Russia Today — “The saddest geopolitical fact of my adult life”

On the first day of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that I hoped Russian dictator Vladimir Putin “rots in hell” and urged the Ukrainians to send lots of Russian boys “home in body bags.” The Ukrainian armed forces have done that and more in the past 56 days – killing some 7,000 to 14,000 Russian soldiers, and dealing Putin a serious black-eye both militarily and diplomatically. Six days ago the Ukrainians sank the heavy guided-missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship for the Russian Back Sea Fleet. It was the most dramatic naval loss anywhere in the world in over 40 years.

I say to the Ukrainians: Good job boys! Keep it up!

At the beginning of this war all the supposed experts claimed that the Ukrainians would be overwhelmed and defeated by superior Russian forces after a brief fight. Inspired Ukrainian forces fighting for the independence of their sovereign nation, experts assured us, would be eventually reduced and defeated by superior Russian numbers and firepower.

That did not happen.

The Ukrainians fought the Russians to a standstill. In many places, they defeated them. 

Or at least the Ukrainians prevented the Russians from taking Kiev and other major cities. And they killed Russians soldiers and destroyed Russian armor like crazy.

I predicted two things to my students at the outset of the war: There would be intense combat raging up and down Ukraine with huge numbers of casualties and fatalities, and millions of civilian refugees would stream out of the nation seeking to escape the fighting. Both have been proven true in spades.

Vladimir Putin has seen anger in Europe and the United States with regards to his “special military operation” and essentially said in response: “Fuck you.” Putin would do what he thought necessary for the national security of Russia and nothing would get in his way. The West has said, “Not so fast.” So here we are. Finland and Sweden are now fast-tracking membership in NATO. That is hard to imagine. Sweden!

Now the Russians have regrouped and re-focused their forces in the east of Ukraine for a major new offensive in the Luhansk and Donbas regions. More fighting, more dying. I so much want the Russians to get another bloody nose. But I just dread reading the news about the fighting in Ukraine. And the worst thing? I see no end to it. Eight weeks and counting into the war and it seems to be turning into a long-term slog-fest for both sides. Putin sees Ukraine as a national security priority and will seemingly do anything to reduce it and keep it within the sphere of Russian national interest. Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the nation-state of Ukraine can hardly afford to give Putin anything with their independence and freedom on the line. This seems to suggest that the fighting (and dying) might go on indefinitely. It does not appear that this war will end anytime soon.

Sigh.

The climactic battle of this war in the east of Ukraine seems to be starting as I write this. Both sides have massed their forces and here it goes. This should be some of the most intense combat since WWII. What will be the end result? What will be the status of an independent sovereign Ukraine? Will the USA and NATO be able to stay out of this war, while still helping Ukraine to resist Russian encroachment? There is a lot of stake. President Biden has rushed hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, and good for him. Our European allies are doing what they can. I see my neighbors in Ventura, California flying Ukrainian flags from their front porches. We shall see. It is nerve racking.

The Ukrainians are battle-hardened and fighting for home: my money is on them. That is what my heart says. My head, on the other hand, tells me this fight will go on indefinitely with nobody able to land a true knockout blow. Even if the Ukrainians enjoy further success on the battlefield, the Russians are not going away; the result will be a stalemate. The solution to this fight will be a political one, not military. But neither side can back down. There is so much at stake.

History is watching. Time for the Ukrainian people – and its armed forces, in particular – to rise to the occasion. Earn your freedom! Smaller but inspired democracies have a long history of success against larger tyrannies, from the Greeks pushing back the Persians at Salamis and Plataea onwards. Do the same. Stick it to them!

It has been interesting to watch the reaction of countries around the world to naked Russian aggression towards neighboring Ukraine. Many of the strongmen in Africa – dictators themselves – have strong connections with Russia and buy weapons from them – and the Soviet Union before that. They are standing with Vladimir Putin and Russia. Many other illiberal governments in the Middle East are siding with Putin for similar reasons. If the democracies of Western Europe and Asia are lining up against Russia, others are not. Let us take note. It is a “with us” or “against us” moment.

