Sleepwalking into World War III
The West is flirting with its doom, and everyone seems to be fine with it
In light of recent developments in the Russo-Ukraine War, it seems that the West and Russia are closer to a nuclear conflict than ever before. One would think that there would be widespread popular demand for a peaceful resolution. Yet if you look at the media and political landscape, it feels like everyone in the West is a neocon bent on delivering a crushing defeat to Mr. Putin. For many, the only way out of this war is for Russia to give up and pull out…or else! Anyone who proposes a peaceful way out or points out the missteps of NATO, the United States, or Ukraine is accused of falling for Russian propaganda or being a shill for Putin
This a is recipe for disaster and ignores some ancient bits of wisdom recorded by Sun Tzu in The Art of War:
The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.
In order to reach geopolitical goals with as little fighting as possible, we need to know the enemy as he is, not as how we want him to be, and to know ourselves. In the case of the Russian-Ukraine conflict, that involves trying to understand the motives of Russia, whether justified or not, and acknowledging the weaknesses and even the transgressions of NATO, the United States, and Ukraine.
There is propaganda from both sides, making it incredibly difficult to know what is actually going on in this conflict. I am willing to admit error in light of this. However, even though I am not a foreign policy expert, I feel I have a vested interest in avoiding nuclear holocaust, and therefore feel entitled to express my view of the situation. Again, if there are inaccuracies, I am more than willing to correct them and alter my opinion. I also acknowledge that the details of this conflict could fill volumes. In this summary, I try to cover some main points in a neutral manner, but I can’t include everything.
Two sources of information have proven valuable in trying to follow the wisdom of Sun Tzu. One is Benjamin Abelow’s long read about how the West brought war to Ukraine (I encourage readers to also go through the comments on his Medium article as there are some good rebuttals). Another is Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer and colonel in the Swiss Army who has been dubbed by French-speaking media as “the spy who loved Putin.” Mr. Baud’s extensive credentials and experience are impressive, and include work with NATO and Ukraine. His interviews and writings are primarily in French, but translations are available here. Baud is incredibly knowledgeable of the situation and tries to cut through propagandist narratives in order to understand all sides of the conflict.
Understanding the Past: Ukraine and Russia
Behind every conflict is a long, complicated, and messy history. It is impossible to go through the entire history of Russia and Ukraine and come out with all the answers to questions of sovereignty and legitimacy. History is rife with rebellion, slavery, despotism, and conquest, and the history of Russia and Ukraine is no different.
Perhaps what is relevant to understand is that most of Ukraine has been subject to Russian rule for hundreds of years, starting under the Russian Empire in the 18th century, then eventually under the Soviet Union. During much of that time, Ukrainians were relegated to serfdom. Perhaps the most tragic period in Ukrainian history was in 1932-1933 during the Holodomor, an artificial famine created by the enlightened communist planners of the Soviet Union. Millions of people starved to death as they worked their land and were forced to watch all their food get shipped to cities.
During World War II, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians, such as those in Kharkov, saw the Nazi invasion as a liberation from the Soviets. Anti-semitic ultra-nationalists such as Stepan Bandera saw the invasion as an opportunity to organize an independent, fascist Ukrainian state, but they ultimately failed. Remnants of these ultra-nationalist factions survive today and form a small but not insignificant coalition in modern Ukrainian politics. Outside of the ultra-nationalists, a strong national sentiment exists among the people as a consequence of years of oppressive Russian rule.
The Nazi invasion was one of the deadliest campaigns in world history. An accurate death count is difficult to obtain, but an estimated 25 million Soviets perished in the invasion, including Vladimir Putin’s older brother, who as a young child starved during the Siege of Leningrad. 130 years earlier, Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. These events are key in understanding Russia’s modern foreign policy. The Russians know that Western European regimes may some day try to invade their country and slaughter their people as they have in the past, and the protection from such invasions is of paramount importance. Since Ukraine and Belarus occupy a large amount of territory that separates Moscow from the rest of mainland Europe, these countries form an integral part of Russia’s defense strategy against future invasions from Western Europe.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many in the Western world and in the former USSR looked forward to enhanced freedom and peaceful commercial opportunities in Eastern Europe. This occurred in some former Soviet bloc countries such as Estonia and Georgia. In Ukraine and Russia, however, western corporations congratulated the most successful peaceful revolutionaries in history by plundering their lands. In her 1999 congressional testimony, Anne Williamson laid out how the United States, with the help of meddling Harvard economists, helped turn Ukraine and Russia into oligarchies. Private companies were able to take over publicly owned corporations, after which currency manipulation depleted the savings of the average person, causing a large portion of the wealth from Ukraine and Russia to fall into the hands of a few. Life expectancy in Ukraine plummeted after the switch to “capitalism”, and the new oligarchs started pulling levers in government to benefit themselves. The result was widespread corruption in Ukrainian and Russian politics. Both countries consistently rank among the most corrupt in Europe.
