From Russia With Bluff

Are We Really On the Brink of World War 3?

Some countries acquire reputations that are difficult to shake off, and Russia has a particularly grim place in the Western imagination that never seems to change much, regardless of the historical and political context.   To Joseph Conrad, Russia was the land of barbaric despotism and ‘spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations.’ Writing in 1939 Winston Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’

Though Churchill recognised that the key to understanding and predicting Russian behaviour was to consider ‘Russian national interest’, such interests have often been ignored or misconstrued through persistent representations of Russia as an eternal despotism driven by an insatiable aggressive expansionism.

In the nineteenth century, the British Empire waged the ‘Great Game’ in an attempt to prevent the ‘Russian Bear’ from establishing itself in Tibet or Afghanistan, or gaining strategic advantage at British expense from the Ottoman Empire’s position as the ‘sick man of Europe.

In George Kennan’s famous 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ that shaped the Cold War doctrine of ‘containment’, Kennan offered a more sophisticated variant on the theme of Russian aggression, in which the Kremlin’s ‘neurotic view of world affairs’ was derived from a ‘ traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.’

In ruling over a vast open territory that was uniquely vulnerable to invasion, Kennan argued, the Soviet regime, like its Tsarist predecessors had ‘learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts or compromises with it.’

Kennan was right about this vulnerability. At the time he made these observations, Russia was recovering from its second catastrophic invasion in less thirty years. In World War 1 it ceded - temporarily - territory that included approximately a quarter of its population to Germany. In World War 2 twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died and vast swathes of the country were laid waste during the Nazi empire’s maniacal attempts to turn the Slavic lands into a giant slave-colony.

Kennan, like his government, ignored the fact that Russia was capable of compromise, after a fashion. Even Stalin made a pact with Hitler, which he scrupulously observed. After the war, he accepted the division of Eastern and Western Europe into mutual spheres of influence, to the point when he refused to support communist-led revolutionary movements that might have been successful, even in countries where communist parties enjoyed widespread prestige.

Instead Stalin concentrated on keeping Germany weak, and imposing Soviet rule over Eastern Europe in order to create a ‘buffer zone’ against any potential invasion from the West. Naturally, these aims did not take account of the wishes of the countries incorporated into the Soviet ‘buffer zone’ against their will, but they did not amount to the sinister drive to world domination that Western governments attributed to Stalin and his successors.

I mention these precedents because there is a kind of historical groundhog day effect to the West’s confrontations with Russia, in which no matter where we are, we always seem to be in the same place: on the one hand the freedom-loving West, and on the other, some new despotic iteration of the eternal Russian adversary.

To some extent the dangerous confrontation now unfolding in Ukraine belongs to the the same tendency.  It is a strange and bewildering confrontation, in which we are constantly being told by Western governments and the media that we are on the brink of a major European theatre war or even World War 3, even as the president of Ukraine insists that ‘The best friend of our enemies is panic in our country. And all this information is just provoking panic and can’t help us.’

While Russia denies that it has any intention to invade Ukraine, the US and British governments have suggested that an invasion is imminent within weeks or days, or even that such an invasion has already been decided, even though much of this seems to be based on speculation and interpretation.

Personally I don’t believe Russia intends to invade Ukraine - though I don’t dismiss the possibility of a military confrontation that could escalate into something its protagonists may not intend.

This isn’t because I have any prophetic gifts, or some unique insights into the inner workings of the Russian government, and it certainly isn’t because I think the Putin regime is benevolent or innately peaceloving.  

After all, this is the same kleptocratic KGB gangster government which crushed Chechnya with bombs and terror; which waged an equally pitiless and savage bombing campaign in support of Assad’s regime in Syria; which invaded Georgia; which has annexed the Crimean peninsula and fuelled a long-running low intensity war in eastern Ukraine; and which terrorises opposition parties inside Russia, and poisons dissidents and political opponents abroad.

So if Russia conducts military exercises involving some 130,000 troops alongside Ukraine’s borders in Belarus and the oblasts of Voronezh and Rostov, then we do have a problem. The question is, what kind of problem do we have? 

Politics by Other Means

Some of these troops – we don’t know how many - were already deployed in these areas.  Others remain following the latest phase in the Russian Federation’s quadrennial Zapad exercises in Belarus in September last year.  These units have been reinforced since then. If Western intelligence reports are to be believed, medical units have now been integrated into the troop formations ‘massing’ on Ukraine’s borders.

