IBSPECIAL

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has no parallel in the post-World War II era. This is no military adventure of a mighty power bulldozing in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. It is that, and much more. This is an invasion that has brought us close to a nuclear disaster, made us fear the possibility of a third world war, and has the potential to beget more wars.

The pounding of Ukrainian cities and towns, brutal in every aspect, has been watched by the strongest nation in the world and by its powerful European allies. Watched with hands tied behind their backs, as civilians have been killed, buildings pulverised, and more than 3.6 million Ukrainians forced to flee to neighbouring countries. No sending of boots on the ground, no enforcement of a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The reason? Fear of the conflict escalating into a third world war.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin promises to attack with more cruelty and let loose more blood in Ukraine, the mighty friends of this war-ravaged nation have refused to directly join the battleground. Yes, the US and the European nations have imposed unprecedented sanctions to cripple Putin, his oligarchs and the Russian economy. Yes, they are helping Ukraine with monetary assistance and arms. But the grim reality is that the Ukrainians are being left alone to defend their state against an enemy who is determined to win the war at any cost of devastation.

Soon after the Russian invasion, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made this appeal in a midnight video address: “Who is ready to fight alongside us? I don’t see anyone. Who is ready to give Ukraine a guarantee of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) membership? Everyone is afraid.”

The fear that any direct confrontation with Russia could lead to World War III has remained with the Americans and the Europeans, a month after experiencing the horrors of the assault on Ukraine from land, sea and air. This has put them under military restraint and a cautious approach has also been adopted due to fear of Putin going nuclear if the West intervened to thwart his invasion.

Chilling reality, isn’t it? The world watches Ukraine resisting the attacks alone, bloodied every day, bombed and ruined, the infrastructure built over decades gone, their homes destroyed. The US and European countries of NATO, proclaimers of democracy, can’t send in troops to save this spirited nation from losing its freedom and democracy as there is risk of the other side going nuclear. For how long can Ukraine survive this way? How long can the soul of the free world be protected this way? When will Putin win or lose?

Putin, who was born a decade after the Leningrad siege which unleashed human catastrophe for the Russians, has won all the wars so far while killing any kind of democratic movement at home. Disturbed by the declining power of Russia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he has carried forward a winning technique learnt from his days as a small boy: hit first and keep hitting so that the others would fear you.

As he has set upon himself the ambition of getting back the lost glory of Russia, he has scared the US and the top-tier European nations despite having an economic size smaller than theirs. In Chechen, he showed what he could do a month after he became prime minister. He did that in Georgia eight years later, in 2008. Then six years on, he annexed Crimea from Ukraine. And now, again after eight years, it is the whole of Ukraine that has come under his brutal attack.

We have reached a turning point in history. Putin has shown that the post-second world war order cannot survive any longer. The war in Ukraine has brought to surface the many contradictions that have plagued the world. Democracies have weakened, populist dictatorial regimes have grown, societies have become polarised and income gaps have widened. Isolated by the coronavirus for two years, Putin has obsessed himself with Russia's past while his oligarch friends have accumulated more money. During this period of Covid-19, the power handles against the common man have become stronger.

We are living perilously close to what happened in 1939. If Adolf Hitler used the unfair terms of the Treaty of Versailles to fuel ultra-nationalist sentiment among the Germans, Putin is pushing through the message that the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a redivision of the world and an eastward expansion of NATO is a plot to destroy Russia.

Listen in to Putin’s speech as he ordered war against Ukraine: “We will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine”. As a threatening note to the Western world, he declared that he was putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.

Putin warned that there could be nuclear strikes against any unfriendly country that intervened militarily. “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your history.”

Though the US and European countries responded with the widest sanctions possible against Russia, there is a complex web that shows linkages running across the financial and political veins of the world. Crippling Putin will mean cleaning the dirty elements that have supported power structures in democracies as well as dictatorial regimes. Overturning everything won’t be easy.

