Putin's posturing or real conflict?

I spoke to my sister the other day.  She is getting on in years - passed 80 last year, without appearing to be speeding - but still very active.  She lives alone now, a widow, in a small bungalow near the north Norfolk coast that has a big garden, landscaped lawns and flower beds at the front and deliberately "wilded" at the back and sides, with a fish pond, high hedgerows bordering the fields beyond, patches of meadow grass and wild plants everywhere.  It's a lovely idyllic place that I visit as often as I can, with benches scattered here and there in shady spots, to sit and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air in the summer months, sipping a cold beer or a glass of wine, and watch the multitude of wild birds swooping in and out of the hedgerows and feeders that are rigged on posts beside the washing line.  She and her late husband were avid twitchers, driving miles throughout the year to different nature reserves to enjoy the wildlife, and her binoculars are always at hand still.

She goes off on the community bus every couple of weeks with a group of old friends, all of an age and situation, to the nearest big market town, where they spend a couple of hours doing a bit of shopping, then meet at a coffee shop and have a slice of cake and a cappuccino or latte, and a good old gossip, putting the world to rights, before returning home on the community bus.  She loves it.  What with that, and caring for the garden and washing and ironing and cleaning the cottage, and popping next door every day for tea and a sandwich with the neighbour (widowed last year and recovering from hip replacement surgery), my sister is arguably busier than I. 

But right now, she said, she is very worried about me.  She has seen the news reports on the BBC and on ITV News of the difficult situation on the border between Poland and Belarus, and now close by between Russia and Ukraine, and although her geography is sketchy she knows that Poland is close to both those countries too.  She also knows that where I live is not more than a couple of hours' drive from both Belarus and Ukraine - which is true enough - and that politically the situation here is a little, shall we say unsettling.  Which is also true enough, although receiving nowhere near the press coverage it deserves (in Britain at least), and restricted pretty much to the various arguments between the Polish government and the EU - and even that seems to be rarely mentioned and when it is, misreported.  

From all she has seen and read, she is convinced we are on the brink of war, and how will we cope?  Will my family be safe? Is the car packed ready to dash for the German border at the first sight of a Russian tank crossing the border into Poland? Well, I tried to soothe her troubled mind, and assured her we were ready to go at a moments notice, and the situation wasn't quite as bad as all that, and we'd be okay, don't worry........  But I'm not sure she believed me.  I'm not really sure I believe it myself.

The main participants in the search for a diplomatic solution are simply too erratic to trust.

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First among them, of course, is Putin.  He sees himself as the New Czar of all the Russias, and numbers both Belarus and Ukraine among them.  A few years back I wrote a couple of pieces on my old blog, The World According to Travellin' Bob, about the man's obsession with Ukraine.  I called the essays "Ukraine against the Russian Bear".  and "What should we do about Putin?"   I published them in March and July 2014, and you will find them at The World According to Travellin' Bob: Ukraine versus the Russian Bear. (travellin-bob.blogspot.com) and The World According to Travellin' Bob: What should we do about Putin? (travellin-bob.blogspot.com) respectively, when a similar state of tension existed, and thousands of troops were massed along the border and there were invasion fears.  To summarize, both pieces dealt with Putin's culpability in the invasions of Crimea and the Donbass region and the mass murder of 300+ passengers and crew aboard Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.  My view then was that he should be brought to justice in The Hague for war crimes and suggested extreme personal sanctions against him (not the Russian state or his associates) including seizure of assets and a global blacklisting of his passport to prevent him leaving Russia as an immediate and proportionate requirement.  Neither happened, of course.

Since then, the conflict in Donbass continues unabated, Crimea remains occupied and quiet, and Putin has had free rein.  For four years he was blessed with an incompetent US President, Mr. Trump, who basically believed everything Putin told him and refused to do or say anything in the least bit critical.  Putin has brutally clamped down on political opponents at home and abroad: the Salisbury poisoning of the Skripals and later, on a domestic flight, Navalny,  In addition, what passed as a free press has all but disappeared, with newspapers, magazines, tv stations and internet channels even lightly critical of Putin closed down, editors and journalists imprisoned.  These are the actions that have gained international attention, and no doubt there are thousands of other similar actions that have not been covered.

