Russia, US Pushiness, and National Character. By Mark Higgie.
Barbaric:
In the ten months of horror since Putin’s assault on Ukraine, occasional particularly chilling cases of infamy stand out. One is that of Yurii Kerpatenko, director of Kherson’s Philharmonic Theatre, who was pressed by the Russian then-occupiers in September to participate in a ‘festive concert’ to celebrate the city’s new Russian future. He refused. Russian security officials turned up at his flat and shot him dead.
Just as Europe’s memories of the barbarism of Stalin’s Red Army fade from living memory, all its features have again been on display in Putin’s Ukrainian war: atrocities against those who refuse to collaborate; torture, rape, looting; the mass abduction of children to turn them into Russians; and revelations that the army has units whose function is to kill soldiers who try to surrender or retreat. And the Kremlin’s ramshackle army, seemingly incapable of capturing and holding territory against a professional military, responds to humiliating reversals with missile attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. …
What now?
Stalemate looks more probable than a decisive victory by either side. …
Could negotiations end the war? That’s a non-starter while Putin remains in power. Ukraine understandably demands nothing less than the return of all the territories claimed by Russia – Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. According to the 2001 census, all except Crimea are majority Ukrainian. Still, in 1991 even Crimea voted with the other now-annexed territories for Ukrainian independence. …
Ukrainian outrage over Russia’s aggression is reinforced by the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine was pressured by the US, UK and Russia to surrender its large share of the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal in return for Russian commitments to respect Ukraine’s borders. Ukraine also understandably demands Russian reparations and co-operation in war crimes trials. Putin would, of course, reject all such demands. …
Putin’s hope has probably been that the West, hastened by energy blackmail, would tire of supporting Ukraine. There’s no sign of this …
The mother of all tantrums?
If the Ukrainians did make more dramatic progress in liberating their territory, might Putin resort to the nightmare scenario of using nuclear weapons to terrorise them into capitulation? After his multiple stupid decisions on Ukraine, of course no one can say for sure he won’t make another one. …
China, the closest Putin has to a serious ally, would strongly disapprove of any nuclear adventurism. And yet many still worry that a serious Ukrainian threat to Crimea, with which Putin is especially obsessed, could prompt him to throw the mother of all tantrums, possibly leading to nuclear threats, however irrational.
The war now unpopular in Russia:
In early December a leaked Kremlin poll showed support among Russians for the war had dropped from 80 per cent in April to 25 per cent. So far around 100,000 Russians have died because of Putin’s imperialist folly — compared to 15,000 in the ten years of Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan, which increased domestic hostility to the Soviet regime.
In 1989, the ‘short 20th century’ concluded with the ‘end of history’ – the victory of the Western capitalist world over the Soviet socialist project. …
Russia had, at first glance, found its niche in the new world order. The country had become a peripheral economy specialized in the supply of raw materials. …
The [reaction to US pushiness] was the erosion of trust and growing skepticism on the part of other major players. Russia was the first, then China began to come to a similar understanding. In Russia, this started to emerge amid NATO’s eastward expansion in the post-Soviet space. In China, this happened later when then-US President Donald Trump launched an attack in the form of a trade and sanctions war without blinking an eye. However, Moscow and Beijing responded differently. Russia banged its fist on the table in 2014 and then turned over the table. China has started to prepare hard for a worst-case scenario, without yet openly challenging the US. But even short of such a challenge, it is perceived in Washington as a more dangerous long-term adversary than Russia. …
A major power has risked giving up the benefits of the ‘global world’ overnight. Historians will argue about whether Moscow anticipated such harsh sanctions and the departure of hundreds of foreign companies so quickly. However, it is clear that Russia is vigorously adapting to the new realities and is in no hurry to return to US-centric globalization.
Meanwhile in the woke West:
Ideology is capable of being the very self-sustaining value that can make social action value-rational rather than goal-rational.
That last sentence puts its finger on something important to explain/understand what’s going on in the developed West today.
