From Putin’s Bluff to Putin’s Invasion
The following is the passage in the post that triggered a discussion and debate that resulted in more than 1000 views and 144 comments:
“Putin knows that Russia cannot survive a war with the United States with the backing and support of NATO.
The ultimatum should read something like this:
Invade Ukraine and we will wipe Russia off the face of the earth. And then, come after YOU!”
Putin’s basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false
In reality, these countries have longstanding ethnonational identities distinct from Russia. But Putin does not accept this, treating the former Soviet republics — and, above all, Ukraine — as parts of Russia stolen from the motherland as a result of communist machinations.
He believes that Ukraine is an illegitimate country that exists on land that’s historically and rightfully Russian: “Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood,” as he puts it.
Simply reducing Russia’s motivation to one clear grievance — fear that Ukraine may join NATO or a simple aggressive desire to seize Ukrainian land — is a mistake.
Putin cannot see post-Soviet Ukraine as a real country; in his view, it has no real history nor national tradition to unite it. Instead, he sees it as a playground for oligarchs who deploy anti-Russian demagoguery as a smokescreen for their corruption. “
It is simply incorrect to say that Ukraine has no independent national identity separate from Russia. Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, was built centuries before Moscow. At the end of World War I, Ukraine declared independence from Russia; it was put back under Soviet rule by force.
It is not merely manipulation by elites that led people in former Soviet republics, from Estonia to Ukraine to Georgia, to attempt to exit Moscow’s orbit in the 1990s — it was real anger with Soviet repression and colonialism. And it’s Putin’s behavior, not some kind of elite Ukrainian manipulation, that has driven up support among Ukrainians for a tighter link with the West.
Stephen Sestanovich, a former US diplomat who worked on Russia issues, argued that “Putin’s focus is less the European security order and more a kind of obsession with Ukraine as an illegitimate state that makes it almost impossible to imagine serious negotiations.” He agreed that Putin may not escalate much further in Ukraine, but that’s because the West had called his bluff( There’s that word again.) by refusing to grant any major security concessions
Kadri Liik, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, claimed that Putin’s revanchist nationalism was at odds with the Russian public.
“A real large-scale war for Ukraine would be hugely unpopular,” she said. It “would be the beginning of the end of Putin’s rule, and I think he might know that.”
There is no straight line from Putin’s bluff to Putin’s invasion or to any one particular course of action.
The basic difficulty in analyzing the all-out invasion of Ukraine — that Putin’s bluff and his preparation for an invasion looked extremely similar — remains in place even after his deployment of invasion forces to Ukraine has begun in earnest.
The reconciliation of Putin’s articulation of the Russian history of victimhood and grievance and his autocratic leadership of the world’s foremost kleptocracy can occur only in the greedy thuggishness and sick delusional criminal mind of an individual like Vladimir Putin.
03/02/2022 @ 11:05 am
I don’t think Putin can survive this. I could be wrong.
To understand where this came from, the best thing I’ve seen on it is this: https://youtu.be/8X7Ng75e5gQ. This talk is from well before the current crisis.
It’s a journalist by the name of Vladimir Pozner giving a talk at Yale. It’s a long video but the first 40 minutes are his talk, the rest is conversation with the audience which I quite frankly haven’t had time to watch. Pozner is a journalist who has citizenship in France, Russia, and the US, and has worked as a journalist in the US and Russia. Apparently in Russia he’s prominent but having been raised in the US he understands our perspective. He gives the history of post Cold War American/Russian relations in more detail than I’ve ever heard and it isn’t pretty, with all of what isn’t pretty coming from our side. I’ve said for a while that we should have offered Russia NATO membership. I had no idea that about 15 years ago Putin requested NATO membership. That’s a tiny piece of the puzzle. This gives the best explanation I’ve seen of where Putin’s attitudes toward the United States come from and also why the Russians have supported Putin previous to now. Putin views the US as someone not to be trusted and, given his experience, he’s right. Russia is rejected for NATO membership but Ukraine is considered for it. If you’re Russia and NATO was founded basically to contain you, what does this make you think?
The problem is that there’s something missing from all these calculations and what’s missing is what’s blowing up in Putin’s face. What Putin didn’t really consider was Ukrainians. Sure, he had success in Crimea, but the reason he had success in Crimea is because Crimea is primarily inhabited by Russians. And when he tried to break off a couple of regions, they were also heavily inhabited by Russians. Certainly in Crimea’s case the Russian public was behind him but largely because Crimea was from a population standpoint Russian. But now he’s not dealing with Russians in Ukraine, he’s dealing with Ukrainians. He may think that Ukrainians are a flavor of Russian but they do not. They just view him as a foreign invader.
What’s happening is a little like what would have happened if Trump invaded Canada. On one hand, Americans know perfectly well that Canadians aren’t Americans; on the other hand, Canadians are so much like us that an attack on them would look (and be) completely unreasonable, ridiculous, immoral, like What The Hell Are You Doing? They’re our neighbors, for God’s sake. Though Russian and Ukrainian are different languages they’re close enough to be mutually intelligible.
And that’s how the rest of the world is reacting, at least most of it, with the exception of a few Russian allies like Syria, Venezuela, and Belarus.
It’s not that Putin didn’t read his people when it came to NATO, it’s that it never occurred to him that their feelings about NATO were more minor than their feelings about Ukrainians. Nor did it occur to him that Ukrainians in general do not want to be a part of Russia.
Oops
03/02/2022 @ 5:06 pm
Dictator Putin relishes his high wire.
His monothematic delusional besmirched halo glows along with our timeless perpetuities of transnational semantics — our humanistic survival reflex to rationalize his insane/arcane terroristic labyrinthine: his Russian Carnage Complex (RCC) invasion. His wanton merciless ceaseless hurting of innocents.
Hence, the horrific whole truth PUTIN’S BLITZ.
jpHart
Grandad’s Bluff
LaCrosse,
America