Ukraine war: Putin tries to redraw the world, but it doesn’t turn out – BBC News

In Prague, the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel addressed a crowd of 400,000 gathered in the square from a second-floor balcony. It was an exhilarating moment and the scene was dizzying. That night, the communist regime fell, and within weeks, Javier was the president of a new democracy.

Even then, I felt like I was witnessing the transformation of the world – a rare moment because, you know, the world is changing before your very eyes.

How many moments like this have there been in European history since the French Revolution? I thought, maybe 5. 1989 was the sixth. But when Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, the world that was born in a people’s revolution in a thrilling moment came to an end.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the moment a “historical turning point” (zeitenwende), while British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss described it as a “fundamental shift”. She said the era of peace of mind is over.

Quentin Sommerville, one of the BBC’s most experienced war correspondents, recently walked through the ruins of Kharkov, Ukraine, speaking of the Russian bombing indiscriminately: “If you’re not familiar with these tactics, then It means you didn’t pay attention.”

He knew, because, under the Russian rocket attack in Syria, he spent enough time to pay attention. But the governments of the democratic world – how much attention have they paid to the nature of Putin’s regime?

Over the years, more and more evidence has accumulated.

It has been 20 years since Putin sent troops into Georgia and claimed he supported breakaway areas.

Later, Putin sent spies into British cities to murder exiled Russians with nerve agents.

In 2014, Putin ordered an invasion of eastern Ukraine, annexing the Crimea peninsula.

Still, Germany and most EU member states, knowing the risks, insist on relying on Russian gas supplies. A year after Russia annexed Crimea, EU countries have approved the construction of a new gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, aimed at increasing Russian gas supplies.

What the British foreign secretary, Truss, described as “sleeping at ease” was also blaming her own country. London has been a safe haven for Russian money since John Major was prime minister. Russian oligarchs have invested billions of dollars here, laundered money, bought the capital’s most prestigious private mansions, mingled with British politicians and donated to their campaign funds. Few wondered where these Russians’ sudden fortunes came from.

So, the answer is no concern. Western democracies are not “concerned” about the nature of the threat brewing on Europe’s eastern border.

Putin also seems to be feeling relieved.

First, Putin believes that the Western bloc is in long-term decline, weakened by internal divisions and ideologically provoked hostile positions. He thinks the victory of US President Donald Trump and the UK’s departure from the European Union are proof of this. The rise of right-wing authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary is further evidence that liberal values ​​and democratic institutions are being dismantled. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a humiliating testament to the withdrawal of a declining power from the world stage.

Second, Putin misunderstood what was happening on the other side of the Russian border. He refuses to believe the series of pro-democracy protests or the true expression of public opinion in the former Soviet republics—Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004-5), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). Because every struggle is aimed at eliminating a corrupt and unpopular pro-Moscow government. The Kremlin always seems to think that these events are self-evidently at the back of foreign intelligence agencies, especially Americans and British — that Western imperialism is marching into territory that historically rightly belongs to Russia.

Third, Putin does not understand his own armed forces. It is now clear that he expects the Russian army’s “special military operation” to end in a few days.

The incompetence of the Russian military has shocked many Western security experts. It reminds me of a smaller, more controllable war in the former Yugoslavia that still wreaked havoc.

In 1992, Serbian nationalists waged a war to kill the newly independent state of Bosnia. They believe that Bosnia’s national identity is false, that Bosnia’s statehood has no historical legitimacy, it is actually part of Serbia. That’s exactly how Putin sees Ukraine.

Like Russia today, the Serb army had an overwhelming firepower advantage. But they stagnated when they encountered resistance from local non-Serbs. They can’t seem to take over the city – they don’t want to fight in the streets on foot. The Bosnian Resistance was initially poorly equipped – I remember seeing 3 boys in sneakers in the trenches in Sarajevo with nothing but an AK-47. But the Bosnians fought to defend the capital for nearly four years. The same determination was displayed among young Ukrainian volunteers defending the capital, Kyiv.

