Vladimir Putin

Over at least the past two months, US President Joe Biden’s White House has successfully inculcated in nearly all of the corporate media its firm belief that Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, has made the decision to mount a military invasion of Ukraine. Most of the articles published on the subject at best wonder about only two things. When will the invasion take place? And how far will it go?

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Since the question of whether he will invade has been put aside, the pundits are asking themselves a different question. It concerns President Putin’s motives. Does Putin feel he needs to overthrow the Ukrainian government and reestablish a friendly regime that will serve as a buffer state between Russia and Europe? Or will he simply be content with controlling the Russian-speaking eastern parts of Ukraine, effectively destabilizing the current regime and thus preventing the possibility of the nation’s integration into NATO?

Given the apparently Beltway mantra that an invasion is imminent and that the West insists on Ukraine’s right to do what it wants, including joining NATO, it was therefore surprising to read in The New York Times this week that people in the White House — in this case, people who usually are removed from communication with the media — may have made a different assessment. In an article whose title “War May Loom, but Are There Offramps?” is an acknowledgment of the level of uncertainty that surrounds the current geopolitical standoff, David E. Sanger reveals that “even President Biden’s top aides say they have no idea if a diplomatic solution, rather than the conquest of Ukraine, is what Mr. Putin has in mind.”

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Like most Russians, and unlike most Americans, Putin knows something about how the game of chess is played. Geopolitics for Russians has always been a game of chess. Curiously, Western commentators instead seem to believe that the game logic Putin respects is similar to that of American football or basketball. They incessantly talk about Russia’s “playbook.” These are sports where you assign roles, plan actions and then try to execute. However complex the configurations may come, plays in a playbook follow a logic of going from step one to step two. Chess requires a different form and level of thinking.

It is reasonable to suppose that the Russian-American AP reporter Vladimir Isachenkov has a good understanding of Russian politics and Russian culture. Here is how he describes the current situation: “Amid fears of an imminent attack on Ukraine, Russia has further upped the ante by announcing more military drills in the region.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Up the ante:

A metaphor from poker that when used correctly means to increase the initial stakes of a game, the amount that must be advanced by each player to enter the game. It is often used incorrectly as an equivalent of another poker term: call the bluff.  

Contextual Note

Isachenkov predictably foresees the invasion authorities in the West almost seem to desire, and not only in Washington. This week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson forecasted Putin’s “plan for a lightning war.” Translated into German, that means Blitzkrieg, a term Johnson preferred to avoid using, though the innuendo was clear. The point of the entire effort to predict a Russian invasion is to instill the idea that Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler.

Russians, however, are not known for practicing Blitzkrieg. Chess players prefer to construct their game patiently through a series of maneuvers that look at a long-term evolution. They challenge their opponent’s understanding of an evolving situation and are extremely sensitive to the layout on the chessboard, with the intent of making a checkmate inevitable. Americans, in particular, tend to go for strikes and are always hoping for a lucky strike.

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Perhaps because Isachenkov believes Americans may not understand such strategies, instead of looking to the subtlety of chess for his gaming metaphor or even to Putin’s documented experience of judo, he draws his literary inspiration from another quintessential American game, poker. He tells us Russia has “upped the ante.” In so doing, he misinterprets not only the meaning of Putin’s moves but even the practice of poker itself. Isachenkov appears to interpret “up the ante” as meaning “increase the pressure” or “raise the temperature.” He didn’t realize that poker offers a better metaphor for Putin’s actions: calling Biden’s bluff.

No respectable Western commentator would frame the situation in those terms. It would mean acknowledging that the US resorts to the ignoble art of bluffing. Bluffing implies hypocrisy. The US has only one goal: to make the world more equitable and to help democracy prevail. Secretary of State Antony Blinken defined the mission in these terms: “It’s about the sovereignty and self-determination of Ukraine and all states,” before adding that “at its core, it’s about Russia’s rejection of a post-Cold War Europe that is whole, free, and at peace.” And, just to make things clear: “It’s about whether Ukraine has a right to be a democracy.”

