund III,
had actually taken his army south to defend his Ukrainian possessions against
the Ottoman Empire, thus providing Sweden’s protestant king, Gustavus Adolphus,
with the perfect opportunity to invade Poland’s territories along the Baltic
coast. This meant that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as it then was, was
effectively at war on two fronts hundreds of miles apart, which the Russians
naturally saw as a perfect opportunity for them to attack it from the east. To
make matters worse, Sigismund then died, leaving his young and inexperienced
son, Władysław IV, to fight three simultaneous wars for which he had neither
the manpower nor the finances.
Needless to say, it didn’t take long for the young king to
make a bad situation even worse by making some very bad decisions. For having
concluded a largely one-sided peace with the Ottoman Empire – which already ruled
Crimea and the whole of the Black Sea coast connecting Crimea to the Ottoman
province of Romania, and which now took possession of large chunks of
Zaporizhzhia as well –
he seems to have thought that he was safe to save money on his southern flank
by halving the number of annual stipends paid to the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, whose
traditional role it had been both to maintain control over the Ukrainian serfs,
who worked on the huge Polish owned estates which at that time dominated
Ukrainian agriculture, and to fend off raids on those same estates by the Muslim
Tartars who actually ruled in Crimea as vassals of the Ottoman Empire.
Affronted and aggrieved, not just by their material losses,
but by what they regarded as an insult to their military prowess, the Cossack
leadership therefore decided to offer their services to the Russian Tsar instead,
who, knowing that whoever controlled the Cossacks controlled Ukraine, was only
too happy to take over the Cossacks’ annual stipends in full, leaving the
Polish authorities in an almost impossible position. For while they still
nominally ruled what was still left of Ukraine, they could neither police nor
defend it, plunging it into a state of chaos which eventually led to the
Khmelnitsky Uprising of 1648 in which the Cossacks, in alliance with the Tatars
and the Ukrainian peasantry, committed numerous atrocities against the Polish civilian
population, especially the Roman Catholic clergy and the Jews, of whom more
than 10,000 were killed.
The pogroms against the Jews were particularly brutal
affairs due to the fact that most of the aristocratic Polish landowners who
owned land in Ukraine didn’t actually live there. Instead they employed
stewards or estate managers to manage their estates for them, many of whom were
Jews. This was because, throughout nearly all of Europe at that time, Jews were
not allowed to own land of their own and so were not regarded as a threat to
the Polish landowners. They were also literate and numerate with a good head
for business, making them excellent estate managers. It also made them
absolutely hated by the Ukrainian serfs, who not only saw them as the
representatives of the ruling Polish elite but as a reminder of their own lowly
status, being at the very bottom of the social ladder, even in their own land.
If the Khmelnitsky Uprising gave the Ukrainian peasantry a
brief glimpse of freedom, however, it was extremely short lived. For with the
representatives of the Polish landowners and the Polish provincial officials
either dead or fled, and the Cossacks and their Russian masters firmly in
charge, it didn’t take long before Russian landowners slowly but exorably
started taking over the former Polish estates, bringing their Ukrainian serfs
back under control and even, in some cases, employing the same Jewish estate
managers as their predecessors. The result was that the Ukrainians very quickly
learned to hate Russians almost as much as they hated Jews, creating a state of
perpetual hostility which was made even worse in the 18th century
when Catherine the Great decided to pivot Russia’s maritime trade away from the
Baltic, which was ice-bound for half the year, and concentrate instead on the
Black Sea, which was ice-free all year round.
The problem she had, of course, was that Crimea and most of
the Black Sea coast were still ruled by the Ottoman Empire and its Tartar
vassals. What’s more, the whole region was still in an almost perpetual state
of conflict, with continual skirmishes between the Cossacks and the Tartars,
making it more or less impossible to even consider centring Russian maritime
trade there. In 1768, therefore, just six years into her reign, Catherine took
the epoch-making decision to remove the Tartars and their Ottoman masters from
everywhere north of the Black Sea and bring the whole of Ukraine, including a
few remaining Polish enclaves, into the Russian empire.
Her second problem, however, was that, at this very early
stage of her reign, there were still a large number of Russians who refused to
accept a woman on the throne. In despatching her army south to fight the
Ottomans, therefore, she left herself vulnerable to rebellions elsewhere, the
most notable of which took place in Siberia, to where she consequently had to
divert a sizeable contingent of troops. The result was that her first Black Sea
campaign was indecisive. She did manage to gain some territory to the west of
the Dnieper River and, in the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, she secured free
access for Russian shipping passing through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.
But her principal objective, of removing the Tartars from the entire northern
Black Sea coast and opening up the region for Russian trade remained
unachieved.
If anything, in fact, the situation was made even worse. For
one of the main terms of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji stipulated that Crimea – and those areas of
Kherson and Zaporizhzhia still in Tartar hands – were to become an independent Khanate, in which the
Tatars would elect their own Khan, who consequently exercised even less control
over his people than former Tartar leaders who only had to answer to the
Ottoman Sultan. In fact, several factions now formed within the Tartar court, one
of which was actually pro-Russian, which had the rather unfortunate effect of
tempting Catherine into interfering politically in the Khanate’s affairs, which
naturally antagonised those who opposed to her. In 1784, therefore, she finally
gave up on politics and ordered another invasion, which, with only an
independent Tartar army to face, was, this time, overwhelmingly successful.
Not that the conflict ended there. For the Ottomans were so
enraged, not only by Catherine’s abrogation of Kuchuk Kainarji treaty, but by
the personal tour she took around her new possessions –which she dubbed her ‘New Russia’ – that they embarked on
another seven years of war. By this time, however, the Russians were not only in
control of the entire northern Black Sea coast but of Crimea as well, where
they not only built a new Black Sea Fleet but the more or less impregnable
naval base at Sevastopol, which the Ottomans were never able to successfully
assault.
In all, Catherine spent twenty-seven years of her reign on
her Black Sea campaigns, which is what ultimately earned her the accolade of
‘the Great’. For by opening up the Black Sea – and hence the Aegean and the Mediterranean – to Russian trade, she totally
transformed the Russian economy, enabling it to compete with other maritime
powers such as Britain and France, which became so alarmed by this development
that, in 1853, they actually invaded Crimea with the intention of shutting down
Russia’s entire Black Sea operation and returning Crimea to the Ottoman Empire:
an objective which, by then, was about as realistic as their plans for Russia
and Ukraine today. I say this because Catherine didn’t just transform Russia’s
economy, she also changed its geography. For with so much money to be made from
foreign trade and its ancillary industries, throughout the 19th
century people flocked to the Black Sea coast from all over Russia, building
new port cities from Odessa in the west to Kerch in the east and turning Catherine’s
New Russia into one of the wealthiest regions in the country.
The problem was that while, by the end of the century, wealthy
Russians living in Ukraine’s coastal cities were enjoying a life style very
similar to that of their French counterparts in Nice or Monaco, the Ukrainian
peasants of the hinterland were still living under the same grinding poverty
they’d had to endure under Polish and Russian rule for the previous 500 years.
