Thursday, February 3, 2022

Ukraine Blogging

 

Weird message from Mr. Tucker Carlson a while back that was tagged by some observers, I think correctly, as of Russian origin:

It's easy to call it propaganda, but I'm finding myself inclined to think of it as something a little bit different, really a message from Putin, one in the Whataboutist mode, seriously, asking for just a little understanding, bro—the Russian Federation really is kind of surrounded on its west, by NATO members some of which control nuclear weapons, all along the western borders of Russia or Belarus or Ukraine from Estonia to Turkey, from the north end of the Gulf of Finland to the eastern end of the Black Sea, members of an alliance that was specifically designed 70-odd years ago to thwart Russian movements in that direction. 

It isn't even a conspiracy, it's the organization's entire public purpose, and generally run by a country, the United States, that ism't even a neighbor, and doesn't have a great history of not invading people. Russia's opponents love to say, accurately, that no moderately important country has marched into some other country and stolen its territory since World War II until Russia captured the Crimea in 2014 (which is understating the case, since it was also Russia that created and still sustains "breakaway republics" that are essentially colonies in Moldova and Georgia, the former well before Putin himself was even involved), but ask them in Afghanistan and Iraq how glad they are that the US never actually annexed them.

What I'm saying is, Putin may be evil, and the Russian Federation may the world center of fascist ideology at this historical moment, as I've said, but Putin is not being paranoid in taking a dim view of the possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO member.

On the other hand, it should be pretty clear that he is mistaken about it, in the sense that Ukraine is not going to become a NATO member, not any time soon and quite likely not ever, for various reasons (one of which Putin himself is responsible for: you don't qualify for NATO when your country has a slow-burning civil war going on in a corner of it, as Ukraine does thanks to Russian support for the Donbas insurgents). The thing I'm especially thinking of is that two of the big four partners, France and Germany, really don't want to expand NATO any further, in a pattern that's been consistent (with respect to Ukraine and Georgia, but not Albania, North Macedonia, or Croatia, none of which have Russian borders) since 2008 and, I think, longer than that, much longer in the case of Germany's Social Democrats:

This German-Russian relationship, a recent Chatham House paper argues, has been shaped by two factors. First, Ospolitik, which refers to the “change through rapprochement” foreign policy strategy towards the Soviet Union and its satellite states that was pursued in the 1970s by the Social Democrat chancellor Willy Brandt, and that tried to overcome hard lines by focusing on joint interests. The policy is still considered by many to be the way forward.

Second, the mutual dependence deal between the two countries that dates from the 1970s, when the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to exchange natural gas from the USSR for German pipes and steel. It is premised on the belief expressed by Schmidt that “those who trade with each other do not shoot each other”. By 2018 Germany accounted for 37% of Gazprom sales, and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline had been agreed. German exports to Russia rose fivefold between 2000 and 2011.

In 2004, Germany and France persuaded Putin to accept a huge NATO expansion along Russian-Belarusian-Ukrainian-Moldovan borders, when Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria all joined. When fighter jets—four Belgian F-16s—arrived in the Baltic states a couple of weeks later, Russians began to freak out, as if they hadn't been expecting such a thing to happen:

While Russia has resigned itself to NATO's expansion, albeit grudgingly, the reality of NATO forces being deployed in the Baltics -- on short notice -- has deeply unsettled and angered its politicians and commanders, prompting some of the sharpest criticism of the alliance since its war against Serbia in 1999.

Russia's lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a resolution on Wednesday denouncing NATO's expansion generally and the deployment of the F-16's specifically.

And that—at a time when Putin's own hold on power was a lot more tenuous than it is today—is where the current standoff really began, as the Russian president worked more and more assiduously to keep Georgia and Ukraine (the homelands of Stalin and Khrushchev respectively), by means political and military, from completing the encirclement, while the West mostly watched.

And here we are 18 years later, with Russia occupying two tiny smuggling havens, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, on its border with Georgia (not to mention a third, Transnistria in Moldova, where they've been since 1992) and a huge piece of Ukraine with a vital port and naval base, Crimea, and feeding that civil war in the eastern coal country, and now surrounding it in this weird way, which feels less like a strategy to accomplish some military objective than a cry of resentment: "This is what it feels like to be surrounded—see how you like it!"

What's been making me hesitate to write about this all these weeks has been the feeling that I haven't been taking it seriously enough when everybody that's thinking about it has their hair on fire—that I haven't been worrying enough about Ukraine. 

But the invasion threat just hasn't seemed entirely real to me, from the start: when Putin decides to invade Ukraine, he makes some effort to pretend he isn't doing it, with the unmarked trucks and little green men, and now he's been doing what looks like the exact opposite, making it look a lot fiercer than it actually is. 

Via BBC.

Why were troops massed on all the possible invasion routes? Couldn't Putin make up his mind which ones he wanted to use? Why weren't there more troops ready behind the front lines? Some people said there were actually far from 100,000, that number was conflating those actually at the border with others that could easily deployed there; but a serious invasion would take more than 300,000, in any event. If the plan was just for a targeted invasion of the Donbas region (Luhansk and Donetsk in the east) what were all those troops doing in Crimea, Transnistria, and Belarus? Why were there no field hospitals or other medical infrastructure at the border posts?

