I was completely wrong when I opined on February 9 that the Russians would not invade Ukraine. I mistakenly took them for more rational than they turned out to be. Mea maxima culpa. For the rest, I was not mistaken at all when I enumerated the reasons that militated against a martial adventure. The course the war took shows that the Russian leadership neglected them or, what is worse, does not read the Telos blog. Here are some obstacles to a successful operation I indicated and the consequences we can see today.
With the exception of the inhabitants of the separatist regions, no one greeted the Russians as liberators. The invaders crossed the border at provinces with a sizable Russian population, at regions where a significant proportion of people claim Russian as their mother tongue, no matter the ethnic group their ancestry happened to belong to. At the 2019 elections, all these regions voted overwhelmingly for current president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish origin, not necessarily an advantage in Eastern Europe. The comedian-turned-war-leader won more than 73 percent of the voices against his rival, billionaire and outgoing president Petro Poroshenko, who can boast Ukrainian forefathers. The Kremlin bosses apparently believed that only ethnic, religious, and linguistic affinities define political allegiances in Ukraine, or they simply did not take the trouble to have a look at the relevant statistics.
Manifestly, warlord Putin and his underlings hoped that Ukrainian politicians were going to vie with each other for the honor of serving as the head and the members of a collaborationist government. To no avail. Shortly after the attack, Putin launched an appeal to the Ukrainian military and its high brass and urged them to topple Zelensky’s government. Not even a private has volunteered so far. The Ukrainian army is heavily outgunned, but it managed to brake Putin’s blitzkrieg. It has hardly any chance to win the war. However, its bold resistance scored a moral victory in a couple of days.
Putin carefully refrains from addressing the Ukrainian people. Maybe he would sound credible if he could raise miserable living standards, finish with the rule of corrupt oligarchs and their protégés among politicians and in officialdom, and open brighter perspectives than the present regime. All things he does not do at home. Why would he or his eventual puppets do them in Ukraine?
We should not forget that the corruption amongst the Ukrainian dignitaries successfully competes with that of their Russian counterparts. For instance, bribes are often required by officials and employees of the law enforcement agencies, the courts, the healthcare system, and in academia. In the political sphere, parliamentary groups buy members, deputies sell votes, oligarchs set up patronage networks, and highly placed officeholders trade favors and strike shady deals with solvent individuals and coteries.[*] Our sympathy with the plight of the people of Ukraine and our admiration for their courage should not mean unconditional endorsement of the Ukrainian regime, which is manipulated by an unscrupulous elite. And the censure of the latter should not be confounded with the justification of the Russian aggression.
* About endemic corruption in Ukraine, see, e.g., Réduction de la grande corruption en Ukraine: des résultats encore insuffisants malgré plusieurs initiatives de l’UE, Cour des comptes de l’Union européenne, 2021; Anders Aslund, Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How To Fix It (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2015); Erik S. Herron, Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2020); Oksana Huss, How Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policies Sustain Hybrid Regimes: Strategies of Political Domination Under Ukraine’s Presidents in 1994–2014 (Stuttgart: ibidem Verlag, 2020); Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2015); Eduard Klein, Bildungskorruption in Russland und der Ukraine (Stuttgart: ibidem Verlag, 2020); Henry E. Hale et al., eds., Beyond the Euromaidan: Comparative Perspectives on Advancing Reform in Ukraine (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, 2017); Oleg Reznik et al., Political Corruption in Ukraine (GlobeEdit, 2018).
Mr. Rittersporn:
Way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s you wrote some articles for Telos which seemed to imply that at that time that you represented some type of Left populist current in the then Soviet Union/Russia transition period.
In “Reforming the Soviet System,” (Telos, Spring, 1989) you stated: “Nothing suggests that reform politicians want more than a regulation of the workings of the administration and a greater credibility for officeholders…they are supposed to act under the supervision of an apparatus whose prerogatives remain unaffected.”
Taken your sensitivity then to the internal structure of power within the former Soviet Union (and I assume a similar sensitivity to the Putin apparatus today) does the Putin decision to invade Ukraine mark the potential beginning of the end to his regime? Has he put key pillars of his regime (like internal security) at risk? How likely is it that any leader which follows him will be even worse?
A cautionary tale. When dictators tell you exactly and repeatedly what they will do as part of Ihrem Kampf, believe them.
Gabor, I think you’re missing the point: For Putin, its strictly business, not personal.
Stopped reading at the line “warlord Putin and his underlings”. Anyone resorting to snark that early isn’t being serious. If you were being serious, then you were intent on writing a propaganda paean. No one in this world is pure or clean, morally or politically. Every government is criminal: Russia, Ukraine, and every member of NATO. If you can’t speak outside the Pablum of the anti-Russian Western criminal gangs, about the real forces at play in power politics governing the Russian and Ukrainian mafias, you shouldn’t bother.