Looking in the Mirror: The West and the United States
Since World War II, the relationship between the West and Moscow has been strained. In 1949, the United States and many Western European countries formed NATO, a military alliance meant to combat the growing nuclear threat of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR, western leaders offered assurances to Moscow that NATO would not expand eastward. Though these assurances were not formalized into official treaties, they signaled to Moscow that there was no need for the new government to fear a military threat from the West.
Unfortunately, neoconservatives in the U.S. government had no intention of scaling back on America’s quest for dominance. NATO has added 14 members since the end of the Cold War, including some which share a border with Russia and absolutely despise Russians. The United States also pulled out of multiple treaties that were originally crafted to maintain peace between Moscow and the West.
If we look at the other wars carried out by the US and its allies over the past several decades, we can see what the game plan is of those in power. Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lybia, and Yemen have served to destabilize oil-rich regions while simultaneously increasing America’s control over those parts of the world. Those in the military industrial complex have sought to enrich themselves by lobbying for endless wars. Intelligence and security agencies and their media shills have lied incessantly over the past couple decades about the need to go to war and the success of America in “spreading democracy” as it bombed third world countries back to the Stone Age.
The goal of the neocons is simple: global unipolar hegemony. U.S. policy is focused on policing the world and sowing chaos in order to weaken threats to its global power and strengthen allies who will put America’s interests ahead of their own. This has sometimes been accomplished with the help of NGO’s like the National Endowment for Democracy, which trains activists to protest and push for government reform. In Eastern Europe, color revolutions broke out between 2000 and 2014, likely with the aid of these NGO’s and the US government. Influential neoconservative bureaucrats and politicians have masterfully maintained their positions of power for several years. They continuously succeed in implementing their interventionist schemes, while the defense contractors lick their lips watching taxpayer dollars get funneled in their direction.
Though other power players like China and Russia have expansionist goals for the 21st century, their actions have paled in comparison to the death and destruction brought about by the United States and its allies. Millions of people have been killed over the past 30 years as a result of America’s military interventions, almost all of which have resulted in billions of dollars of wasteful spending as well as exacerbated political instability in the targeted regions.
The Russo-Ukraine War
Though we may be inclined to think that the war in Ukraine kicked off with the Russian invasion in February 2022, the war has actually been going on since 2014.
Political tensions had been on the rise in prior years. Leading up to the 2004 presidential election, the president at the time, Leonid Kuchma, was accused of corruption. After a controversial contest in the 2004 presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych had apparently won, though the electoral process was heavily criticized as being corrupted. Protests erupted in what became known as the “Orange Revolution,” a U.S. supported operation similar to other color revolutions in Eastern Europe. The peaceful revolution succeeded when the results were annulled and Yanukovych’s rival, Viktor Yushchenko, ascended to the presidency.
Like Kuchma, Yushchenko’s presidency was plagued with corruption, and in 2010, Yanukovych narrowly won the presidency in what various international organizations deemed a fair and legitimate election.
The voting pattern in the country is consistently split between East and West. Ukrainian speakers in the West tend to want better relations with the EU and the U.S., while the Russian speaking East tends to favor strong relations with Russia. Yanukovych‘s victory was carried by strong support in the Russian speaking population. Like any Ukrainian politician, his administration was marred by corruption, and there was concern in the West that the new president would focus on strengthening ties with Russia.
In 2013, Yanukovych‘s government came close to signing an association agreement with the EU, a deal that would allow more open trade between Ukraine and Western Europe. Putin’s government saw the EU deal as problematic. European goods could easily flow from Ukraine to Russia due to the Customs Union between the two countries, but Russian goods would not be able to be traded as freely to Europe. Some Russian leaders worried that this one-way trading valve could flood Russian markets and hurt the industries of their constituents. Putin then put pressure on Yanukovych to not go through with the EU agreement.