Amid all the accusations, Putin has played a classic straight bat.  He has either denied all knowledge - as in the cases of the Salisbury poisonings or the Malaysian Airlines mass murder (no matter the strength of evidence against the state - and it is very strong) - or accepted responsibility but claimed "acting in Russia's interests" or "defending Russian citizens", as in both Ukrainian incursions.  Nobody outside the borders of the Russian state believe a word he says (except for Trump, of course, and he is no longer in office) but equally no-one has the moral courage to call him out.  Essentially, nothing has changed.

Putin clearly is Stalin's heir, more so than Kruschev, Brezhnev or any other of the grey men who succeeded Uncle Joe ever were.

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In Ukraine, meanwhile, Presidents have come and gone, with the office currently held by Volodymyr Zelensky, who at the time of his 2019 election was totally devoid of any political experience, beyond playing the part of the President in a tv series.  His election came as a shock, not least to himself, and is the ultimate "protest vote" from an electorate tired of the existing political class.

He has refused to bow to the demands of Putin, although an extremely fragile ceasefire has been negotiated in Donbass, and remains insistent that both that region and the Crimea remain Ukrainian territory under occupation and should be returned immediately.  Predictably, this has not happened. Zelensky has also, to his credit, refused the demands and veiled threats from Trump, prior to his 2020 election campaign, to start a criminal investigation into the business affairs of the son of Trump's opponent, Joe Biden - a clear case of political interference by the then incumbent US President.  The election was duly lost (or in the view of Trump and his followers, without any credible evidence, stolen) but how much the spat with Zelensky had to do with that is impossible to say.

Clearly,Zelensky has none of the political nous of Putin, nor his willingness to sacrifice anybody to gain what he wants, but he has been prepared to meet force with force.  Ukrainian troops are dug in along the front line in Donbass, and further troops and armoured units moved up to the Russian border in response to Russia's deployment.  All are pledged to defend their country and do whatever their President demands to do so.

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Which brings us to the third major participant.  The US, for better or worse, is the de facto leader of NATO, its largest and strongest military power, and Russia's - and Putin's - Public Enemy Number One. It has been so since the beginning of the old Cold War, and despite the failure of Communism and the break up of the old USSR remains so still.  As an ex-KGB officer, Putin knows this and believes it more than most: despite his Western, smart cut clothes and often urbane manner.  Joe Biden's election has moved the goalposts.

With Bush and Obama, Putin's relationship with the US seemed relatively even, publicly at least. When Trump was elected, his summits with America's enemies, notably North Korea and Russia, to a lesser extent China, seemed quite cordial: there was rarely any criticism of their leaders (Kim Jong Un and Putin especially), except before the meetings took place, and invariably at the end of them, Trump and his opposite number seemed the best of friends.  After his first summit with Putin, Trump surprised many by defending Putin (on paper his enemy) over claims that Russia had interfered in his election - a claim subsequently proven - whilst criticising, strongly, NATO (on paper his allies) over a lack of investment and threatening to withdraw from the Alliance, while Putin sat next to him with a smug smile on his face.  Clearly, he was tucked comfortably in Putin's pocket.  To this day, the truth about what was said in private between the two men remains a matter of conjecture.

Biden's election has changed all of that, and taken away the apparent certainty that Putin and Russia could more or less do as they liked without American or NATO sanction.  Before his first summit, Biden stated that he knew what the real Putin was like, based on his own experiences with the Russian leader as Obama's Vice President, and was "going to look him the eye and make it clear to him that America was back in business".  I assume he did so, because at the subsequent Press conference, Biden was his usual grandfatherly self while Putin glowered alongside him and saying little.  Relations between the two have remained frosty since then - s return to normality that Putin clearly does not like.

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These then are the main parties who, somehow, must navigate a way through this crisis.  On the sidelines sits Belarus, close allies and customers of Putin with a dictator who lost an election a couple of years ago but remains in power after suppressing the opposition be expelling or imprisoning its leaders and using troops to curb public demonstrations, all of it supported Russian forces and Putin's agreement.  The country also has a border with Ukraine, and thus could easily be used by Russian forces to provide another line of attack.  It also has a border with Poland that throughout this winter has been a flashpoint as thousands of migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have attempted to enter the EU via Poland.  The refugees are caught in a standoff on the border, blocked by Polish troops pushing them back through the now snowy forests into Belarus, where troops are waiting to push them back to Poland.  There have been many deaths and will be many more.  The Belarus state is widely believed to have provided assistance in getting the refugees to the border area specifically to provoke a response from Poland and stir trouble in the EU - again, with alleged support from Russia, in allowing flights carrying refugees to overfly its territory and providing unmarked militia to assist the Belarus police and security forces.  