Nor did it get any better under the Soviet Union, when the
huge agricultural estates created by the Poles and taken over by the Russians
were simply turned into collective farms where the quality life for those
living on them actually deteriorated. This was because the priority for the
Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, was the industrialisation of what, in
1917, had still been a largely agrarian economy. As long as agricultural
republics like Ukraine continued delivering food to the new industrial
metropolises being built in the east, Stalin didn’t really care, therefore, how
they fared. Unfortunately, he also thought that collective farms, where food
was produced on an industrial scale, were the best way to maintain and even
increase food supply and so abandoned the reforms introduced by former Russian
Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin, which allowed traditional Russian peasants to
become small independent farmers known as kulaks. What Stalin didn’t understand
was that, incentivised by the rewards their hard work brought them, the kulaks
were actually the most productive part of Russia’s agricultural economy and
that, in abolishing them, he actually reduced agricultural output.
What turned this simple if rather egregious misunderstanding
of economics into a tragedy, however, was the fact that, no matter how much
agricultural production fell in republics like Ukraine, they still had to
provide the same quantities of food to Stalin’s new cities, with the result
that, between 1930 and 1933, rural areas such as Kazakhstan, Western Siberia
and, most of all, Ukraine, suffered a massive famine in which between 5.7 million
and 8.7 million people died.
After centuries of oppression, for many Ukrainians this was
the turning point, giving rise to a new Ukrainian nationalist party called the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was not only modelled on the
nationalist parties of Germany and Italy but espoused many of the same
policies, especially with regard to the Jews. Because Ukraine was still part of
the Soviet Union, of course, this didn’t intiually pose much of a threat to
Ukraine’s Jewish population. In 1939, however, when the Germans invaded Poland,
it just so happened that, in a strange twist of fate, the OUN’s founder and leader,
Stepan Bandera, was in a Polish prison awaiting execution for the murder of a
Polish government minster and was thus in a position to influence the future of
his country in a way that would never have been possible under almost any other
circumstances. For not only did the Germans release him, they welcomed him into
the highest circles of the Nazi party and included him in their plans for the
invasion of the Soviet Union, the southernmost arc of which, of course, would
proceed through Ukraine.
For the fledgling OUN and its leader, this was therefore an
opportunity of which they could only previously have dreamed. As soon as Kiev
fell to the Germans, however, Bandera made an absolutely astounding error. For
without first clearing it with his German handlers, he issued a Proclamation of
Ukrainian Statehood – effectively a declaration of independence – which, of
course, was the last thing the Germans wanted. Indeed, anyone who has read
‘Mein Kampf’ will know that Hitler’s principal objective in conquering the
Slavic world was economic. He wanted to create colonies, populated by people
who were more or less slaves, whose sole purpose it would be to supply the
Fatherland with the natural resources and raw materials it needed. The idea of
an independent Ukraine was therefore totally at odds with the entire Nazi
agenda.
Even though Bandera’s proclamation pledged the cooperation
of the new Ukrainian state with Nazi Germany, recognised the supreme leadership
of Adolph Hitler and was accompanied by the massacre of thousands of Jews by
OUN supporters, the result was that Bandera, himself, was promptly arrested by
the Gestapo and spent the next three years in detention – albeit reasonably
comfortable detention – until he was released in 1944 to help fight against the
Soviet advance.
Even during his captivity, however, so blinded was he by his
hatred of Russians and Jews that he still doesn’t seem to have understood the real
nature of the Nazi enterprise or that the Germans were simply using him. As a
result, he helped them recruit what eventually became two whole divisions, plus
one additional brigade, of the Waffen SS: the 14th Waffen SS Grenadier Division
(1st Galician), the 30th Waffen SS Grenadier Division, and the Dirlewanger
Brigade, a total of around 20,000 men. All three units fought alongside the
Germans throughout the rest of the war and all three were responsible for a
variety of atrocities and war crimes, especially in eastern Ukraine where they
murdered an estimated 500,000 Jews and Russians. Probably the most infamous of
the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Waffen SS, however, occurred during
the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, when the Dirlewanger Brigade massacred around
100,000 Polish civilians, for which a number of the brigade’s officers were
later executed.
Needless to say, ex-Waffen SS soldiers and members of the
OUN who were later captured and identified as such by the victorious Russians
were treated with great severity. Bandera, himself, however, escaped to West Germany where he was
protected by the US-backed Gehlen Organization and by various underground Nazis
groups, who helped him cross the borders between Allied occupation zones,
enabling him to evade those hunting him. It wasn’t until 1959, therefore, that
he was eventually tracked down in Munich and assassinated by the KGB: a fitting
end, some might say, to one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, but one
which actually enhanced his almost legendary reputation among many Ukrainians
and led to his being awarded the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’ in January 2010.
3.
The Road to War
With this shared and very troubled history, it is
unsurprising, therefore, that when the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991,
Ukraine decided to become an independent nation rather than join the new
Russian Federation. After all, Ukrainians had been fighting for their independence
since the 1930s. What is surprising is the fact that, for quite a while,
relations between the two countries were as amicable as they were. Yes, there
were tensions over the Black Sea Fleet and the naval base at Sevastopol, to
which Ukraine naturally laid claim. Once the leasing arrangements for the naval
base and a trade deal had been sorted out, however, including the transit
payments for piping gas to Europe, relations between the two countries settled
down into something approaching normality.
In fact, given the benefits of the trade and transit deals
to the Ukrainian economy, it would have been very difficult to prise the two
countries apart without concerted western interference, which began, in fact, at
the NATO conference in Bucharest in April 2008, when it was announced that both
Ukraine and Georgia would be invited to join NATO, to which Russia naturally responded
in the strongest terms possible, citing the argument outlined above that this
would give NATO a pre-emptive first strike capability that would very probably
lead to a nuclear war.
Despite stating that it was up to NATO to decide who would
be invited to join the alliance and that Russia had no say in the matter, at
this point, therefore, western leaders clearly decided to back away from this
confrontational approach and to try instead to entice Ukraine away from Russia
by offering the Ukrainians and even more lucrative trade deal than the Russians
had given them. In July 2008, as a consequence, just three months after the
Bucharest NATO meeting, the EU duly began talks with Ukraine which were
intended to ultimately lead to Ukraine’s full EU membership.
That this was done for purely geopolitical purposes is clear
from the fact that Ukraine’s very poor economy and high level of corruption
meant that there were a lot of obstacles to be overcome, making it hardly
surprising, therefore, that even this first stage of the process towards EU
membership was not completed until March 2012 when a draft European
Union–Ukraine Association Agreement was initialled by both sides in Brussels.
Even this, however, was a massive step forward for Ukraine. For not only did it
include a comprehensive free trade agreement, but it provided Ukraine with
access to the European Investment Bank (EIB), making it very popular with most
Ukrainians, especially the young, who saw even this loose association with the
EU as their best chance of both improving their economic prospects and cleaning
up public life.
The problem, however, as those who negotiated the deal must
have known, was that any free trade agreement with the EU was more or less
bound to be incompatible with the free trade agreement Ukraine already had with
Russia. In fact, the Russians had already made this clear, pointing out that if
Ukraine signed such an agreement with the EU, Russia would then have to erect
customs barriers along the Russian Ukrainian border in order to prevent EU
goods simply flowing through Ukraine into Russia tariff-free: a problem very
similar to that which the EU later had with an open border between Northern
Ireland and the Republic of Ireland post-Brexit.
