Putin’s war with the future

My generation and that of our parents was until yesterday spared the threat of war. Since last Thursday, the world as we know it, the comforts of Western life, has been under mortal threat. In the Europe of peace, the fear of war has crept in after Russia invaded Ukraine in an act of aggression that brought images of World War II to the minds of many.

Putin and Hitler, the invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. Both invoked historical revisionism as an argument for war, a need for „living space”. Just as Hitler wanted to erase the humiliation of losing World War I, Putin too wants to make up for Russia’s loss of a great war, the Cold War, by recently expressing an ambition to restore the past glory of his empire, albeit a fantasy glory.

But in addition to the historical motivation, there are purely economic explanations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin has seen the moment fast approaching when Russia will have nothing left to sell to Europe, the main source of money and prosperity for himself and the Russian oligarchy.

Russian oil and gas won’t be in such high demand and at such good prices in a future green Europe, covered in solar panels and crisscrossed by electric cars.

The values of the Western world have reshaped Europe’s economy from the ground up, and by 2050, which is a very short time on the historical scale, it will be completely free of Russian hydrocarbons. To counter this, Putin had two options:

1. completely rebuild its economy, whose GDP is dependent on oil and gas sales, modernize and democratize his country to make it as competitive as possible with the Western world.
2. declare war on the Western world to regain its spheres of influence, to rebuild the former USSR in the hopes of somehow stalling the great transformations that are taking shape on the continent, and deal a mortal blow to the European project as a whole.

Putin chose option 2, hoping that a war against the future would ensure his survival and that of the siloviks and oligarchs around him. For this is in fact the deeper meaning of the war in Ukraine: it is a war declared on a world that risks suffocating Russia economically, ideologically, and militarily.

In other words, Putin wants to halt the progress, the forward march projected by the membership of more and more countries that have been within Russia’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine, in the EU and NATO.

Russia’s and Putin’s real war is therefore with the future. Let us not forget that, I stress again, he has waged war in the name of an idyllic past only for the generation of former KGBists of which he is a member.

His ultra-conservative, traditionalist, pan-Slavist, and orthodox political ideology expresses the same desire to freeze Russia in time.

Since economically Russia is a massive failure and cannot be an aspirational model for anyone, Putin has built a Russia based on a set of values that he alone proclaims superior to the decadent, LGBT-infested West and with its other progressive movements that, according to the Kremlin propaganda, poison the mind and soul.

In addition to gas and oil, Putin’s Russia is also selling the West a lot of propaganda.

Putinism, therefore, does not project in people’s minds, like Nazism or Communism, a Third Reich or a golden future, but a journey back in time. Putin’s Russia wants to turn back the clock to the former USSR.

But who wants to go back to the USSR and relive those times? Nobody in their right mind (not even his own people) wants to go back to the Soviet gloom.

The past Putin wants to return to was a good deal only for the former KGB officer and his siloviks. As proof, protests and dissent are growing in Russian society. More and more writers are making desperate appeals to Putin to stop an absurd war.

Mocking the president’s project to rebuild the Soviet Union, Russian writer Guzel Yahina writes:

• I spent fourteen years of my life – all my childhood and part of my youth – in the Soviet Union. At that time, communist ideology was living its last moments. We pioneers believed in it, but somewhat half-heartedly, not very seriously. What we really believed in was peace. The propaganda machine launched at the dawn of the Soviet era was working wonderfully, but the rhetoric it produced was no longer so much communist as pacifist. „USSR – fortress of peace!”, „Peace in the world!” – these slogans were written on the walls of every kindergarten, every school. The lesson about peace was invariably held the first one every school year, for every class. Songs and poems about peace were on the schedule of every pioneer’s event (and there were plenty of them in our school). Peace doves decorated every classroom, every classroom wall gazette, and every student notebook. We believed in those doves – so sincerely, as only children can.”

So the natural question is: what are Russian tanks doing in Ukraine, on foreign soil? How do you explain starting a war by a country that recently claimed, grossly falsifying history, that it had never attacked anyone?

