A Forlorn Attempt at Analytical Sanity In the Face of the Ukraine Crisis

Let us not get bogged down in the detail of the Ukraine Crisis. Let us try and see the whole forest rather than look at the trees of troop movements and sanctions. This note explores the difficulties in doing so during a period of distorted news agendas and begins the process of developing some sort of credible paradigm based on what facts we know.

The basic fact is, of course, that Russia decided to invade Ukraine. This is incontrovertible. It is not a 'special operation', it is an invasion. Beyond that singular point of fact, there are two sets of questions to drag out of the mire of misinformation and disinformation –

• what are Russia’s aims and will it succeed in those aims? and,
• who opposes those aims, why and will they, in turn, succeed in thwarting them?

There is then a secondary set of issues to understand: what will the economic consequences of the conflict be to the actors??

We now have two wars going on. There is an inter-state war between Ukraine’s current regime (a hybrid between democracy and oligarchy) and Russia (also a hybrid between democracy and oligarchy). This is a violent struggle for control over the second most populous sovereign territory in Europe, a prize for European integration and a key element in the containment of Russia but also a territory that could bring Western military capability closer to the Russian heartland than at any time since the Nazi regime was stopped at the gates of Moscow. The more important war is the far greater quasi-imperial struggle for hegemony between a defensive (despite this singular act of aggression), anxious and battered Russia and the constant advance of post-Soviet Western liberalism in Europe which desperately needs a 'win' after its succession of total screw-ups in the Middle East and Central Asia. Russia has its back to the wall and considers the situation existential. The West (which really ought to be defined more rigorously but that would take an essay in itself) feels it has its back moving towards a wall and also considers the situation existential.

As a result we have the State machineries of both sides engaged not in direct military action with one another but in limited indirect military action (by the West against Russia in support of Ukraine’s regime), economic warfare (aggressive by the West, retaliatory by Russia), political warfare and, above all, massive psychological operations which are geared largely to unifying their own peoples for the course of action decided by their leaders with only a tenuous link to popular-democratic decision-making on both sides. This is a clash of systems where the stakes are high in terms of potential nuclear exchange, economic and trade losses, deterioration in economic security for the masses, global hegemony and existential survival (for the Russian regime and perhaps Russia itself). Indeed, the prize for the harder edge of Western analysts is the total destruction of Russia as a separate civilisation, its eventual absorption amoeba-like into the prevailing Western model and its detachment from Washington's real and constant concern - China.

It is, in fact, possible, to sympathise with Ukrainian independence and also to sympathise with Russia’s existential problems but the competing 'war' narratives have silenced sympathy with the Ukrainian regime (but not people) in Russia and any sophisticated understanding of the Russian existential dilemma in the West.?Let us take a look at the two narratives that are used to unify populations around the relevant positions.

The Russian Narrative

The Russian narrative is fairly simple and historically based. Russia was subject to significant Western intervention during the Civil War and much of the horrors of the succeeding period can be put down to the disruption caused by Western attempts to force it to remain in the First World War. It was then subject (after its own failed rapprochement with Berlin at the expense of Poland and the Baltics) to a particularly brutal invasion which was one of the most bloody in history, in which countries like Italy and Romania played an active role and in which Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists allied with the Nazis, elements in both national groups providing the auxiliaries involved in the bloody repression of the Russian and Jewish populations, including as, notoriously, extermination camp auxiliaries.

The West dismisses the ‘denazification’ propaganda of Putin but it speaks to a stronger and longer sense of history in Russia where the Great Patriotic War still has a resonance that is hard for the West to understand because its losses were so much less and reconciliation so much easier. Only Israel has a stronger sense of its own past as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century although Ukrainian Nationalists can legitimately speak of the trauma of the famine in the 1930s as a driver for their national myth. The viciousness of Ukrainian responses to the Jews in the early 1940s owed something to the perception that Bolshevism was led disproportionately by Jews (the finer points of historical analysis mean little in such circumstances) responsible for the Holodomor. Everyone disputes everyone else's history but history is reality to many peoples nevertheless. Moscow also feels strongly that the collapse of communism (recognised as the collapse of a failed system) should not be allowed to become the collapse of Russia. In recent months, we have seen undoubted Western moral and political sponsorship of attempted regime change in Russia (Navalny), Belarus and probably Kazakhstan that almost certainly goes far beyond the relatively weak and still only alleged interventions by Russia in Western democratic operations.

