My wife hasn't trusted my political opinion ever since the election of Trump. It doesn't matter that it was one of those rare conflagrations of events that ushered him into the White House, which so few could have predicted. In fact, very few did, but I was wrong just the same.
I suppose that is why she doesn't trust me when I say that Putin's threat to invade Ukraine is nothing more than a means to garner the world's attention. He wants everyone to see how important he is, especially Russians. Nothing feels better than having a captive audience in the President of France, telling Boris Johnson to fuck off, and forcing Biden's hand in Washington. On top of it all, he forged a historic alliance with China, mutually condemning NATO as part of their "Pact against the West." Who's the big man now?
They say that politics make for strange bedfellows and there are no stranger bedfellows than Xi and Putin, except for maybe Trump and Kim Jong-un. Unfortunately, these two world leaders present a far greater danger than did the cartoonish pairing of Donald and Little Kim. Of course, Trump thinks that if he was still president none of this would have happened as he would have worked out a really great deal like he did in Syria and Afghanistan. Instead, we are left to ponder just how far this new axis will go to exert its influence over the West?
I really don't think Putin would risk the Western world's massive condemnation over a swathe of land he really doesn't need. He has effectively closed off the Sea of Azov with the acquisition of Crimea and the bridge he built across the narrow strait at Kerch. Even if Ukraine were to win Donbas back, what value would it have for them? But, you never know with Vlad.
Lithuanian television has been dominated with talk of the impending invasion, which most political pundits consider a foregone conclusion. Ukraine represents the heart and soul of the Russian identity. It was the acquisition of Old Rus (present day Ukraine and Belarus) in the 16th century, and the breaking apart the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that led to the creation of Tsarist Russia. From that point on, Russia became the biggest player in the East. The dissolution of the Russian Empire after WWI and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are major sore points for Russians, who believe in their manifest destiny every bit as much as do Americans. For them, this region belongs to them, as it laid in Russian hands for the better part of 400 years. Their literature is steeped in Pan-Slavism, Dostoevsky being one of the most fervent believers. Ever since Ukraine began drifting toward the West with the election of Viktor Yushchenko in 2005, Russians began to doubt Putin's Slavic convictions, and so the pundits here think he has no choice but to reclaim what many Russians believe to be their sovereign hold over Ukraine.
We have at least two weeks before something happens, as Xi would never forgive Putin if he were to invade Ukraine during China's Olympics. This is the Poohish premier's shining moment, and he has gone out of his way to ensure that this is the best Olympics ever for China, with all the fake snow, convenient disqualifications in sprint skating, token Uyghur flagbearers, and even the reappearance of tennis phenom Peng Shuai to deny any accusations of sexual abuse from Chinese authorities close to the premier. The last thing Xi needs is a war to deflect attention away from his Games.
So, Putin bides time, courting the more favorable European leaders like Orban, bringing former German PM Schroder out of retirement to speak on his behalf, and engaging Macron in a marathon talk that focused mostly on all his grievances with NATO. In Vlad's addled mind, this is the root of all evil, not Russia's inherit imperialism. It's bad enough NATO enticed all the Eastern European countries that were formerly under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. You can't expect him to give up Ukraine and Georgia too!
Putin firmly believes that the aim of the United States is to box Russia in, limit its economic development, and reduce it to a "regional player." He's not willing to admit his own shortcomings over the 20+ years he has been in power, unable to bring the kind of economic revival he has long promised. He has to blame it on outside forces. He conveniently forgets all the favors the US did over the years in trying to bring Russia into the Western fold, not least of all adding it to the G7 when its economy lagged far behind other members. This was specifically meant to jump start Russia's economy back in the 1990s, after providing so much in the way of financial aid, largely at the expense of emerging Eastern European countries.
The breakdown first came in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. Still, the G7 included Russia in its annual gatherings, hoping that a diplomatic and economic resolution could be reached. Then for some inexplicable reason Putin decided to invade and annex Crimea in 2014, bringing to an end this tenuous global relationship, and earning the ire of then US President Obama, who openly chastised Putin, calling Russia's unlawful annexation "an expression of vulnerability rather than strength." It was probably at this point that Putin began to plot his revenge against the United States.
It is hard to believe, but everything seemed to be going exceptionally well in 2016. The economy was soaring, the Dow closing in on 20,000. Unemployment had dipped below 5% in the US. Interest rates remained low, encouraging development, virtually no inflation, or at least little reported. Even Europe seemed to have finally emerged from the 2008 global recession. It seemed a foregone conclusion the Democratic nominee would win because what did Americans have to complain about? Everything, it turned out, especially when Hillary Clinton emerged as the Democratic nominee.
For Putin, Hillary was even worse than Obama. Not that he was running, but the election would be a referendum on his administration, and Putin went out of his way to ensure that Americans second and third guessed everything he did. Putting his money behind Trump seemed an incredible long shot, like taking a bet on a 50-1 horse at the racetrack, but Putin had a lot of things working in his favor. Largely, an angry conservative American base that had been turned off by all the protests over racial discrimination, and couldn't stand the idea of a woman in charge of the country, least of all a Clinton. So, he had his trolls go to work fomenting as much unrest as they could on the social media, which many considered the deciding force in the 2016 elections.