Neither the ordinary Russians nor the oligarchs want in the past. Abramovich, Deripaska, or Fridman are living large in the decadent West described by Putin’s ideology. They shop in Paris and vacation on the Côte d’Azur, not in Moscow or Sochi. Their children go to the best schools in Britain, not in St Petersburg.

Putin seems not to understand that today’s Russia is more connected to the Western world than it was during the Cold War, where he wants to return. Not only through its oligarchs, but through a plethora of mechanisms (the SWIFT banking system) and total access to information that did not exist three decades ago in his old world.

However much Putin has tried to decouple from the global internet, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, information cannot be censored today. Russia does not have the economic strength of China to create a reality that perfectly parallels Western reality.

Putin has lost the war declared on Ukraine twice so far, also due to his lack of understanding of the world he lives in.

For one thing, it completely missed the preparatory phase, which in any war should be secret. The Allies changed strategy and revealed to him, based on intelligence information, all plans, intentions, and maneuvers. Allied tactics delayed the attack for months, with the Russians’ plans exposed, turned upside down, endlessly rehashed.

Thus, while it massed its troops since November last year, Russia only launched the attack at the end of February, when winter is almost over in Europe, and when its other weapon, the blackmail of shutting off the Russian gas tap to European countries, no longer works as effectively.

The EU, as hesitant and cumbersome as we know it to be, has had much more room for maneuver. As a result, Brussels has been able to gradually adopt sanctions packages, which have gone as far as freezing the accounts of Putin and influential Russian oligarchs, blocking the accounts of the Central Bank of Russia, restricting access to the SWIFT payment banking system, etc. It is unclear whether they would have gone so far if the invasion of Ukraine had taken place in the middle of winter when temperatures were much lower and energy blackmail could have crippled EU sanctions.

Secondly, Putin missed the psychological effect of the invasion, thinking he would take Ukraine in 48 hours. The Ukrainians have been heroically resisting for four days, and their president, Vladimir Zelensky, has inspired the whole Western world with his courage and has been an example to his own army.

Although a small army compared to that of Russia, like David faced Goliath, let us not forget that behind the Ukrainian army are NATO advisers and all the European countries that have donated lethal weapons and combat equipment. We see Russian convoys with Buk rocket launchers being blown to bits at the push of a button by Turkish Bayraktar drones, just like in video games.

Again, Putin thought that for the great USSR, Ukraine was a certain victim. Only he walked right into a bear trap adroned with attractive lures, while below ground, the West has been hard at work.

Living in his Soviet fiction, Putin again projected the image of a new Red Army liberating Ukraine from „neo-Nazis” (one of the Russian tanks even had the USSR flag flying), only again reality played tricks on him. The President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenlsy, is Jewish and he didn’t miss the opportunity to publicly ask Putin how could he be a Nazi?

As one G4Media.ro reader wrote, a comedian in the real world turns out to be a warrior, and the great warrior of all the secret services turns out to be a comedian.

Maybe Russia will eventually conquer Ukraine, take Kyiv and execute Zelensky in cold blood, and replace him with a puppet. Perhaps the war will drag on for years and there will be a lot of bloodshed, as the British Foreign Secretary fears.

To end on a high note and return to the Hitler comparison, Kyiv may be the „Stalingrad of Ukraine”, as a friend suggested. A war of attrition, unanimously condemned and without support from the Russian society, will begin to feel the harsh effect of sanctions imposed by the Americans and Europeans, and could cost the former KGB spy dearly.

To avoid losing all power, he will be thrown overboard by the same system that made him Russia’s master for over two decades.

For the siloviks and oligarchs, Vladimir Putin will no longer be useful if they lose a lot of money and privileges, especially since he has nothing to offer them except a past that nobody wants to live in anymore.

Whatever the fate of his war, Putin has already lost the war with the future. Ukraine has instead, with its heroism, earned the respect of the entire Western world.

 

Traducerea Ovidiu Harfas