Yanukovych knew that trade with Russia was especially beneficial for the Russian speaking constituents who put him in office and who already worked closely with Russian industries. Even though the Ukrainian Parliament had already approved the EU deal, Yanukovych decided to postpone signing it.
In response, a peaceful opposition movement developed in and around Kiev. Many people were thoroughly fed up with the corrupt Yanukovych and demanded change. However, the protests took a violent turn when ultra-nationalist activists arrived from Galicia. What started as a peaceful call for change turned into a violent coup. Yanukovych fled to Russia just before rioters seized his residence.
By the time the Maidan Revolution ended, a new, unelected government was in power, and one of the first pieces of legislation was to undo a 2012 piece of legislation making Russian an official language. Counter protests erupted throughout Russian-speaking Ukraine and were sometimes met with lethal opposition. In the Russian speaking Donbass region, protestors took over local government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk and demanded recognition as autonomous republics. The new regime in Kiev denounced the “Rebels” and confronted them with military might.
It’s difficult to know how much the United States played a role in overthrowing Yanukovych, but it is clear that well connected NGO’s and officials in the Obama Administration played an important part in the Maidan Revolution. Any doubt of U.S. involvement was cast aside when the infamous conversation between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt leaked to the public, and additional information is still coming forth about what really happened during Maidan. Though the Russians may have overblown claims of a Western-backed coup, Putin saw that the new Western-supported regime posed a potential concern for Russia’s national security. He responded by supporting rebels in the east and eventually annexed Crimea after the Crimean public voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.
The civil war has been going on ever since, with NATO providing support for the Ukrainian army while Russia has provided support for the separatists. Much of the fighting took place until 2015 when the Minsk 2 agreements were put in place, but some fighting has still persisted. Because the regular Ukrainian army has had trouble retaining soldiers, the government has relied on aggressive paramilitary units who have engaged in atrocious behavior against the “traitors”.
In the six years prior to Russia’s invasion, fighting was not as severe as it was in 2014 and 2015. However, Ukraine consistently violated the Minsk agreements with Western backing. In 2021, President Zelensky proclaimed Ukraine’s intention to recapture Crimea, a region Russia considered its own territory. NATO also carried out exercises near Russia’s border, and Russia carried out its own border exercises in October and November. Throughout 2021, Zelensky pushed for Ukraine’s membership in NATO. On February 11, President Biden declared that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, even though we aren’t sure how he had received that intelligence. Five days later, Ukraine began ramping up artillery attacks in the Donbass region. The separatist republics asked for Russia’s help, and Putin decided to intervene with an invasion.
While we can and ought to condemn Putin’s invasion, Jacques Baud points out that there are causes for Russia’s actions that the West has refused to acknowledge:
on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO;
on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
Getting to Know Putin and the Russian Strategy
Western media has concocted several wild theories for Putin’s actions. The normally cool, calculated president was suddenly a madman, isolated for too long during COVID and emerging from the pandemic with a Hitler-esque obsession to obtain more Lebensraum for the Russian people. However, if we are to follow Sun Tzu’s advice to “know the enemy”, we need to ignore the pundits, listen to Putin’s words, and compare those words with his actions. Of course, encouraging everyone to listen to Putin will be met with taunting and accusations of naïveté.
But we don’t need to believe what he says. We need to listen to his stated intentions and then compare them with his actions. As it turns out, this is generally how you determine if someone was telling the truth.
The media pundits who imagine a maniacal dictator bent on world domination, or who imagine that Aleksandr Dugin is the mastermind behind Putin’s actions, see the Russian advance on Kiev as a failure. However, Putin stated in February that Russia’s intention was “demilitarization and denazification.” Viewed through this lens, we can see that Putin has generally tried to keep to this strategy. The goal was never to take Kiev or even to topple Zelensky, but to “demilitarize,” draw troops away from the regions of conflict in Eastern Ukraine, destroy military sites, and force a negotiation. “Denazification” is directed at engaging with the violent paramilitary units, which have a reputation for espousing ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist ideologies.