Even though both the Ukrainian parliament and the elected
president, Viktor Yanukovych, continued to assert that the EU agreement was the
best way forward for their country, the result was that neither was willing to
commit to it until some of the negative consequences of this new alignment were
addressed, which, for its part, the EU quite rightly stated that it could not
do. The result was an inevitable impasse with which many Ukrainians very
quickly became impatient and which led to huge public protests in Maidan Square
in Kiev throughout November and December 2013, at which Victoria Nuland, Deputy
US Secretary of State, was videoed handing out cookies to the protestors,
thereby demonstrating America’s solidarity with their cause.
While the protests in Maidan Square were largely peaceful, however,
and were depicted as such by the western media, behind the scenes, supporters
of the only very recently created ‘Hero of Ukraine’, Stepan Bandera, were being
bussed into the capital to intimidate anyone who opposed the EU deal. There are
even reports that more than a hundred people were killed, though how accurate
these reports are is very difficult to say. With the unrest becoming
increasingly violent, however, even some of the more conservative members of
the Ukrainian parliament were persuaded that President Yanukovych had to step
down, thereby allowing a new presidential election to be held the following
May.
Whether this was strictly constitutional is unclear in that
Yanukovych had been directly elected by the people and was not therefore
dependent on the confidence of parliament for the maintenance of his
presidency. Whether this therefore represented a coup d'état, however, is also
unclear, not least because Yanukovych’s successor was not, at this point,
obvious. All that was ostensibly taking place, therefore, was the resolution of
a political impasse by means of a new presidential election. Nor is there any
evidence that the election was rigged. What does seem rather remarkable,
however, is the fact that, in a country apparently crying out for reform, the
man whom the people elected as president that May was a billionaire oligarch
called Petro Poroshenko, who was not only known as one of the most corrupt men
in Ukraine, but whose party, the National Alliance of Freedom and Ukrainian
Patriotism (NASTUP), later renamed the All-Ukrainian Union Solidarity (BOS),
was merely the latest incarnation of Stepan Bandera’s OUN.
To say that the return to power of the Ukrainian Nazi Party
sixty-nine years after the end of the second world war was a cause of concern
to the Russians would, of course, be a huge understatement: it rocked Moscow to
its core. The Kremlin’s biggest fear was that Ukraine would immediately
abrogate the Kharkiv Treaty and would then be fast tracked into NATO, which
would not only mean that the naval base at Sevastopol would be returned to
Ukraine but that it would be effectively handed over to the Americans. To avoid
this at all costs, the troops already stationed in Sevastopol were therefore
redeployed to the narrow isthmus which connects Crimea to the Ukrainian
mainland, thereby securing the entire peninsula and preventing Sevastopol from
coming under siege.
Under international law, of course, this was technically an
invasion of the territory of another sovereign state. In an attempt to
legitimise it, the Russians therefore held a very speedy referendum in which the
Russian population of the peninsula, fearing the return of Banderite Nazis,
voted by 97% to join the Russian Federation. Not, of course, that this had any
effect upon western leaders, the western media or, indeed, the general public.
For not knowing that nearly all the inhabitants of Crimea are descendants of the
Russians who flocked there in the 19th century and that the new
ruling party in Ukraine was actually a reincarnation of Ukraine’s World War II
Nazi party, everyone in the West just naturally assumed that the Crimean
referendum had to have been rigged to have produced such a result.
This reaction, however, now left the Russians with an even
bigger problem than the sanctions which were immediately imposed upon them. For
they now had to decide what to do about the twelve million or so Russians who
actually lived in mainland Ukraine, most of them in the provinces of Kherson,
Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. I say this because, within weeks of taking
office, President Poroshenko started introducing new anti-Russian laws intended
to Ukrainianize Ukraine. This included purging all ethnic Russians from the
civil service, banning Russian-language newspapers, radio stations and TV channels,
and prohibiting the use of Russian in schools, a measure which was particularly
onerous in the two most eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk where the vast
majority of children, along with their teachers, only spoke Russian. Indeed, it
could be said that this really didn’t give the people of Luhansk and Donetsk
very much choice other than to break away from Ukraine and form their own
independent republics, which then inevitably came under attack from the
Ukrainian army.
This therefore presented President Putin with a massive
dilemma. For in the case of Crimea, the Russian army had secured the peninsula
without actually coming into contact with Ukrainian troops, which meant that, had
the Ukrainians attacked Russian positions on the isthmus, it would have been
they who initiated a shooting war between the two sides. If the Russians sent
troops to help the militias being formed in Luhansk and Donetsk, however, it
would be they who would be initiating the war: something Putin was particularly
reluctant to do while there was still a chance of a diplomatic settlement,
especially as peace talks were already getting underway in Minsk under the
co-chairmanship of President Hollande of France and Chancellor Merkel of
Germany.
What probably made him even more reluctant to start a war,
however, is the fact that, as a trained lawyer, he strongly believed that what
he was asking for was not unreasonable: merely that Ukraine remain neutral,
providing a buffer between NATO and Russia – something that was clearly in the
interests of both sides – and that the freedoms and rights of Russians living
inside Ukraine were protected. What he did not understand at that time was that
what was being arranged in Minsk had nothing to do with reasonableness and that
the talks were a total sham. For as Angela Merkel later admitted in an
interview with Die Zeit, the entire purpose of the Minsk Accords was to buy
time for Ukraine to build up its military. What’s more, this was done with the
full knowledge and support of America and its European allies.
That’s not to say, of course, that over the next seven
years, the Russians couldn’t see what was going on, especially as NATO immediately
started arming, equipping and training what, by 2022, was the second largest
army in Europe, consisting of more than 600,000 men. What made the hollowness
of the Minsk Accords even more obvious, however, was that fact that, throughout
this period, the Ukrainians relentlessly shelled and bombed towns and cities
throughout the Donbas, killing over 14,000 people while injuring countless
more, making it perfectly clear that their intention was ultimately to provoke
a war.
Not that the Russians just sat back and watched this happen.
Not only did they create the Wagner Group, a private military contractor they
could send to the Donbas without actually sending Russian troops, but they were
also quietly preparing for war themselves. The main difference between the two
sides was that the Russians did not entirely give up on peace. In fact, they
continued to search for a diplomatic solution right up until December 2021,
when, in one last attempt to avert a totally unnecessary war, they submitted
what they described as a comprehensive peace plan for Europe to both the EU and
US, in which they proposed that both sides guarantee Ukraine’s independence and
neutrality in return for Ukrainian demilitarisation. When this was summarily
dismissed with hardly any discussion, however, there was virtually nothing more
the Russians could do but actually walk into the trap the West had carefully set
for them. For if they wanted the attacks on the Donbas to stop, the only option
left was to stop them themselves.
4.
