A few months ago I wrote from eastern Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin might have blinked when he appeared to do an unexpected volte-face and called for an end to the violence there.
I was wrong. Putin did not blink. What the Russian leader has done every day since the beginning of March has been to hoodwink the West about everything related to his absurd tale that his forces were not involved in the annexation of Crimea or in the bloody civil war that he has fostered along Ukraine’s eastern border.
All that winking is why it is bootless to put much stock in the peace plan which Putin was said to have penned during a flight Wednesday from Moscow to Ulan Bator, Mongolia. The timing of his unexpected seven-point scheme to end a war that he started was mischievously designed to throw a serious spanner into the NATO summit now underway in Wales.
However, after months of obfuscation and outright lies, Putin’s latest misdirect — which demands that Ukraine withdraws its guns from the east while not mentioning that Russian would stay put — is not going as smoothly. France has halted the sale of two massive Mistral-class assault ships that were to have been the flagships of Russia’s Pacific and Atlantic navies. Furthermore, as the U.S. Naval Institute website reported Wednesday, Putin’s latest brainwave will not delay four NATO warships, including HMCS Toronto from entering the Black Sea this weekend on a training mission. And NATO ground forces are still going ahead with an annual exercise in western Ukraine that will involve a modest Canadian contribution.
Russia has interfered in Ukraine not only because it doesn’t want its neighbour to join NATO, but because Putin and the hardcore Russian nationalists constantly hectoring him, wish to recreate something approximating the Soviet Union. This dream includes resurrecting such wretched constructs as Comecon, which for decades imposed the politburo’s political and economic ideas on what once were its constituent republics and its reluctant Warsaw Pact partners. Even Ukraine’s ousted president and pro-Russia ally, Viktor Yanukovych, sat on the fence about joining what Moscow called the Eurasian Customs Union.
The old Beatles tune, Back in the USSR, comes to mind. But Russians have never really left their former homeland, despite the working class’s immense fondness today for vacations in Egypt, Spain, Turkey and Thailand rather than in Soviet-era sanitariums. And the ruling kleptocracy’s child-like delight at the pleasures to be bought in London, Paris and Rome with their misbegotten lucre rather than in the dreary Soviet shops where the self-proclaimed “prestigni elite” once shopped for forbidden fruits such as oranges and bananas.
A telling example of how the Russian mindset never changed is that while Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as the Baltic states and Ukraine, quickly dropped visa requirements for westerners, Moscow has continued to impose the same unfriendly visa regime.
“Crimea and Sevastopol are ours once more” is an appropriate slogan for what is happening today. Those exact words were invoked at the Moscow school attended by the son of a friend of mine last week at the students’ official welcoming ceremony.
Putin correctly calculated that he could bamboozle the Europeans by constantly denying involvement in Crimea, and later in eastern Ukraine and the Malaysia Airlines outrage, because the Europeans wanted to be fooled in order to keep relatively cheap gas and oil flowing.
Meanwhile, in dribs and drabs and then in a torrent, Russia provided the rebels in eastern Ukraine with what they needed to wage war. The assistance has run the gamut from leadership, money, strategic advice, psy-ops and intel to weaponry including, surface-to-air missiles that have been used to largely neutralize the Ukrainian air force.
While western Europeans slept in their Russian-heated homes, Moscow also supplied rebels with hundreds of tanks and armoured personnel carriers as well as food and water for the fighters that was brought in as part of that infamous Russian convoy last month. The trucks in that convoy had been stripped of their military plates that were painted white on the outside but were still army green on the inside. Those trucks were driven by Russian “volunteers” while other Russian soldiers allegedly opted to have shooting vacations in Ukraine.
If western Europeans had not been so myopically self-interested in the early innings, the battlefield might have been shaped a bit differently, and they would have held a stronger hand in the coming energy wars with Russia.
By allowing themselves to be seduced by Putin’s mendacity, NATO’s established European members underscored the deep philosophical rift that exists between them, Canada and the United States. The summit in Wales will put a Band-Aid over this rupture, but until and unless NATO presents a truly united front Vladimir Putin will continue to be a colossal irritant.