War Begins

On Saturday, the russian government officially announced sending troops to Ukraine.  This comes two days after Russian helicopters and armor crossed into Crimea, taking de facto control of the peninsula.  This in itself already constituted an act of war; we can expect a couple more days of such provocations and Ukrainian government’s attempts to ignore them, but sooner or later firefights will break out in eastern Ukraine.

In Kharkiv, my homecity, a pro-Russian rally stormed the regional council building, flying the russian tri-color over it.  Serhiy Zhadan, a prominent writer and an activist of the Maidan movement in Kharkiv, was beat up by the crowd.  A lot of busses with Russian license plates were spotted at Kharkiv, some attackers had their handwatches set to Russian time, and the person who installed the flag was a citizen of Russia.  The next day, thousands of Kharkiv residents took to the streets to protest Russian military intervention — this time, both pro- and anti-Maidan factions were on the same side.

I arrived from Kharkiv to Kyiv yesterday.  The Ukraine capital is still mourning the heroes that gave their lives in the Ukrainian Revolution.  People are concerned about how to found systemic public oversight over the new government, and insure that these lives were not given in vain.  At the same time, they are very worried about developments in the east.

Why does Russia want a war with Ukraine?

Having been born and raised in Kharkiv with Russian as my native language, before moving to the U.S. and then Europe, I hope to give an account that can be understandable to my western friends.  This post will be the first to that end.

(Truth is, I had long predicted this war.  I do not view it as the worst outcome.  I would totally support eastern regions having an independence vote, under auspices of a free and all-inclusive national dialogue, free press, and fair democratic process.  But Moscow can’t.)

There are two reasons.  First is practical: because it’s in Putin’s economic and political interest.  The second is existential: Russia can’t afford to have a successful independent Ukraine, because then it would be called on to admit to Soviet crimes, which would be extremely damaging to Russian national historical narrative and identity.

Let’s look at the first one.  Russia is facing a long-term economic and national decline.  Putin’s kleptocratic regime simply cannot deliver a competitive economy in the global world.  Meaningful reforms are impossible because any moves toward liberalization put the regime under threat.  A country with the greatest amount of natural resources of any other, is delivering war-time demographics while failing miserably to move an inch toward modernization.

An intentional, well thought through war would help Kremlin by giving employment to what is undoubtedly the nation’s greatest asset: military might.  (In a way, the cold-war policy of containment succeeded precisely because it actively denied USSR effective use of this asset.)  Just as in the case of 1930s Germany, a well-controlled war would positively stimulate the economy.  True, this stimulus would come at the cost of international trade ties and good relations with the rest of the world.  But the only trade the Kremlin depends on today is oil and gas exports, which are unlikely to be boycotted globally, and a more hostile international environment would actually be in Putin’s favor, by opening up more opportunities for use of military.

Finally, a war at the Russia’s borders in such a sensitive country as Ukraine would go a long way to stabilizing Putin’s own regime at home.  The kremlin propaganda machine ensures that the public at large sees things exactly how the state wants them to see it.  In this connection, it is truly amazing to see the kremlin media in recent days detach itself so completely from the rest of the world, building a kind of parallel universe inside the regime’s information space.  The Ukraine’s president resurfacing in Russia to give a press-conference in which the only non-Russian journalist’s question was overdubbed by a mechanical rubbing noise is a particularly cinematic exposure of how this “matrix” operates.  Human rights violations, journalist killings, civil activists prosecutions, punk rock group detentions, torturings of lawyers and other non-political professionals, all of this would be justified by the reality of war.  It even shows Putin’s “prescient” leadership, to build the country up so as to be prepared for this war.

The second point is more delicate, and I will treat it in a separate post.  It is actually the more decisive factor forcing Russia’s invasion in Ukraine.

Let me conclude this post by warning against what I find to be the single most powerful and consistent hindrance to the West’s understanding of Russia.

I call it “the temptation to judge”.

The Western mind is not able to even seriously consider that Russia might be willing to start a new world war, were it in its national interest to do so, because that would be crazy and “bad”.

But who are you to judge?

The West is made up of developed countries which have good prospects for the future in a stable, peaceful, globalized world.  Most people in the west experience life in constant confidence that, no matter what happens, they are going to be more or less ok.  They have no moral authority to judge Russia.  The presumption of such an authority is even a form of modern day racism, echoing the principle that richer-is-better.

The Russian leadership doesn’t have good prospects in such a world.  They have little interest in hearing western advice about reforms which threaten the very sources of their lifestyle.  If they see an opportunity for Russia to become great again by blackmailing the world with nuclear war, and sense a decent chance of it being successful, they are certain to execute that option, and thereby expose the West’s own moral flaws.  The willingness to follow through on the threat would be seen in the Soviet political tradition as heroism, as the expression of the power of Will over History, a common theme in both Communist and Nazi ideologies.

Whenever an organism’s existence is threatened, it is in the nature of living things for it to do all it can to survive.  It’s not wrong.  It’s not crazy.  It’s life.

Existential struggles reveal the ugly forms in nature.  When humans are involved, one is tempted to moralize, in order to more fully distance one own self from them.  But this is a mistake.  One should also see the beauty in the lengths to which the human spirit can go in order to have their patch of freedom under the sun.  A true humanist loves Russia, for what it might do.

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