In short, Russia feels (with some objective justification) as if the purpose of the West is to force regime change on the entire Russian sphere of influence. The tensions between Russian and Ukrainian nationalist political activists, the machinations of oligarchs with links to the West (and, of course, Moscow has its own local oligarchs too), the frustration that Ukraine is still fundamentally economically dependent on Russia through gas transit fees and mutual export-import trades and the belief that pro-Western influence in Ukraine will result in NATO troops being positioned at the soft under belly of the country (see any map) created a bomb waiting to go off, one that could only be disposed of by neutralising and demilitarising the country, a position the West actively worked against.

The Western Narrative

The Western narrative is much more complex because, as we have seen in the early days of the crisis, it has taken time to unify several different positions within the West into one clear narrative of ‘resistance to Russian aggression’. This requires a concentration on the undoubted act of aggression and a deliberate evasion of the back history to the decision to invade. This, in turn, requires a concentration on moral absolutes (which drives Western liberal thinking in any case), on the individualisation of decision-making by Russia so that Putin and not Russia is the enemy and on a highly emotional media-directed commitment to the human interest victims of the aggression (and, of course a plucky resistance narrative).

It is the moral absolutes, the demonisation (with the implicit ‘parallels’ to Hitler and the threat of repeating Munich, another nod to history eighty years ago) and the high level of emotion that enables Western Atlanticists to sweep away Western doubts (which might be centred on economic and nuclear risks and on the recent history of NATO expansion and of Ukraine) and to position Russia as a ‘fascist’ force engaged in a criminal enterprise - not only in the media but amongst a general public (or at least the politically active liberal element) where the central point – the act of aggression – is a fact on the ground. The West’s own Middle Eastern adventurism is forgotten in a flood of horror at this being the first war in Europe since 1945 (actually since that against Serbia in the 1990s).

The propaganda though is less relevant than the purpose to which it is put. The Russian aggression is a gift to one faction of the West – the hard-line Atlanticists who were aware of growing internal criticism of NATO and who were frustrated at the failure of the European Union to re-militarise against what they believe is a real Russian threat. The aim is also to draw European neutrals such as Finland, Sweden and Austria into NATO, increase military expenditures and allow Ukraine (the subject of the war) to shift allegiance from the East to the West rapidly and decisively and so at least create the potential for further regime change in Minsk, Moscow and the ‘lost’ Central Asian Republics.

To the West, Putin has ‘proven’ by his actions not that Russia is under threat (the Russian narrative) but that it is an aggressor which is determined not merely on salvaging Ukraine but is posing a risk to the Baltic and other East European states in a paradigm regarded as the recreation of the old Soviet Empire. In fact, there is no evidence of a Russian intent to clash directly with NATO (at least until now) nor of wanting to change the status quo with Finland or Sweden nor of entering the Baltics in particular (although they probably would be placing similar pressure on them if they were not members of NATO). As we can see, there are elements of paranoia in both the Russian and Western narratives.

The Problem of Costs of Economic Warfare

There are other political groups that are seizing the moment and the emotion and who are taking us down a spiral of half-truths much as Russian state narratives are doing the same. What is worse is that both sides are cutting off their populations from alternative sources of information and claiming the other is offering only propaganda (when, in fact, both are). Mainstream media and social media platforms are becoming willing vectors of political narratives that suit ‘their side’. In addition, the ‘wartime mentality’ is having a chilling effect on reasoned dissent and the expression of doubts on both sides such as probable Russian popular dislike of the war and quiet but increasingly unvoiced fears in the West about where the aggressive strategy is taking us.