Isachenkov points out that Russia “has refused to rule out the possibility of military deployments to the Caribbean, and President Vladimir Putin has reached out to leaders opposed to the West.” He calls this “military muscle-flexing” but perhaps fails to see this for the theater it is meant to be, coming from the president of a nation that gave us Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Gorki. Evoking the Caribbean is Putin’s way of alluding to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It may especially be meant to call Americans’ attention to the idea that powerful nations do not look kindly to discovering an adverse military nuclear presence at its borders. If John F. Kennedy could force Nikita Khrushchev to back down 60 years ago, Putin should be allowed to do the same to Biden today.

Historical Note

If Vladimir Putin is calling Joe Biden’s bluff, what is the nature of that bluff? In the simplest terms, Biden’s bluff is the latest version of what President George H.W. Bush, after the demise of the Soviet Union, proudly called the “new world order.” After defeating Donald Trump, Biden announced to his allies in Europe that “America is back,” which was his way of saying “my version of America is great again,” the version that uses its military reach to protect its business interests across the globe.

In a New York Times op-ed dated January 24, national security expert, Fiona Hill, who served under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, claims that Putin’s aim is not just to annex all or part of Ukraine. He isn’t looking at taking a pawn or even a bishop. He has the whole chessboard in view. Hill is undoubtedly correct about Putin’s real purpose, that he “wants to evict the United States from Europe.”

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“Right now,” Hill writes, “all signs indicate that Mr. Putin will lock the United States into an endless tactical game, take more chunks out of Ukraine and exploit all the frictions and fractures in NATO and the European Union.” In other words, the current posture of the United States is offering Putin a winning hand (poker) or setting itself up for a checkmate.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who knows something about the stakes associated with warfare, makes a complementary point concerning the nature of the risk for the US: “It is another thing altogether to speak only of the pain sanctions would cause Russia, with little thought, if any, to the real consequences that will be paid on the home front.” If events get out of control, as is likely if there is no diplomatic solution, the effects on the West’s economy will be far more dramatic than any damage that can be inflicted on Russia through sanctions. 

The US has refused to listen to the arguments not just of Putin, but also of foreign policy wonks such as John Mearsheimer. They believe that even the daydream of linking Ukraine with NATO crosses the reddest of lines, not just for Putin but for Russia itself. Failing to take that into account while insisting that it’s all a question of respecting an independent nation’s right to join a hostile military alliance represents a position that makes war inevitable.

In a 2021 Geopolitical Monitor article with the title “Do We Live in Mearsheimer’s World?” Mahammad Mammadov cited “Mearsheimerian realism,” which he claims “sees Ukraine’s future as a stable and prosperous state in its being a ‘neutral buffer’ between multiple power poles, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Accordingly, Russia is still a declining power with a one-dimensional economy and need not be contained.”

That seems like a solution most people in the West could live with… apart from the military-industrial complex, of course. And Democratic presidents seeking to prove they are not weaklings before this year’s midterm elections.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

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First, let’s be clear: Russia already invaded Ukraine. At the end of February 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia seized key facilities in Crimea and then helped secessionists in eastern Ukraine some weeks later. Crimea is now under Russian control and a civil war continues to flare up over the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east.

Second, the United States has repeatedly provoked Russia by pushing the boundaries of NATO ever eastward. Virtually all of Eastern Europe is part of the military alliance, and so are parts of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Ukraine is in a halfway house called “NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners” and it has contributed to NATO-led missions.

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A majority of Ukrainians — those not living in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk — support NATO membership, according to a November 2021 poll. Such poll results are no surprise given that membership would provide Ukraine with the additional insurance of NATO’s collective defense clause. Of all the countries considering membership in NATO, Ukraine is the one that most threatens Russia’s national interests in what it calls the “near abroad.”

That’s some of the necessary context to the recent news that Russia has been massing around 100,000 soldiers along its border with Ukraine, coupled with medium-range surface-to-air missiles. Russia argues that such maneuvers are purely precautionary. Ukraine and its supporters think otherwise.

