As the implacable Russian military machine subjects Ukraine and its heroic defenders to a slow-motion high-tech lynching, the world is benumbed by the magnitude of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding. The carnage has been horrific and the destruction of infrastructure heart wrenching. Never would the civilized world have imagined that this kind of urban horror was possible after the cold war.
But it can get worse that is if Russia is forced by sheer economic strangulation or panicked by the unanticipated defiance of the Ukrainians buoyed by military support by their western allies to reach for the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Over the years, the Russian leader has demonstrated a chilling daredevilry and coldblooded ruthlessness that nothing can be put beyond him.
The world has never been closer to a nuclear Armageddon than this. If Putin loses his mental balance, there is every possibility he might do something desperate and unusual. The changing nature of global order has been brought forcibly to the front burner by events unfolding in Ukraine. Once again, history is reminding us that it does not progress in a straightforward manner, but in a haphazard and contradictory way.
On the one hand, we can say for sure that the old empire is gone and buried forever. Yet on the other hand, it can also be seen that notions of empire in different manifestations exist in the political imaginary or subliminal consciousness of the major world powers.
While America for the past three hundred years has acted like an empire in denial even while maintaining far-flung protectorates all over the globe, Russia has retained an emotional attachment and identification with its former satellites beyond the call of ordinary duty. Yet it will be awful to condemn the Russians without first hearing them out.
It is a case of loving your former slave to death. With particular reference to the strategic and mineral-rich Ukraine, its old master will not even allow it to act in its own established national interests unless they tally with the larger empire interests. If they try it, they must be swiftly brought to book before they endanger empire. In the case of America, the urge to further incapacitate and even finish off the old Russian bear has never been more pressing.
In America’s subconscious, Russia, even in its economically degraded state, represents the most potent global threat to America’s military domination and unipolar designs. The Americans nurse a secret fear of the Russian military machine. This is probably because the Russian army is a match for them when it comes to gung-ho daring and sheer fecklessness in battle.
Unlike the Chinese who fight with uncanny mental subtlety combined with uncommon natural toughness and who believe with their greatest general that the best victory is the one won without a a single shot, the war-like ancient nobility of America and Russia share a bloodlust and a glorification of martial derring-do which probably hark back to a mutual Viking ancestry.
This Russian high caste are to be distinguished from what the Germans dismiss and mercilessly caricature as the untermensch, or semi-barbarians, wild unreconstructed sub-humans from the Siberian steppes. This paradoxical consanguinity leads to a love-hate relationship.
Vladimir Putin shares with the Russian nobility a deep distrust and abiding phobia for the west and its hypocrisies and corrupting values. Starting from the frenzied modernization—or westernization—program of Peter the Great which led to the creation of Petersburg from scratch, the Russian high class believe that whenever Russia apes the west unconscionably, it always leads to national disasters.
Rapid and untrammelled industrialization in an essentially backward country led to factories where conditions were so fetid and appalling that they spawned radicalized workers that became foot soldiers of two revolutions. Marxist rhetoric downloaded from Anglo-German Europe flourished powered by intellectual emigres like Lenin who himself was eventually spirited back into the country from Western Europe.
It was only the brave and charismatic Empress Catherine who saw through the western ruse. A woman of unsurpassed mental acuity and formidable intellect, the gamey matriarch who overthrew her own husband in a savage putsch, had invited Diderot, the celebrated French philosopher and famous social disrupter, to impress on her the virtues of radical reforms, particularly the emancipation of slaves and serfs. But the great lady saw through the trap and quickly bundled the slightly unhinged philosopher back to Paris. This at least helped to stave off revolution for almost two centuries.
Thus with a split identity, Russia struggled and managed. Ironically it was Soviet munitions and the rugged fighting spirit of Socialist Russia which helped the west to overpower Hitler’s Fascist machine. Then came what they consider the biggest catastrophe of their modern history. Ensnared by western cajolery and flattery, Mikhail Gorbachev let his guard down.
The Soviet Union crumbled and splintered into its component parts. It led to an apocalyptic fiscal meltdown and the rise of corrupt oligarchs who fed on the misery of their own people. The lot fell on Putin to clear the mess and to restore Russia to some measure of stability and international respectability.