So instead of occupying the city, the Serbs resorted to siege tactics – they surrounded the city, bombarded it indiscriminately, and cut off electricity, water, and electricity.

The same situation happened in Mariupol, Ukraine. Within 24 hours after the besieged city was cut off from water, every toilet became a public health hazard. Citizens had to take to the streets to find water pipes and fill buckets to flush toilets. The power was cut off and people had to endure the cold at home. Food gradually ran out. Is this the tactics used by the Russian army against Mariupol, Kharkov, Kyiv? Attempt to force Ukrainians into submission by starvation?

But this brutal reality of nearly four years left the Bosnian nation with a nation-building story of resistance, suffering and heroic struggle. Likewise, Ukrainian fighting will further strengthen Ukrainian national identity. The Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine did not feel “liberated” by the Russian invasion. There is evidence that they are equally convinced that Ukraine is a sovereign state. Putin’s war was aimed at reuniting the two parts he believed to belong to Russia, but had the opposite effect — reinforcing the desire of most Ukrainians to take control of their own destiny and free themselves from Russian rule.

In 1994, when the Balkan wars were still raging, the rest of Eastern Europe was looking to the future – each eager to take its rightful place in a Europe of independent sovereign states coexisting peacefully. But they are not sure whether any of them will be allowed to join NATO.

There was a debate at the time about whether the freed Eastern European countries should form a third security bloc to serve as a buffer zone between NATO and Russia. Russia was weak in the 1990s, but the country that endured Soviet occupation for 40 years did not believe Russia would be weak for long. Ultimately, these Eastern European countries all want to join NATO.

Under President Bill Clinton, the United States advanced NATO expansion. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who considers himself a loyal Clinton ally, was said to be furious when he discovered at a news conference that NATO was planning to admit new members without asking Moscow.

Thus, the dismantling of the Iron Curtain raises a new geopolitical question – how far will the western world stretch to the east? I was commissioned by the BBC to undertake a road trip through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine to answer the question “Where is the eastern border of the Western world now?”

At the end of 1991, I went to a hunting lodge in Belarus, where the President of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin, met the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus. At the time, they agreed to recognize each other’s Soviet republics as separate nation-states. Then they called the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tell him that the country he led – the Soviet Union – no longer existed.

This is a time of danger and opportunity. For Belarus and Ukraine, it was an opportunity to break free from Moscow — from Russian imperialism modeled on tsars and Soviets.

For Yeltsin, it also provided an opportunity to liberate Russia from its historical role as an imperialist power. After World War II, neither Britain nor France were imperialist powers – as Austria did after World War I. In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk established a modern European secular republic, the Turkish nation-state, after the defeat and dismemberment of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Could Yeltsin do the same thing – build a modern Russian nation-state at peace with its sovereign neighbors on the rubble of the Soviet empire? In the early 1990s, he launched his Westernization experiment in an attempt to transform an imperialist power into a democracy.

But Yeltsin’s rush to transform Russia’s rigid state command economy into a free-market system, encouraged by Western democracies hungry for investment opportunities, has been disastrous. This reform produced gangster capitalism in Russia. A small elite became incredibly rich by plundering assets in major industries—especially oil and gas.

The experiment, conducted in 1998, eventually derailed, causing the country’s economy to collapse, with the ruble losing two-thirds of its value in a month and inflation reaching 80 percent.

A middle-aged couple and I line up in front of a bank in Moscow. They want to withdraw their money in exchange for dollars or pounds for rubles – any foreign currency as long as it’s not rubles. The line was long and moving slowly, with a bank employee updating the displayed exchange rate every few minutes as the ruble continued to depreciate. People can see the value of their life savings shrink every minute. As the couple lined up to approach the bank window, the security roller shutters suddenly fell – the bank was empty of cash.

