Some Initial Thoughts about the Ongoing Russian Invasion of Ukraine

As everybody who is not living in some remote luddite monastery knows by now, Russia finally decided to invade Ukraine to ‘demilitarize it in addition to getting rid of Neo-Nazis in its government and security forces’. Fun fact- this statement is technically true as they have expressed the desire to do both for at least the past eight years. However, the true beginnings of what we are witnessing today began in 1991, after the dissolution of USSR. While the government of Russia, even in the early 1990s, had no illusion about many of the countries in erstwhile Eastern Block remaining friendly with them, they had expected the countries to maintain a good relationship with a few which were adjacent to them (Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan etc). The reason behind this expectation had to a lot to do with those countries having a significant Russian minority and security concerns due to their location. For example, the lands on which Belarus and Ukraine exist today have been on the route taken by any western invader of Russia.

In the contemporary world, there is also the issue of military bases housing conventional forces as well as nuclear missiles. You might remember a little incident in 1962 called the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ where USA reacted very strongly to the presence of soviet nuclear IRBMs on an island less than 100 km from its continental borders. But what does this have to do with the current situation? As it turns out, a lot more than you think. See.. the main objective of the current military incursion by Russia in Ukraine has everything to do with derailing any chance by Ukraine to join the NATO alliance in future. But why would Russia not want Ukraine to join NATO? Well, for the same reason that USA would react badly if a future government in Mexico signed a military alliance with China allowing it to build military bases and potentially base nuclear missiles in that country. No country likes a serious security risk on its border and will do anything within its power to remove the potential for such a situation. It just happens that Russia has the military and economic might to translate its beliefs into reality.

If you want to read a longer version of why Russia is invading Ukraine, here is a good English translation of the speech given by Vladimir Putin when he went public with his plans to invade that country. The very short version is that he has enough of the USA-led NATO alliance plan to keep expanding eastwards in Europe and has decided that nothing short of military action could top such an expansion into Ukraine. He also pointed out that even though Ukraine had not officially joined the NATO alliance, it had greatly increased its military cooperation with countries in that alliance since 2014, thus destabilizing its border situation with Russia. I am not going to go too deeply into what occurred during the 2014 “color revolution” in Ukraine, other than point out that it was subsidized and coordinated by USA and resulted in the overthrow and replacement of a pro-Russian leader with an American puppet. It is worth pointing out that even an official mouthpiece of the UK government admits that this was the case.

There are of course, other reasons driving this invasion. It should not surprise anybody that after failure of the Minsk agreement signed in 2015, Russia sees the creation of a Russian-friendly buffer state subsequent to the future partition of Ukraine as its best hope of preventing further NATO expansion. Given the demographics gradients in Ukraine with a high percentage of ethnically Russian people in Eastern and Coastal Ukraine, this is an eminently feasible option. It should be pointed out that the current boundaries of that country only came into being in after WW2 and some areas in the west of Ukraine used to belong to Poland, Hungary and Slovakia within the last century. My point is that the thought process driving Russian views of this conflict has a strong basis in reality, even if it is unpleasant to western liberals. Which brings us to the question- how will this conflict unfold and what will be the short and medium term effects of this invasion?

Well.. what I am going to say next will sound most displeasing to those of the supposedly ‘western liberal’ disposition. The simple fact is that level of inequality in military capability between those two countries is so large that it is almost inevitable that Russia will win and successfully occupy Ukraine. Whether this occurs after a swift campaign or after a more prolonged struggle is irrelevant, since Russia is willing to take far more casualties than effeminate western nations. We have consistently seen this throughout history and also during the past 20 years in conflicts such as the 2nd Chechen war, Russo-Georgian War in 2008 and involvement in Syria since 2014. Post-USSR Russia has also demonstrated an ability to carefully titrate military conflicts such that they don’t become too expensive or overextend their reach- unlike what we have seen with the involvement of USA in long, costly and ultimately failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. There are those of you who want to desperately believe in all the feel-good lies promoted by mainstream media and professional liars on social media about how Ukrainian army is successfully resisting, how pace of progress for Russian armed forces is very slow, how Russia might run out of money or missiles or anything else which provides false hope to gullible western liberals.

The reality is far different. Firstly, Russia has currently deployed only a fraction of available forces amassed at the Ukrainian border. They could put far more people and weapons in play if that became necessary. Secondly, the choice of targets and areas of that country they are focusing on has a lot to do with forcing a quick capitulation by Ukraine. They could certainly bomb cities indiscriminately like USA did in Iraq or Syria. They could harass and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians like USA did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did I mention that USA still lost both occupations in spite of doing that and pumping trillions in those doomed endeavors? If I had to make a guess, they want to occupy the eastern and coastal areas of that country in addition to overrunning Kiev and forcing the current government in Ukraine to surrender unconditionally. After achieving that, they could either demand a much less federalized future Ukraine which would never be able to join NATO or they could partition the country based on existing demographic patterns. It remains to be seen which path the current situation will go down.

Of course, if the delusional morons in governments of adjacent NATO-allied countries such as Poland have their way, things could get far more interesting. Some of you might think that western economic sanctions and other futile attempts at economic blackmail of Russia might work. However, this is 2022 and the West is now in an irreversible decline on many fronts. Today, China is the largest industrial economy in the world and they have no interest in supporting the West, unless it is in their own interests. Did I mention that China wants to “integrate” Taiwan by 2030? Even other normally spineless countries such as India have no interest in towing the western line on Russia. To make a long story short, the West has basically no realistic chance of successfully blackmailing Russia via sanctions and other economic bullshit unless they want to let their population experience continuous blackouts due to power shortages and $ 400 a barrel crude. Did I mention that Russia is quite capable of helping a certain large-ish country in the middle-east to start trouble in the oil-rich parts of that region? And we haven’t even started talking about cyberwarfare and its potential fallout. I will likely revisit this conflict in future posts, depending on nature of upcoming developments.

Here is a long YouTube clip of a lecture by John Mearsheimer, from 6 years ago, describing the exact situation we are in today.

What do you think? Comments?