Ukraine and Putin: How to Deal with? Five Writers Explore

[Sukla Sen]

On February 24, when, after months of nailbiting suspense, the horrifying invasion of Ukraine was, eventually, launched, it pretty much looked like yet another lost cause - just a walkover for Putin, despite the, rather hollow-sounding, shrill blusters from the West - led by Joe Biden.

The first faint hint - even if only a hint, of a different possibility, would nonetheless come almost immediately in the form of the spirited refusal of Zelenskyy - the democratically elected Jewish President of the besieged republic, of the American offer to fly him out of the country. He, regardless, looked only like a tragic hero of some Greek classic.

Since then, well over three weeks has elapsed and despite massive bombing of civilian targets - including schools, hospitals etc., Putin's, putatively much superior - in terms of number and firepower, forces have as yet failed to capture a single major population centre. On the contrary, they have by now, reportedly, lost top four Generals - out of estimated total twenty deployed.

Who could have imagined it then!?

This amazing resistance has opened up space for continued animated discussions.

Here's yet another sample - consisting of five noteworthy independent opinions.

[In the meanwhile, there's an utterly disturbing news: <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10630387/Depressed-Vladimir-Putin-moved-family-secret-underground-city.html>.

One only hopes that it's not accurate.]

I/V. <<Twin pipelines of money sustain Putin and his fellow kleptocrats. One carries western money into kleptocracies to pay for natural resources; the other carries money back out again, after it’s been stolen, for safekeeping in the west’s property markets and universities and political parties. If we wish to weaken him and his system of corrupt power, we must disrupt both pipelines. That means increasing and sustaining the reduction in our consumption of Russian oil and gas. If we do not wish merely to switch our support for one kleptocracy to others, we must replace this energy supply with something other than the fossil fuels that are the lifeblood of kleptocrats everywhere. As for the second pipeline, our noisy declarations that we are turning it off – that, as Boris Johnson put it, “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” – are laughable. A few names on sanctions lists and some loophole-ridden reforms to economic crime laws not backed by budgets to enforce them are close to meaningless while we still permit financial secrecy.

...

We are watching the rise of what I’ve called Kleptopia. An undeclared, unconventional war between kleptocracy and democracy has been under way since long before Putin’s troops marched into Ukraine. The two sides are not arranged merely by geography. The kleptocrats have plenty of allies in the west, from the lawyers shielding their plunder to the politicians advancing their influence within democratic governments. Their victims include both Ukrainian civilians and Russian conscripts. With whom do we stand?>>

II. <<Much as I share Tolstoy’s scepticism about the individual’s impact on history, to a significant extent this is Vladimir Putin’s war. Determined to reverse the entropy for which he blames Gorbachev, Putin believes in the transhistorical unity of Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia. Ukraine as such does not exist.

At best, “Little Russia” is a province that is entitled to its own picturesque traditions. But autonomy equals disloyalty. Those who seek it are “Nazis”. The term assimilates campaigners for Ukrainian independence to the invaders routed by the Soviet Union (for which read, Russia) in the great patriotic war between 1941 and 1945. At the same time, it erases from the record the crucial contribution to victory in that war of Ukrainians themselves. Only such wilful forgetting could allow Putin, a Leningrader, to inflict on Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv and Mykolaiv the siege warfare that devastated his birthplace in 1941-1944.

...

Don’t organise boycotts by place of origin either. Rather than ostracising works of art, try to understand the complex history of Russian imperialism. Pushkin’s To the Slanderers of Russia (1831) told western critics that Russia’s repression of Poland was a family affair. But Evdokiya Rostopchina’s The Forced Marriage (1845) presented Russia and Poland as an abusive husband and defiant wife – provoking outrage in Nicholas I.>>

III. <<All the horror that Putin is unleashing – the death, the lies, the violence, the refugees trudging through landscapes bleached of their colour by snow and artillery – echoes the 1940s. Putin himself calls the Ukrainians Nazis, as if this unprovoked aggression is somehow a rerun of the Soviet people’s self-defence in the second world war. That accusation is disgusting, but it’s harder to dismiss the parallels between Putin’s own behaviour and those of the dictators of the mid-20th century.

He is driven by a perverse misreading of history to deny his neighbours’ humanity. Russian officials and politicians are aggressive in their patriotism. The orange-and-black striped medal ribbon became the nationalist symbol when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the air-recognition-mark “Z” has rapidly morphed into an equivalent for this new war. Putin is a bully who invades his neighbours and kills his critics, and whose government lies compulsively, even about facts that are so self-evidently true that denying them seems self-defeating. He is even driving his tanks through Ukraine, the second world war’s main battleground.

...But Putin is not Hitler or Benito Mussolini, he is not even Joseph Stalin, he is a modern problem, and solving a problem like him requires new skills, new sacrifices, and new laws.

In the first place, the Russian elite’s patriotism and anti-western posturing is performative. The anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny has made a cottage industry of revealing how top-ranking officials or regime propagandists have property in countries that are the supposed enemy. After a hard week campaigning against the evil west, which is undermining Christian civilisation by allowing gay people to get married, they would fly to their villas in Italy or their townhouses in London. They may think they believe what they say, but their actions belie them: the ideology is just cant to confuse foreigners and keep Russians in line.

