Exactly a year ago today Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine in an attempt to reshape the canvas of Europe. It is not just that country and the continent on which it is located which alone are experiencing the consequences of this invasion; the international community too is feeling the reverberations. Trade relations and geopolitical structures, supply chains and commodity shortages have also made their impact across the globe. Whatever eventually emerges from this war, the world will never be the same again.
“The war machine [Nato] is on the move and, I repeat, it is approaching our borders,” said President Vladimir Putin in an early justification for invasion. But for all the talk of Ukraine and Nato encroaching on Russia in defiance of earlier understandings, it now emerges from what the Russian people have been told that the underlying motivation of President Putin for the aggression was of a rather different complexion. This is not to say that he was not concerned about Nato expansion, or that he had not expressed his opposition to Ukraine becoming a member of Nato, but he was shrewd enough to know that that organisation was not very cohesive and lacked purpose following the end of the Cold War. As such it did not represent much of a threat to him. In addition various heads of state and/or government had assured him that Ukraine would not be allowed to join any time soon.
It was Nato’s lack of unity and resolve, not its expansion, which was one of the factors persuading him to invade his neighbour, since his calculation would have been that he would not meet any resistance from that direction. The irony cannot be lost even on him that by his actions he has achieved the opposite of what he intended, ie a unified Nato with an undeniable sense of purpose which is also on the brink of expansion.
What seems to be undergirding the rationalisations for his decisions is a pseudo-historical fantasy. Various writers have described him as being closeted away in lockdown for months on end reading dubious works of history covering a period going back more than a thousand years. The subject of these was the first Slavic state, Kyvian Rus, from which both Ukraine and Russia emerged, and at the heart of which was Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine. It is a matter of no consequence to him apparently that in the centuries which followed Ukraine was dismembered by a number of other states or that its independence and sovereignty following the collapse of the USSR was recognised internationally. Whether President Putin acquired his view during lockdown, or whether it goes back much further in time, he now says: “Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole”.
It is a position he continually repeats to the Russian populace, and can be seen as his ‘moral’ justification for the war, placing it in the category of a ‘just war’ albeit with an irredentist patina. It is reinforced by his consistent claims that Russia is seeking to de-nazify and demilitarise Ukraine, something which is patent nonsense, not least because President Volodymyr Zelensky himself is Jewish who lost some of his family members in the holocaust. Untroubled by this, the Kremlin nevertheless portrays the invasion as a war of liberation in the mode of the Great Patriotic War (Second World War), something which has great resonance with the people of Russia.
In the early days of the war Mr Putin was given to misleading his people about genocide being committed against ‘ethnic’ Russians in Ukraine, which is part Russian speaking. It might be noted that President Zelensky’s first language is Russian, not Ukrainian, but in any case less is heard about that claim nowadays, and it can only be wondered whether it is connected to the fact that in the south of the country particularly, and even in the liberated east, many Russian-speakers define themselves as Ukrainians and are bitterly opposed to the Russian invasion.
President Putin as far as can be seen enjoys widespread support for what he calls his ‘special military operation’. No one is allowed to call it a war, and if they do they are likely to be charged and imprisoned. In fact anyone criticising the prosecuting of war at all will be charged and incarcerated, and some brave citizens have been. To ensure only the Kremlin’s view is heard, all opposition media have now been extinguished and social media are under control, although some enterprising young Russians find a way around that. But for the mass of the population only Mr Putin’s voice is heard and state TV is the sole news to which they have access. Russian losses in Ukraine, particularly of poorly trained conscripts have been heavy, but even that does not seem to have fully penetrated the public consciousness. The faces of a few soldiers killed in battle look down from hoardings in the cities on the pedestrians below, their patriotism acknowledged and praised.
It is only in a fully-fledged dictatorship that it is possible to insulate the citizenry so completely from the truth about the invasion of a sovereign state, the bombing of civilian targets, the war crimes committed against its people and the displacement of millions. And yet despite social media and all the other avenues of information available to the modern world, the Russian autocracy has still succeeded in silencing dissenting voices while it pursues its objectives of obliterating a neighbouring democracy. How long the destruction of Ukraine by the Russian war machine will continue is difficult to say. Both sides believe victory is achievable, in the case of Ukraine if it gets sufficient quantities of modern weapons from the West. That is already a problem, because in the case of ammunition, for example, key nations are not producing fast enough. On Russia’s side it knows it can throw manpower into the fray that Ukraine simply cannot match, while the sanctions have had much less of an effect on the economy than anticipated. Mr Putin may be hoping too that if the war drags on for long enough then divisions will appear in Nato, and democratic electorates will simply lose tolerance for supporting Ukraine if it comes at the expense of their well-being in hard times.
In the course of his various threats, Mr Putin has also made implicit nuclear ones, while on Wednesday he announced the suspension of Russia’s participation in a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States. The consequences of the latter are not altogether clear.
But that aside there may be a new factor in the equation, and that is China, which was due to issue a peace plan today. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused Beijing of being in the process of considering supplying lethal weapons to Russia. A China Foreign Ministry spokesman retorted in response that the US was in no position to lecture his country on Ukraine since it was America which had been “pouring weapons on the battlefield.” It was a disingenuous remark, since if the West (and not just the US) hadn’t done so, then Russia would have taken over its neighbour, something which the Chinese should reject if their advertised respect for the sovereignty of states is to be believed.
Some commentators have expressed the view that China may indeed be contemplating such a move, since while it would like a weakened Russia which it can control and whose oil, gas and agricultural products it needs, it does not want a completely defeated one which would affect the international order in a way favouring western approaches. If it does go that route, then not only will the news be bad for the war in Ukraine as well as for the West, but it will create a dangerous new reality in terms of the world order and our ability to manage crises. It will be to take a step backwards in terms of the evolution of international relationships, since it is not in the interests of progress for autocracies to dominate the world.
Last night the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion demanding that Russia pull out from Ukraine immediately. The resolution was adopted with 141 votes in favour and 32 abstentions. Six countries joined Russia to vote no – Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua and Syria.
Those concerned by what Secretary General António Guterres called an “affront” to the world’s collective conscience can only hope that China pays attention to the views of the international community as expressed at that forum. And especially that Russia does too. If Mr Putin continues on his present path, which seems likely, we might be in for a long war. In the end, however, whatever the duration of the conflict it is important that Russia is defeated not just for the sake of Ukraine, but also for the sake of freedom in the world as a whole.
