The world is barely out of one pandemic when another has struck. In the early hours of Thursday, the unexpected became the unavoidable as Russia launched a full scale military invasion of Ukraine pounding its principal cities from the land, sea and air. It was a fearsome onslaught honed to precision by years of relentless preparation.
Despite the loss of empire, it is obvious that the Russian military machine remains as ferocious and conventionally impregnable as ever. All the western powers could do for now is to rail and rant in helpless fury. Vladimir Putin is a military gambler of the highest order and distinction. It is now obvious that the west misunderstood and underestimated the chilling resolve and capacity for punitively proactive strike by this former KGB apparatchik.
After the Russian invasion, the entire post-cold war global order lies in tatters. It is the return of the repressed. It is a return match and the old Russian bear growls furiously again unnerving the west even as hordes of refugees litter the Donbas region. Putin says he wants to “demilitarize and de-nazify” the region as an act of enlightened self-protection. This is bound to resonate very well with the local Russian populace who still bear the institutional scars and horrific national memory of the Nazi invasion.
In the epic battle of Stalingrad, over three million Russians perished defending their fatherland. Russia says, and rightly too, that it cannot afford to have a Ukraine as a NATO member and with its nuclear warheads beaming down its territory. In all fairness, it is akin to having Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba. The handshake would be slipping beyond the elbow.
The Ukrainians themselves are badly and bitterly divided. While a sizeable proportion favours cooperation with Russian on the grounds of old umbilical ties, many others are for western-style democracy away from the neo-Tsarist autocracy so beloved by Putin and his pan-Slavic acolytes. The ideological divisions do not make for national unity of purpose in the face Putin’s blitzkrieg.
Putin is mute and immutable where it comes to western concerns and interests. The western powers have not taken time to understudy Putin and what drives his maniacal insistence and single- minded tenacity. Neither have they shown a deep immersion in Ukrainian history. For centuries, Ukraine has been an integral part of the old Russian Empire, treated like a Slavic province with organic ties of shared ethnicity and consanguinity to the Russian homeland. Nikita Khrushchev, a Soviet ruler of consequence, was a Ukrainian by birth. Stalin himself was originally from Georgia.
The Russian ruler is a coldblooded Slavic supremacist who dreams of new Russian empire with himself as an absolute Tsar. He has already built up a formidable foreign reserve and is not likely to be fazed or deterred by actual sanctions or threats of such. It begins to feel like the Cold War again. But let us get real. You cannot step into same river twice. It is a new global order staring us in the face. And it requires thinking out of the diplomatic red box.