Previous Subchapter → 10.1 Curveball
The consequences of this are likely to be seismic, a frozen conflict involving perpetual Russian occupation, especially of territories that are in every sense, culturally, linguistically, Ukrainian, is a peace without justice, Ukraine being forced to accept it through starvation or gunpoint is a recipe for long term resentment, that kind of resentment can be a major threat to creating a lasting peace.
In the short term, Zelensky ending the war with many of Ukraine’s lost territories unrecovered could shatter his Churchillian war hero image and leave him open to claims of betrayal, especially from ultranationalist figures, long term rivals of the state from Volunteer Battalion figures like Right Sector and the Azov Movement, putting the stability of Ukraine at risk.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin will feel emboldened, although he’s had to shrink his ambitions it’s Putin who has won the battle of attrition, the Second Cold War has only just begun and with the US having a noncommittal President, noncommittal not just towards the conflict in Ukraine but in a much broader sense, towards even NATO itself, the West may have already lost, the Western Bloc deprived of its strongest power.
And it seems that some don’t realise the damage this would bring, we’ve mentioned previously that a lot of so-called “anti-war” commentators have essentially encouraged appeasement to Russia, claiming that this is what will bring a better world, they believe that a Russian power bloc would be a positive, as a strong counterweight to the US and the West.
And let’s be honest, we can understand why, in the last 2 decades, the era of the Terror War, Western interventionism has done immense damage, showing the world that Western influence isn’t such a rosy thing, the US has been far from a model country and its influence as the world’s superpower has been very destructive.
It’s a country that has constantly preached about freedom, democracy and human rights while making those values into a laughingstock through its actions:
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Illegally stalking people through mass surveillance programs at home and abroad
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Sanctioning countries into starvation
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Waging aggressive wars
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And forming alliances with governments just as authoritarian as its enemies
The list of injustices is long and other NATO members have been participants in them one way or another, and many people are tired of it.
So there’s a certain appeal that comes with the idea of Russia being a strong power, able to say no to the bullies in Washington, but we have to ask ourselves, has Moscow shown us a better example for the world? Watching the war in Ukraine in real time over these past years has given us some insight and the answer is no, this isn’t like the First Cold War, which saw a struggle between two very differing visions for the future.
This is a struggle between two sides of the same coin, Russia’s leaders don’t really represent an alternative to the American way anymore, if anything, they’ve emulated it;
Creating a crony, capitalist country, waging aggressive foreign wars based on lies, distortions, and victim mentalities and using creative terminology to deny the reality of their actions:
Just as the USA’s conflicts were renamed to avoid the legal need to seek a declaration of war from Congress, with the “Korean War” becoming the “UN Police Action” or the Invasion of Iraq becoming “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the Russians have renamed their conflicts to dodge their own laws against aggressive wars, the Russo-Georgian War became a “Peace Coercion Operation”, the War in Donbas became an “Inter-Ukrainian Conflict”, and now the Invasion of Ukraine becomes a “Special Military Operation”, the Putin vision of the 2020s doesn’t look much different from the Bush vision of the 2000s, a vision of imperialism, undeclared wars and delusional saviour narratives, and so the results of that vision should be the same, failure.
The Russians being a counterweight to the US is useless if they rely on the same tactics, the same suppression of independence and the same empire building desires, the hypocrisy of activists who claim to be anti-war and anti-imperialist while excusing Russia’s militarism are just as damaging as the hypocrisy of Western politicians, who lecture on freedom and democracy while supporting dictatorships in the Gulf.
Essentially, the Second Cold War is one the Western Bloc deserves to lose, but the Eastern Bloc doesn’t deserve to win.
I say this because I’m speaking from experience, growing up in the era of the so-called War on Terror I saw Western governments fueling extremism in Syria while telling blatant lies that they were only supporting moderate democrats, I learnt about how they’d done the same thing in Afghanistan and how that had led to the birth of the groups that carried out the 9/11 attacks, I learnt about so many instances of Cold War meddling and tyranny carried out by the US and its allies, the neverending attempts at “regime change”: Vietnam, Nicaragua, Chile, Congo, Cuba, Iran and so on, I learnt how they invaded Iraq on the basis of blatant lies about supposed WMDs that didn’t exist, and that fuelled a contrarianism in me that made me overlook the dirty sides of the political West’s enemies.
I was thinking of those lies when we were told Russia was imminently going to invade Ukraine, I laughed when the media announced dates the invasion was supposedly going to happen on and they passed with nothing happening, another fear mongering grift to manufacture hostility towards Russia, they aren’t imperialists like the yanks, Putin’s too savvy to do something so thuggish!
