Recently, my closest colleague and friend had to leave her 10-year stint in this country in order to return to Ukraine. It was, at first, quite secret, but ultimately became obvious as to why. She was returning to her family in a time where war was imminent.
I mean, I would have done the exact opposite personally but hey what do I know about family bonds!
Meanwhile, my other closest colleague and friend is Russian. He and she are both friends and both obviously quite against this whole situation.
Because I have this connection to the current news, it hit me quite hard. Somebody I would see and work with every day, somebody I stood on stage with giving out speeches, performances and awards, is now hiding in shelter waking up to the sound of missiles raining down on the surrounding buildings.
As helpless as I was and continue to be, I did what I usually do to cope and obsess over gathering as much information as I can in a vain attempt to understand. I watched hours-long videos ever since it broke out, kept live-streams going until I fell asleep, and immediately checked when I woke up for updates. I read articles and talked to anybody who would listen (nobody beyond a few lines of off-hand remarks tbh, but hey).
Thankfully, so far my colleague is doing ok. She managed to get out with her family into the countryside, although has dwindling food supplies. This is something they will figure out, I have no doubt. They cannot leave, as the father is between 18-60 and so has no permission to leave the border, being encouraged to join the fight.
I'm going to try and string together some thoughts in writing, as it might help me make sense of things at least a little more. There are so many angles to this that I don't think it would be wise for me to claim anything politically or strategically - I'll leave that to the experts. But I'm going to just type whatever comes into my head following this sentence.
Credits: UP9 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This is a common thing I've been seeing, and I strongly disagree with the sentiment. For a start, by dismissing him as just going blindly insane, we are removing some level of responsibility on his part. He can't control his actions as he is not of sound mind, right? No, he is very sane and very in control of what he is doing.
This is made further apparent because this attack is clearly years in the making. He launched a 'Peace Enforcement' team in 2008 - a 6-day war with hundreds of lives lost - which had been first publicly discussed back in 2003 by Putin himself, with relations deteriorating from that point on.
Why Georgia? Supposedly, to defend the people of 'South Ossetia', a breakaway region of Georgia that Georgia doesn't recognise.
The reality, I suspect, is more to keep Russian relevance on the world stage, a show of force. Putin demonstrably cares very little about 'his' people and their wellbeing. Why go to such great lengths to protect a small handful in another nation?
The same goes for Crimea in 2014. Supposedly, the Russian supporting population was ripe for the rescuing, so he simply took it, with the background sentiment that NATO was encroaching on its borders and this was I suppose a warning shot and reminder of military might.
The reality, I suspect, was the underwater oil reserves recently discovered there and Ukraine's increasing ability to fund access to it with companies and new technologies - which, now, 80% of it is under the control of Russia by happy coincidence of annexing the peninsula.
And 2022 attacks? Well, all other motives aside, it's interesting to see a huge swath of gas reserves across the eastern half of Ukraine where Russia focussed its attacks to begin with under the guise of rescuing those breakaway Ukranian regions:
Could this whole endeavor over decades be about gas reserves? Well, I wouldn't rule it out, but I wouldn't put it down to a single reason, either. There have been far larger wars for the grab bag of fossil fuels, and 60% of Russia's GDP is natural resources.
With the new 30-year agreement with China, sending '10 billion cubic metres of gas per year', it makes sense to divvy up its resources and break away from its dependence with Europe entirely. By grabbing Ukraine's supplies, it doesn't matter how much the West hates on them, Europe will remain a slave to Russia's supplies for decades to come, even more so if coming from Ukraine, a fellow European state.
Ukraine, after all, was already a pain in the ass for Russia. Almost all of its gas pipes went through Ukraine, and it was only recently they managed to diversity with pipes going through the puppet country of Belarus among others. When Russia took Crimea, the water supply, which came directly from the mainland of Ukraine, got cemented up out of spite, cutting off all supplies - being a peninsula and all - to the already desolate wasteland. The whole area of Crimea has essentially been dying ever since.
So, no, I don't think Putin has gone mad. I think he has been plotting this for a very long time, and I think he has been conjuring up various colourful justifications in the meantime. That's not to say, of course, that there are some disagreeable problems in Ukraine with the ethnic and political divides, the actual problem they have with Neo-nazism and so forth. But the response to even the worst Ukraine has to offer, should probably have been 'let's discuss what we can do about this', rather than all-out war. Putin's disproportionate response is not a symptom of madness, but of secondary unspoken agendas.
Nobody really knows what is going on in his mind. Nobody can see how Russia can financially gain from this, with the West's response to start off with, but how much is it going to cost to perpetually maintain a puppet government in Ukraine, to quash its people for a generation? Ukraine has 1/3rd the population of Russia itself - that's a hell of a financial burden.
Well, for now, yes. But if he managed to get these huge swathes of gas reserves in a huge European country under his command, in the long term that's a financial benefit without a doubt. In the meantime, he has already stocked up reserves to last a lifetime should he be totally isolated from the world, and he only needs to sell barrels at $44 in order to make ends meet, while they're currently going for about $120.
