It is too early to say we are seeing the beginning of World War III, of an international catastrophe whose consequences no one can foresee, or that the current crisis will end in the way that Vladimir Putin successfully gobbled up Crimea in August 2014 after the sanctions imposed by Barack Obama and NATO countries on Russia.
That battle ended by late November of that year, when Moscow demanded the lifting of sanctions, promising to end the ban it had imposed on food imports from the West, while Crimea remained under the new Tsar’s control.
Of course, talk of the outcomes that could impose themselves on the Ukrainian scene where Putin has taken his latest steps to achieve his goals and ambitions. He has been working to rebuild the Russian Empire piece by piece, strengthening Russia’s position by adding the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk, perhaps Ukraine as a whole as well, to the list of so-called independent states that are recognized only by Russia, like those in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.
At the time of writing, it seems unlikely that the United States and NATO will opt for military conflict, which would lead to an international catastrophe. Since Thursday at dawn, the question on the peoples of the world’s minds has been: “Is this World War III?” While the Western countries were preparing to hold a meeting to discuss their response on Thursday afternoon, Moscow was announcing that its forces were bombing Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
In any case, matters were clear before Putin’s lengthy speech last Monday, which he gave after having massed over 150,000 troops on the border with Ukraine and 50,000 on the border between Belarus, which is under his control, and Ukraine.
Very shortly before the speech, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that a summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin had been arranged, which Moscow said it had been in no hurry for, revealing the Kremlin’s intention to intervene to protect the separatist provinces in Eastern Ukraine from Kyiv’s hegemony.
Putin critics swiftly reminded us that in March 1938, Germany had made a similar argument when it laid claim to Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia under the pretext of protecting the Sudeten Germans there. Just as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier had, at the time, bowed to Germany’s demand “to achieve peace,” the West may now do nothing but impose harsh sanctions on Russia. We are in the nuclear age, and with a man like Putin, it is not clear how any of these wars will end.
Before his long speech last Monday, Russian television broadcasters showed practical evidence that Putin, as Western experts have unanimously agreed, is a leader who has tasked himself with building Russia’s future on the foundations of its imperial past. When this empire collapsed like a car being scrapped, he was left with deep scars that he discusses regularly.
The broadcast that preceded his speech was a show of strength that raised eyebrows around the world. He sat at a massive table, alone, in the middle of an opulent hall and began posing questions to the senior Russian security officials, who took turns standing behind a small podium. It looked like they were being quizzed on the decision to invade Ukraine, with Putin asking Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin: do you propose that we start a negotiation process or recognize the sovereignty of the separatist republics of Luhansk and Donetsk? After Naryshkin gave a stammered response, Putin scolded him: Speak clearly! “I will support the proposal,” the former replied. Putin then yelled furiously: I will support, or I do support... Yes or no?
Putin delivered his lengthy speech after this encounter. In it, the Russian President refutes the historical legitimacy of Ukraine’s existence as an independent state, claims its territory is Russian land and that the country was created by Bolshevik and communist Russia, and accuses NATO of seeking to turn the country into a springboard from which to attack Russia and undermine the two republics in the Donbas.
After he then went on to issue a transparent threat directed at the United States and NATO, telling them: “We are ready to show you what real decommunization means for Ukraine,” it became obvious that he had decided to enter Ukraine, whose people he believes are one with the Russians despite living in two different countries, a conviction that mirrors how Hafez al-Assad saw Syria and Lebanon.
Thus, it was not shocking to see Putin announce the invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, saying he had decided on a special military operation without discussing the scope of his invasion. “We seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine,” he promised during his announcement, planning to bring those who had committed a plethora of crimes and are responsible for the bloodshed to court.
However, after what happened in Georgia and Crimea and years of his policy of shipping away at his neighbor’s territory to re-establish the Russian Empire, who believes Putin when he says: “Our plans are not to occupy Ukraine, we do not plan to impose ourselves on anyone” as Kyiv is bombarded by Russian forces?
He did not hesitate to belittle the United States and the 27 Western countries that makeup NATO either. “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history.”
He did and said all of this as Western continued to slap new sanctions, which Washington had always said would be very painful and should remind Putin of what Barack Obama said in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy almost brought it to a halt. Especially worrying is the fact that these sanctions may hit Russian MPs, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and even Putin, whose fortune is said to be more than $200 billion, himself.
After the annexation of Crimea, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “Putin has lost touch with reality... He is in another world.”
As for Philosophie Magazine Editor in Chief Michel Eltchaninoff, he wrote at the time that a mix of rationality and total insularity shapes his relationship with reality. Putin, he wrote, had to an extent lost touch with reality in the name of his paranoid ideology.
“We have always said that he is a pragmatic leader. Will he sacrifice his pragmatism in the name of his ideology? This is possible, and, in any case, he seems ready to wage war.”