The Reasons Why the West Provoked Russia into
Invading Ukraine
I realise, of course, that very people in the West today are
prepared to even entertain this version of events. In fact, very few people in
the West today have even heard this version of events. They believe what their
governments and media have been telling them for the last three and a half
years: that there was no build-up or reason for the war in Ukraine; that
Vladimir Putin just woke up one morning and decided to invade his entirely
innocent neighbour as a first step towards rebuilding the old Soviet empire.
The idea that we could have provoked this unprovoked attack is therefore regarded
as utterly preposterous. After all, we are the ‘good guys’; we don’t do things
like that. More to the point, why would
we!
There are, however, two deeply rooted reasons – one political, or even
philosophical, the other both economic and existential – why we not only would but actually did engineer the
events I have outlined.
The first has its basis in our response to the end of the
cold way, which most people alive at that time greeted with a mixture of relief
and jubilation: relief because, for most of the previous forty years, we had
believed that, at any moment, the world could be destroyed in a nuclear
holocaust; jubilation because it seemed like the dawning of a new era, in which
the political struggles of the 20th century had been finally brought
to an end with the victory of liberal democracy, which it was the duty of an
enlightened West to now spread around the world. American political scientist,
Francis Fukuyama, even called it the ‘end of history’: the end-point of
mankind's ideological evolution from which universal peace and prosperity would
now flow.
Others, however, were slightly less sanguine, believing that
the biggest challenge the West now faced was that of protecting the very
fragile state of peace and stability it had won, especially from those who might
drag us all back into the darkness. One such proponent of what consequently became
a policy of heightened vigilance was U.S. Under Secretary of Defence for
Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, who, along with his deputy, Scooter Libby, published a
policy document in 1992, in which they argued that, far from sitting back and
enjoying its victory, the United Sates should actively police what was still a very
dangerous world and take pre-emptive military action against any potential
threats. Known as the ‘Wolfowitz
Doctrine’, it is this policy which underpins what is generally called
‘neo-conservatism’ and has given rise to a whole series of wars over the last
thirty years, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria. In their policy
paper, however, Wolfowitz and Libby paid special attention to Russia, which
they argued should never again be allowed to rise to the status of a superpower
and thus threaten anyone.
Not that this seemed very likely in 1992. For as I have
explained elsewhere in a different context, the most catastrophic consequence of Russia’s political
disintegration was the near total collapse of its already fragile economy. For in
a highly centralised and bureaucratic system, people simply weren’t used to
thinking for themselves, taking responsibility or acting on their own
initiative. Most people simply did what they were told and put as little effort
into it as they possibly could, knowing that if they kept their heads down and
their noses clean, they’d get paid anyway. When instructions stopped coming
down from above, therefore, everything more or less t ground to a halt. Parts
weren’t delivered to factories, food wasn’t delivered to shops and despite a
rapidly growing black market, run largely by criminal gangs who drove up prices
beyond what most people could afford, people began to starve.
As an
indication of just how bad things got, average life expectancy in Russia in the
1990s actually fell by five years, which may not seem a lot but, in a
population of around 120 million, actually represents an expected total loss of
life of 600 million years: a loss which cannot have therefore fallen solely on
the very old. Indeed, there were premature deaths across every age group, from
the very old to the very young, with a lot of young people actually committing
suicide.
Nor was the situation helped to any great extent by western
aid, which was mostly directed towards the privatisation of previously
state-owned industries through the provision of loans to those managers and
officials who were in a position to buy and run them. The problem was that,
even including the $2.5 billion ‘Loans for Shares’ package provided by the USA,
the collective west could not provide enough such loans to privatise the entire
Russian economy at its true worth. The result was that most state-owned
industries were sold off at massive discounts. In 1995, for instance, Boris
Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, two of the most well-known beneficiaries of
this bonanza, bought the state-owned oil company Sibneft for $200 million. Ten
years later, Abramovich sold his share of the company alone for $13 billion.
With such huge fortunes to be made from what was effectively
the looting of Russian state assets, this then set off a huge wave of
corruption among the officials administering the sales. For if a purchaser
wanted his bid for a business to succeed, there were often dozens of palms to
be greased, with sums running into millions. Nor was it just Russians who were
involved. Western corporations also now descended on Russia in order to buy up
Russian businesses on the cheap. And while it was the Russian state which
garnered the proceeds from these sales, there was hardly a single person in
government who wasn’t getting rich.
From the perspective of those in the US administration who
subscribed to the Wolfowitz
Doctrine, the chaos into which Russia consequently descended, both as a
result of this widespread corruption and the consequent lawlessness to which it
gave rise, must have seemed like the perfect solution, explaining in no small
measure why they so fervently supported the alcoholic and totally incompetent
Boris Yeltsin who, as president, presided over this dystopian nightmare. In his
last year in office, however, Yeltsin did something so uncharacteristically
thoughtful and judicious that it almost redeemed his entire presidency. For in
August 1999, he appointed the relatively unknown but highly intelligent,
fiercely patriotic and utterly incorruptible Vladimir Putin as his Prime
Minister, thereby paving the way for him to become President the following year
when Yeltsin, himself, retired.
Nor did Putin waste any time in beginning the task of
cleaning up the mess Russia was in and going after those he deemed responsible.
His first target was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had purchased Yukos Oil under
the US ‘Loans for Shares’ deal and
was thought to be worth around $50 billion, making him the richest man
in Russia and the perfect candidate for the example Putin intended to make of
him. For in what was clearly intended as a message to all the other so-called
oligarchs who had plundered Russia’s wealth, Putin not only had Khodorkovsky
arrested, tried and imprisoned for fraud and tax evasion but then had Yukos Oil
sold off at a price so low that the proceeds only just covered its former
owner’s unpaid tax bill, thereby leaving him with absolutely nothing.
Fearing that they would be next, many of the other
oligarchs, including Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, consequently fled
to London, where their billions were welcomed with open arms by the City’s
banks, but where they were constantly followed and harassed by the FSB in what
was clearly part of a well worked-out plan. For instead of going after those
oligarchs who remained in Russia in the way he had dealt with Khodorkovsky, Putin
offered them a deal in which they would be allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains
as long as they made annual, ‘voluntary’ contributions to the Russian treasury,
an arrangement which even those in London were eventually forced to accept if
they wanted to avoid spending the rest of their lives looking over their
shoulders.
His next target was Viktor Chernomyrdin, a former Prime
Minister under Yeltsin, whom Yeltsin had appointed chairman of Gazprom, the
massive state-owned energy company which had been set up by the Soviet Union in
1965 in order to exploit Russia’s huge reserves of natural gas. So large were
these reserves, in fact, that there was no chance of any one single person or
even a consortium buying the company as a whole. When it came to privatization,
therefore, it was decided that 15% of the shares should be given to the
corporation’s employees, 45% sold to the general public – with 747,000 people taking up the offer – while the remaining
minority stake of 40% would be kept by the state. Given the atmosphere of
rampant corruption at that time, however, it didn’t take long for the board of
directors, including the chairman, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the Chief Executive
Officer, Rem Viakhirev, to start channelling funds and assets to other gas
trading companies owned by themselves or their families, with the result that
the shareholders, including the state, never actually received any dividends.
