Memo to the West: Putin is not mad, we are

Abiding arrogance

The abiding arrogance of the West when it comes to its contemptuous disregard for the rest of the world was never more evident than its role in the Ukrainian crisis between late 2013 and early 2014. The coup which brought down the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev back then was the catalyst for a dangerous rise in tensions between Russia and the West — tensions which have culminated in the conflict now raging in Ukraine.

The role of the EU in fomenting this crisis in supporting the coup in 2014 – with more than a little help from those supposed US ‘champions of democracy’, now departed Senator John McCain and State Department mandarin Victoria Nuland – was irresponsible and utterly reckless. The sight of those same political figures, and others like them, now attempting to claim the moral high ground vis-à-vis Moscow, having lit the touch paper responsible for leading us to where we are now, has been embarrassing to behold.

No amount of dissembling and dissimulation alters the fact that in Kiev in 2014 a democratically elected government was overturned by an armed mob with fascists and neo Nazis in the vanguard. It served to confirm, yet again, that where the West is concerned democracy is not an end but merely a means by which to establish governments whose priority is not the welfare of their own people but Western strategic and economic interests, regardless of whether those governments come by way of the ballot or the bullet.

The hypocrisy in this regard is inarguable.

Geopolitical context

Also inarguable is that there is a compelling geopolitical context to these events. This revolves around the struggle between the continuation of a unipolar world, wherein the writ of Washington and its allies runs anywhere it so decides, or the multipolar alternative that the emergence of Russia, China, and other rapidly emerging economies demands and which places a check on US hegemony.

In this respect, Russia’s ability and willingness to project hard as well as soft power, utilising its oil and gas deposits as a political weapon, has been increasingly evident under Putin, enabling Moscow to defeat Western stragetic objectives in Georgia in 2008, Syria between 2015 and 2022, and which now sees it in direct and open conflict with the West in Ukraine. At least hawks in the US and Europe have proved consistent when it comes to failing to learn the lesson that Putin is no slouch when it comes to protecting Russia’s vital geo-strategic and security interests.

The West’s kamikaze course

In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Washington, London and Brussels have embarked on the kamikaze course of completely cancelling Russian energy imports, with the result that a disastrous cost of living crisis is now hurtling down the track towards their own people. When Boris Johnson warned the British people that weaning ourselves off Russian oil and gas will be painful, who exactly did he have in mind? Certainly, neither he nor any of his very wealthy Etonian and Oxbridge pals will feel much in the way pain from the economic shock that is about to ensue.

Though Mr Zelensky may be the toast of Western ideologues for whom war is a spectator sport, in truth he has presided over a disaster in his own country. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has been a battleground between Russia and the West when its development, security and stability has always been contingent on it being a bridge.

The sad and bitter irony is that Zelensky was elected by a landslide in 2019, pledging to “reboot” peace negotiations with the breakaway republics in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine on the basis of the conditions agreed under the rubric of the Minsk II Agreement (2015). One can only conclude that either he was prevented from acting on this pledge by hardline nationalist elements within the Ukrainian political and security apparatus he wasn’t strong enough to confront, or that he lied in order to win the election.

Interdependence

Taking a wider view, the relationship between Russia and Europe has up to this point been one of economic interdependence, geopolitical differences and tensions notwithstanding. Europe had been reliant on Russia for over 60% of its oil and gas requirements, while Moscow depended on the revenue it received in return. As part of this process, Ukraine benefited in the form of trans-shipment fees to the tune of $15 billion a year, being home to the pipeline through which Russian gas has for years made its way into Europe.

Russia’s motivation for Nord Stream 2 — by which it would be able to by-pass Ukraine and instead pump its gas through directly into Germany through an undersea pipeline — was the parlous relations it had enjoyed with Kiev since the Maidan coup of 2014. Germany, however, in response to Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine, has mothballed the project, with the likelihood that it will cancel it altogether given the trajectory of events.

The point is that when ideology is allowed to triumph over reason, chaos and strife follows. In terms of security and economic prosperity it has never made sense, taking a dispassionate view, for Ukraine to go down the path of integration with Europe at the expense of confrontation with Russia; just as it makes no sense for Europe, Germany in particular, to pursue closer links with Washington at the cost of a fractious relationship with Moscow. To her credit, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel understood this. It is why she was key in blocking the attempt to set Ukraine on the path of Nato membership at the military alliance’s annual summit in Bucharest back in 2008.

If true, as reports suggest, President Zelensky is willing to accept that Ukraine’s future will not be as a member of Nato and embrace the neutrality demanded by Putin, it comes as a welcome engagement with the reality represented by Russian tanks on the ground and an overdue rejection of the unreality of the castles in the sky painted for him in the West.

Cancel Russia

The attempt to cancel Russia, spearheaded by Biden and Johnson, falls into the category of lunacy. The attempt to disinvent the largest country by landmass in the world and by population in Europe, home to vast supplies of energy, is about as futile as trying to nail raindrops to a wall. The unedifying sight of Boris Johnson travelling out to the Middle East cap in hand to beg the region’s most murderous potentates — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and his chums — to increase oil production in a desperate effort to stabilise global energy prices having cut Russia out of the equation; this would be laughable if not so ruinous.

Meanwhile, in what qualifies as a volte face par excellence, the Biden administration has gone cap in hand to Maduro in Venezuela — the very same President Maduro Washington had hitherto been extending itself in toppling — to beg for Venezuelan oil after years of punishing sanctions imposed there.

You truly couldn’t make this stuff up.

It should be pointed out that months before Johnson embarked on his tour of blood-soaked capitals in and around the Arabian Peninsula, and Biden rediscovered the principle of sovereignty vis-a-vis Caracas, Russia had been preparing for Western sanctions over Ukraine by fomenting ever-closer ties with China.

In reality, all the West has done in following its madcap Russia delenda est (Russia must be destroyed) direction of travel is accelerate the growing schism between East and West that has been underway since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The narcotic of triumphalism which flooded the veins of every neocon and neoliberal in response to that event of world-historical importance has brought the world to the brink of WWIII these past few weeks. Just think about that.

The demonisation of Putin

‘The marketplace of fear requires a steady supply of monsters,’ wrote Eduardo Galeano in words that describe to a tee the demonisation of Vladimir Putin that has risen to the level of an entire industry in Western capitals. Indeed, we now have a mass media that is united in an orgasmic embrace with the supposed virtues of war with Russia. We can only be be thankful that these ‘inkslingers of the jingo press’, as James Connolly accurately referred to them, have access to computers rather than machine guns.

Before his death in 2020, US academic and Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen was tireless in denouncing US and Western foreign policy towards Moscow.

To wit:

We desperately need in this country a discussion of American policy toward Russia. We can’t keep saying an untruth, that this new Cold War is solely the fault of Putin. We need to rethink our policy toward Russia.

If successive US administrations had heeded the sage words of people like him more than they did the maniacal rantings of people like John Bolton, the Cold War of which Stephen F. Cohen spoke would not now be a hot war and Europe a far more stable and secure continent.

History will not be kind.

End.