It’s entirely consistent with Russian offers, all of which have essentially amounted to Ukraine surrendering.
I see what you mean. For a cease-fire being only temporary respite Ukraine would never agree. It was a nice try though.
And no demilitarized zone on the Belarusian frontier where the war started a year ago. Brilliant!
To my knowledge that map doesn’t have any connection to the actual Chinese proposal. The actual Chinese position is pure fantasy as well, in that it’s kind of a kumbaya can’t we all just get along and respect sovereignty and drop sanctions delusion that’s completely devoid of any awareness of what’s happening. I’m pretty sure the proposal is actually nothing to do with Russia/Ukraine and purely about what would be good for China.
But I’ve seen no evidence that the ridiculous map with Russia keeping all the territory it currently occupies and “demilitarization” of half of what would be left of Ukraine is any part of the Chinese proposal.
The only caveat to that is that modern technology is a bit of a wild card. Rapid worldwide communication has led to a lot of self-reinforcing silos. But it also holds the potential for rapid proliferation of change. Not to say it will change anything. Could be it would end up worse (i.e. those silos), but I don’t think we can be sure of anything. Russia might be in a rather different place culturally in a generation or even less.
But it probably won’t be tomorrow.
Yes, but they are examples where the change occurred based on political principles that were already nascent in the country; and the change took a long time.
Compare:
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The political structure of England in 1640 with the political strucutre of the UK today;
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The political structure of France in 1700 with the political strucutre of France today;
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The political structure of the US in 1791 with the political structure today.
Those are massive changes: from absolute monarchies to liberal democracies (1 and 2), and an oligarchic republic to a liberal democracy; all three with a universal adult franchise. No outsider imposed those changes.
But those changes were nascent in those three countries. All three of them had strong political traditions of self-government that pushed against the tide of centralised power:
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The Parliamentarians in England didn’t try to replace an absolute monarch with their own absolutism; they harkened back to Magna Carta and the idea of limited monarchy, and parliaments where elected members had a share in government.
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Absolute monarchy failed in France when Louis XVI was finally forced to recall the Estates General, after a century of absolutism, and the Estates relied on French historical themes as part of their justification for the overthrow of the monarchy.
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And in the US, that phrase “All men are created equal” had tremendous staying power. The political ideology in those five words gradually transformed the US from a country where slavery was allowed and encouraged, into a strong liberal democracy.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in Russian history, but the little reading I’ve done has never shown any similar native historical ideological seeds for Russia to go the democratic route.
Sure, that’s what people want. The next question is: “In the society I live in, what is the best way to achieve that?”
The standard western response is work hard, put your money in the bank where it’s safe, teach your kids to work hard, and call the cops if someone breaks into your house or steals your money."
But in other societies, that is not the road to achieving a good life. The cops might be just another type of thief. The banks may not be safe, because the government can use them as their own piggy banks. Working hard might not do it, because the jobs don’t provide a living wage.
In those societies, having a side hustle is important; get in on the graft and corruption. Find a way to be in a position where people bribe you! Keep your head down so no-one notices you. Do not in any way criticise the government. Find a way that your kids are associated with people in power, and hope that that friendship will help get them into good schools.
The basic goals are the same; how to achieve those goals depend on where you live.
I think Putin was thinking of the historical precedents of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968: do a decapitation strike, haul rebel leaders off to Siberia (or just kill them) and install the new amenable government, who would do as Moscow instructed. They had Viktor Yanukovych waiting in the wings, the rightful president of Ukraine who had been forced out by the west.
The famous story that a key point in Putin’s life was “Moscow is silent” was, I think from his perspective, that Moscow had failed to be strong, and East Germany fell. He would be strong in Ukraine, just as in 56 and 68, with the same result.
And remember, back in January of 2022, people in power in the US, and people here on these boards, didn’t think it would be a stupid war that dragged on for years. There was a common belief that there was a good chance Putin would succeed, the Ukraine government would fall, and Ukraine would be safely back in Russia’s orbit.
No-one counted on the determination and skill of the Ukrainians, and the comedian leader with his famous line: “I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition!”.
And a video, outside at night in Kyiv, when it was still a war zone:
“The President is here. The Prime Minister is here. The Minister of Defence is here. All the Cabinet is here.”
Putin’s other real mistake is that he really does not believe that Ukraine is separate from Russia. But from anything I can tell, that is a common position in Russia.
