President Putin’s world game

Before the invasion, Putin suggested a Yalta type of summit involving the world’s powers to formulate a new order

In its issue of January 10, 2022, The New York Times published a long and powerful editorial titled ‘Russia invites calamity if it invades Ukraine’. The newspaper reminded its readers that the “border between Russia and the West contested for centuries, and the amount of blood spilled across the lands of that frontier is beyond measure. There is no good reason to spill more of it in 2022.” The Russian president “appears to have decided that it was time to reassert his claim to a leading role in world affairs, with the United States in political chaos and in no mood for foreign entanglements after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Europeans likewise too divided and too dependent on Russian energy to muster a serious response.”

Before ordering the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Putin suggested a Yalta type of summit involving the world’s large powers to formulate a new security order. The United States and Europe would not agree to any agreement that would bar a sovereign state from membership in the alliance. Finland, for instance, declared that the option of joining NATO is key to its security, given its long border with Russia. Given that Moscow has a problem with the very existence of a sovereign Ukrainian democracy with the freedom to chart its own course in the world, still it appeared there was room for negotiations. One constant Russian demand was that Ukraine meet its obligations under the six-year-old Minsk agreement — a deal brokered by France and Germany that saw a degree of regional autonomy for rebel-held areas in eastern Ukraine in return for an end to Russia’s proxy war there. But Putin kept talking about “historical unity” between Ukraine and Russia.

What form will a battle for Ukraine take? One answer came from David Ignatius in his column in The Washington Post published on January 26, 2022. It was based on the conversations he had with defence officials in Washington and Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. They foresee “a long, bitter battle — probably broken by pro-Russian coup attempts, intermittent ceasefires and desperate peace plans — that will leave a volcano of violence festering in the middle of Europe. As during the Cold War, the path of eventual victory for the West will be unity, patience and refusal to compromise on matters of principle.” However, “President Biden and other allies have said they won’t use U.S. troops directly to support a country that isn’t a member of NATO. The world will have Ukraine’s back, but not its frontlines.”

Ignatius saw a lack of resolve on the part of Ukraine’s officials to take steps not to be rolled over in a cyber war if that turns out to the preferred weapon by Moscow. In a long a costly war in terms of body bags, the reaction of the Russian people will also count. “Unless the West bends, this war will certainly end with a defeat for Putin, whose own advisers must doubt the wisdom of the course he has chosen. If polls are any indication, Russians will rebel at the cost of this ‘war of choice’, begun by a leader who became mesmerized by his dream of his forced remarriage with Ukraine and recreation at gunpoint of the essential components of the old Soviet Union.” Younger Russians are connected to the modern world through cellphones, social media and easy travel to the West. Asked Ignatius: “Given the potential costs of this conflict, why has Putin risked war to pull Ukraine back within Moscow’s control? One answer may lie in his conviction, expressed in a long manifesto published last summer, that Ukrainians and Russians are indissoluble people. It is believed that the manifesto was drafted by Putin himself. If that’s true, then Ukraine’s increasingly European democratic identity spelt doom for the autocratic Russia Putin had created. A free Ukraine will pull Russia westward if it isn’t’ brought to heel.”

History can be rewritten but it can’t be redone. Rewriting means interpreting it differently. This is being done all the time. The effort by black scholars to retell the story of America by taking it back to 1619 when the first slave ship arrived is a vivid example of rewriting history. Redoing history means changing the events that shaped it. This is a part of a methodology historians call the ‘What if approach?’ For instance: What would have happened had the British and the Indian National Congress discovered that Muhmmad Ali Jinnah was near death because of tuberculosis when they agreed to his demand for splitting the Indian colony and creating Pakistan?

Had Putin been in command of the USSR when Moscow sent in its troops to Afghanistan or when Gorbachev pulled down the Berlin Wall, there is no doubt that world today would be a very different place. Moscow would have persisted in its Afghanistan adventure and sent in more troops and sophisticated weaponry to beat back the mujaheddin fighters who were challenging the USSR. He would have continued with the Soviet Union’s march into Central Asia, regarding Afghanistan to be a part of that landlocked region. He would have most certainly not brought down the Berlin Wall, a move that led not only to the reunification of the divided city but also the reunification of Germany. He would have used force to keep Germany divided and in that way continued to keep Western Europe weak with respect to the Soviet Union. In fact, what Putin attempted in Ukraine was one example of redoing history.

Which way will Putin take Europe and with it the rest of the world? The answer to the crisis may be relatively simply depending on what the Russian leader was hoping to accomplish. It is possible that Putin’s bottom line is straightforward: to stop Ukraine from joining NATO and to be assured that the West will never place offensive weapons that threaten Russia’s security. Given the poor level of governance in the country and rampant corruption, it would take decades before Ukraine can be admitted to NATO. Putin has made clear that he wants to restore what he calls Russia’s sphere of influence in the region. This would mean redoing history and returning to the Cold War order before Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed in 1997 that former Soviet States could choose their foreign policy, including at some stage joining NATO. If President Biden can’t hold back Putin, President Xi Jinping will. On February 3, Putin traveled to Beijing and met President Xi Jinping.

According to the English version of the joint statement issued after their meeting, Xi and Putin talked about the meaning of democracy, and said that “it was up to the people of the country to decide whether their state is a democratic one.” As Eva Dou wrote in The Washington Post, “but while the criticism of the Western democracy is not new, it’s inclusion in the joint statement at the opening ceremony of a high-profile event such as the Olympics reflects the two countries’ resolve to build a coalition of ideologically like-minded nations.” Moscow also said that it was ready to continue working on the China-proposed Global Development Initiative, a relief programme for developing nations. We can anticipate significant changes in the global order once the current Ukraine crisis is over.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 7^th, 2022.

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