Despite becoming a global ‘pariah’, Putin’s Russia has not even faced complete isolation in Europe. How do you cut off Russia’s oil and gas revenues that significantly fund Putin’s war machine? Europe continues to pay Russia $1 billion a day for oil and natural gas as they cannot switch to alternative sources of energy so easily and so quickly. There is a move to ramp up renewable sources of energy, but this will take time and will require collective political will.

The fossil fuel economy has created Russia as a petrostate and Putin has used this to create his class of oligarchs. After he came to power as prime minister in 1999 and as president in 2000, he renationalised Russia’s energy assets and other natural resources, made them compete globally and placed his friends and former colleagues in important positions to take care of these ‘national champions’ like Gazprom and Rosneft. As the Russian economy grew after declining by 40% in the early 1990s, Putin had major control over it.

Putin’s desire to get back the Russian empire made him hate NATO, a group of 30 North American and European nations whose purpose is to guarantee the security of its members. He did not like NATO’s eastward march to include countries which were once part of the Soviet-led Warsaw pact. He had his own map in mind and, as a first step, he planned to make Europe in general and Germany in particular dependent on Russia for their energy needs.

With the European Union sourcing 40% of their natural gas imports from Russia, that part of Putin’s plan got achieved. Crucial to his gameplan is also the $11-billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline project as the natural gas will flow directly to Germany, without having to run through other European countries like Ukraine. Much to Putin’s design, this project had Europe divided and the US unhappy.

Putin’s influence outside Russia also grew through his oligarchs who bought properties, yachts and soccer clubs in Europe. These purchases, mostly in the UK, made them penetrate into political parties, financial markets and the real estate industry. In the London property market alone, Russians are estimated to have invested $2 billion.

In his all-out offensive against Ukraine, some of Putin’s calculations went right. He knew that the US and the European countries would keep out of direct military engagement in Ukraine. While the West would impose swingeing sanctions, Russia’s oil and gas taps to Europe would be left open. And he could turn to China, the main foe of America, for help.

Putin, however, went terribly wrong when it came to calculating the amount of resistance he would face inside Ukraine. He was not a new invader in that land and, in 2014, had annexed Crimea in a matter of days. So, he thought this time, too, the war would be short and he would install a client regime in Ukraine.

He was in for a rude shock. No matter the bombings, the ruined apartments, the damaged hospitals and the daily deaths, the Ukrainians rallied around their inspirational leader, Zelenskyy, and pledged to protect their freedom till the very end. The more their lives got wrecked, the more determined they became.

As historian Yuval Noah Harari would write, “Nations are ultimately built on stories. Each passing day adds more stories that Ukrainians will tell not only in the dark days ahead, but in the decades and generations to come. The President who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “go fuck yourself”; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from.”

The stubborn resistance Ukraine offered took the world by surprise and led the US and the European Union to sign a landmark gas deal, a month after the Russian invasion. As per the deal, the US will supply 15 billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU this year to cut the EU’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels. There is a parallel push to cut Europe’s gas usage by taking energy efficiency steps and also by powering renewable energy.

Another area Putin miscalculated was the extent China would go to support this war. China has not decisively supported Russia with economic and military support as it does not want to be left ostracised from the Western world. The war in Ukraine has united the US and Europe, much to the dislike of China as it plans to take over Taiwan.   

There are three ways the Russia-Ukraine war can end. If Putin wins, the world may move into a dark era as dictatorial leaders get a boost and conflicts around territories restart. Putin will continue his exercise of rebuilding the Russian empire and Europe will feel uneasy and stressed. This will push the US closer to Europe while China will get encouraged to retake Taiwan, which it considers as its breakaway province. It will make China very powerful as it will dominate the semiconductor business and control the global economy in a big way.

If Putin loses, Russia could see political protests at home and authoritarianism suffer a severe jolt. While the importance of NATO as a security shield will grow, it is crucial for Russia to find space in the new balance of power that gets constructed. A disgruntled Russia can be dangerous even as oil power stays with it until Europe shifts to renewable energy.

