TOMORROW’S REDOLENT DATE, February 24th, marks one year since Russia’s Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale war on Ukraine, and our media are falling over themselves to observe the anniversary. An almost festive air was built up with the showy flourish of President Joe Biden’s tightly media-managed train journey to Kyiv ahead of the red-letter day.
This could suggest that for the media it is some kind of birthday celebration, which is unfair. The date obviously and rightly offers an occasion for the kind of considered reflection and interpretation that everyday news coverage will rarely provide.
We need, though, to first acknowledge the unavoidable calendar truth that Russia’s use of military force against Ukraine could be better dated to its seizure of the Crimean peninsula nine years ago, not one.
That previous Putin land-grab (alongside his simultaneous military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas area) reflected Russia’s deep paranoia about being victimized by an aggrandizing US and Western Europe – as some more thoughtful examples of our western media have been reminding us all along. The current full-on warfare that began a year ago was a thrashing, bullying – and tellingly incompetent – outgrowth from that same sullen perception of victimhood. The paranoia is fundamental to the Kremlin’s thinking, and evidently nowhere more sharply than in Putin’s own obsessive mind – as was amply demonstrated in this week’s video from Moscow: the president’s war-delayed, self-justifying parliamentary speech.
Ukraine’s stunningly valiant response to the invasion has been – of course – lauded in much of the international press. Though badly battered, suffering an estimated fatality count of 150,000 (though probably fewer than Russia’s nearly 200,000 lives reportedly lost), Ukrainians both won the western world’s support and further buoyed up their own national unity and cohesion.
It could have been more widely reported, I feel, but one under-noticed opinion survey in Ukraine, conducted during the barrages of Russian artillery, missiles and drones, reached a finding that is well worth reflecting on. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology posed an eyebrow-raising, almost offensively inappropriate question: “Do you consider yourself a happy person?” In late 2022 almost 70% of Ukrainians answered that they did – a dramatic increase from little more than 50% back in 2017.
Sheer adrenalin, along with a heightened sense of communal purpose, may help to account for such cheeriness in the face of adversity. It certainly has echoes with a conviction that’s shared among my fellow-Brits, born of our somewhat mythic good spirits while Adolf Hitler was blitzing London in 1940-41. The conclusion often drawn is that you simply cannot bomb a civilian population into submission. (That notion seems well demonstrated elsewhere – Vietnam in 1965-68, for instance – although there are some dispiriting counter-examples, like Bashar al-Assad’s horribly successful pummeling of his rebellious fellow-Syrians. And here we should maybe register just how much help he enjoyed in that slaughter from Vladimir Putin.)
TO MANY INTENTS AND PURPOSES we are witnessing what is a proxy war of a kind: Russia against the US and its allies, with Ukraine as the proxy. We can recognize this without signing on to Putin’s belief that NATO is hell-bent on destroying a once-proud Russian empire.
The US and Nato countries choose to remain, formally speaking at least, more like cheerleaders for the Ukrainians than fully engaged supporters in the field. They still hold back from providing Ukraine with, for instance, the Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jets which could decimate Russia’s positions and its strength in the air. Western nervousness about provoking Russia too far (and ‘too far’ is a notoriously difficult qualifier to quantify) could well have been stoked further by Putin this week. He added an extra twist on his familiar nuclear saber-rattling: withdrawing from the New START Treaty, our last remaining US-Russia arms control agreement.
The current piling-on of vivid war reports in the present tense … media retrospectives covering the war’s entire chronology … leaders’ rallying pronouncements amid lights and cameras … all combine to reaffirm for us two truths about war and governance from time-honored analysts in different periods of history. First, Machiavelli’s dour reflection about the impossibility of banishing humanity’s self-made scourge: “There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed.”
And then, what has come to be called ‘The Thucydides Trap,’ meaning the Greek historian’s dissection of the Peloponnesian War, in which he might even have been predicting Putin’s paranoia. He boiled it down in simple terms: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
