I read the following powerful story by Anne Applebaum with reference to the impending crisis of possible war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s “Weimar Russia” is on the move, and nobody seems ready to stand up to it. Applebaum claims while there are no craven Neville Chamberlains in this story, there are also no stalwart Winston Churchills — “and the Ukrainians will fight alone.” My first response is: I hope there will be no need for a Winston Churchill. Is that where we are in European security in February 2022?
But while watching the fiery speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin last night, I wonder. I saw a paranoid Putin ramble on emotionally about the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian state, and it seems war is indeed just around the corner, all Putin’s misinformation to the contrary. I wonder. And I worry.
Look at this guy —
— and I think the following thought: I can’t be the only history teacher having déjà vu moments listening to Vladimir Putin rant about the great injustices done to the fatherland by its historical enemies, and the need to invade neighboring countries to rectify them?
It is perilous to compare today to yesterday. They are not the same. But sometimes they can be pretty close. So I think about Ukraine in 2022 and the Sudetenland in 1938.
I have watched for the last three months as Russian forces have surrounded Ukraine. Putin has continuously talked out of both sides of his mouth about the issue. But this much seems clear: he wants NATO OUT of Eastern Europe and Ukraine IN as a part of Russia. He is willing to go to war to do it. Or at least it looks that way.
From his speech last night it would appear Russia will soon invade Ukraine. Putin declared the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics to be part of Russia and sent in Russian soldiers as “peacekeepers,” and one wonders how long until he reaches for the rest of Ukraine. The people there will resist and tens of thousands will die. A Russian invasion of Ukraine would be the worst outbreak of violence and aggression in Europe since the infamous mass bloodbaths of the 20th century: WWI and WWII.
Can the United States and NATO stop it? If Putin seeks to redraw the political and security map of eastern Europe, can the Atlantic Alliance prevent it?
Time to firm up NATO’s eastern flank. Time to put some heavy American and UK armored divisions in Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. As five American F-15 fighter craft flew to her country to reinforce NATO forces there recently, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas claimed, “It is quite a deterrent if you plan an attack on a country where US troops are based. If a big bully is threatening you, it is good to have big friends.”
Fuckin’ A right.
Putin has demanded a return of NATO countries to pre-1996 borders.
Not going to happen.
I say let’s put a new Iron Curtain through the eastern border of NATO, and tell the Russians this is the line in the sand that they cross and get war with the United States, just like in the Warsaw Pact days. We have done this before. The foreign policy of the 1980’s, to some extent, would seem to be back.
And let’s see how long Vladimir Putin can live like this. As the Czech leader Tomas Garrigue Masaryk claimed, “Dictators always look good until the last minutes.” Eastern European history, and especially Russian history, is full of dictators and assassinations and revolutions. That is mostly why Putin wants to stamp out any burgeoning instances of democracy in his midst, like that in Ukraine, for fear of contamination. Liberal democracy and social change sets a bad example for the Russian nation, the Russian people, and especially Vladimir Putin. An independent democratic Ukraine is an existential, not a military, threat to authoritarian Russia; Putin sees it as a knife pointed at the heart of his kleptocratic regime and dividing “Greater Rusland,” and maybe he is right. Putin remembers none of his predecessors in the Kremlin left power in a favorable light; dictators like Putin don’t have a retirement plan. It is “ride or die” for Vladimir, imbued as he is with nostalgia for Soviet-era power. He appears to be rolling the dice in a big gamble here to re-draw the security maps of eastern Europe. He is quite consciously making History, and that is exactly his intention; Putin wants to leave his mark. Russia, as he sees it, deserves this. But wars once started have a way of producing results the opposite of what were intended — just ask the Romanovs after 1914.
Well, for now we can’t do all that much for Ukraine or against Russia. But it should be much easier to contain contemporary Russian expansion moving forward than it was against its Bolshevik antecedent.
This much should be pretty clear: everyone can see exactly what is at play right now, and how incredibly full of shit Vladimir Putin is.
Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė put it prettily when she made the following claim —
Putin variously claimed that an independent Ukraine would serve as a springboard for NATO attacks on Russia, will try to develop its own nuclear weapons, was engaged in “genocide” on ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine, was full of neo-fascists, etc etc. It is paranoia in search of a source — the need to reduce an independent Ukraine looking for a reason. Maybe Putin will blame Ukraine for the coronavirus next, and insist he must invade that country in the name of epidemiology.
Time for President Biden and anyone else interested in the liberal democratic experiment to stand up. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The European Union. The Atlantic Alliance. Time to put some steel into your spine and draw a line on the ground: Thou shalt not pass.
Putin evidently has concluded that the Western democracies are irredeemably irresolute and meretricious — that we are divided and weak.
Hitler said much the same in the 1930s, for many of the same reasons. We saw how that worked out for him.
The next few years we shall see how it works out for Vladimir Putin. His brute-force invasions over the past 20 years (Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas, Ukraine) hearken back to the bad ol’ days of mid-20th century great-power gangster-regime geopolitics: you get in my way, you get hurt. It would appear Putin wants to re-assemble some shell of the former Soviet Union. He will not be appeased; he knows what he wants. Putin does not have the slightest intention of not invading Ukraine. Anyone who thinks otherwise misreads the man. It is the same sinister cynical psychology of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 (or Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968). Yes, Hitler and Stalin… and now Putin (with nuclear weapons) in the same general geography as before. Maybe the times do call for another FDR and Winston Churchill?
But we have Joe Biden and Boris Johnson. We shall see.
President Biden seems to have done a fine job so far in walking a fine line with Vladimir Putin. I approve.
But this is all delicate, deadly work.
At least that rank amateur Donald Trump is not in charge.
History is watching the Ukrainians and the Russians. Ukraine is not a part of NATO, and so they will fight the Russians alone. They will lose, and the other nations in the region will take careful note. Tens of thousands will die. As Applebaum concluded in her essay yesterday:
“In the meantime, despite everything that was said, everything that was promised, and everything that was discussed, Ukraine will fight alone. At a dinner last night, a Ukrainian woman whom I first met in 2014—she began her career as an anti-corruption activist—stood up and told the room that not only was she returning to Kyiv, so was her husband, a British citizen. He had recently flown to London on family business, but if there was going to be a war, he wanted to be in Ukraine. The other Ukrainians in the room nodded: They were all scrambling to find flights back too. The rest of us—American, Polish, Danish, British—said nothing. Because we knew that we would not be joining them.”
Anne Applebaum “There Are No Chamberlains in This Story”
Balls. The Ukrainians have balls.
And looks like many of them might die soon.
Russians, too.
I hope I am wrong.
But I don’t think I am.
We shall see.
It is worrisome.
Time to let the military and diplomatic professionals in the American government do their jobs.
And we will watch as History — in the tragic 20th century meaning of that word — returns to central and eastern Europe.
It would appear the post-1989 European interlude of peace is at an end.
Only time will tell.