Poland also has a long border with Ukraine, so there is a fear that in an escalation of hostilities Russian troops could easily, once in Ukraine, simply turn right and be at the Polish border in a few hours.  Poland is a close ally of Ukraine and already home to a couple of million refugees fleeing the Donbass and Crimean conflicts, and in addition has not forgotten the way the then USSR invaded eastern Poland on the same day as the Nazis invaded in 1939, thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that only came to light after the war ended. The invasion in the east caused many more casualties than did the Nazis, with entire villages wiped out brutally.  This is often overlooked in western European war histories, or its effects minimized.  But not by Poles.  

Poland also has an intense dislike for the present Russian regime resulting from the Smolensk disaster in April 2010 when an air force plane carrying the Polish President, his wife and many senior military commanders - virtually the entire "elite" crashed in fog as it landed in Smolensk, killing everyone on board.  The passengers were travelling for a commemoration of the Katyn Massacre nearby, during World War 2, in which some 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia were murdered by Russian NKVD troops who blamed the Nazis - again, the truth was not revealed until after the war ended.  Although multiple enquiries showed the Smolensk crash was a result of a mixture of bad weather, poor air traffic control equipment and pilot error, the belief that in some way Putin and Russia sabotaged the flight or ATC equipment and deliberately caused the crash is still widely held, especially by the ruling party led by the late President's twin brother.  Smolensk is in Belarus......

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So my sister's fears, going back to the start of this piece, are justified, and I share them (though perhaps not as strongly).

Putin has made a number of demands and been consistent throughout - even since before Crimea and Donbass incursions  He still considers Ukraine to be a part of Russia.  He will not accept Ukraine joining the EU.  He will "under no circumstances" allow Ukraine to join NATO.  He insists that both the EU and NATO "stop their eastward expansion" as this impacts Russia's "sphere of influence".   Russia (i.e. Putin) will take "whatever steps are needed" to prevent any of this happening.  

The response from the west - i.e. the US, the EU and NATO - has so far ruled out all of Putin's demands.  They have pointed out that Ukraine is an independent country and a democracy, albeit partly occupied (references to Donbass and Crimea) and demanded again Russia's withdrawal.  It has pointed out that Ukraine has not applied to join either the EU or NATO, even though it has expressed a desire to do so at some point, and any application by a sovereign democracy will be considered on its merits. It has also pointed out that any action seen to threaten a NATO member state will be considered, as per its charter, as a threat to the entire Alliance, to be defended by whatever means.

Additional NATO troops are being moved into Poland and the Baltic states, mainly US and British, as well as "observers" and "advisers" to Ukraine - which mirrors what happened in the early 1960s when the US sent them into Vietnam - and we all know how that went.  Not well.

So it does not look promising, but I hold on to one big hope.  Putin may be many things - a dictator, a gangster, a cold blooded killer, a devious and cunning operator among them - but I do not believe for a minute that he is stupid.  You don't drag your way from the rubble of post-War Leningrad to the Presidency of Russia (for nearly 20 years now), and maintain an iron grip on power, without being very smart as well as very nasty.

I don't believe he wants a war. I can't see what he would gain, strategically, in a bloodbath - because even with conventional weaponry, no nukes. that's what it would be - where much of the blame lies squarely on his doorstep. It's one thing interfering in a far away country, having a proxy war in say Syria or Libya or hacking computer systems and employing troll farms to get your man elected, and another thing entirely kicking something off in Europe, close to home, that could cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

I think he is testing out Joe Biden, testing out American resolve - NATO's too.  These is no doubt if Putin says he will do something, then he does it, but the unanswered question is does NATO and old Joe have the same resolve.  How will the new German govcrnment react (given the country's reliance on Russian gas)?  What about France, the Netherlands, Spain - all still in a Covid crisis and suffering public resentment over that?  Britain, with Boris Johnson and his government falling apart at the seams?  And let's not forget the problems Biden has at home.......

These are difficult times indeed.