UKRAINE FALLS INTO WHIRLWND

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RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN LIVE STREAMED (pre-recorded) MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2022 and UNITED STATES PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN LIVE STREAMED TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2022.

ANOTHER BAD BAD PROXY WAR TO MULL OVER FOR KREMLIN AND BUNDESRAT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

R

ussian President Vladimir Putin announced the reasons why 150,000 troops had amassed on the Ukrainian border on Monday night.

Putin’s recognition of separatist regions within the Ukraine has repercussions throughout the world, with several distinct territorial enclaves wanting to splinter away from a large political entity, for various reasons, on just about every continent.

The problem with Putin is that he does not exactly have clean hands in the matter of the Donbas Region, with Donetsk and Luhansk in the east suddenly becoming in desperate need of Russian intervention. 

Putin mind you is not digging fox holes from which his generals will view the front line trenches.

Putin presented his justification for the separation of these two regions from the Ukrainian political entity in a historical context that may or may not be justified. Putin does not even have to get the historical facts correct to be found just plain wrong in this approach.

I mean, redrawing the political map and reversing political allegiances in Europe was what, on a very simple level, compelled the two Great Wars of the last century.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire stood to gain from the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

And the German Austria amalgamation then sought to unify Germanic parts of Europe such as on the borders of Czechoslovakia. In the end the Czechs could not get along with each other anyway, after a long Soviet ideological occupation, choosing instead a commonsense partition over civil war in 1993. 

But really? ‘This is ours and this is yours, and that is ours’, went Putin, as if he could rewrite the wrongs of history with his first crack at using a teleprompter to address not only the Russian people but a global audience in the late evening (middle of the day in the West), Soviet time.

The Crimea conflict ended badly for the West in 2014. Russia built a 19 kilometer bridge over the Strait of Kerch, ever thereafter connecting the Russian mainland with the Crimean Peninsula. I am not sure what history books United States President Barack Obama had read at the time, but the proxy war in Syria was a large distraction for him, I am sure.

What really seems shocking is that Ukraine has such substantial territory with so many people, and Putin is kind of unabashedly challenging the territorial integrity of the region, by just walking in Russian troops. Crimea and Donbas are substantial pieces on the map of Europe and not just inconsequential bits that do not quite fit into an artificial line of demarcation drawn after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

The news of war is saddening even if another proxy war between the old legions so far is missing a lot of direct contact that could escalate into a nuclear exchange. The Europe that includes a lot of the Russian Eastern Front is a relatively small space that could easily suffer harsh apocalyptic fallout in the event of one or two nuclear detonations.

Unlike, the United States and Canada, Western Europe and Russia are not protected by the vast expanse of an ocean that the missile, nuclear tipped or not, must circumnavigate.

Unlike Bosnia-Herzegovina, the strife in eastern Ukraine has been allowed to fester, with a lot of rebel conflict, since 2014. Those rebels, I guess, have now finally secured enough territory for the Russian ethnics to make the expense of tank diesel worthwhile for Putin.

Regarding Crimea, historians would immediately think about concession to Nazi Germany in 1936, but then that history professor from the University of Chicago giving advice to the Oval Office probably said something like, ‘the circumstances are totally different in the current context of geopolitical forces.’

Maybe Crimea is more like Cyprus, split in half between the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, until Turkey just decided to unequivocally take half of the territory for good on July 20, 1974. Turkey is the home base for the former Ottoman Empire. And Putin referred to the Russians taking territory along the Azos Sea from the Ottoman’s.

The Ottomans were like the Romans, and stretched out armies from present day Turkey along both sides of the Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Holy Land in Jerusalem, converting Christian Churches into Muslim Mosques along the way, until the Christian soldiers of the Crusades turned them back again.

Cyprus is currently divided into the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, with a lot of United Nation Peace Keepers stuck in between, keeping the peace.

The Bosnian War (Serbo-Croatian) (1992 – 1995) followed the Slovenian and Croatian secessions from Yugoslavia  with territory inhabited by Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Bosnia Herzegovina is also a former Ottoman Province. 

At the time of the conflict, everyone was just happy for the states to be transitioning from dictatorships to democracies after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin refers to oligarchs and gangsters ruining the Ukraine, as a reach to the strife that occurred in Bosnia with the Srebrenica Massacre and genocide until United States President Bill Clinton finally sent in the military, and NATO followed close behind until the bloodbath and ethnic cleansing subsided.