I ran to an old coal mine near the Ukrainian border, where the mines were nearly shut down. I met an unemployed mining engineer – college-educated, 30-something with young kids. He took me to one of his houses outside the city, which had about an acre of land. He said, “About 80 percent of what my family eats in a year is what I grow on this land. The rest, like coffee and sugar, I trade with others. I haven’t used or seen it in a year and a half. Cash.” Nothing says Yeltsin’s failure to change Russia better than seeing this highly educated man farm for a living.

“It took Stalin a generation to turn a peasant state into an industrial superpower. Yeltsin was doing the opposite,” he told me.

The Russian people feel that they have been looted. The massive Westernization experiment is a deception that enriches the sinful elite and impoverishes everyone else.

Many of our reports from Russia at the time asked a question: “What political consequences of disillusionment are now deeply felt by Russians?”

The answer is that Russia will eventually go back to the old ways — back from democracy and back to authoritarian rule. A regression from nation-state status to a return to a more domineering imperialist attitude toward its “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics.

Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said that Russia can be a democracy or an empire, but not both. The national emblem of Russia is a double-headed eagle that looks both east and west. History has pulled Russia in two opposite directions – one as a democracy and the other towards hegemony.

In St. Petersburg, you will see another dimension of this duality. It is a beautiful window facing the Gulf of Finland. This 18th century city faces west. The urban architectural form was deeply influenced by the European Enlightenment. During the reign of the Tsar it was the capital of the empire.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow, and the core of power retreated behind the high jagged walls of the Kremlin. The architectural style is reminiscent of defense, doubt and even fear. When Russian leaders look west from here, they see vast, flat countryside stretching hundreds of miles to the southwest, with no natural borders.

When I was a BBC correspondent in Moscow in the late 1990s, an old driver recalled seeing Nazi German troops on the outskirts of Moscow as a child, in the 1940s. Every time he drives us to Sheremetyevo Airport, we pass by the Moscow Defenders Monument, which consists of three huge metal anti-tank horses, otherwise known as “Czech hedgehogs.” The driver would point to the monument and say: “The German army was advancing, so close to Moscow.”

Napoleon’s army had gone further a century earlier. This history — this chronic lack of security on the western frontier — constantly shapes how Russia’s leaders view “near neighbors.”

In another conversation on the topic of “nearby countries,” a friend read me a rhyming limerick. Pronounced in Russian, it does rhyme, and translated into English, it means: “Chickens are not real birds; Poland is not a real foreign country.” Russia’s sense of ownership of its western neighbor permeates the public consciousness.

I heard this little joke from another friend when I was in Moscow. The same old driver picked her up from the airport and asked her where she was going. “I spent a weekend in Prague,” she said. The old driver replied: “Oh, Prague. That’s fine. That’s ours.”

but it is not the truth. Nine years ago the Berlin Wall came down and Eastern European countries are no longer “ours”.

Except for Ukraine. Putin doesn’t see Ukraine as a neighbor, but as part of Russia’s frontier — something he wants to bring back into Russia’s arms.

How much force does Putin need to exert to achieve this goal? How could a nation so united and resisted be subdued by force? It is almost certain that Putin has overstepped his limits. Several factors have emerged so far that shocked him.

The first is the state of the Russian army.

The second is the tenacious resistance of the Ukrainian army. Does Putin really expect Russian-speaking Ukrainians to welcome the Russian army as liberators? Does he really believe that the popular protests that took place in 2014 – demanding the replacement of a pro-Moscow government with a pro-Western government – were all a Western conspiracy? If he really thinks so, it shows how little the Kremlin knows about its “near neighbors.”

But Putin’s biggest miscalculation was to underestimate the resolve of the West. It is this that makes 2022 a pivotal year – a “historical turning point” in the words of German Chancellor Scholz.

Almost overnight, Germany changed its attitude towards its role in the world. Traditionally, for legitimate historical reasons, Germany has been reluctant to play a leading role, preferring to use its soft power rather than hard power. It’s all changed now. Germany announced it would double defense spending and send deadly weapons to Ukraine. Gone, too, was the Ostpolitik, a policy Germany had pursued for decades in the hope of seeking peace, especially trade, by maintaining contact with Soviet Russia.