Putin’s first step, therefore, was to replace Chernomyrdin
and Viakhirev with Dmitry Medvedev and Alexei Miller, both of whom had worked
for him in St. Petersburg and were part of a small team of trusted and able
individuals whom Putin has collected around him over the years and who were a
vital factor in Russia’s recovery. He also made Gazprom a ‘National Champion’:
one of a small group of companies which, while still public corporations, were
selected to work alongside government in rebuilding the Russian economy. In
fact, Gazprom has probably played as big a role in this as the government
itself, becoming the world’s largest producer of natural gas and building a
network of pipelines spanning thousands of miles in order to supply customers
in both Europe and Asia, thereby contributing immeasurably to Russia’s
industrial transformation.
It was this transformation, however, that almost certainly
set off alarm bells in the West. For in less than a decade, Russia had gone
from being an economic basket case to being an industrial powerhouse: an almost
miraculous metamorphosis which as was most dramatically demonstrated in 2010
when the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was completed and commenced delivering 150
million cubic metres of gas a day to Germany. To many people in Washington,
indeed, it must have seemed like their worst nightmare and was further
compounded the following year when work began on Nord Stream 2, which, had it
ever been put into operation, would have resulted in Russia supplying all of
Germany’s natural gas, rendering Europe’s largest industrial economy more or
less dependent on Russia for its energy.
It was this prospect, indeed, which almost certainly led the
neo-cons in Washington to decide that Russia had to be stopped, not just
because of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, but because they knew that if Russia were
allowed to go on expanding its exports to Europe – not just of natural gas, but of other commodities
as well, such as fertilisers, aluminium, uranium and oil – then eventually Europe
would become so dependent on Russia for raw materials that the Russians would
be able to demand payment in rubles, thereby undermining the dollar and posing
a threat to the USA itself.
5.
The Russian Threat
To those unfamiliar with this particular field of economics,
it may, of course, be hard to believe that,
by simply becoming the world’s largest supplier of commodities, which,
by 2014, it had indeed become, Russia could pose any significant threat to
America. After all, it’s population is only about a third of the size of that
of the United States and its economy is only about half that of Germany. The
threat, however, is real and stems from the fact that it is generally – although not always – to the advantage of an
exporting country to sell its goods in its own currency. This is because, in
order to purchase those goods, the customer first has to purchase units of the
currency, itself, thereby increasing demand for that currency and pushing up
its price on foreign exchanges. This, of course, has the effect of making the
exporting country’s goods more expensive and may therefore seem to be a
disadvantage. But while the volume of the exporting country’s sales may
consequently decline, the income derived from them may not. What’s more, any
disadvantage a higher priced currency may cause will be further offset by the
exporting country’s imports becoming cheaper. Thus it is generally to the
advantage of an exporting country to sell its goods in its own currency.
The problem for Russia, however, is that, up until very
recently – the
start of the war in Ukraine, in fact –
this option of selling its commodities in its own currency did not really exist.
In fact, it didn’t exist for any of the world’s major exporters of commodities,
which, since the early 1970’s, when the US made a deal with Saudi Arabia
guaranteeing that Saudi oil would always be sold in dollars, have been almost
universally traded in dollars. This is not only because, up until very
recently, the US dollar was seen as absolutely safe by third parties, but
because, in terms of world trade, there is also a considerable advantage to be
gained from trading commodities in the same currency regardless of their
country of origin.
This is because all commodities, by definition, are
fungible, which is to say that, once certified, each unit of the commodity is
the same as the next and has the same value. Because one doesn’t therefore have
to inspect each unit of a certified commodity individually, this then allows
commodities to be traded globally in the ‘abstract’, most commonly in the form
of ‘futures’, which often change hands multiple times on paper before an actual
shipment is physically delivered to an actual customer. While this greatly
increases the speed and ease with which international trade can be conducted,
however, it is only possible as long as all the trades are made in the same
currency so that margin costs are not incurred on currency exchanges.
For a country like Russia, however, this system has a lot of
disadvantages. For even though it is the largest exporter of commodities in the
world, because all of its trades are, or used to be made in dollars there was
hardly any demand for its currency, the value of which was therefore kept
artificially low. Indeed, one can see this in the dollar value of its GDP,
which, as already noted, is only half that of Germany’s. If one went to live in
Russia, however, one would find that one could live quite satisfactorily on an
income less than half of that which would be required to maintain the same
standard of living in Europe or America. For the value of the ruble when traded
on foreign exchanges is not the same as the value of the ruble when used to buy
food and clothing etc. inside Russia.
For those Russian corporations, such as Gazprom, which sell
commodities abroad, this, of course, is not a significant problem. Because they
are paid in dollars, they can then use those dollars to purchase anything they
may need from the rest of the world. Before the war, for instance, Gazprom used
to buy the gas turbines it uses to power its pipelines from Siemens, almost
certainly paying for them in either dollars or dollars converted into euros. It
didn’t therefore need to exchange low priced rubles for high priced dollars,
which would have made the Siemens turbines very much more expensive. This is
not the case, however, for Russian corporations which only sell their goods in
Russia but which have to buy components such as engine parts from abroad, making
Russian manufactured cars far more expensive than they need to be.
Not, of course, that this has been wholly disadvantageous to
Russia’s economy. For the high price of imports has led to the growth of
thousands of firms producing substitute components in Russia, thereby adding
significantly to Russia’s economic transformation over the last twenty-five
years. What’s more this process of home-produced substitution has been forced
into over-drive by the war in Ukraine and the imposition of western sanctions.
In early 2023, for instance, Gazprom put out a tender for the supply of gas
turbines made in Russia by Russian engineering firms, the intention being to
develop home produced substitutes for the Siemens turbines embargoed in 2022.
With Gazprom as their biggest customer, it wouldn’t surprise me, therefore, if
a Russian firm became the world’s biggest supplier of gas turbines by 2030.
Even so, the disadvantages with which Russia has had to deal
as a result of selling its commodities in dollars and therefore being left with
an under-valued currency still outweigh the advantages, not least because, up
until the beginning of the war, corporations like Gazprom had to convert at
least some of their dollar receipts into rubles in order to cover domestic
costs. This meant that Russian banks, especially the Bank of Russia, Russia’s
central bank, ended up with a surfeit of dollars which they could only really
invest in dollar denominated assets such as US Treasury bonds. Not only did
this mean, therefore, that Russia was effectively lending its balance of
payment surplus to the United States, but that the US Treasury could freeze or
seize this surplus any time it wanted, as of course it did in 2022 when the US
and EU froze $300 billion of Russian assets.
One of the main consequences of this, therefore, is that,
after the war, one can be fairly certain Russia will not go back to trading in
dollars. If other countries want to buy Russian commodities, as they certainly
will, they will have to do so in rubles or some other mutually nominated
currency such as the Chinese Yuan. More to the point, had Nord Stream 2 been
turned on when it was completed in September 2021, Russia would not only have
had good reason but sufficient leverage to request that Germany pay for its gas
in rubles: a request with which the Germans would have had little choice but to
comply.
Indeed, it was almost certainly for this reason that the
Biden administration forbade the Germans from making the second Nord Stream
pipeline operational. For they also knew that once the financial apparatus for
making international payments in rubles had been put in place, it would then
have almost certainly been used to pay for other Russian commodities, such as
fertiliser and wheat. In short, a massive crack would have appeared in the
‘petrodollar’ system, which would only have got wider as other countries sought
to follow Russia’s lead: something which the United Sates simply could not
allow.
