The title of this post speaks for itself. Everyday I wake up and check the headlines in the Washington Post, the first half-dozen of which are always about Ukraine. It's progressively worse news. There were some relatively heartening stories in the beginning about the Ukrainians surprising the Russian military with their willingness to fight back, and there is still an element of that going on, but it might be just delaying the inevitable, a total occupation and take over of Ukraine by Putin's force. It might not be, but it might be. I'm far from an expert on the subject, and even the experts aren't clairvoyants. It just seems to me that Putin is pot committed at this point, and he isn't going to stop unless he's compelled to by force, and the Ukrainian military and the makeshift militias are probably not strong enough to do this.
This raises the obvious question: Should NATO countries send in troops to help the Ukrainians repel Russia? NATO hasn't directly intervened militarily (though they've sanctioned Russia heavily and provided weaponry and other supplies to Ukraine), and I think that's the correct call. As difficult as it is to watch a sovereign nation get senselessly steamrolled by a regional bully, it's still preferable to WW III and/or nuclear warfare, both of which would be distinct possibilities if a NATO country, particularly the US, were to get involved directly on the battlefield in Ukraine. There's a bit of a trolley problem element to this. No decision the US and our allies make now can prevent massive death and destruction. It's all a series of very sobering least-bad tradeoffs.
But what's in it for Russia? That's what I've been trying to figure out. I said in my last post that it's about Putin's ego and inferiority complex, and I still think that's it. I've read other analyses, even a few that put a lot of the blame of the US for expanding NATO so rapidly and making Russian feel boxed in and existentially fearful. Invading a neighbor like Ukraine to prevent it from becoming too pro-US and possibly joining NATO is, under this philosophy, an understandable defensive move by Russia.
But this idea of defense just doesn't hold up upon examination. For one thing, Russia's hostilities toward Ukraine over the past decade are, in large part, what have made it more pro-US. If Putin would have respected Ukrainian sovereignty, the people of the country probably would not be so keen on joining NATO and the EU (polls results back this up). For another thing, the US and western Europe have major incentives to maintain friendly (or at least neutral) relations with Russia. We import a ton of their energy (especially Germany), and we are tired of fighting and western imperialism, in general, after the mostly failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Warring with Russia would not have been a consideration. They weren't even really on our radar. (Mitt Romney was an outlier when he called Russia our biggest geopolitical threat back in 2012. But dude was prescient, I guess.) So what if Russia lived next to a "western" country? What were we going to do, set up bases there to attack Moscow? That would have been the last thing we would have wanted to do. I mean, the Republican party was an unabashedly pro-Russia party until like two weeks ago.
That's the thing about the defensive self-interest argument: Invading Ukraine has done the exact opposite of advancing those goals for Russia in almost every regard. Russia could have just kept their head down, stayed off their neighbors' land, sold their energy, maintained amicably trading and diplomatic relations with the US and the EU, and lived their best lives in peace. The only way this war makes any sense to me is to view it through the lens of a dictator with an inferiority complex who is obsessed with projecting power. I think he thought the Ukrainians would be a pushover (or even welcoming to Russia), and now that they aren't, he's going to double-down on the brutishness rather than admit he's not as strong or as smart as he pretends to be.
And what's the endgame? That's the part I've heard nobody been able to even answer with any confidence. The stated goal of Russia is to "denazify" Ukraine, which isn't really a thing, considering it wasn't overrun with Nazis before. Russian can probably take control of the entire country militarily, but then what? They are then going to govern a war-decimated country in which the only people who haven't fled or been killed hate their guts? And they are going to do this with their economy at home severely weakened because of sanctions? That doesn't seem very realistic to me.
I dunno... and I also don't have my endgame worked out with this post, so I'm just going to stop here.
Until next time...
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