A compromise is the other outcome, with Ukraine possibly not joining NATO but being offered some security guarantees. This will enforce an uneasy period of peace in Europe as Putin and Zelenskyy learn to co-exist.

There is no clarity on how long one has to wait before the war ends with one of these three outcomes. It could get into a long-drawn battle, leaving behind human tragedies, ruined buildings, war-weary bodies and embittered souls. Already Ukraine has been accusing the Russian troops of forcibly deporting several thousand residents of Mariupol to Russia and claiming that the besieged city has been “wiped off the face of the earth”.  

Putin’s invasion, though, has ensured one end result: the world will move to a multipolar order. America, the only main actor in the world after the end of Cold War, will have to operate in some form of an evolved balance of power structure. In a major shift in policy, many countries in Europe have already announced they would increase their military spending to be in better control of protecting their freedoms. There is also a pitch among countries, including India, to build self-reliant economies.

The war has shown how divided the world is on such a simple humanitarian issue. Though Putin has lost support from most of the world for his brutal aggression, there are many who side with him or prefer to sit on the fence. In pockets of Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Africa, India, China, Brazil, Syria and several other countries, many are sympathetic to Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine while feeling bad about the damages the war is causing.

The war in Ukraine is not simply a battle between democracy and autocracy, pitched between the Western world and countries like Russia and China. Even inside democracies, there aren’t all who are accepting Putin as a naked aggressor. The world has also not forgotten America’s role in Vietnam, Iraq and many other places. It has recently seen America’s cold-heartedness in Afghanistan where the superpower withdrew troops to allow Taliban to rule, with the clock going back 20 years on human and women rights. Illiberal populism is also hitting parts of Europe and the US.

The intrusion of social media and fake news has made the world more complex and polarised. In today’s weaponisation of social media, Putin has used propaganda news to polarise people and split cross-border family ties. He has also used the monopoly of the state television news channels to spread the message that the army is on a special military operation in Ukraine. The letter Z, promoted heavily and made widely visible, has become the stylized symbol in support of the war and of Putin.

In the midst of this wreckage, Zelenskyy has offered a contrasting image. While Putin’s rise is from the ranks of the KGB, the Ukrainian President has transitioned from a sitcom star to a heroic war leader who has convinced his countrymen to “fight as long as it takes” to protect the country’s freedom.

Putin has used the Moscow stadium that hosted the football World Cup final in 2018 to stage a pro-war rally in support of his military campaign. Zelenskyy uses no such platform to display his power; he carries the common man image, visits hospitals, is in the streets, and sends out video messages to connect with his nation and with political leaders who are willing to help.

Zelenskyy’s voice is that of the underdog who wants to defend his nation’s flag in a part of the world where he is caught between an aggressor and a block of nations who are only willing to help with one-hand tied.

As we move out of the Ukraine war, one gets a sense that much of the ugly world would go uncorrected. Europe will be in uneasy calm, the US will fight a bitter economic war with China, and the Asia-Pacific region with the creation of small blocs may lead to new grounds of confrontation. The issues of inequality, climate change and fossil fuel will continue to remain half-buried.

There is a fundamental problem the world faces which tells me that the new order won’t be able to erase the evils that have divided us for so long. Ukraine presents us with this dilemma. The argument many of us carry is: ‘Oh, what’s wrong? Russia is only getting back its old territory…’ ‘The US has done so many evils in the past…’ This is a line of thought some of my friends in India share as well.

There are many of us who are taking sides when what we are seeing right in front of us is a month of hell in Ukraine. Why can’t we be in grief for what we see in that ravaged land? Buildings crushed to rubble, people dying, a civilisation being bombed. Why do we need to look behind for a third actor? A wrong now can’t be defended for a wrong someone else did in the past. Unless we feel the other’s pain as ours, we will not be able to correct the wrongs of history.

We are as much to blame as the political world around us. There is something core in us which has polarised, lost its humanity and decayed.