WHO’S DELUSIONAL?

People in the west are suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “delusional.” His attack on Ukraine is called “irrational” and “shocking.” What could he possibly be thinking?

We find Putin’s actions shocking only if we fail to understand that Russian leaders are not bound by western scruples. There is no sense of fair play in Russian domestic or international politics. Everything is about gaining and using advantage. Putin has nothing but ruthless, self-serving cynicism where his scruples should be. If that were not true, he would not be in power in Russia.

Once we understand Putin’s nature, the logic of his actions becomes very clear. He can’t tolerate a free democracy on Russia’s border demonstrating to the Russian people what they too could have if they decided to get out from under his thumb. Besides, Ukraine has abundant mineral resources, prime agricultural land, a long and beautiful Black Sea coast with major ports – not to mention land access to Crimea, the peninsula Russia stole from it just seven years ago. Putin has also repeatedly lamented the demise of the Soviet empire, so there is a purely nationalistic motive in addition to all his practical reasons to reconquer Ukraine. In sum, Putin resents Ukraine, wants what Ukraine has, and fears what Ukraine represents.

You didn’t have to be an intelligence analyst to see this attack coming. You only had to pay attention to Putin’s words and actions for the past two decades. Throughout his time in power, he has laid the groundwork for this attack in plain view, with clumsy propaganda and disinformation campaigns and less-than-stealthy military moves.

A BBC article asks, “Is this a new Cold War?” The answer is no, not only because it is obviously a hot war, but also because the old Cold War never really ended in Putin’s mind. The west may have beaten its swords into plowshares in the 1990s in the hope of reaping a “peace dividend”, but Russia (and China and others) have been aggressively making up ground on the economic, strategic and political fronts.

Call him delusional if you will, but Putin is clear-eyed enough to see that the west has become decadent, soft and divided. While western society has been warring with itself over pronouns, deriding its founders, self-flagellating over its history, and adopting an “everyone should get a trophy” mentality, Russia has been playing to win and building toward this day – nurturing western dependence on its oil and gas, expanding its harem of client states, building and testing its cyber warfare capabilities, and so forth. The west has allowed all this to happen. Now Putin is turning his Cold War hot, and the west poses no deterrent.

What is truly delusional and shocking is the response of western leaders. How could they not have expected this? After Putin annexed Crimea, sent little green men into the Donbas and stationed troops in Belarus within easy striking distance of Kyiv, did anyone seriously think he was finished?

Even now that Russia has launched a full-blown assault on Ukraine, western leaders still don’t get it. ?As Russia was ramping up its attack, Antonio Gutteres, Secretary General of the United Nations, responded with a Beatles lyric, imploring Putin to “Give peace a chance.” It would be hilarious if it weren’t so embarrassingly puerile and pathetic.

The same day, when asked about Russia’s use of force and disregard for international law, former US Secretary of State John Kerry said he “thought we lived in a world that had said no to that kind of activity,” before pivoting to his concern over the “massive emissions consequences to the war” and stating, “I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.” Even with the death toll mounting in Ukraine, Kerry’s attention is clearly elsewhere.

Politicians throughout the West proclaim that they “stand with Ukraine.” Nice words, accompanied by a few piddling sanctions against a handful of Russian individuals, and the merest dribble of material support to Ukrainian defence forces. Much more must be done to weaken the Russian aggressor. The west’s policy of selective engagement, appeasement and accommodation should have ended long ago, and it would be inexcusable to continue it now that Russian rockets are raining down on Ukraine. NATO and the entire community of free democratic nations should undermine Putin by every means at our disposal. We should close our airports and seaports to Russian traffic. We should provide both covert and overt support not only to the resistance in Ukraine but also to dissidents in Russia. And we should stop allowing Russian oligarchs to stash their filthy lucre in western banks and send their children to our superior western universities.

In the medium term, like it or not, we must spend more money and strengthen cooperation to significantly increase our hard military capabilities and to secure ourselves against cyber attacks. And we should make every effort to bring Sweden and Finland into the NATO family.

Perhaps most important and most difficult of all, western Europe must stop financing the enemy by buying Russian oil and gas. Energy-producing allies of France and Germany, such as Canada, can step into the breach. Limiting the flow of Russian oil and gas will certainly drive world prices up, but it is ironic, not to say hypocritical, for western leaders to wring their hands about rising fuel costs while they support carbon taxes, the effectiveness of which is based entirely on the fact that they increase fuel costs. If they feel that sanctions against Russia’s oil and gas sector would drive costs up too high too fast, they can mitigate the pain by rolling back carbon taxes, excise taxes and the host of other taxes that make up half the retail price of gasoline, at least here in Canada. The loss of government revenues would be largely or wholly offset by increased royalties on the larger quantity of higher-priced domestic oil and gas that would be sold. It would be insanity to continue the march toward phasing out Canada’s fossil fuel sector by deliberately increasing fuel prices, while simultaneously sustaining Russia’s fossil fuel sector to avoid increased fuel prices.

In sum, the west should be pulling out all the stops to undermine and isolate Russia, to make it a pariah state. The west must reassert the ethos that made it great in the first place, and restore its will to compete and win. If Russia’s attack on Ukraine doesn’t awaken us to this necessity, God help us all.