Nor is the reason for this hard to discern. For just as the
selling of Russian commodities in dollars weakened the demand for rubles and
hence caused the ruble to be undervalued, so the whole world’s use of dollars
for international trade has kept the demand for the dollar – and hence it value – artificially high:
something which may seem like a good thing but which also has its down side.
For while it means that the price of imports into the USA has been kept
artificially low –
to the benefit of consumers –
US exports to other countries are that much more expensive. The result has not
just been a large and more or less permanent US trade deficit but an economic
handicap which has given US manufacturers an additional incentive to move their
factories to non-dollar domains. This in turn has meant that what was once the
beating heart of the mighty US economy, its manufacturing, has been steadily
eroded and hollowed out, leaving mostly only service industries in its place,
where pay is generally much lower and where workers often require subsidies in
the form of welfare payments in order to maintain a decent standard of living.
While this may therefore seem like an argument in favour of
ending the dollar’s reserve currency status and actually encouraging third
party countries to trade in their own currencies, the problem, as I have explained
in more detail elsewhere, is that this erosion of the US economy has already
gone on too long for any administration to even contemplate this option. For in
order to keep an increasingly impoverished electorate happy, successive US
governments have had to resort to more and more public spending, which, because
it cannot be funded solely out of taxation, has led to more and more borrowing,
with the result that the US now has the largest mountain of debt in history – nearly $37 trillion at
the time of writing –
the accumulation of which has only been possible because when countries with
trade surpluses in dollars opt to retain those dollars as part of their
strategic reserves, they do not actually keep them as dollars – on which no interest is
paid – but convert
them to dollar denominated assets such as US Treasury bonds. In fact, nearly a
third of all Treasury bonds are held by foreign central banks in this way.
The problem is that a large proportion of them are in one
year T-bills, which have to be refinanced every year, which means that, every
year, the US Treasury has to sell around $10 trillion worth of bonds, notes and
bills in order to have enough money, not only to redeem the bonds, notes and
bills falling due that year, but also to finance that year’s deficit. It can
only do this, however, if
a)
enough of the cash paid out to investors with
bonds falling due is reinvested in new bond issues and
b)
the gap between this reinvestment and the
Treasury’s overall borrowing requirement is filled by commodity exporters with
new dollar receipts choosing to invest these receipts in US Treasuries.
If, however, commodity exporters such as Russia or Saudi
Arabia, for instance, were to stop selling their commodities in dollars, not
only would they not have these new dollar receipts to fill this gap, but it is
very likely that their very act of breaking away from the petrodollar system
would deter investors with bonds falling due from reinvesting the proceeds of
their redemption in new bonds. The Treasury, as a result, would not therefore
be able to sell enough new bonds to redeem the old ones and would consequently
be forced to default.
Thus, in one of history’s greatest ironies, the ultimate
cause of America’s economic decline –
the use of the dollar in world trade – is the only thing which
is now preventing this whole house of cards from collapsing. Worse still, the
collapse of the petrodollar system would not just cause the collapse of those
parts of the international financial system not already trying to insulate
themselves from the dollar’s vulnerability, but would also very probably lead
to individual states within the US seceding from the union in order to disavow
the federal debt and print their own currencies. Thus it is that Russia really
does pose an existential threat to the USA. For if it were to permanently cease
trading in dollars, as it very probably will, and if other countries were to
follow Russia’s lead, which members of the BRICS group are already doing, there
is a strong possibility that the USA would not survive in its current form.
6.
The Failure of the Neo-cons’ Plan
At some point before the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest,
therefore, the decision was clearly made in Washington that Russia had to be
destroyed. I do not know this for certain, of course, because only an insider
would have this kind knowledge and no one inside the upper echelons of the US government
at that time is ever going to admit that this is what happened. But all the
evidence points in this direction.
The chosen method by which this destruction of Russia was to
be achieved is also fairly obvious. For given what has subsequently happened, the
plan clearly centred on provoking Russia into invading one of its neighbours,
Ukraine being the most obvious candidate due to the troubled history between
the two countries and the existence of extreme Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev who
could be installed in government and encouraged to force Russia’s hand by
introducing anti-Russian legislation, rapidly expanding Ukraine’s military and conducting
a genocidal campaign against Russians living inside Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
The plan was that this would make Russia an international
pariah upon which punitive sanctions could therefore be imposed, destroying the
Russian economy, while Ukraine’s massive NATO equipped and NATO trained army would
steadily erode Russia’s military capability, eventually leading to political
unrest inside Russia and regime change in the Kremlin.
The problem, of course, is that, over the last three and a
half years, this plan has failed miserably in all of these respects. Not only have
trade sanctions not destroyed the Russian economy, they have actually made it
stronger by accelerating import replacement with home produced goods. What’s
more, Russia’s allies, especially in BRICS, have continued to buy Russian
commodities in ever larger quantities, in many cases selling them on to customers
in Europe where they have been banned and where their loss has had serious
negative consequences for the European economy, especially the German economy,
which, without cheap Russian gas, has undergone deindustrialisation on a
massive scale.
In the West, of course, much is made of Russia’s high
interest rates and high inflation rate, which are seen as indicators of an
economy in distress. The high interest rates, however, have been imposed by Russia’s
central bank to prevent the economy from overheating, while the high inflation
rate, around 8%, is largely the result of labour shortages pushing up wages in
a rapidly expanding economy. In fact, both of these problems are problems the
West would love to have right now.
Nor have the financial sanctions imposed on Russia had any
significant effect. Barring Russia from using SWIFT, in fact – the American controlled
international settlement system –
has also significantly backfired. For all it has done is accelerate the
development of the BRICS alternative international settlement system, known as
the ‘BRICS Bridge’, which is superior to SWIFT in three key respects. Firstly,
it is not centrally controlled by any one country. Based on distributed
Blockchain technology, each BRICS member simply creates their own node which is
then connected to the network. Secondly, it is instantaneous. Whereas it can
take up to a week for SWIFT to process a payment, with the money passing
through multiple banks, making it very expensive, in the case of BRICS Bridge,
the user only has to press the SEND button and the money is instantly transferred
to its recipient, with the transaction redundantly recorded on a distributed
ledger. Finally, payments can be made in whatever currency the participants to
the transaction choose, another benefit of the system’s instantaneousness being
that the participant making the payment knows exactly what the exchange rate of
the currency is at the moment the payment is made.
With the system already undergoing trials, its rollout will thus
almost certainly further accelerate the de-dollarization of international trade
which BRICS members have already started: the very outcome which the war in
Ukraine was intended to prevent.
It is militarily, however, that western governments most
misjudged the impact of the war on Russia. For they not only seemed to have believed
that the Russian army was still the listless mass of ill-equipped and poorly trained
conscripts it had been at the end of the cold war, but they also rather
arrogantly assumed that a NATO trained and equipped army would be vastly
superior to any army Russia could mobilise, not realising that the war in
Ukraine has actually made NATO training and equipment more or less obsolete.