Bosnia was a breakaway state from Yugoslavia, but the gangster type politicians picked up some tools from the fascists and drove ethnic populations against each other for political advantage and a lot of hatred.

The Ukranian oligarchs can join the exclusive club of villains already occupied by the gangsters in Chicago — with Chicago almost having invented gangsters in the 1930s as a logical derivative of cowboy – and the waring gangs in Vancouver, and the mafia in New York and Las Vegas.

Why can’t the Ukraine stay neutral like Switzerland has been non-military since 1815?

Switzerland still has a foreign policy, the Swiss Guards at the Vatican and everything else except a recourse to military force when the plan doesn’t turn out so well.

I can just see the future: Swiss Chocolate and Ukrainian Easter Eggs sold from the same eBay supplier.

That hopeful outcome is likely why United States President Joe Biden spoke softly, while carrying a big stick today when he addressed the Russian people and the Allies in the West.

The Ukraine and Russia have a lot going for them, but they will have a lot more if they just kept to their separate corners.

Biden announced a first wave of sanctions stopping the flow of money from the West in and out of Russia.

Germany and the US also stopped the Big Gas Pipeline #2 (Nord Stream 2) that had been built with the intention of allowing natural gas to flow from Russia to Germany and other parts of Europe by diverting around the Ukraine. The Big Gas Pipeline #1 (Nord Stream 1) does the same thing.

The real villain in the Ukraine is the existence of poverty in a historically significant nation rich in resources. Gas and wheat flow west, but the people stay poor. Poverty and rebellion has festered in the Ukraine to the point that Putin can just roll in the troops under the Russian flag to waving crowds and relieved armed rebels in dire need of relief from the siege.

I was just beginning to like the Russians again when Putin took the Crimea. Why would you continue to deal with Putin after that. What do you think Putin has been doing with all the gas money the Russian people get from Germany?

This Ukraine crisis has been allowed to fester, I am not sure why, perhaps to create another battle ground, where legends are made and legacies lost. Putin seems overwrought about history and the Russian people finding the correct spot in history as the world becomes digitally smaller and smaller and more and more stories get shared regardless of the truth.

Germany is in a real pickle after shelving nuclear power when securing access to Russian oil, gas, and coal. Without fuel from Russia, the Germans will have to find a better nuclear fuel and give up a bit of their green ethics, like France, which is 70 per cent powered by electricity made at nuclear power plants.

So, Biden is walking softly with just a few sanctions on the table for round one.

First, VEB (whatever kind of bank that keeps rubles in the West) and the Military Bank, and sovereign debt held by Russia, but serviced through bonds purchased in the West, are frozen as far as the Americans can reach, which is pretty far.

Second, Russian elites and their family members will pay a price for sticking with Putin when the Americans and the Allies freeze their personal assets held in the West. Putin’s inner circle will hurt.

Third, the Russian gas pipeline to Germany, Nord Stream 2, will not move forward through the regulatory process, costing Russia billions of euros a year, as long as the pipeline remains inoperable.

Fourth, the United States will provide defensive military assistance to the Ukraine in the meantime, which is already occurring.

And fifth, the United States will send armed forces into neighboring areas, as a countermeasure to the presence of Russian military a bit too close to Kiev.

Biden reiterated that the United States has no interest in fighting Russia.

I doubt whether the Russian people have the stomach for a ‘fist fight’ of conventional weapons on or near the Eastern border either.

The proxy war in Syria was far afield. And before Syria, the war of attrition in Afghanistan was not a popular invasion either, although still so far away, the wounded soldiers and dead bodies were shipped home eventually.

The Europeans, on the other hand, are rather proud of their little bit of peace chiseled out of a history of wars since the end of World War II.

Why cannot the Russians simply ship the gas to Germany in exchange for euros, and then spend the euros on improving the standard of living, rather than reinventing a modern military?

And the Ukraine can feed the world with wheat, in exchange for less poverty at home.

None expect that the little pretty Russian teenagers will start hanging out at shopping malls while their parents buy those Chinese made appliances, that keep breaking, to make housework a bit easier.

Russia and the West have substantive ideological differences in everything from running the household to making the economy go around, but that does not mean that they have to kill each other.