Ukraine: the big picture - revisited, by Sackerson

Peter Hitchens has said it: the real struggle in Ukraine is between the US and Russia.  In his subsequent rebuttal of people who have swallowed our war propaganda he repeats:

‘A foolish Western policy has goaded Russia into an irrational act… I have argued ceaselessly against the deliberately dangerous policy of NATO enlargement, and against the destabilisation of Ukraine by outside intervention.’

Why has Russia done it?

Natural resources, say some. Ukraine is rich in agriculture and minerals; but it is a vast country and much harder to hold than to invade. Besides, Russia is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and boasts huge mineral reserves of its own. 

On the other hand the West is tempted, and finance plays its part, says Professor Prabhat Patnaik, who argues that the IMF, once simply an international rescue-bank, is now used to enforce ‘investor-friendly’ economic restructuring on the borrower; in Ukraine’s case this entailed reforms such as cutting spending on education and health and slashing the gas price subsidy to its consumers, who are already the poorest in Europe. Patnaik claims that the IMF deliberately loaned more than Ukraine could ever repay, so paving the way for taking land and mineral resources in lieu; it will end, he says, by turning Ukraine into Greece and the economy will be disrupted as masses emigrate for a better life:

Domestic populism. Putin courts his people’s support by adopting the role of national/ethnic protector. Article 69 (3) of his revisedConstitution of 2020 extends this protection to Russians abroad and Article 79 allows him to ignore international treaties that stop him doing it, e.g. in his annexation of Crimea. That said, war is a costly gamble; did Putin really ‘cast the die’ just to boost his popularity?

Defence. Geography makes Russia vulnerable to invasion from the West, which has happened five times since 1605.  As for nuclear weapons, officially the US has only 100 in Europe (map here) but we must pray that the Pentagon is never convinced that a nuclear war is winnable with a massive pre-emptive strike, say from missiles smuggled to near the Russian border. President Putin has been referencing the 1962 Cuban MissileCrisis since 2019, when Washington withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF)Treaty. Nor can we assume that Russia would refrain from using its own nukes if seriously threatened: post 1991 we discovered that ‘the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.’ Hawks should understand that both sides would be safer with a buffer zone.

Securing future economic growth. Russia’s foreign minister Lavrov sees the United States as wanting ‘to come back to a unipolarworld’ and says ‘the West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent andautonomous development of Russia.'  Strategically, eastern and southern Ukraine are vital elements, not only in Russia’s military and naval security in the region, but also in her international trade via waterways.

Before the Soviet collapse and EU/NATO encroachment, the Black Sea was very largely a Red lake, except for the shores of north-eastern Greece and northern Turkey. Now, if we look at the map and visualise both Ukraine and Georgia within the fold (still under consideration), Blue is certainly crowding what is left of (what was once) Red. Without Crimea and its warm-water port Sevastopol, Russia would be boxed-in to the north-east corner and feeling vulnerable.

Accordingly, Russia has long been strengthening its facilities in that Sea. The Sochi Olympics served a dual purpose: in 2014 America’s The Nation magazine scoffed at Putin’s $51 billion dollar ‘white elephants’, missing the greater potential of the new Sochi airport, and of the development of the ports there, at Novorossiisk (in preparation for oil and gas shipping) and at Port Kavkaz - which faces Port Crimea across the Kerch Strait, the two linked (road and rail) since 2019 by Russia’s Crimean Bridge, Europe’s longest. South Stream, the planned undersea gas pipeline to Bulgaria, jinking through Turkey’s zone to avoid Ukraine, had to be scrapped because of political fallout from the Crimea annexation, but it is clear that the Black Sea is a hugely important trading nexus for Russia.

So is the Sea of Azov, after which Ukraine’s hardest-line regiment is named. Until 2014 the Sea of Azov was jointly controlled by Russia and the Russophile eastern Ukraine. The River Don empties into it, and is connected to the Volga, which flows into the Caspian, by the Volga-Don Canal, which strains to accommodate modern shipping needs. One proposal is/was for a vast  Eurasia Canal linking the Caspian to the Azov and so on to the Black Sea; in 2007 Kazakhstan’s PresidentNazarbayev enthused that the canal ‘would make Kazakhstan a maritime power and benefit many other Central Asian nations as well’; an alternative Russian plan is to widen the Volga-Don Canal. 

Either way, a hostile Ukrainian force on the western shore of the Azov would again pose a threat to Russian trade and prosperity in the area, and indirectly to long-term plans for a Eurasian trading bloc as envisaged in  the International North–South TransportCorridor or Damir Ryskulov’s scheme of a Trans-Asian Corridor of Development (below):

To conclude, America has been pursuing an outdated geopolitical policy originally aimed at containing the spread of Communism.  The mystery is why the US continued to foster China’s ascendancy after the Soviet collapse; Professor John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 blamed America for the Ukraine crisis, sees this as a ‘colossal strategic blunder’, saying we should settle with Putin and ‘pivot’ towards Asia. Nevertheless, conservative historian David Starkey thinks it is too late; pace Sellar and Yeatman America can no longer remain ‘top nation’ and pace them plus Francis Fukuyama, History has not ‘come to a .’ 

Indeed, why should they?