And Now The War Is On

Vlad The Imperialist

In the end Vladimir Putin couldn't pull back from his own rhetoric. I don't think he's exactly drunk on his own words, but he's certainly dancing to his own misshapen tune as he sends in his forces over the borders into Ukraine. 

The global markets were a bit perturbed by all this. Why wouldn't they? Everybody thought a shred of sanity would prevail, but no. Vladimir Putin is doing the kind of thing we haven't witnessed since the middle of the last century - an ideologically framed war with zero regard to collateral damage. 

Because he denied his intent to invade Ukraine for so long as he amassed his troops along the borders, it is actually quite hard to figure out how he sees the endgame. If he wants Ukraine to come back to the fold as a nation that is part of a greater Russia, he's sure failing to win friends and influencing people in Ukraine. If he is hunting down his political enemies who would see Ukraine join Western Europe, then he might be in for a lot of resistance. For every historic reason Putin might cite as to why Ukraine belongs with Russia, the Soviet experience has been plenty for a lot Ukrainians. Can you really blame them? 

As the history of capitalism amply demonstrates, if you start a war against the capitalist hegemony, your reputation suffers greatly and maybe even get whacked. No matter which way you dice it, invading Ukraine was the worst option for Putin, no matter how much he might try to spin it otherwise. And let's not forget he lied about his intention for months so what credibility does he have left anyway?

The Spy Who Can't Come In From The Cold

Having watched Russia turn into this rather silly caricature strongman state over the last 25 years has been a bit of a drag. It's not like it's the fault of the Russian people. They're as much a hostage to history as anybody living under a tin pot tyrant. It's just that it's kind of weird to see what once was the high-minded Soviet Union reduce itself to the kind of state Saddam Hussein was running in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait. 

Now, we're not putting together a big coalition to push Russian forces out of Ukraine like we did with Kuwait, but we likely will send weapons and supplies to the Ukrainians and we have no idea how this all plays out. In light of that, one has to wonder ho all this came to pass, and essentially, it comes down to the inability of the US led hegemony to talk Russia off the cliff edge when the Soviet Union collapsed. Somehow we didn't manage to shepherd Russia back in to the fold of a capitalist Europe. We didn't woo Russia back to civilisation - we let it wander off like an orphan, still equipped with nukes. Essentially, the West let Russia meander into this dictatorship and let the paranoia fester. That very paranoia has now manifested itself as this political will to take Ukraine like some re-run of World War II. 

So there's Vlad Putin, the ex-KGB guy who just can't get rid of his ideological framework and mindset. He climbs to the top of Russian politics and he's still largely informedly his experience as a spy. For years and years he was presented as this weird Russian guy who may or may not be a psychopath. it turns out, he was exactly the kind of bad guy you would expect from an ex-KGB spy allowed to run a country. Wo's fault is it exactly that Russia ended up with him as their de facto dictator? I sure don't want to pin that on the Russian people. Some of that responsibility lies with the west.

And so here we are today.