Vladimir Putin, with a sideline in murdering journalists and political opponents is the clear aggressor in Ukraine. China, North Korea and Iran have enabled him with money, weapons and ammunition; they are unmistakably his accomplices. Yet the other side with its American and European backers is guilty as well, even if not as flagrantly.
The conflict dates to 2014 when Russia repossessed the Crimea, which, having for centuries been Russian territory, she considered mislaid. Tolstoy had in 1854- 55 defended it for the Czar as a Russian lieutenant against the UK, France and Turkey. As of the last 2001 official Ukrainian census its population was 60 percent Russian, 24 percent Ukrainian and 10 percent Tatars. Moreover, Ukraine had, except for some months after 1918, never been independent. It had belonged to Lithuania as far back as 1362, and had thereafter been a part of Poland and after 1783 of Russia. It remains however that the seizing of Crimea in 2014 was lawless.
In response to its annexation President Obama brandished sanctions and warned Putin that he would be sorry. He was soon so sorry that he was nibbling on Ukraine’s southeast, the Donbas.
In June 2020 NATO granted Kiev a precondition to membership. In September 2020 President Zelenskyy declared his intention to join. (What would the US have done had Russia or China proposed putting Mexico or any part of Central America under the protection of their militaries?) Putin massed troops on his border on April 2021. On December 17, he demanded that NATO rollback its weapons and military forces. In February 2022 he invaded.
The story of Afghanistan’s 40 million against the fanatic, medieval Taliban unfolded parallel to the struggle of Ukraine’s 38 million people against Russia. There is a connection also with the situation of South Korea seventy years earlier where the US had protected a dirt poor dictatorship against a North Korean tyranny. There, after 50 + years under a 50,000 strong GI umbrella, that now 50 million people country had emerged as a flourishing democracy and a valuable US ally.
In contrast, in February 2020, President Trump agreed to abandon, by May 2021, the hard fought 20 year long, multi-hundred billion dollar Afghan struggle. In September President Biden acceded to and completed that agreement with a hasty and ignominious pullout. It is likely this shameful demonstration of US pusillanimity by Obama, Trump and Biden encouraged Putin to dare his invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian leader for his part erred in three ways. Wrong about a short war, he bit with brittle teeth a Ukraine far tougher than he had imagined. Big as those blunders were they were not the worst. He knew that as a dictator he could not fight a sustained war without wide public support. Even Stalin in WW 2, had ultimately needed to appeal to Mother Russia. Putin too sought a powerful patriotic emotion behind which to rally his public. He realized they do not fear the West, hence he downplayed the NATO provocation, and masked his real geopolitical goals of regaining the territory of the old empire. Instead he chose the single strongest national feeling extant in Russia today. Horror at their neighbor's fascism: he made that his casus belli.
Hitler slaughtered 27 million in the East during WW2. That remains an open wound. Russians were shocked when soon after the USSR’s collapse, several outright fascist parties opened shop in Kiev with millions of Ukrainians joining joyously. What's more many in Ukraine's military revealed a passion for snapping the Hitler salute. They were celebrating their grandfathers who had, half a million strong, fought WW2 in the uniform of the Waffen SS. Several million more as volunteers in the Reich’s factories had helped replace its workers drafted into the Wehrmacht thereby sustaining Speer's economy. Further tens of thousands of Ukrainians had freely served in Nazi construction battalions. Those built the fortifications US GI’s battled on D-day. Granted, other nationalities also enlisted in the Waffen SS and most Ukrainians did remain loyal. Still, very substantial numbers served Hitler and proved to be his most numerous and effective allies.
However quickly that passed from memory in the US, it did not in Russia. There it remains powerful and painful, and explains why a substantial part of Putin’s public has supported his invasion, despite his blunders, despite a declining economy, despite a staggering death toll. Not an independent but a fascist Ukraine offends most Russians. That white hot affront, not the dictator’s ice-cold ambitions sustains the conflict. It is what keeps the war going and what can stop it.
The law, Straffgesetz §86a, of Germany’s Civil Code, has successfully suppressed Germany's radical right since the late 1940s. A similar law with serious jail time passed and diligently enforced could achieve the same result for Ukraine. This would have a good chance of ending the war at small cost and objection from its decent citizens. They would have to prove themselves an honest democracy in any event for EU acceptance. Russia's casus belli would have a clear victory and Putin would have his off ramp. Spurning it would loose him his home support which he cannot afford. He would be check-mated.
Why hasn’t this fair and obvious gambit been recognized and attempted long ago? It is not complicated or costly and is known to the Internet. It sprang to mind in the early month of the invasion and must have occurred to many others as well.
Granted, Ukraine’s Hitler saluting military would dislike it and also many in Kiev's establishment who have a financial or political stake in the war, but neither of those interests could stand up against a US/EU demand: enact and vigorously apply such a law now, or not another bullet, not another dollar/Euro.
Other factors may well explain why this end game has been neglected. Russia remains for many in the West, the enemy. In their view, whatever weakens its army, distorts its economy, humiliates the Kremlin is all to the good. Moreover, for various ammunition and weapon makers the Ukraine is an important market.
Most disappointing is how few mainline papers and pundits have bothered to objectively examine the two sides of the conflict. No media has bothered to lend an op-ed or guest essay to a new stratagem. Across two years Ukraine's unsavory aspects and Russia's justification has been ignored.
Perhaps, for a material hungry media it makes sense to protect and sustain rather than help settle and end an exciting tale of death and destruction where a ferocious villain throttles an innocent victim. Certainly in the past, when the papers liked a war they helped it, and when not, the Washington Post for example, sent a reporter like Thomas E. Ricks ahead before the outcome was clear, to declare it a Fiasco. In short, today's journalism even as it rides up to date electronics and in snappy moral jodhpurs, retains yellow stains under the armpits.
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