"If they knew that an invasion was coming, why did they do nothing except leak Putin’s plans to the media?"
I have mentioned Volodymir Ischenko on here before as someone to follow and read about what’s happening in Ukraine from a Ukrainian perspective. I met him once in 2018 over beer at a fast food place in Kiev and talked about Ukrainian nationalist politics. Volodymir’s a brilliant and very fair and thorough guy. So it’s not surprising that he’s been in high demand recently to put things into perspective for a western audience that’s mostly ignorant about the complex dynamics of this conflict. He just did a lengthy interview with the New Left Review that I recommend reading.
I want to quote a small part of Volodymir’s interview — including the bit where he voices something I’ve been thinking about a lot since the war started: The invasion surprised pretty much everyone, even the Ukrainians. But it seems that American spies got it right — or, rather, they weren’t just lying about it or over-hyping the threat like they usually do. But if the Americans did get it right, then that automatically led me to the next question: Why didn’t these geniuses have an oh shit moment? “Damn Putin isn’t just bluffing here!” Why didn’t then America work harder to try to head off the invasion and push Ukraine and Russia to sit down and work something out? But that’s always been more of rhetorical question for me. If you’re like me and are realistic about America’s intentions in the years running up to this invasion, the answer is obvious: America’s foreign policy brain bug wanted this war. And now that Putin’s made the decision to pursue this horrible fucking war, the brain bug couldn’t be happier.
Anyway, here’s a bit from the interview:
Of course there cannot be any acceptable justification for this war, leave alone from a progressive point of view. The war aimed to assert Russia’s Great Power status, to mark the boundaries of its ‘sphere of influence’ where Russia would be in the right—able to proceed either with changing the ‘anti-Russian’ regime, or with the partition of Ukraine, or with turning a large territory into a huge grey zone bombed into a pre-modern state. An act inevitably leading to mass casualties, massacres of civilians, disastrous destruction. The war also serves an important domestic goal for Putin. It aims to transform Russia’s politics from post-Soviet Caesarism, whose fragility has become so evident during the recent uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan, to a potentially more stable, consolidated, mobilizationist political regime with an imperialist-conservative ideological project, more hegemonic for some but more repressive for others. In this project, many Ukrainians would need to be forcibly ‘re-educated’ from a ‘Banderovite’ anti-Russian Ukrainian identity into a maloros pro-Russian Ukrainian identity.
Whatever the problems post-Euromaidan Ukraine had—and there were many: messy incompetent politics, cynical, predatory oligarchy, deepening dependency on the Western powers, neoliberal reforms instead of progressive change, nationalist-radicalization trends, narrowing space for political pluralism, intensifying repression of the opposition—these were all Ukrainian problems that Ukrainians should and could solve themselves in a political process, without Russian tanks and bombs. Virtually no major Ukrainian politician or opinion leader welcomed the invasion, even those who had been labelled ‘pro-Russian’ for many years.
Last year, in response to questions from Russians on what Russia could do to help ‘pro-Russian’ people in Ukraine, a Ukrainian ‘pro-Russian’ opposition journalist posted something like this: ‘Leave Ukraine alone and focus on building an affluent and attractive Russia.’ The answer reflects a fundamental post-Soviet crisis of hegemony: the incapacity of the post-Soviet and specifically Russian ruling class to lead, not simply to rule over, subaltern classes and nations. Putin, like other post-Soviet Caesarist leaders, has ruled through a combination of repression, balance and passive consent legitimated by a narrative of restoring stability after the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s. But he has not offered any attractive developmental project. Russia’s invasion should be analyzed precisely in this context: lacking sufficient soft power of attraction, the Russian ruling clique has ultimately decided to rely on the hard power of violence, starting from coercive diplomacy in the beginning of 2021, then abandoning diplomacy for military coercion in 2022.
In the build-up to the invasion, from December 2021, the Biden Administration was refusing to negotiate with Putin and instead publicizing its intelligence about Russian invasion plans and conducting megaphone diplomacy. How was that seen in Ukraine?
Until February 24, most Ukrainians didn’t believe Russia would invade. The government didn’t believe it. Zelensky thought there might be some ‘limited invasion’, but not the full-scale onslaught which actually took place. Ukrainian military analysts from a Ministry of Defence think tank produced a report saying it was extremely unlikely that Putin would attack Ukraine in 2022. Zelensky was unhappy with the Western media campaign, thinking it was intended to put pressure on him to start implementing the Minsk Accords, which he resisted; or perhaps to abandon the claim to join nato. It turned out they were wrong, and the cia and mi6 were right—although they have now informed the media that the signs of Putin’s final decision to start the war appeared no earlier than February. At the same time, the us and uk grossly underestimated the potential of the Ukrainian army, just as they overestimated the Russian army, which they expected to take Kiev in three or four days. Or, at least, they publicly projected such forecasts, which complemented apparent Russian miscalculation about a quick and easy victory for their ‘special operation’ in Ukraine.
So why did Washington not prevent the invasion? If they knew that an invasion was coming, why did they do nothing except leak Putin’s plans to the media? One strategy would have been to start serious negotiations with Putin, to agree that Ukraine would not become a member of nato, because they never had any desire to invite it to join—nor do they have any desire to fight for it, as we see now. Another, opposite strategy would be to send a massive supply of weapons to Ukraine before the war started, sufficient to have changed the calculations on Putin’s side. But they didn’t do either of those things—and that looks sort of strange, and of course very tragic for Ukraine.
…What sort of Ukraine do you see emerging from this war?
The war is changing Ukrainian-Russian relations and Ukrainian identity. Before the war, a significant minority, perhaps 15 per cent, of Ukrainian citizens could say they felt themselves to be both Ukrainian and Russian. Now that will be much more difficult—they would be making a choice and, I think, one in favour of Ukrainian identity. The position of the Russian language and Russian culture will be even more restricted in the public sphere—and in private communication. In the case of a prolonged war that would turn Ukraine into a Syria or Afghanistan in Europe, there would be a strong likelihood that radical nationalists would begin to occupy leading positions in the resistance, with obvious political consequences. The Ukraine in which I was born, and where I lived most of my life, is lost now, forever—however this war ends.
—Yasha Levine
Want to know more?
Evgenia on “RuZZkiy Mir.”
The war one month in.