Germany and other democracies will now take action to end their reliance on Russian gas. The Nord Stream 2 project has been suspended – although not yet scrapped. We are seeing a complete redrawing of the global energy distribution map, aimed at excluding Russia.

Russia is highly integrated into the global economy. But it has now been excluded from the payment systems the world uses to exchange goods and services. Russian industries, including oil and gas, depend on imported products and components. Soon, though, its production will come to a standstill. Employers will have to lay off workers and unemployment will rise.

No one expected the West to sanction the Russian central bank. The ruble has depreciated and interest rates have doubled. No other major economy has been hit with a string of punitive and severe sanctions before. This amounts to expelling Russia from the global economy. More workers will be fired. Major industries will be unsustainable. Unemployment will rise further. Soaring inflation will shrink lifelong savings considerably.

We will all be affected by it. This could lead to a setback in the globalized economy that emerged after the end of the Cold War.

The United States and the European Union have effectively divided the world. Those countries and companies that continue to trade with Russia will find themselves punished by being excluded from trade with the rich world.

This amounts to erecting a new economic iron curtain that separates Russia from the West.

To a large extent, this situation depends on how China responds to this new world situation. China and Russia have rallied against American power, with Beijing and Moscow convinced that the greatest threat comes from a rejuvenated, more unified democratic world.

China does not want to see Putin weakened, or the West consolidated. However, this is exactly the effect of the war in Ukraine.

Some China watchers believe that Beijing will try to challenge the dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, opening up a distinct renminbi zone as an alternative space in the global economy, free from any future U.S. sanctions on China. Thus, Putin’s war may redefine the international financial landscape.

But most importantly, this is a war between world democracies and world dictatorships.

This is also a war between two opposing ideas, involving how the norms of international relations should be maintained.

Timothy Garton Ash, a scholar at Oxford University, said that these two worldviews can be expressed in two words – Helsinki and Yalta.

In Yalta in 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill divided postwar Europe into “spheres of influence”—with much of Eastern Europe belonging to the Soviet Union and the West to a transatlantic alliance that would set out to rebuild Europe’s democracies.

By contrast, “Helsinki” describes a Europe made up of independent sovereign states, each free to choose their own alliance. It grew out of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and gradually evolved into the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Defenders of Ukraine are fighting for “Helsinki”. Putin has dispatched the army to force a modern version of Yalta – which would stifle Ukraine’s independence and bring it under Russian rule.

Ash argues that the West has been too half-hearted in defending Helsinki’s values ​​— it formally recognized Ukraine’s right to join NATO at a future date, but never set out to do so.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed willingness to compromise on Helsinki principles, agreeing to abandon Ukraine’s ambition to become a NATO member. With all the risks that arise, this may still be the price Ukraine pays for maintaining its statehood.

My generation grew up with the fear of survival threatened by nuclear annihilation. The war in Ukraine has brought that fear back into the public consciousness. Putin has threatened that Russia could use nuclear weapons.

This is the most dangerous moment since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. At the time, the Soviet Union shipped nuclear missiles to its ally Cuba. The United States deployed a large fleet to land and invade Cuba.

But what the Americans didn’t know was that the Soviet Union not only had long-range strategic missiles. They also have small tactical nuclear missiles — so-called tactical nuclear weapons. Soviet military doctrine gave ground commanders the decision to use nuclear weapons first.

If the US invasion plan is approved, it will trigger a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.

Then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara didn’t know this until 1991, when the Soviet archives opened. Only then did he realize that the world was only one step away from disaster.

In a fascinating documentary called Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, he explains how the world can avoid self-destruction. Skilled diplomacy or wise leadership? neither.

“Luck,” he said, “we got lucky.”

This experience has now faded from people’s memory, and the world must be alerted.