But there is a sting at the end of the tail. Just as it is said that Stalin drove barbarism out of Russia through sheer barbarity, it will be said that Putin drove oligarchy out of Russian by creating his own oligarchs. Yet a sizeable portion of the Russian populace is willing to put up with Putin’s authoritarian rule and draconian cruelty as long as it restores Russian pride and glory.
The equation may be changing. But this is where Putin is coming from. A coldblooded Slavic supremacist, the Russian leader has forgotten nothing and forgiven nothing. When Ukraine, a former prized satellite of the old Russian Empire, began to assert its independent cultural and political values, when it began to turn an affectionate gaze in the direction of the west and NATO in particular, it was like raising a red flag in the face of a distempered Russian bull. Here they come again!!!
Putin is having none of that. With NATO in his backyard, Putin feels totally disrobed and encircled by the hostile western powers. As far as he is concerned, this is a last-ditch battle to save his country and its civilization from being overwhelmed by the much-hated west. If all else fail, and if care is not taken, the Russian monomaniac despot may go under pulling the nuclear trigger.
The civilized world is aghast and appalled. But when they bemoan the horrific carnage in Kyiv, the wanton brutality on the streets of Kharkov and the unremitting cruelty with which the Russians have put this beautiful country to sword, Putin taunts: Where were you when the Slavic Serbs were bombed into submission, or when Iraq was destroyed on flimsy grounds, when Libya was openly disembowelled and when Afghanistan was overwhelmed by sheer firepower?
As many Ukrainian cities are reduced to rubble by Russian heavy-duty artillery and fierce aerial bombardment, it is becoming a dialogue of the deaf. Putin dreams of a return of the old Russian Empire. But this is not going to happen. You cannot step into the same river twice. The old Russian Empire is gone forever. The earlier Putin is made or persuaded to realize this, the better for everybody.
The irony of it all is that history will record Putin as the person who signed the death warrant of the warm, friendly and affectionate relationship between these two Slavic nations through frustrated and miscalculated aggression. Once again, the Russians have been pushed into an “unforced error” by their western tormentors and it is the Americans and the EU nations looking like unlikely liberating heroes on the streets of Ukraine.
After centuries of intermarriages and blood ties, the Ukrainians had come to regard the Russians as their own. But after the invasion, the public mood in Ukraine has shifted against Asiatic despotism and all that Russia represents. It will be militarily impossible from now to keep a bubbly and fiercely independent nation under the thraldom of a neighbouring Tsar.
China, North Korea and Vietnam should be approached to nudge Russia back to the negotiating table. A war against a hostile people does not end with effective military occupation. It is merely the end of the beginning.
Russia should take a cue from its signal and disorderly retreat from Afghanistan which unleashed a chain of events culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. Putin should learn from the Chinese effective pacification of Hong Kong how to pursue national interest with strategic cunning and superior patience.
In exchange for the immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine and the unilateral declaration of unconditional ceasefire, the strangulating economic blockade of Russia should be lifted forthwith. It is an economic crunch that will hurt Russian in the short run and everybody in the long run. Ukraine must be persuaded not to join NATO in the nearest future until the strategic and geopolitical implications are thrashed out.
If this feels like the Cold War all over again, we must perish the thought. This one is much more than the Cold War and of greater global import. We appear to be on the cusp of great events; a possible reconfiguration of existing power relations. In a dramatic re-enactment of what is known as the cunning of history, the nation-state paradigm has come under its most potent threat from newer variants of its old empire-state progenitor.
The Russia/ Ukraine conflict has put into sharp perspective the dire circumstances of indentured nations. They proliferate on the African continent. An indentured nation is one that is yet to achieve economic and political manumission despite flag independence. They are very vulnerable to the antics and reprisals of their former masters. More than sixty years after the onrush of decolonization only few African countries can boast of genuine sovereignty or organic nationhood.
Unfortunately for them and without having consolidated the nation-state paradigm, they are being frogmarched to a new global order in all its immense geopolitical complexities. Either by direct involvement or through mercenary proxies, Russia is already deeply embedded in Sahelian Africa. And so is China in other regions. The old colonial powers never really left.
An audit of the voting pattern among African countries at the recent UN resolution on Ukraine shows a continent bitterly divided with individual countries voting according to the body language of their new postcolonial masters. Almost a century and a half after the Berlin Conference, a more fearsome scramble for Africa may well be under way.