...

What would Russia be without these offshore services [to let its kleptocrats park their enormous looted wealth on foreign shores]? It would be a fading power with a declining population run by an ageing political class loyal to a dead empire. Its sole world-class assets are its resources of oil, gas and minerals, many of which will become irrelevant in the decarbonised world we are moving towards. The USSR’s soft power was once enormous, with its communist ideology, sublime ballet companies, film directors and musicians. But what does the Kremlin have now? A misinformation machine and an unequal alliance with a Chinese elite that must be looking at Russia’s riches and licking their lips.

...

We cannot solve the problem of Putin; only the Russians can do that. But we can stop helping him be a bigger problem than he has to be. The first step is to deprive him and his cronies of their access to our financial system. Being able to bury their wealth deep in our economies has allowed Russia’s rulers to avoid the consequences of their own greed: their children have studied in English schools; their wealth has been invested in western funds; their German-built yachts fly under the flags of British tax havens.

...

Stripped of their access to the international financial system and of their stolen riches, Putin’s oligarchs will be not plutocrats but thugs. Deprived of their boltholes, they will be forced either to improve Russia for everyone that lives in it, or they will be swept from power.>>

IV .<<So far, the war appears to be going very badly for Russia. Its assumptions about the country it chose to invade have been exposed as fatally flawed; years of expensive military reform have failed to produce an army capable of effectively fighting a war of choice; and it has had to deny asking the Chinese government to feed and arm its troops.

Despite this litany of humiliations, the relative strength of the Russian armed forces mean that a military victory can’t be ruled out. There would probably be continued resistance, forcing Russia to choose between draining its catastrophically damaged economy and military capabilities in an open-ended occupation, and a withdrawal. Unless sanctions are lifted, its most important trading and diplomatic relationships – above all, with China – will be firmly tilted in favour of its partners, who will be able to deal with Russia on much more favourable terms than in the past.

Whatever happens in Ukraine, it seems likely that Putin will remain in power for the foreseeable future. Nothing about his behaviour in the past decade has indicated that he would be willing to give up power voluntarily, and it seems unlikely that those in the best position to remove him will do so, not least because they are themselves closely tied to Putin and his crimes.

...

...The western debate about a no-fly zone and the Russian government’s inflammatory, if vague, threats about nuclear weapons are a sharp reminder of the threat of escalation between nuclear superpowers – a threat that, worryingly, many seemed to have forgotten or dismissed. However hostile the relationship between Russia and the west becomes, dialogue on nuclear matters needs to be maintained.

...

Finally, the west will need to think about how it tries to engage with Russian society. Closing off all contact will simply confirm Putin’s narrative that the west wants to destroy Russia. States need to keep their doors open to Russians who want to study or visit, as well as those who are escaping repression.>>

V. <<...(W)hatever your take, ultimately solving the Putin problem and creating change in Russia means confronting the psychological grip he has on his own people. The mental model of Putinism, the worldview it constructs with propaganda of word and deed to keep Russians under control, is built on several foundations: it appeals to nostalgia; it projects a conspiratorial perspective and it insists that Putin can get away with anything, that there is no alternative to Putin. As oppositionally minded Russians, pro-democracy media, civil society activists and public diplomats from the west seek to engage the Russian people, they need to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of these foundations. Even if Putin manages to cut off the Russian internet even further (he has already shut down Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the last independent radio and online television stations), there will always be ways to reach the Russian people, from virtual private networks to satellite TV. The question is what to talk to them about.

Currently, most Russians back the war and Putin’s reasons for it. It’s hard to trust polls in a dictatorship where you get 12 years in jail for mentioning the word “war”. Moreover, it’s always nice to hide behind propaganda: pretending you don’t know what’s going on allows you to avoid responsibility and make any tough or dangerous decisions. But even if these cognitive biases, fears and motivations to dodge reality don’t shift immediately there are already vulnerabilities in Putin’s main propaganda strategies.

Let’s start with Putin’s uses of nostalgia. His mission has always been to “bring Russia off its knees”, the Kremlin version of “make America great again”. This has now reached a climax: in his rambling historical speech validating the invasion of Ukraine he invoked his mission to restore the Russian empire, and framed his war in terms of a second world war redux to battle (utterly mythical) Nazis.

...

As the economic situation worsens, and the propaganda weakens, Putin will turn to the power ministries to use oppression rather than ideas. This has always been his final argument: that he can carry out any crimes at home, any invasion abroad, any war crime from Grozny to Aleppo, and get away with it. In Ukraine, Putin is purposefully targeting humanitarian corridors, bombing refugees and hospitals in order to break the will of the people. It’s a message to the world that all statements about humanitarian values, the UN’s “responsibility to protect”, “safe zones” is guff. His argument is that might is right, and in the futureless new world the ones who are most ruthless, from Beijing to Riyadh and Moscow, will flourish.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/solve-problem-like-putin-writers-russia-ukraine-oliver-bullough-peter-pomerantsev>.)