Of course, the American news media played right into his hands, treating Trump as a celebrity, giving him billions of dollars in free airtime, so it didn't matter how many red MAGA hats he sold. SNL lampooned him almost every Saturday, with Alec Baldwin becoming a surrogate Donald Trump. There was even a caricature of "Pooty" as Santa Claus that aired shortly after the election, reminding everyone who helped Donald orchestrate this miraculous victory. Donald Trump was not only perfect for the news media, but perfect for Putin, someone he could easily manipulate and end anymore talk about Crimea or Syria or any of the other conflicts that had cast Russia in a bad light.
I will never understand how Americans could vote for Trump, but then Hillary won by 3 million votes, although I admit I pinched my nose when I voted for her. It was the antiquated electoral college that gifted the presidency to Donald Trump. A Congressional investigation revealed that Russian troll farms had specifically targeted the three states that won the election for Trump, casting just enough doubt among the electorate that the ballots tilted ever so slightly in his favor. It also helped having a third party candidate, also bought and paid for by Putin, to siphon a few more votes away from Hillary in these crucial states.
Putin had honed his cyber warfare skills to perfection. For Eastern European countries, it was nothing new. He had been doing this for years in their states, managing to tilt several national elections in his favor, most notably Hungary and the Czech Republic. Here in Lithuania, the rise of the Farmers and Green Party played right into Putin's hands, but mercifully we had a president who wasn't beholden to Putin the way Trump was.
This is another reason I don't see what Putin gains by invading Ukraine. He has accomplished so much through media manipulation that it would seem out of character to take such a coarse action. Influencing elections seems much less costly with more desirable outcomes. I guess he wasn't happy with Ukrainian President Zelensky, who still chose to lean toward the West and its greater economic opportunities than tilt back toward Russia as Putin had expected him to do, when the young comedian won the 2019 election. Zelensky won largely on the hope that he would finally end the war in Donbas, but it has drug on nearly 3 more years, as Putin has refused to call off the dogs. Worse, Zelensky found himself tangentially involved in the impeachment hearings in Congress when it was learned that Trump had tried to extort favors from him over arms shipments. This wasn't "Servant of the People" anymore.
Most political pundits have been surprised by how competent Zelensky turned out. Of course, they expected nothing, but he has grown into his role as president, refusing to buckle to Putin's demands, while at the same time showing tact in his relations with the West. He's become BFF with French President Macron, who has actively supported him throughout this ordeal, and is probably in the best position to broker some kind of peace deal with Putin.
I think the Lithuanian political pundits look too much at history and not enough at the current dynamics. Putin's long game may indeed be to reconstitute Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, take your pick, but I don't think he is willing to pay the political and economic price that would come with it. He would indeed get his war with NATO at that point, one he would definitely lose. He barely has the forces necessary to make a sweeping land grab in Ukraine. What makes him think he could take on a united NATO front if he were to expand his territorial ambitions into the Baltics?
Of course, many of these Lithuanian pundits feel NATO would abandon the Baltics at that point, as the Allied Forces did at the end of WWII. They fear NATO would retreat back into its safe Western alliance and to hell with Eastern Europe. However, so much of what the EU and NATO has built in the last 15+ years is predicated on a strong Eastern Europe, and it would be pure folly to think they would give that up to Putin. "No more Yaltas!" as former President Bush said in a speech on the steps of the old city hall in Vilnius on a cold November day in 2002.
I'm worried, that's for sure, but not to the level of cynicism I hear on Lithuanian television. It is a 1938 Moment, as Lithuanian PM Šimonytė describes, but I think NATO has Lithuania's back, and I think NATO will do whatever it can to aid Ukraine, even if it should come to war. This great military alliance would lose its entire reason for being if it forsook Eastern Europe just to appease Putin's imperial dreams. I just hope that this time around, the EU makes a bolder initiative to wean itself from Russian natural gas and oil, so that it no longer needs pipelines like Nord Stream 2, and purges disgraced leaders like Gerhard Schroder, who negotiated this awful deal back in 2005, just before he left Berlin, and now sits on the board of the company that manages it.
We can no longer afford to appease Putin, and that does mean making some hard choices, which the current German PM Scholz doesn't seem quite prepared to do, judging by his evasive answers during a joint press conference with Biden. Negotiating with Putin along softer lines has failed. If the Russian president really wants to return to a pre-1997 political map of the world then let's do so starting with his resignation. He has superseded his own constitution multiple times, or I should say rewrote it, to suit his own imperial ambitions. His own people have grown tired of him but don't have the electoral means to oust him, just as we saw in Belarus. Not that Pooty will resign, but at least throw his negotiating tactics right back in his face!
Anyway, my wife would have cut me off long before now. I hope I'm right this time, and that clearer heads will prevail. The last thing Europe needs is a war.
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