Trying to understand Putin’s brutal actions does not mean trying to justify them. If Ukrainians want to come out on top, and if Western governments wants to avoid a nuclear holocaust, they need to understand the Russian strategy so that they do not risk further escalation.
Support Your Local Comedian: Zelensky
Finally, it’s important to understand what is going on with Ukrainian politics. Remember, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. It is essentially ruled by oligarchs, and since 2014, violent ultra-nationalists have played a small but not insignificant role in the Ukrainian government.
The current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, won the election in 2019 with support from the East and West for his promises to negotiate and promote peace. For a while, he seemed to be devoted to this path. Though he has made multiple attempts at negotiation, violent political factions have threatened him with death if he does not pursue an aggressive policy with Russia.
Like his predecessors, Zelensky is up to his eyeballs in corruption. The leaked documents in the Pandora Papers revealed offshore accounts in his name, and he has close connections with one of Ukraine’s most corrupt oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky. After the Russian invasion, the president banned several opposition parties, including the second largest political party in Ukraine, and kidnapped their leaders.
As a famous entertainer in his home country, Zelensky is very familiar with the power of the media. He hired a PR firm in Washington to help boost his image and promote the Ukrainian war effort throughout the world.
The West’s support for Ukraine has emboldened Zelensky to make audacious demands from the military alliance to which his country does not even belong. The United States and other European countries have already devoted billions of dollars to support Ukraine, yet the country continuously demands more and more from its willing sponsors.
With all this in mind, it’s not hard to see that Zelensky has little to personally gain from a peace deal with Russia. He is praised and worshiped throughout the West as standing up to Russian aggression. His country is receiving billions of dollars, some of which will inevitably end up in his pockets. And to top it all off, he could likely get assassinated even if he tried, so what’s the point?
Bringing it All Together
The situation is far from being black and white. There are several truths about this war that seem to contradict each other, making the whole thing a gray, muddled mess:
The U.S. has supported two color revolutions in Ukraine since 2004.
There is a strong national sentiment among the Ukrainian people.
Ukraine is ruled by a corrupt kleptocracy that has been massacring Eastern Ukrainians since 2014.
Russia has legitimate security concerns.
Russia’s actions are not moral
If we want to bring this war to an end, it is important to understand its origins, as well as the tactics and plans of all the players involved. The EU, the Obama administration, the Kremlin, violent ultra-nationalists, the Kiev regime, Russian-speaking separatists, and NATO, among others, have played significant roles in escalating the conflict into what it is today. Though the Ukrainian people are at the center of the conflict, the war is essentially a power struggle between the United States and Russia.
As such, the war can quickly be brought to an end if the United States actively pushes for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. A deal may look similar to what Elon Musk proposed not that long ago on Twitter.
Pushing for peace will be met with heavy criticism, as Mr. Musk found out. War is the health of the State, and the State will use all its powers to ensure that war continues. We cannot say things like, “The war can end as soon as our enemy surrenders!” and expect to avoid further escalation. Realistically, if we want the war to end, the West has to accept that Russia is going to keep Crimea, and the international community must recognize and respect the will of the people in Eastern Ukraine. We can lecture all we want about how Russia needs to be brought to justice, but in an imperfect, unjust world, we have to realize that peace is the ultimate goal. Justice is of course a worthy goal too, but it is not possible to right every wrong that has ever been committed and ignore the costs of doing so. Many Westerners are dead set on not letting Putin get away with his actions, even if it would mean the deaths of thousands of people along the way.
And who would bring Putin to justice anyway? Will it be the United States, the same government that has gotten away with killing millions of people in its foreign interventions? And why are Western governments not condemning Saudi Arabia for its atrocities in Yemen with the same vigor that they condemn Putin? And why have we not mourned the deaths of Eastern Ukrainians by the Kiev regime in the same way we mourn the plight of those who have suffered during Russia’s invasion?
The pursuit of peace in an imperfect world is not the pursuit of righting every wrong. It is the pursuit of understanding, negotiation, exchange, and compromise. Peace cannot be acquired through stubbornness and refusal. It comes by extending the olive branch, by understanding the motives of the opponent, and most importantly, by acknowledging one’s own past transgressions.
Some other useful links:
Ukraine in Conflict, a book by David Marples.
Oliver Stone‘s documentary Ukraine on Fire
The Fog of Information War in Ukraine by Pedro Gonzalez