And then he did it, giving a speech riddled with what I see as the world’s greatest sin, hypocrisy. He cited all those instances of American lies and aggression then told his own lies and laid the groundwork for his own aggression.
He told the world he would respect the sovereignty of the Post-Soviet states, he told the world he had no plan to occupy Ukrainian territory or impose anything by force, he told the world he was forced to act to protect people from genocide, he told the world freedom was his guide and he wanted Ukrainians to have a free choice. These things were all lies, the genocide was made up and so was the respect, he held “referendums” at gunpoint and swallowed large chunks of Ukraine, there was no free choice to be found.
Putin’s speech called the US an “empire of lies”, and he was correct, but the speech and the actions that followed it revealed the truth, he was that empire’s perfect mirror, these scumbags were made for eachother. I couldn’t stay blind anymore, there was one perfect word for this, imperialism.
That’s why when we wrote about Ukraine the first time around, for the Narratives project, we decided to call out self proclaimed anti-imperialists and anti-war activists who were embracing hypocrisy when it came to Russian warmongering, and why we repeated that call in this series too.
A genuine multipolar world, where everyone gets their fair share and a seat at the table, would undoubtedly be a massive improvement, but that’s not what Russia’s offering, the modern Russian doctrine is a step backwards, a return to the power blocs of old, and a return to imperialism, where smaller nations become client states, secondary to the wants of larger powers.
If you trade US imperialism for Russian imperialism, what you get is imperialism, it might be different people suffering from different borders and different wars, with different countries at the top of the hierarchy, but it’s the same mechanisms with the same results.
All of that is being conveniently ignored or overlooked by certain sects of the “anti war” crowd in the name of peace, and well, it’s true that accepting the bulk of concessions Russia demands will bring a kind of peace, but the problem with a peace without justice, a frozen conflict, is that if you don’t resolve any of the underlying issues, the issues generating so much rage and hate, a frozen conflict can easily thaw.
Syria has shown that very clearly: 13 years of war, 4 years of a mostly frozen conflict, suddenly in just a week it reignited, rapidly escalated and totally changed the situation on the ground, answering some questions and asking new ones.
That’s not to say we think that justice is bloodletting attrition until Russia is defeated by conquest, we don’t think conquerors make true solutions in this day and age, we said back in the Ukraine Narratives that we don’t think the people of Donbas should be forced to rejoin Ukraine if they don’t want to, but the truth is we don’t know what they want, because they’ve never had a real choice.
Russia’s supposed referendums, first in Crimea, then in Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhia were all obvious frauds held under duress, to us a peace with justice would involve serious referendums, real choices.
As we said before it’s an unfortunate truth that within the Post-Soviet borders there are large numbers of people that aren’t happy with the countries they are expected to call home, we don’t think the right answer to that is rigidly sticking to those borders and we don’t think redrawing the map at gunpoint is the answer either.
In the battle of values between sovereignty and self determination we believe self determination should win and the third option, conquest, should be kicked back to the dark ages where it belongs. States shouldn’t be prisons with millions of their citizens rattling on their cages, they should be reflections of their populations, as best as possible.
And before anyone asks how much land of my country I’d be willing to bargain away to Russia, the common response to suggestions that these territorial disputes should be resolved in some other way than by force, I’ll give you the honest answer: None.
But that’s because my country doesn’t have a substantial Pro-Russian minority that wants separation.
I’ll tell you just how much of my country I’d be willing to give up to separatism in general: As much as the people of its regions want. In the UK we clung to the argument of sovereignty for centuries, refusing to give up land for so long, but since the 1990s we’ve had a fundamental shift.
We found a peace with Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland by agreeing that its status would be up to a referendum, if the time ever came that the nationalists were in the majority, we eventually responded to Scottish nationalists in the same way, holding an independence referendum in 2014 where Scots narrowly voted to stay in the union.
It’s not a principle we’ve perfectly upheld, it has been tested as the Scottish nationalists call for another referendum that we’ve so far denied them, but it’s the practice of a value I’ve come to hold closely, that nations only deserve to exist by consent.
In most cases I don’t want to endorse separatism, I don’t think countries splintering into endlessly smaller and smaller pieces, drawing more and more borders, is a recipe for prosperity in the world, but I also believe that isn’t up to me to decide.
For now though those values have no chance to come into play, these disputed lands will be dealt away under political and military necessity, with little the people living in them can do about it.