This is because both its training manual and its equipment were
designed to fight the kind of highly mobile war which all NATO armies have
employed as standard since the Germans introduced it as ‘blitzkrieg’ during the Second World War. The war in Ukraine,
however, has made this whole form of warfare impossible. This is due to a cluster
of technologies known collectively as ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance), which uses satellites, drones and other aircraft to pinpoint
targets on the ground and send their GPS coordinates directly to the targeting
systems of strike weapons such as drones, missiles and guided bombs, which,
depending on their range, can take out their targets within minutes if not
seconds of them being acquired. This means that anything moving around on the
battlefield, especially large objects such as tanks and armoured fighting
vehicles, both of which are much favoured by NATO, are very quickly destroyed. It
is for this reason, indeed, that Ukrainian battlefields look far more like the
battlefields of the First World War than anything we have seen since, with
networks of trenches and underground tunnels linking fortified bunkers.
What this also means is that this new form of warfare is far
more difficult for an army on the offensive – which is, by definition, moving forward – than it is for an army
sitting comfortably in pre-prepared defensive positions. In theory, therefore,
the Ukrainians, who were never going to attack Russia and had seven years to
prepare their defences against a Russian assault, should have had a distinct
advantage. The problem was that the Russians also had seven years to prepare
for war, which gave them plenty of time to develop the weapons and tactics
needed to overcome the problems posed by this asymmetrical battlefield. For the
one thing they were never going to do, of course, was send waves of infantry
against heavily fortified positions –
as the western media often depicts them as doing – not least because President Putin was only too well
aware of the effect that large numbers of causalities can have on political
opinion at home. As a KGB officer, in fact, he’d seen what happened to the
Soviet Union when Russian soldiers started coming home from Afghanistan in body
bags and had no intention of making the same mistake.
Not
that the answer his generals came up with was particularly original. For based
on the evidence of the last three and a half years, their solution can be
summed up in one word: ‘artillery’, and lots of it, the principle being that,
no matter how thick the reinforced concrete carapace of a bunker may be, if you
hit it with enough high explosives, eventually it will crack. The Russians’
main tactic throughout the war, therefore, has been to stand off the Ukrainian
defences and bombard them for weeks if necessary before sending in the
infantry. The real challenge they faced, as a consequence, was to build up
enough industrial capacity to manufacture enough artillery pieces and
ammunition to sustain such protracted bombardments, which, in the seven years
leading up to the war, the Russian clearly did.
I say
this because during some phases of the war, the Russian army has fired up to
60,000 artillery rounds a day and has at no point showed any sign of running
out of ammunition. This contrasts markedly with the Ukrainians, who, firing
less than 10,000 rounds a day, completely exhausted NATO’s stockpile of 155mm
shells before the end of 2023, since when they have had to make do with NATO’s
current production of around 30,000 shells a month.
Not, of
course, that this solved all of the Russians’ tactical problems. For being on
the attack, their artillery was still out in the open and vulnerable to
ISR-guided strike weapons, especially drones. To counter this, therefore, they
developed a new generation of mobile air defence systems, which not only
comprised radar and conventional antiaircraft batteries, but electronic jamming
systems which are primarily designed to block GPS signals, with the result that
incoming drones and missiles are effectively flying blind.
The
Russians also had another crucial advantage. For while the Ukrainians were
being supplied with a variety of mostly rather old NATO weapons, designed to
fight a more mobile war, throughout the conflict the Russians have continued to
develop new weapons designed to fight the war they have actually been fighting.
This has been particularly true with respect to the weapons needed to demolish
heavily fortified defensive positions, for which a new generation of glide
bombs has been developed. These are bombs, not missiles, in that they do not
have engines and therefore have to be dropped from aircraft. They do, however,
have adjustable wings and fins and targeting systems under satellite control.
They can also be dropped from over 40km away from their target, outside the
range of most of the air defence systems available to Ukrainian troops on the
front line.
With
all these tactical and industrial advantages, in fact, one has to wonder why
the war has lasted as long as it has. There are, however, two main reasons for
this. The first is that the Russians only began their ‘special military
operation’ with 190,000 regular troops, less than half the number the
Ukrainians could put in the field and clearly not enough to conquer and hold
the whole of Ukraine, let alone the whole of Europe, strongly suggesting,
therefore, that President Putin’s principal objective was not to conquer
anything, but merely to get the Ukrainians and their western allies back to the
negotiating table. And, to some extent, he succeeded. Within two weeks
of the Russians crossing the border, in fact, the Ukrainians agreed to hold
peace talks, first in Minsk and then in Istanbul, where it took just three more
weeks to draft an agreement which both sides were prepared to initial. It was
only when Boris Johnson persuaded President Zelensky not to sign the agreement,
therefore, that the Russians realised that their primary objective had failed
and that they were in what was likely to be a protracted war, giving them two
further problems.
The first was that they needed to mobilise and train a much
larger army, which meant that, for the rest of 2022 and most of 2023, the war
was more or less put on hold. To manage this new situation, General Sergei
Surovikin, previously commander of Russia’s forces in Syria, was appointed as overall
Commander in Chief in the Ukrainian theatre of operations with clear
instructions to adopt a largely defensive posture. This he did by withdrawing
troops from west bank of the Dnieper where they could easily be cut off, and from
Kharkiv, where they were just too thin on the ground to hold the line. He also
set up new defensive lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, against which the
Ukrainians fruitlessly threw away the lives 80,000 men during their summer
offensive of 2023.
All this defensive activity, however, further reinforced the
view of western governments and their attendant media that the Russians were
militarily weak and encouraged NATO planners to urge their Ukrainian
counterparts to mount even more offensive operations, losing even more men. What
was really important about this brief hiatus in Russian operations, however, is
the fact that while they were building up their strength, they were also redefining,
not their objectives as such, but their strategy for achieving these objectives.
For if they could not get the Ukrainians to meet their demands through
negotiation, they now realised that they had to do it on the battlefield, not
by taking more territory, which would inevitably lead to more losses, but by so
degrading the Ukrainian army’s military capability that it would be forced to
seek terms.
What this meant, therefore, was that the war now became even
more static, which the West interpreted once again as a sign of Russia’s
military weakness. For even in areas where they were still on the offensive,
such as in the Donbas, they approached every Ukrainian defensive position with
the utmost care so as to minimise their own losses. Not only did they spend
weeks bombarding their targets but they further perfected the kind of siege
tactics they had used so effectively at Mariupol, slowly and methodically
encircling Ukrainian positions so as to cut off or greatly restrict resupply
and reinforcement.
Almost incredibly, this Russian strategy of slow attrition – of slowly wearing away
at the Ukrainians without sustaining unnecessary casualties themselves – was made even more
effective by the fact that, for political reasons, the Ukrainians continually
made the mistake of not withdrawing their forces from positions that were
becoming untenable, but continued instead to feed men and supplies into what
the Russians referred to as ‘cauldrons’, where they were systematically
destroyed.
A perfect example of this is Bakhmut, which the Russians
besieged for around nine months and into which the Ukrainians invested 36 whole
brigades, each of around 4,000 men, most of which suffered up to 80% casualties
before being withdrawn. The result was that,
by the time the city fell in May 2023, the Ukrainians had lost around 120,000
men to the Russians’ 30,000.