Nightmare scenarios from US and UK intelligence—the threat of an undescribed false-flag operation that would give Russia a formal excuse to invade, the suggestion Russia is delaying the invasion so their Chinese friends can enjoy their Olympics party,  the wild tale of a Russia-friendly Ukrainian being readied to step in and take over the Kiyiv government in a coup—didn't seem very real either, especially when the reported presidential pick turned out not to be Russia-friendly at all:

The Foreign Office’s claims were thrown into further confusion when the man it named as a “potential candidate” as Moscow’s presidential pick told the Observer he would make an unlikely candidate to head a puppet government for Moscow.

“You’ve made my evening. The British Foreign Office seems confused,” said former Ukrainian MP Yevhen Murayev, laughing. “It isn’t very logical. I’m banned from Russia. Not only that but money from my father’s firm there has been confiscated.”

And now we're seeing the peculiar spectacle of friction when a Ukrainian president asks a US president not to panic:

“Because the White House understands that there are risks, they keep articulating this, they keep supporting this theme, this topic, and they make it as acute, as burning as possible,” Zelenskiy said through a translator at an almost 90-minute press conference in the Ukrainian capital with foreign journalists. “In my opinion, this is a mistake.”...

Other reports indicate Zelenskiy told Biden in their phone call that the Russian military threat is not “imminent,” while Biden reportedly warned an invasion could come as soon as February when the ground freezes.

Thing I learned about Zelenskyy, by the way: not only is he Jewish (which lends a funny resonance to Moscow propaganda calling his government "Nazi"), he's also from eastern Ukraine and primarily a Russian speaker—Russian is the language of almost all his film work—with an imperfect command of Ukrainian. It's one of the things that got him elected when the vote of the western Ukrainian-speaking establishment was split between over-familiar and remote politicians, with the idea that he would be a force for fairness to the eastern population and for peace with the giant neighbor to the east; contrary to what Moscow propaganda would have you believe, there's a large population of Russian speakers who are happy to remain Ukrainian citizens, enough to decide a national election, and in 2019 they did. But Zelenskyy has spent a lot of time talking with Putin, and I find I'm inclined to respect his assessment of Putin's intentions at least as much as I do those of the CIA and MI6.

In fact, I'm inclined to think those rumors of how Putin intends to conquer Ukraine and install a puppet government in Kiyiv are likely to be disinformation planted by the Russians as part of Putin's broad attempt to create the atmosphere of panic that Zelenskyy was warning Biden about. Taken seriously by US and UK, like the "sexed-up" information of 2002, but not by Germany and France. I'm inclined to think no invasion is actually planned at all, and certainly nothing that would make the situation markedly worse than what Ukraine has been enduring for the past eight years. For Ukrainians, the invasion already took place, in 2014, and they've been improving their ability to cope with it ever since (with a much bigger and better trained army, for one thing, as well as those Javelin anti-tank missiles Trump tried to stop Zelenskyy from getting). 

So what is Putin up to, if he doesn't plan to invade? Yesterday Dmitri Trenin of the Moscow Carnegie Center told NPR listeners,

I never thought that Vladimir Putin was preparing for war or preparing to invade, let's put it that way. I think he was using the massing of Russian forces, both in the spring of last year - and that's the - and the end of fall of last year, as diplomatic leverage to engage the United States to talk about Russian security concerns. And I would say he has succeeded in that. The talk has begun.

But Fred Kaplan at Slate, who has seemed bewildered and all over the map on the situation, seeing the invasion as almost ineluctible, convinced that Biden completely blew it,  unconvinced an invasion was even likely, and completely mystified; has seen an additional goal Putin has been working on for years (almost succeessfully when Trump became president), that of splitting up NATO, and he's now saying Biden and NATO have already won:

Yes, the Russian president has arrayed roughly 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border—enough to mount a major invasion, if that’s what he wants to do. But threatening Ukraine is only a means to Putin’s main strategic goals, which are a) to carve out a “sphere of influence” that as much as possible re-creates the old Russian (or Soviet) empire, b) to deepen the politico-economic fissures within the European Union, and c) to drive a wedge between the United States and its NATO allies.

And yet his military gambit has accomplished the opposite. The overt threat to Ukraine has rallied the European nations around a common menace, revitalized NATO’s original mission to deter and contain Russian expansion, and thus bonded the European allies to the United States (the prime guarantor of their security) more tightly than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

What's more, he's giving Biden the credit:

Putin’s moves were too blunt, and his denials of any unusual activity were too blatant. Then came another surprising twist: Biden and his diplomats, who had made missteps in other realms, suddenly turned super competent. Biden was comfortable with trans-Atlantic matters; NATO had been the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy during his decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been at his side, as top staffer, for many of those years. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman had eked out results at the toughest negotiating tables. Their efforts held together the 30-state NATO alliance in opposing Moscow’s moves and threatening firm action in response to any further invasion of Ukraine’s territory.

Whatever Putin winds up doing, his plan of driving the NATO allies apart and reducing the U.S. presence near Russia’s borders failed.

At the same time, it looks as if something really is being offered to Putin on his legitimate security concerns, partly in the hands of France and Germany, in the form of the "Normandy group" (France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine) on reviving the 2015 Minsk Accord ceasefire in the Donbas region, and partly the US and NATO leadership on the wider issue of force posture in the whole region, which Junior hilariously misunderstood:


That last (consisting of reciprocal gestures on the part both of Russia and the NATO countries, so of course the US would get to inspect Russian missile deployments too) is a start of a framework for a really big détente, which could really enhance everybody's securing, including Ukraine's. Biden may yet realize his potential as a foreign policy president in ways that will astonish us all.

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