It reminds me of September 11th, 2001. When news of the terror attacks and destruction of office towers in Manhattan made its way around the world, spontaneous eruptions of popular celebration broke out in the streets of the Palestinian territories until local police grew embarrassed/concerned and so dispersed the celebrants. The South African government, run by the African National Congress, first expressed support for the United States after 9/11 against terrorism, until they remembered they were “non-aligned” African revolutionaries at odds with the imperialist West and took a more neutral stance. I never forgot. They are not really our friends. Let it be noted.

It really is a time for choosing. Watch who is choosing and why.

And yet. 

I read this morning that the Wimbledon tennis tournament in Great Britain will ban Russian and Belorussian tennis players from competing because of the Russo-Ukrainian War. As if individual Russian tennis stars like Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev were responsible for Vladimir Putin and his murderous policies: this is short-sighted and mean-spirited. A few questions: How much influence do Russian or Belorussian tennis players have on their governments back home? Does Putin give a rat’s ass about Wimbledon or tennis? This Twitter posting is spot-on:

I also saw the Boston Marathon recently did the same with Russian distance runners: this is counterproductive. I am in favor of shipping hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Ukrainians to help them save themselves. Freeze Russian governmental assets and refuse to buy Russian oil or natural gas: that is fine. But don’t take your ire out on individual Russians traveling overseas who have no ability to control Putin or his tyrannical regime. This is anger misplaced.

Vladimir Putin claims that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” For me it seemed like exactly the opposite at the time. The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989, and the subsequent development of democracy in all those countries, including Russia – this seemed like the arrival of heaven to a troubled earth. But after a decade of Boris Yeltsin and a flailing attempt at democracy, Putin arrived and any claim to an open society in Russia began to die.

And now here we are. Russia today. That is what is sad. Not the fall of the Soviet Union. It seems Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has become just another autocratic state, not unlike those in the distant and recent Russian past. Putin is the new unofficial Czar/Commissar. The reality of the post-Soviet Russian society is a repressive, kleptocratic government at home, a lack of independent media or free elections, and aggressive wars against its neighbors. The Russian people will pay the price, as they are doing. But everyone else, especially the Ukrainians, are also paying.

I have been a confirmed Russophile going back decades. Turgenev, Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Prokofiev, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn – I have drunk deep from those wells and become drunk with pleasure. 

So the reign of Vladimir Putin and Russian politics over the past two decades are particularly painful and disappointing for me. Not that I wanted perfection from the Russian government – or from any government, for that matter, as we’re talking about the messy business of politics – but I hoped for much better than this.

But if the current Russian regime is murderous, it does not follow that all of Russia – its music, literature, history – is murderous. “Mother Russia” will ultimately rise above and beyond Vladimir Putin. In the end, their dictator is a problem for the Russian people to solve. But the rest of the world also has an abiding interest, not to mention Russia’s neighbors.

Russia is such a paradox, and always has been: the brilliant theoretical physicists and Bolshoi ballerinas and Cliburn award-winning pianists and chess grandmasters of Russian high-culture in Moscow and St. Petersburg – and the semi-literate conscripts in the Russian army from the countryside who have hardly ever even seen a power outlet who brutalize helpless Ukrainian (or Chechen or Georgian or Syrian) civilians. And the Russian organized crime networks, and their allies in the government, who are too often the same thing. As the late John McCain observed, “Russia is a mafia operating a gas station masquerading as a legitimate government.”

It did not have to be this way. 

But it is this way.

The failure of Russia to become anything like a normal pluralistic democratic state after 1991 is the saddest geopolitical fact of my adult life.

And here we are with Vladimir Putin and the Russo-Ukrainian War, which was started in 2014 but vastly accelerated in 2022.

How will this war end?

How will Putin’s time in power end?

I don’t know.

But after spending almost a lifetime studying Russian history this is my suspicion: it will not end well.

For now I say this to the Ukrainians: keep killing up those Russians! 

This is the only way Ukraine can protect its freedom from Russian subjugation: make the Russians experience reversals on the battlefield. As much as you can, turn Ukraine into a graveyard for Russian soldiers and a military disaster for Russia.

Because military disasters abroad have a way of boomeranging back home in Russian politics throughout history.

We shall see.

---