I don’t have anything to contribute (yet), but I’d like to chime in that this thread has been very educational and will help me better understand news reports and to better parse the words coming from “expert” talking heads.
Thanks.
It is easy enough to think of Russians as lacking backbone, or that they simply do not care about democracy, but, remember, while the average Russian may be happy to say they support various protest movements while sitting on their couch at home, Russia is a totalitarian state with cameras (incorporating face and gait recognition, links to every building’s CCTV, etc.) everywhere, and actually going out and really protesting guarantees a knock on your door in short order.
Sure. But my point is that in all the centuries of Russian history, there has not been much in the way of any movement towards democracy, to prevent that from happening. Tsarist authoritarianism, Soviet authoritarianism, Putinism authoritarianism; Russian society seems accepting of authoritarianism.
In my opinion, it’s because Putin saw one of the necessary pre-conditions to a successful Russian war was a weak America. In the period from 2017 to 2021, the United States kept getting weaker due to incompetent leadership. Putin, who had helped create that situation, was undoubtedly hoping for four more years of decline and probably originally planned on invading Ukraine around 2025. But when the Trump was voted out, Putin realized America had reached its nadir and would start regaining its strength. So he moved up the schedule.
Nobody has made this claim at any point. It’s a strawman that you want to beat for some reason.
However it needs to be noted that Russian cultural attitudes include a well-documented and default assumption that Russia is entitled to expand and subsume its neighbors due to Russian cultural superiority. Another big element is the fact that Russian culture is hierarchical and doesn’t value individual initiative very much. Generally you do what you’re told and believe what you’re told, even if you know it’s lies, because that’s how you survive.
Nothing lasts forever, but things on a certain trajectory will remain on that trajectory until some force causes it to deviate. Nobody has a credible theory of how Russian culture might change, nothing other than a vague belief that “this can’t last forever.” This culture has lasted hundreds of years and it’s survived two world wars and a radical political revolution. There are many concrete reasons to expect it to endure. Nobody can articulate a credible and concrete reason why it should change.
Being fair here, while some of the most important developments happened from 2017 to 2021, America’s political weakness regarding Russia started when the USSR broke up. Every administration from Bush to Trump got it wrong (Biden excepted, but only because reality became undeniable when Russia invaded Ukraine).
Bush believed Yeltsin’s fantasies about Russia somehow joining NATO (which, amazingly, persisted well beyond 2000). Clinton saw it as an opportunity to triangulate for his own political reasons, as was his tendency. Bush ignored it while he was pursuing his own wars, and slept on Russia’s invasion of Georgia. SecState Hillary Clinton performed the idiot “reset button stunt” followed by Obama whiffing on Russia’s aggression in Syria and Crimea (remember “red lines”?). Trump of course was the worst by far.
I don’t say this to slam any particular individual. All of them failed (maybe it’s inaccurate to say Trump “failed”, as he clearly never cared and behaves as if he was trying to aid Russia). All of them repeatedly made the analytical mistake of imagining what America would do if it were in Russia’s shoes, assuming that Russia wanted peace and stability, that people worldwide all want democracy, would eagerly jump on the democratic bandwagon when they got their first taste McDonald’s and Levis.
It’s really important that America understands how wrong this was, and adjusts its containment strategy going forward.
By coincidence, I wanted to post today about how some foreign-policy observers in the press tend to put America, or the West, at the center of our adversaries’ decision-making (in this case, the Kremlin’s).
Just one example is this recent opinion piece by Anatol Lieven in the Guardian.
Commentators often lament this or that “missed opportunity” that Western leaders supposedly had to steer the Kremlin towards more responsible behavior and that they carelessly neglected to pursue.
I want to take issue with that. Not that the U.S. or the West have no influence on Moscow – they do – but it is routinely overstated.
Also, when “missed opportunities” are discussed, there is rarely any thorough consideration of all the policy constraints Western leaders faced at the time, not to mention all the disadvantages inherent to the road not taken.
I think it amounts to a kind of self-deceiving “Main Character Syndrome” to think in terms of how “we” lost Russia to authoritarianism and revanchism. Who steers the Kremlin’s foreign policy? Russian leaders do.
But for several centuries, Russia has invaded other countries and annexed their territory. Those invasions have been successful, not pointless and stupid. By invasion and annexation, Russia has expanded from a little medieval duchy, centred on a backwoods Moscow, into the largest country in the world, in terms of land area.