The most significant political group which has taken up the anti-Moscow cudgel (other than the Green-Liberal Left’s recent discovery of the benefits of NATO, a major turn-around since the days of cruise missile deployment in the 1980s) is the broad spread of urban liberal ‘centrist’ elites, under siege from populism for the last six years and holding on to power only through their command of the central heights of information. Putin, positioned as the friend of populism in advance and so as part of the forces of darkness for that reason alone, has undertaken an act that has allowed centrists to play to their strength – the emotional meaning of absolute moral values (regardless of context and history). Suddenly, the national conservative Right and liberal centrists can be wholly united on a common narrative based on a truth (the invasion) but uncomplicated by context or risks.

The final stage of moral absolutism has appeared over the last few days as a ramping up of wartime spirit in the assertion that the populations of the West (meaning, in fact, the working class and lower income households of the West) should be prepared to experience risks to and diminution of their livelihoods for the sake of the moral principles involved in resisting Russian aggression (which, of course, is emotionally appealing to the middle class intellectual but forgets just how many relatively powerless and inarticulate people are already on the economic edge because of COVID-19 and supply chain and energy-led inflation). It is no accident that much of the emerging world is less certain that the West is correct - it too has a 'history', parts of it are dependent on a regular flow of food and fertiliser from the new war zone, the West did itself no favours in the early supply of vaccine and either energy inflation hurts as badly as it hurts the vulnerable populations in the West or a country may have a stake in ordering the energy market in collaboration with Moscow. In short, the Western narrative is about morale and not truth, context or reason and it is up to anyone to believe or not believe in the consequences being a price worth paying from their actual perspective and not the moral fervour of the Western intellectual and political class.

Some Conclusions

The Russian side is doing much the same thing as the West in preparing its people for the consequences of what amounts to a declaration of economic war on Russia. The Central Bank's interest rate went up to 20% today, Western corporations are being pressured to dump investments in Russia in a massive fire sale, Russia is being isolated (so long as it does not harm the West) in terms of both financial flows and trade. There is a deliberate Western strategy of breaking the Russian economy’s back as quickly as possible in order to force regime change (such as encouraging a run on the banks today) if it cannot force Putin’s withdrawal from Ukraine (which would probably result in regime change in any case). The West would be happy with the second or the first. This process of economic warfare raises the existential risks to Russia of failure substantially so that it should be no surprise that Russia has responded by raising the existential risk (albeit only symbolically) to the West by raising its nuclear level to ‘special alert’ while allied State Belarus has abandoned its non-nuclear status to permit the introduction of Russian nuclear forces into the 'Bagration salient'.

So, by now, we are at the grim point where one side’s sense of ‘existential risk’ (the ultimate cause of the aggression) has now been raised rather than lowered by Western strategy. This latter, in turn, seems to be directed not only at changing Russian decision-making but at strengthening the West’s own ability to resist breakdown and expand as a unified front by binding its population (or at least its intelligentsia and service classes) to the hard Atlanticist model of a united West, judged vital to contest the Eurasian model not only on the borders of Europe but in the emerging world and Indo-Pacific. We are returning rapidly to the post-war Cold War model or, rather, something closer to the blocs outlined in Orwell’s ‘1984’. Assuming you actually understand what the West is precisely (not an easy task as the initial stages of the conflict indicated) and then agree that the West must be defended at all costs, then these are curiously happy times, possibly reversing a generation of decline and fragmentation on a simple and unsophisticated moral cause, the type the newspapers like.

Worse, the (indirect) control of the media and of political expression as well as normalisation of surveillance and use of psychological operations in the Eurasian bloc to maintain regime stability is also quietly emerging where it can emerge in the West, although in a much lower key, in order to maintain unity amongst disparate players. Big Tech has abandoned any semblance of global neutrality in the last few days and Russia and Facebook/Google are as much at war with each other within their limited frame of reference as Kiev and Moscow.

