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.
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