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The United States has rallied its allies to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. It has promised to levy additional economic sanctions against Moscow as well as send more US troops to Eastern Europe to add to the several thousand American soldiers in Poland as well as those stationed at four US military bases in Bulgaria, a military facility on Romania’s Black Sea coast and elsewhere. The Biden administration has been clear, however, that it wouldn’t send US soldiers to Ukraine to confront Russian invaders.

Putin, meanwhile, has demanded that Ukraine’s membership in NATO be taken off the table. He has also called for an immediate security dialogue with the United States and has been strategizing with China’s Xi Jinping on how to coordinate their policies.

The transfer of troops to the Ukrainian border may simply be a test of the West’s resolve, an effort to strengthen Putin’s hand in negotiations with both Kyiv and Washington, a way of rallying domestic support at a time of political and economic challenges or all of the above. Given enormous pushback from the Ukrainian army among other negative consequences of a military intervention, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not likely in the cards. Putin prefers short wars, not potential quagmires, and working through proxies wherever possible.

A hot war with Russia is the last thing the Biden administration wants right now. Nor is an actual détente with Moscow on the horizon. But could Putin’s aggressive move raise the profile of US-Russia relations in such a way as to lay the foundation for a cold peace?

Fatal Indigestion?

The civil war in Ukraine does not often make it into the headlines these days. Ceasefires have come and gone. Fighting along the Line of Contact that separates the Ukrainian army from secessionist forces breaks out sporadically. Since the beginning of the year, 55 Ukrainian soldiers have died and, through the end of September, so have 18 civilians, including four children. Many residents of the border towns have fled the fighting, but millions who remain require humanitarian assistance.

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For the Russian government, this low-level conflict serves to emphasize its main message: that Ukraine is not really a sovereign country. Moscow claims that its seizure of Crimea was at the behest of citizens there who voted for annexation in a referendum. It argues that the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are simply exercising their right of self-determination in a political climate that discriminates against Russian speakers. Such fissures in the territory of Ukraine, according to this logic, suggest that the government in Kyiv doesn’t have complete control over its borders and has thus failed at one of the principal tests of a nation-state.

For Ukraine, the issue is complicated by the presence of a large number of Russian-language speakers, some of whom feel more affinity for Moscow than Kyiv. A 2019 law that established Ukrainian as the country’s primary language has not helped matters. Anyone who violates the law, for instance, by engaging customers in Russian in interactions in stores, can be subjected to a fine. So far, however, the government hasn’t imposed any penalties. That’s not exactly a surprise given that the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who objected to the law when he was running for office, is more comfortable speaking Russian in public.

Despite its domestic challenges and the recent history of Russian military incursions, Ukraine is very much a country. It is a member of the United Nations. Only a handful of states — Somalia, Palau — have neglected to extend it diplomatic recognition. There is no strategic ambiguity about Ukraine’s place in the international order as compared to, say, Taiwan.

Not even Putin, despite his paeans to “one Russia,” realistically contemplates trying to absorb a largely resistant country into a larger pan-Slavic federation with Russia and Belarus. After all, Moscow has had its challenges with the much smaller task of integrating little Crimea into the Russian Federation. Upgrading the peninsula’s infrastructure and connecting it to the Russian mainland has cost tens of billions of dollars even as the sanctions imposed by the West have cost Russian corporations more than $100 billion. A water crisis in Crimea — because Ukraine blocked the flow from the Dnieper River into the North Crimean Canal — has offset the infrastructure upgrades Moscow has sponsored, leading to speculation last year that Russian would invade its neighbor simply to restart the flow of water.

Invading Ukraine to resolve problems raised by the earlier invasion of Crimea would turn Vladimir Putin into the woman who swallowed a fly (and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider and so on). Such a strategy promises larger and more diverse meals followed by the inevitable case of fatal indigestion.

An Improbable Peace?

