Ukrainian Paradox

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin Putin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

-- Princess Leia, updated for 2022

Well, it's official: The Cold War is back. Russia is marching in troops to Ukraine 30 years after the Soviet Union broke up: Intensifying hostilities with a Western Europe sensing Putin's enmity towards NATO, and an Eastern Europe not wanting to fall back under Russian control.

To quote Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (paywalled):

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years.

Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him...

Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists... But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.”

It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”

By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe...

If you follow a lot of foreign policy and intelligence punditry in the U.S. media - I tend to read first from Adam L Silverman at Balloon Juice who's been covering the Russia/Ukraine conflict for years now - you may have noticed a number of observations how Putin was attempting a game of brinkmanship (and failing): Threatening over the past year to escalate the border conflict ongoing since 2014, in order to force concessions from NATO nations that NATO could never fully concede.

The reason NATO could never concede on what Putin wants, was because what Putin wants is total subjugation and submission of Ukraine to Russia's his control. And only Ukraine - their politics, their people - can decide that.

And Ukraine wants nothing to do with Russia. This is from Steven Pifer at Brookings back in 2017:

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine and Russia maintained relations that at times were testy, but their differences largely appeared manageable. That changed in 2014, when the Kremlin used military force to seize Crimea and then supported armed separatism in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. As a result, attitudes within Ukraine toward Russia have hardened to a consider­able degree, and the appeal of Western institutions such as the European Union and NATO has grown...

One result of the ongoing conflict is hardening attitudes among the Ukrainian population toward Russia and Russians. When Ukraine first regained its independence in the early 1990s, some nationalists held sharply anti-Russian views, but they constituted a small minority. The large majority of Ukrainians generally hoped to get along with Russia; many spoke Russian as their first language and had family and/or friends in Russia.

Russia’s aggression changed that dramatically. Since 2014, a Ukrainian national iden­tity has taken hold. It includes a strong anti-Russian animus. In an April 2017 public opinion survey conducted by Rating Group Ukraine, 57 percent of Ukrainians polled ex­pressed a very cold or cold attitude toward Russia, as opposed to only 17 percent who expressed a very warm or warm attitude...

Those opinions in favor of NATO and the EU have only grown since then: in 2019 they added a constitutional amendment seeking eventual membership in NATO. Today, a solid majority of Ukrainians want NATO and EU membership in direct spite of Russia's growing hostility over that.

Pifer is only noting the current animus between the two bordering nations. A deeper look into history shows a harsh, often violent connection between Russia and Ukraine that underscores a lot of bad blood. Caught between the imperial rises and falls of neighboring Poland and Russia - from the 1600s until the rise of the Soviet Union in the 1920s - Ukrainians became second-class citizens in their own region. Treatment under the Soviets was no better: Between 1932 to 1933 Stalin's regime starved out the population with famine, an act of genocide leading to the deaths of about 3 million people. It's the sort of thing Ukrainians can't ignore or forgive.

And yet here comes Putin, claiming - like most other Russians will - that Ukrainians and Russians are the same ethnicity, the same people: Even though he'll more than likely resume treating Ukrainians as second-class citizens the way they were treated for centuries by Russians.

If we refer to a relationship metaphor: It's like Russia is the drunken abusive boyfriend to Ukraine, who has had to put up with decades if not centuries of emotional abuse, gaslighting, insults, and the occasional beating from a Russia that doesn't understand why Ukraine doesn't love them as much as they should.

(How do you say "Why do you make me keep hitting you, sweetie" in Russian? Also "The beatings will continue until morale improves" would work here...)

Hence the paradox the world faces today.

Russia (Putin) doesn't want Ukraine to go running off to another European alliance like NATO or the EU, but they can't offer anything to Ukraine that would honestly entice Ukrainians to take Russia back as a political/economic partner. So instead, Russia (Putin) will try to "encourage" their relationship by force, not caring that such bullying behavior will only drive Ukrainians more towards joining Western Europe against Russia.

Ukraine is never going to give in to Russia's demands here, they will not agree to any deal absolutely barring them from even thinking about joining NATO. They dare not. Even the mere threat of joining NATO is the only leverage Ukraine has against outright invasion and occupation. Paradox: Every move Russia makes to stop Ukraine from joining NATO only pushes Ukraine further towards joining NATO.

And yet, when you look at it from Russia's perspective - and you do have to give them some sympathy here - the possibility of having a Western-oriented military alliance physically on their border if Ukraine joins NATO would be a straight-up threat to national security. Their own history of invasion and occupation - from Mongols to the East, Napoleon and Hitler from the West - has helped make the Russians a little paranoid about their safety. Being in an ideological Cold War vs. the United States and the West for most of the 20th Century hadn't improved things.

There has always been cultural and political differences between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Whereas Russia prides itself on being more European than Asian - being one of the nations to straddle those two continents - there are still Western cultural norms that aren't normal to them, which keeps them wary and feeling unwelcome. Their history of corruption and human rights abuses doesn't endear them much in Western eyes as well. 

So to the Russians, having some kind of geographical barrier between them and the West makes some kind of twisted sense. In the post-World War era, that meant occupying Eastern Europe to forge a Warsaw Pact to divide Europe against itself for 40 more years. Today, it means trying to undermine democratic institutions across all of Europe to break up NATO and bring nations like Ukraine and Poland back under Russian influence.

And yet, the more Putin and Russia does all this, the more this will drive Ukraine further into siding with the West and guarantee a NATO agreement that would fulfill Putin's darkest fears. It's also forcing NATO members to reaffirm their agreement and support for each other, meaning Putin's efforts to break it up is going for naught.

Everything going on right now as Putin sends more troops closer to Kyiv and closer to outright war with Ukraine is a downward spiral that neither side can stop. Ukraine can't because their very existence as a nation and as a people are under direct threat. Putin and Russia can't because they dare not leave themselves vulnerable to a Western Europe that would challenge their corruption and abuse. NATO and the United States can't stop because Putin threatens our economic integrity (yes, we have some at least compared to him) and our own political/cultural institutions.

The one who COULD stop all of this is Putin. He's the one really triggering all of this and pushing it all into a downward spiral of conflict. But he won't. He's fully committed to this agenda, if he stops himself he will become weak to his own corrupt allies, so he will keep forging ahead until either Ukraine falls completely or Russia collapses from its own failings.

Until then, all the rest of the world can do is push back as best they can, avoiding outright war if we can.

Because THAT kind of war can spiral well out of control and turn the whole Earth to ash.

Gods help us.