Russian denials notwithstanding, this is an aggressive force posture that is clearly intended to send a signal not only to the Ukrainian government, but to its European and American allies. This does not necessarily mean than an invasion is ‘imminent’ however, let alone ‘decided’

Those who make these assertions rarely explain why Russia would do this, and what its strategic aims would be. Does Russia really intend to topple Ukraine’s elected government with a ‘lightning strike’ on Kiev - an act that would almost certainly embroil Russian forces in a protracted military campaign-cum-occupation of a hostile civilian population that it could not possibly maintain without suffering - and inflicting - politically unacceptable losses? 

Why would it need 130,000 troops to prop up two self-declared independent ‘people’s republics’ in Donetsk and Luhansk that it already has de facto control over? Why, given that Russia has spectacularly ‘punched above its weight’ through the use of various forms of ‘hybrid’ force, would it gamble so much on a display of conventional military power whose outcome is so uncertain?

Putin is a hardened ex-KGB streetfighter with a far clearer idea of what he can gain and lose than his opponents, whose military adventures have led their countries into a succession of disastrous strategic defeats.

So it seems more likely that he is using these deployments as an instrument of hard diplomacy, to intimidate Ukraine into remaining with Russia’s ‘Eurasian’ sphere of influence, and also to bring pressure on Ukraine’s allies to make good the pledges regarding NATO’s eastwards expansion that successive Russian governments insist have been made, but not observed.

The extent to which these ‘promises’ were really made is a moot point that historians have disputed but there is no doubt that Nato has expanded eastwards and also outwards. Three wars have been waged under the aegis of Nato, in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya. Only last year, Nato staged some of the largest military exercises in its history in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states.

You can make the argument that these states have the right to choose their own alliances, and also that they have good historical reasons to fear Russian power, but you can’t be surprised when Russia pushes back against these developments.

And those who attribute this pushback to Russian ‘paranoia’, as Kennan once did, should imagine how the United States would react if Warsaw Pact member-states had deployed missiles and troops in its Central American ‘backyard’ or (ahem) in Cuba.

Perhaps they should remember Dick Cheney’s ‘one-percent doctrine’ or the Blair government’s response to the possibility that Iraq had missiles that could attack us in 45 minutes.

That said, recognising Russia’s security concerns doesn’t mean that its response to them is legitimate or acceptable.  If Russia has the right to feel secure, so do states like Poland, the Baltic Republics…and Ukraine. We are not in the ‘shatterzone’ any more, or at least we shouldn’t be, in which small states can be dominated or even erased by empires and great powers.

Putin may insist that Russia and Ukraine are ‘one people’, but that is for Ukrainians to decide, and geographical proximity doesn’t give Russia the right to dictate to Ukraine what it should do and who it should be allied to.

But it is also foolish and disingenuous to insist, as Western governments constantly do, that NATO is purely a defensive alliance that does not threaten Russia, and that sovereign nations can choose to join it or not. Aggression is in the eye of the beholder, and NATO will never be seen as a defensive alliance by Russia, regardless of its government.

In insisting on the right of small countries to join NATO, Western governments are paving the way for permanent confrontation with Russia, and Russia is doing the reverse by insisting on its right to dominate its own ‘backyard.’

In the 21st century, given the horrific geopolitical outcomes of the twentieth, it ought to be possible for states to come up with a more imaginative and inclusive concept of pan-European security. Such ‘architecture’ would not be based on nineteenth century spheres of interest, great power politics, ideological confrontations, or quasi-imperial ambitions, but on cooperation and the mutual recognition of the vulnerabilities and concerns of all the countries involved in the Ukraine crisis.

To get there will be difficult and complex, and I’m not arguing that Russia is trying to achieve this. If Putin is playing a military game of bluff, it has already failed, because Ukraine-Western relations are stronger than they were before, and there are now more NATO forces and weaponry in Ukraine and the other countries adjoining Russia’s borders than there were before.

Putin may be canny, but he is not a strategic genius. He could miscalculate or overreach in order to avoid losing face. Russia could stage a provocation or be dragged into a border war that becomes something worse.

And if this doesn’t happen this time, there is always the possibility that it could happen in the future.

After more than a century in which the global confrontation between Russia and the West threatened the existence of humanity, it ought to be possible to pursue a different concept of security based on mutual cooperation. Because no matter how difficult it may be to achieve that objective, it remains the only way of satisfying the legitimate concerns of all the countries involved.