Here’s the map for the expansion of the Ducy of Muscovy, starting with the dark green region around Moscow:
And here’s the map of the expansion of the Tsardom of Russia:
Over the course of several centuries, imperial expansion and conquest has been very successful for Russia.
However, there is the problem that imperialism runs up against regionalism, and the modern emphasis on democracy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up the problem for Russia, and Russia’s neighbours, very well in the early 1990s:
Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both. . . . Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.
Most folks wants peace and stability. On their own terms. Reagan would I’m sure have said that he wanted peace and stability when he invaded Grenada. Putin isn’t fighting for chaos or for the religious joy of war and sacrifice like an Aztec. In his mind he is fighting for defensible, secure borders and the return of Super Power status and the deference that infers. His secure, defensible borders may include every Slavic-speaking person from Poland to Macedonia, but certainly includes every East Slavic-speaking person from Murmansk to Sevastopol and every non-Slavic person enclosed within that sphere. He regards that as both reasonable and fair. We and some of those people themselves, do not. But he is not dealing destruction for destruction’s sake.
I do think I find myself somewhere halfway between iiandyiii (too optimistic) and you (too fatalistic) on this whole cultural immutability argument. It was cultural that the elites ruled, the peasants served. But 1917 altered that trajectory, just as 1789 altered it in absolutist France. And while it is all well and good to say that nothing really changed, Russia just replaced boyars with commissars, in fact something did change. Primarily the intellectual concept of equality, which has been pounded into every Soviet and Russian citizens brain through universal education ever since.
I do just reflexively give a wary side-eye to rampant otherism, because I just have a sense it often leads to bad conclusions and bad outcomes. I particularly think of the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11. IMO you’re not entirely wrong about some of your conclusions. But I’d caution against what garden path they can lead you down (sounds condescending as I type this, but as much as I personalized the previous sentence, I mean this more generally - we all need to check ourselves sometimes).
But through all of that, Russia has been a significant power on the international stage. Not always a superpower, maybe, but it’s historically always been the strongest power in Eastern Europe.
That’s changed. Russia is no longer any sort of power at all, and everyone now knows it (or at least, everyone outside of Russia’s own domestic propaganda machine). And it’s a lot harder to confidently state that your nation should of course expand, when it can’t.
I’m not being fatalistic, nor suggesting that cultural is an immutable trait. The calculus is really simple:
- Look at the factors that favor change
- Look at the factors that favor continuity
- If the factors favoring continuity are present and strong, and the factors favoring change are weak or absent, then the likeliest forecast is continuity without change.
I don’t hear anyone proposing a credible reason Russian culture should change, just that things must change, because things always do. That is always true, given enough time, nobody can point to anything on the horizon that suggests things ought to be different.
No, and I wouldn’t suggest that. However, Putin clearly is comfortable with dealing indiscriminate death and destruction for the purpose of expansion - in some cases as punishment for resistance, and as an warning to others. Bucha and Izyum resembled concentration camps after Russians vacated. Aleppo and Mariupol look like they were hit by atom bombs. Russia targets civilian residential areas hundreds of miles from the line of contact, people that Putin claims are “brothers”.
None of this is necessary to Putin’s expansion project; it’s pure spite and hatred. Nothing Reagan did comes remotely close to that, and frankly the comparison is obscene.
What? The Bolshevik revolution changed Russia system of government. It traded feudalism for communism, a monarchic elite for a party elite. They gained a new flag and a new ideology, but under all that, it was the same Russian dictatorship it’s always been, even after a revolution and two world wars. That should tell you something about how incredibly hard it will be to dislodge.
This is wrong for 2 reasons:
- Russia definitely is a power, as in a nuclear power. This has limited utility in terms of international influence, but it means airtight resistance to any change from the outside, and broad latitude to get away with all sorts of mischief.
- If we’re talking about the prospects of internal change (which we are), then nothing outside the propaganda bubble matters. That’s what has to be pierced, and there’s no apparent mechanism of overcoming the propaganda (especially, emphatically, because many Russians want to be deceived, every bit as much as Fox viewers tune in to have their priors confirmed).
Russians think they’re enough of a power that they’ll never need to change. Russian leadership can easily shape that narrative, because it’s the narrative the people want hear, and because there’s precious little alternative media that can pierce the propaganda.