So far, the Biden administration has offered a mix of threats and reassurances in the face of a possible Russian invasion. New sanctions and the dispatch of additional troops to Eastern Europe have been balanced by the refusal of the administration at this point to consider any direct involvement in Ukraine to counter Russian forces. Biden communicated this strategy not only in speeches, but in a two-hour telephone call with Putin last week. It was, by all accounts, a diplomatic conversation, with no bridge-burning and no Donald Trump-like fawning.

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Biden and Putin may meet in early 2022. If that sounds like deja vu, you’re right. After Russia mobilized troops on Ukraine’s border last April, a Biden–Putin summit took place in mid-June in Geneva. Long ago, North Korea discovered that missile launches were an effective way of getting Washington’s attention. Russia can no longer count on Trump’s affection for authoritarian leaders to secure summits, so it has now adopted the North Korean approach.

The important thing is that Putin and Biden are talking and that the respective diplomatic establishments are engaging with one another. The problem is that both leaders face domestic pressure to take a more aggressive stance. In the United States, bipartisan efforts are afoot to send Ukraine more powerful armaments and escalate the threats against Moscow. In the Russian Duma, far-right nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and putatively left-wing leaders like Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov have at one point or another called for the outright annexation of Ukraine’s Donbass region. Also, the approval ratings of both Putin and Biden have been dropping over the last year, which provides them with less maneuvering room at home.

To resolve once and for all the territorial issues involving Ukraine, the latter has to be sitting at the table. The civil war, although still claiming lives, is thankfully at a low ebb. But it’s important to push through the implementation of the 2014 Minsk accords, which committed Ukraine to offer special status to Donetsk and Luhansk that would provide them greater autonomy within Ukrainian borders. Ukraine can bring such a compromise to the table by pushing stalled constitutional amendments through the parliament.

Crimea is a different problem. Even if Ukraine has international law on its side, it cannot easily roll back Russian integration of the peninsula. As the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer points out, success might be the best form of revenge for Ukraine. If the country manages to get its economic act together — a difficult but not impossible task — it will present itself as a better option for Crimeans than being Moscow’s charity case. Queue a second referendum in which Crimea returns to Ukraine by popular demand.

The question of NATO membership should be treated with a measure of strategic ambiguity. The US government won’t categorically rule out Ukrainian membership, but it also can deliberately slow down the process to a virtual standstill. Russia has legitimate concerns about NATO troops massed on its border. Putin’s demand that the alliance not engage in a military build-up in countries bordering Russia is worthwhile even outside of its value as a bargaining chip.

Another major thorn in US-Russia relations is Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. Obviously, it should be up to Germany where it gets its energy, and surely Russia is no worse than some of the places the US has imported oil from in the past (like Saudi Arabia). But the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is yesterday’s problem. The pipeline will soon become a huge stranded asset, a piece of infrastructure that will send unacceptable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and will be made redundant by the falling price of renewable energy. The European Union, additionally, is considering a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that will only add to the cost of imported natural gas, stranding that particular asset even earlier than expected.

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Everyone talks about the United States and China working together to battle climate change. The same spirit of cooperation should animate US-Russia relations. The Russian government has been a little bit more forthcoming of late on setting decarbonization goals, but it has a long way to go, according to the analysis of these three Russian environmental activists.

Imagine Washington and Moscow working together to wean themselves off of their mutual dependency on fossil fuels. Let’s call it a “green détente” that includes regular “carbon control” summits designed to reduce mutual emissions, much as arms control confabs have aimed to cut back on nuclear armaments.

Of course, there are plenty of other issues that can and will come up in talks between the two superpowers: denuclearization, cyberwarfare, the Iran nuclear agreement, the future of Afghanistan, UN reform. Sure, everyone is talking about avoiding worst-case scenarios right now. The conflict over Ukraine and the conflict inside Ukraine are reminders that the United States and Russia, despite powerful countervailing pressures, can indeed go to war to the detriment of the whole world. Perhaps Putin and Biden, despite the authoritarian tendencies of the former and the status-quo fecklessness of the latter, can act like real leaders and work together to resolve mutual problems that go well beyond the current impasse in Ukraine.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More