After Ukraine, What’s Next

 

     Grozny 1999                                                     Syria 2018                                                  Ukraine, March 8, 2022

The collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century… First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century… As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory…”                                               Excerpt from Vladimir Putin’s annual state of the nation address to parliament and the country’s top political leaders, April 25, 2005

“I can’t win this war alone… Close the skies, stop the killings.” 

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in a March 10th NBC interview.

With the threat of a nuclear war hovering above us all – clearly with thousands of warheads within the grasp of an unhinged megalomaniac – the democratic world is grappling with containment and damage control in Ukraine. This all-on invasion, now decimating clearly civilian targets, is hardly Putin’s first extreme assault or effort at annexation, amplified by his proclivity towards massive uncontrolled death and destruction. Patterns repeat. “From wars in Chechnya to Syria, Vladimir Putin has overseen military campaigns that have inflicted vast and often indiscriminate damage on civilian infrastructure, raising fears he might repeat the tactics in Ukraine, observers say.

“With his latest invasion seen by Western officials as going more slowly than expected, they see him turning increasingly to the use of artillery and missile strikes that, if continued, will lay waste to residential areas… Putin’s more than 20-year career at the top of Russian politics was founded on his ruthlessness in military affairs…

“[In 1999, a]lthough he denied that a ground invasion was being prepared, tens of thousands of troops were ordered into Chechnya along with an aerial and artillery bombardment that reduced the capital Grozny to rubble… ‘Putin behaved like a political kamikaze, throwing his entire political capital into the war, burning it to the ground,’ [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin later wrote in his memoirs… Grozny, already damaged during what was known as the First Chechen War in 1994-96, was described by the United Nations as the most destroyed city in the world following this second conflict from 1999.” Times of Israel, March 3rd. The Times’ admonition proved correct. History speaks.

Putin’s military supported the Georgian autocracy in 1994 (Georgia has subsequently engaged in serious negotiations favoring NATO), and his support of the brutal Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad over the past decade is littered with Russian pilots dropping barrel bombs and poison gas over unambiguously civilian targets. “Observers say Russia’s brazen military intervention in Syria and the impunity with which it was met emboldened Vladimir Putin. They say it gave him a renewed Middle East foothold from where he could assert Russian power globally, and paved the way for his attack on Ukraine.

“‘There is no doubt that the Russian intervention in Ukraine is an accumulation of a series of Russian military interventions in Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 and Syria in 2015,’ said Ibrahim Hamidi, a Syrian journalist and senior diplomatic editor for Syrian affairs at the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper… Putin ‘believes that America is regressing and China’s role is increasing and Europe is divided and preoccupied with its internal concerns … so he decided to intervene,’ he said.” Associated Press, February 28th. American polarization has clearly been a contributing factor in loosing Putin’s territorial ambitions. He considers us weak and unraveling.

As my February 26th blog, Appeasement vs Remember Afghanistan – 1979-1989, remembers, European nations accommodated Adolph Hitler’s serial annexation of neighboring nations, notwithstanding his pledge not to continue additional territorial expansion, until his invasion of Poland in 1939, the beginning of WWII. Russia too had accepted Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear stockpile for a 1994 treaty guarantee that Russia would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, breached by Vladimir Putin with his annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014. The world sat by. Minor and inconsequential economic sanctions by the West followed with obviously no deterrent impact.

Putin himself has never pledged to respect territorial rights, as reflected in the above opening excerpt, an oft-repeated Putin mantra. He has of course stooped to historical fabrication, lies which if repeated enough become the “truth” of autocrats, eliciting cheers from the groveling adoration from his many unwavering sycophants. The lies continue to pour out of Russia, where calling the Ukraine a “war” is now a criminal act. Many Russians are still willing to protest Putin’s “war” and face long prison terms. Genuine truth drips very slowly into highly censored Russia.

At a meeting between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Antalya, Turkey on March 10th, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov falsely asserted that the images that the world is seeing of Russian decimation in Ukraine are fake and/or staged, that the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine killed only military targets using the building as shelter and that the United States and Ukraine are manufacturing chemical and bio weapons at a secret laboratory in Ukraine, possibly even nukes. As US intelligence has noted, such statements are often a precursor to Russian false flag operations and a justification for Russia to use such weapons as it did in Syria.

Lying and unleashing ultraviolence are the apotheosis of Putin’s brutal mindset. “Putin claimed Ukraine as ‘an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space’ in a speech on Feb. 21, before the invasion. He formally recognized the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, Moscow-backed separatist enclaves in the Donbas, and claimed against historical evidence that Ukraine ‘never had stable traditions of real statehood,’ saying ‘modern Ukraine was entirely created by… Bolshevik, Communist Russia.’” Stars & Stripes, March 8th. He’s also declared Jewish Ukraine President Zelensky as head of a “Nazi” state.

While Russia is reeling from the massive economic sanctions imposed on her by the West and supported by much of the rest of the world and surprised at the level of Ukrainian military resistance that has slowed the pending conquest, Putin is acutely aware that NATO – his uber-villain – remains unwilling to commit any of its own forces or to provide Ukraine with attack aircraft to stop him. His “might as well go all the way” attitude – even facing a possible indictment and prosecution as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court – suggests that conquering Ukraine just might not be his last focus on territorial expansion. 

“For some European countries watching Russia's brutal war in Ukraine, there are fears that they could be next… Western officials say the most vulnerable could be those who aren't members of NATO or the European Union, and thus alone and unprotected — including Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova and Russia's neighbor Georgia, both of them formerly part of the Soviet Union — along with the Balkan states of Bosnia and Kosovo.

“But analysts warn that even NATO members could be at risk, such as [former Soviet] Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on Russia's doorstep, as well as Montenegro, either from Moscow's direct military intervention or attempts at political destabilization.” Associated Press, March 10th. After a vain attempt to remain neutral, non-NATO but vulnerable EU nations Finland and Sweden are beginning to lean towards NATO membership, a slow process in the best of times. Implementing that move, however, could incent Putin to attack there as well.

The big questions remain: what will provoke NATO to send in troops? How seriously did Putin underestimate the world’s reaction to his unlawful invasion of Ukraine? Will that reaction plus Ukrainian resistance stop any further efforts by Putin to recapture and reassemble Soviet Russia? Or will Putin simply change his tactics accordingly? Is nuclear annihilation facing us all? Who and what are next?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is horrifying watching a madman bomb the very people he claims he wants to protect.