Sanction away, it's going to do very little in the grand scheme. Not least because we have another contender to deal with: China.
China, I am confident, has known at least in part Putin's plans for some time, at least since the pipeline deals, but probably longer. In the ethereal plane that is code-worded speech online in China, there was immediately talk about Taiwan: Is this what will happen to Taiwan? Will China use this distraction as an opportunity to attack Taiwan?
Taiwan, after all, has been an imminent point of World War itself for years now, getting ever closer to that as China daily sends Jets into their air defense zone in an attempt to constantly threaten and intimidate, while also exhaust, the smaller country.
Xi Jinping himself has said directly that he will take Taiwan soon, by force if necessary, and its within his own political interest - his politics survival - that he does so. It's only a matter of time.
Currently, the CCP appears to be in observation mode. Keeping mostly quiet, saying a few platitudes while keeping the news entirely out of China if it can help it (at least, keeping out the discussion), while perhaps learning how the West responds, and how comparatively tough it might be to accomplish.
Many suspect the propaganda and 'wolf warrior' tactics of China might adapt and evolve as a result of what happens here. After all, Russia's propaganda is a lot more mature and intelligent, and their military a lot more experienced and advanced. There's a lot to learn here.
Behind the scenes, China is seemingly in minor support of Russia's actions, while simultaneously not really being allies, but more joined in their hatred of the USA, and financial benefactors of each other's trade surplus.
The reason this is significant is because without China joining the rest of the world's condemnation, Putin can essentially do as he pleases. With the comfort of knowing Europe can't possibly cut off its gas supplies entirely, everything else being cut off will be manageable, as long as China is there to keep the money flowing.
His historical claims are the ones that make people feel like he's gone mad. By claiming that parts of Ukraine were simply gifts from the soviet union, and other claims that Kyiv (Kiev to him) was always Russia's motherland (Kievan-Rus), among other claims that go back centuries, he makes himself look pretty dumb. I mean, if you're going to take claims of parts of Europe based on centuries-old history, or even fairly recent ones from dead communist states, then you could easily argue that parts of Russia belong to Germany as they had it occupied in WW2. The Romans would make a roaring comeback, among many more. That's just now how things work.
That's why I think this is simply a misdirection on his part in the same way that saving the Luhansk and Donetsk republics or whatever are to be recognized as official states.
I also think the NATO encroachment concerns are misdirection, albeit based in some legitimate concerns. NATO had indeed been expanding over the decades to encompass previous soviet states, and Ukraine was becoming increasingly Westernised, openly asking to be a part of NATO.
This would be like China setting up shop in Cuba and Mexico. In fact, history tells us what USA's response to this kind of behaviour was. I'm sure I needn't say more.
So there is precedent and there is legitimacy behind this concern, and I certainly don't think the west is without blame in some part here. But anything after Crimea is indeed Purely on Putin's shoulders, as there was no talk of Ukraine becoming part of NATO anyway, and the very act of taking Crimea rocketed Ukraine people's desire to join NATO two-fold, from 20-something % up to over 55%. After these attacks, that number is probably going to reach 100%, even though the likelihood of it happening is going to be closer to 0% if nothing else but to prevent a World War.
In this sense, Putin's actions were indeed quite dumb.
The more you read into this, the deeper it gets. After all, its decades in the making. There's more than a career's worth of knowledge there that needs to be organized and made sense of. This is, therefore, my very amateurish summarization of what I know currently.
Is there a risk of World War? Against Russia, I think not. Any mention of this in that sense is kind of absurd. Everybody knows Russia is not a superpower, as much as it wants to be, and any attempt at attacking NATO countries would result in a fairly swift annihilation of the country without much question.
However, if China was to get involved in some way, we should start getting worried. If China, for example, did take this opportunity to take Taiwan, the US would be somewhat obligated to come to their rescue.
Whether or not they have any legally binding agreement, strategically Taiwan is an absolute necessity for USA and others such as Japan, a country that USA is legally bound to protect. Taking Taiwan also cements China's claim to the South China Sea which will cause all kinds of war for South East Asian nations as they lose access to valuably fishing territories and a vast supply of oil and multi-trillion dollar trade routes.
If China and Russia have each other's backs when such things happen (remember, Japan borders Russia too, in an island-kinda way), escalation could be inevitable and a lot more world-war-like than we had ever dreaded.
Thankfully, I believe China is a lot more prudent than this, and given they don't appear to be true Russian allies, I doubt they would stick their neck out for Putin and his expansionist goals.
Only time will tell.
For now, Let's just hope Ukraine gets out of this without much more damage. As of this writing, Putin agreed to talks outside of Chernobyl at the border. Although this seems like a futile game with Putin having no intention of compromise, it does show something is changing. With the threat of Nuclear arms being talked about now (as a threat to other countries to stay out of it, presumably), this might only get worse, but it could just as easily end in a ceasefire followed by months of tension.
Either way, I just hope my friend is going to be OK.