Even this level Russian casualties, however, was
unacceptable to President Putin who consequently dismissed Yevgeny Prigozhin, a
former friend and colleague from St. Petersburg whom he had made head of the Wagner Group, but who clearly
didn’t understand that the siege of Bakhmut was not intended to capture the
city but to destroy as much of the Ukrainian army as possible and that Putin, himself,
would not have cared if the siege had gone on for another nine months as long
as the Ukrainians kept pouring men and equipment into it and as few Russians as
possible were killed.
Having witnessed Prigozhin’s fate and the ruthless way in
which Putin dealt with someone who was supposed to be his friend, it goes
without saying that no Russian general ever made that mistake again, with the
result that, even with the 30,000 casualties sustained in Bakhmut, over the
last three and a half years, the ratio of Ukrainian losses to Russian losses
has remained at around 7:1. That is to say that there have been seven Ukrainian
casualties to every Russian casualty, with an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million
Ukrainians having been killed.
With so many Ukrainian young men fleeing abroad to avoid
conscription, this has therefore led to what is now an acute manpower shortage
which will almost certainly precipitate a catastrophic collapse in the Ukrainian
army sometime this year. For there will come a point when it will simply not
have enough men to fill the gaps in its lines.
7.
Ending the War
Most wars are won and lost long before they come to an end.
It could be argued, for instance, that
the Germans lost the second world war at Stalingrad, more than two years before
they finally surrendered. Equally, it could be argued that Ukraine lost this
current war the moment President Zelenskyy declined to sign the Istanbul peace
agreement, thereby forcing President Putin to confront the fact the Russia was
now in a full-blown war and that he therefore had to place the country on a
full war footing. As the Russians prepare to launch their summer offensive, therefore,
which may well be the final straw that breaks the Ukrainian army’s back, the
smart thing for the Ukrainians and their western allies to do right now would be
not to wait for the axe to fall but to accept that the war is already lost and
negotiate the best deal they can get.
The problem, of course, is that, from a Russian point of
view, the main two terms of any deal they would be willing to accept are exactly
what they have always been: that Ukraine remain neutral and that the rights of
Russian-speakers living within Ukraine’s 1991 borders be protected, which today,
of course, after three and a half years of war, actually means that those
provinces with a majority Russian-speaking population would have to be ceded to
the Russian Federation: terms which the collective West simply cannot accept,
not because they are unreasonable, but precisely because they haven’t changed
since 2014 and that to accede to them would therefore be to reward, not just Russian
aggression, but Russian intransigence.
Besides which, the Banderite Ukrainian nationalists who
really run Ukraine, for whom President Zelenskyy is merely the frontman, would
never let him sign any peace treaty which excluded the possibility of Ukraine
joining NATO or ceded any Ukrainian territory to Russia. Nor is there much
chance of President Trump strong-arming Zelenskyy into doing something that
would probably get him killed, especially given the fact that NATO is itself
divided on this matter, with Britain and the EU strongly supporting the
Ukrainians’ firm stance, albeit largely for reasons of their own. These
include:
1.
The fact that they have maintained all along
that the war in Ukraine is not just a local dispute between Ukraine and Russia,
but an existential conflict between the forces of evil and the Liberal World Order
and that to give into this evil would mean the end of civilization, making
anything less than total victory over the Devil unacceptable and somewhat
difficult to now spin.
2.
The fact that casting Russia as the enemy and a
threat to all of Europe has, to some extent, served to distract voters from the
unrestricted immigration, soaring energy prices and economic decline which the failed
policies of Europe’s elite have brought upon them, such that to remove this
distraction would be to expose Europe’s leaders to a growing populist backlash.
3.
The fact that the war in Ukraine has allowed
national leaders such Sir Kier Starmer and Emmanuel Macron to concentrate their
energies on foreign affairs –
and hence appear to be world statesmen –
rather than be forced to deal with problems at home, at which they have consistently
revealed themselves to be incompetent.
4.
The fact that having a powerful and threatening
enemy like Russia has enabled both the EU and the European elements within NATO
to expand their power as the coordinators Europe’s defence, allowing them to
take on the almost federal role to which these institutions aspire and which,
one day, they will almost certainly assume.
This, therefore, just leaves the United States or, more
precisely, Donald Trump as the sole champion of peace. For he knows that the
war is lost and that the neo-con strategy of destroying Russia in order to
protect the petrodollar has therefore failed. He also knows that the process of
de-dollarization by the members of BRICS cannot be stopped. It can, however, be
managed. After all, BRICS members do not want the value of the dollar
denominated assets they currently hold to suddenly crash. It would be much better
for all concerned, therefore, if de-dollarization happened slowly, in a
controlled way, over say ten to fifteen years. Trump knows, however, that if he
is going to get Russia and China to even informally agree to this, he has to
develop a rapprochement with both of them, which he can’t do while the
Ukrainian war continues.
His problem, however, is not just that neither the Ukrainians
nor the Europeans want the war to end but that there are neo-cons in his own
administration who are of the view that the neo-con project can still succeed,
if not by war, then by negotiation, as long as the negotiations result in some
sort of a defeat or climb-down by the Russians. Worse still, they seem to think
that any peace deal must involve concessions on both sides and do not realise
that, for the Russians, their two principal conditions are non-negotiable. Thus
it is that even the Russians and Americans are talking largely at
cross-purposes, with the result that, at the time of writing, the talks have
actually broken down with the Russians committed to a military solution to the
conflict.
This, however, raises two questions. The first is how much
of Ukraine the Russians will take once the Ukrainian army has collapsed. Will
they stop at the Dnieper River or will they take it all? For what it’s worth, my
guess is that they will take it all, not to hold indefinitely, but to give them
control while they remove the current government, appoint an interim
administration and hold new elections from which Banderites will, of course, be
excluded. This will then result in a legitimate but not wholly unfriendly
government with which they will be able to sign a peace treaty, in which the
new borders of Ukraine will be defined, its constitutional commitment to
neutrality reaffirmed and the maximum size of its army specified.
The other question, however, is whether, once they see this
happening, the West will feel the need to intervene, not just diplomatically,
which they will almost certainly do, if only to provide an ‘honest broker’
during treaty negotiation –
to which the Russians may well agree –
but militarily, which would be very dangerous, not just for whatever ‘coalition
of the willing’ agrees to provide troops, but for the whole world, in that it could
lead to a geographic expansion of the conflict and raise the spectre of a world
war.
One would like to think, of course, that our leaders would not
be that stupid. Not only are Starmer and Macron delusional enough to think that
they might achieve something by such an intervention, however, but if they sat
back and did nothing, not only would they be seen, personally, as ineffectual
and impotent, thereby putting their political careers in even more jeopardy
than they are already in, but the institutions of which they are a part and
which aspire to run a federal Europe would also be seen as ineffectual and
impotent and might not therefore survive the populist uprising which could
reshape the whole of Europe in the wake of this entire fiasco. If for no other
reason, therefore, it is quite possible that a small cabal of our ruling elite
might do something extremely stupid.
