Page 78 - bne monthly magazine June 2024 Russian Despair Index

78 Opinion
political reality. But it helps a number of crooked personalities
to draw funds from think-tanks and intelligence services.
To begin with, Russia is not the USSR, where the right of republics to separate was written into the constitution. It is
a nation state where over 80% of the population are ethnic Russian, while others are heavily Russified. It has ethnic autonomies, but few with indigenous majorities and even these are hardly sustainable as independent nations. Imagine Sakha-Yakutia, with an area equal to nine Germanies and a population of Latvia – maintaining its territorial defence if it were threatened by the nearby China.
The ambassadors in question – John Herbst, William Taylor and William Courtney – played important roles in developing American policy with regards to Ukraine and Russia over several decades since the 1990s. Two served in Kyiv.
Back in March 2021, Herbst and Taylor appeared among
the authors of an Atlantic Council report containing recommendations for the Biden administration on dealing with the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The other co-author, Swedish economist Anders Aslund, sat on the previous panel. The report argued for a more aggressive approach to steering Putin towards what the authors saw as an acceptable version of peace settlement. That included derailing the Nord Stream 2 gas project and offering Ukraine a roadmap for joining Nato, should Russia display intransigence.
Its publication coincided with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s abrupt transformation from a dove into a Russia hawk, which resulted in Putin beginning to amass troops at the Ukrainian border in preparation for a full-out invasion.
To their credit, the ambassadors who lent their names to the forum as headliners were relatively cautious about the prospects of independent Buryatia and “Smallandia”. Herbst even stated the obvious – that talking about disintegrating Russia might be helping Putin more than anyone else, which begged the question of why he chose to participate in the first place.
But they spoke about Ukraine’s victory, defined as Russian troops withdrawing to the 1991 borders, and about the subsequent regime change in Russia, as a real possibility. It was only a matter of giving Ukraine more weapons and paying less attention to Russia’s red lines and nuclear threats, it followed from their comments.
The story of the demise of the USSR, mechanically extrapolated on today’s Russia, loomed large over the discourse, betraying the speakers’ inability to grasp the abyss which divides the totalitarian communist project from the highly modernised far-right-leaning nation state of today. One of the diplomats indeed repeatedly referred to modern Russians as “the Soviets”.
Hearing their optimistic prognostications against the backdrop of increasingly gloomy analysis provided daily by Ukrainian
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war monitoring services and blogging active-duty soldiers on Telegram created the impression of two parallel realities existing on the battlefield and inside what is commonly known as the Blob.
The stories of people fleeing or resisting press gangs that
are hunting for recruits all over Ukraine seem to have never reached their ears. Neither did the stories of over 8,000 people prosecuted for “collaboration with the enemy” – a number which by far exceeds that of political prisoners in Russia.
Or of repressions against Ukraine's largest church organisation, affiliated with Moscow.
It is this culture of making far-reaching decisions and implementing risky policies without really understanding or bothering to study the potential allies and adversaries which plunged Ukraine into its ongoing catastrophe. This outcome was entirely avoidable had Russia’s reactions and capacities been predicted more accurately and if there had been
a desire to listen to Russia before it degraded into a fascist war machine.
Winning strategies that lose
Biden’s administration may or may not have taken the Atlantic Council report on board, but it was willing to take even more risks than the ambassadors were proposing at the time. In particular, it endorsed Zelenskiy’s clampdown on Putin’s man in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, who owned several popular TV channels and whose party overcame Zelenskiy’s in a 2020 opinion poll. Medvedchuk’s immunity during the previous six years was clearly a part of an informal agreement that ended the hot phase of war in 2015 and which Putin was right to think was now broken.
A series of seemingly coordinated actions by the Ukrainian and the US governments at the beginning of 2021 resulted in Putin bringing troops to the Ukrainian border in March that year. But it took another year of brinkmanship and misguided diplomacy before he launched a brutal full-out invasion of Ukraine. The crime of aggression is entirely on him, but
the catastrophe appears to have been avoidable at multiple points of time.
As an example, Putin did give diplomacy the last chance when Russia recognised the two Donbas “republics” but stayed still for another two days before invading Ukraine. It was during this period when Germany pulled out of Nord Stream 2, leaving Russia without a key incentive to maintain peace.
Another chance to mitigate the catastrophe came soon
after. The talks which the two sides conducted during the first months of war came close to achieving an agreement, which would allow Ukraine to minimise territorial losses and join the EU. But, as a recent Foreign Policy piece by Sergey Radchenko and Samuel Charap suggested, both the United States and Britain were opposed to the peace deal. Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia famously pointed the finger at