Non-Western media are being systematically banned, legislation is emergent to enable a ‘chilling effect’ on social media, pressure is being placed on corporations to comply with political decision-making and narratives and new emergency powers and techniques are being developed (as we saw in Canada) to deal with internal protest. The structures for total war were actually strengthened not loosened after the Second World War in the UK for example and those tools are incremently strengthened at every crisis point within the West whether a matter of 9/11 and global terrorism, management of mass migration, control of the internet 'in the public interest', management of populist protest or, now, economic warfare against a pariah state. The West is mimicking the authoritarianism of the Eurasian bloc but by stealth, in increments and with what Chomsky (who could be naive but was far from always wrong) called 'manufactured consent'.

And What of Ukraine?

Ukraine has been barely mentioned in this review because it is the trigger but not the actual cause of this power struggle between a defensive and paranoid regime in Moscow and their opponents who, in turn, are engaged in a secondary power struggle to ‘create the West’ and continue its ability to compete with rising powers. The West has ten times the economic and military power of Russia (though less of Russia, China and sympathetic elements in the unaligned world combined) so, in a bloody clash, the victory of the West is assured even if what is left is in ruins. Economic war alone is unlikely to bring down Russia, however, unless it is intensified to those limits that almost ask for Russia to die on its feet rather than live on its knees which is a very dangerous mental attitude to create in a nuclear adversary.

So far, the West has been extremely careful to keep the energy and agricultural goods flowing because it has its own vulnerabilities (notably inflation) but each day sees a new ratcheting up of the sanctions with unknown consequences in what might be a last great attempt to prove that the total capitalist system can break the spine of even its largest enemies through sanctions - despite sanctions having had a dreadful record of success so far in effecting regime change. From a Russian or Chinese position, weakening through economic warfare may not stop there but may be the precursor to another attempt at revolutionary 'colour' regime change or even a first strike nuclear war coated in moral rhetoric. This may be paranoid but it is hard to say that it is a stupid assessment given the trajectory of events since the fall of the Soviet Union.

It is far too early to tell now what will happen next. The Russians seem to have stalled but what is reported in the West as successful Ukrainian resistance may or may not be real – the Russians may have stopped to make a point and to allow direct bilateral talks with Ukraine one last chance. There is also a risk that the West might be severely embarrassed by a Russian-Ukrainian agreement that sees Russian withdrawal for a guarantee that Ukraine does not join NATO. Western hard-liners could be competing with more moderate European and American voices on whether the Ukrainians should be encouraged to fight on. In their eyes (shades of 'Munich' again) a deal would have rewarded aggression. Failure to agree a deal would mean loss of life and considerable risks to the world economy.

Even if Zelensky and Putin come to a deal (and we have no idea what is being said today on the Belarussian border), it may not be easily enforceable if Ukrainian nationalists (almost certainly centred now in Lvov to where US advisers have decamped) revolt against their own President as a ‘sell-out’ and he is ousted or by-passed to continue the struggle. The war then continues so that one presumes that it would then turn into a civil war fuelled by Western armament and with Russia having to decide to try and occupy a recalcitrant country that is fully backed by the West or engage in a de facto division of the country and sufficient involvement to make it impossible for the country to join NATO in which case Moscow is permanently isolated from the West, an arms race with momentous possible consequences ensues and proxy wars spread across the globe. These are speculations when we do not even know yet if Russia has the ability to defeat the Ukrainian army in the field and ‘de minimis’ seize its ‘Novorossiya’.

And so here we are! An almighty mess where objective analysis and critical thinking are being systematically discouraged on both sides, where political decision-making is overwhelming rational economic choices and where the ‘trigger’ for the war is at the vortex of a vastly more complex clash of empires but also of power struggles within those empires and where the final outcome could be horrific. And, far away from Ukraine, there are other implications – Russia is not isolated globally despite the rhetoric and China is making its calculations about Taiwan. A clash of empires in the South China Seas could more easily turn nuclear than Ukraine. Russia and Europe could be drawn remorselessly into that struggle because of the attitudes being struck now.?