Putin might be a kleptocratic thug, but he is no fool. So why is he doing it? I offer a few rather disconnected thoughts.
Dreadful things were done by the Soviets in the Ukraine in and around the 1930s in the name of the greater good. There must still be plenty of Ukrainians who know all about this and in whom it will be easy to stir up hatred of all things Russians. Just as there are plenty of Finns. So why not try to smooth things over, rather than stir them up?
Maybe Russians in general dislike Ukrainians almost as much as Ukrainians dislike Russians. Maybe they remember them as the traitors of the second world war. Given the circumstances, perhaps not very fair, but I would imagine that a lot more Ukrainians wound up fighting for Hitler and otherwise doing his dirty work than did Russians.
Against which background, they might have a very reasonable fear of the treatment that Russians living in a right wing, nationalistic Ukraine might get. Spring to the defence of their fellow countrymen. In which connection I associated to their springing to the defence of their obnoxious fellow Slavs just about a century ago.
In any event, there is a real problem in that the borderlands are very mixed up with lots of both Russians and Ukrainians living there. Short of the sort of forced movements of population which happened at the end of the second world war, they have got to learn to get along with each other somehow.
It is unfortunate that governance & government in the Ukraine is about as bad as that in Russia.
It is perhaps unfortunate that the Ukrainian borders were so generous, including chunks which were not terribly Ukrainian, perhaps set down at a time when no-one thought that the Ukrainians would want out of their centuries old connection with Russia. Of the same sort of age as our own connection with Scotland.
Stirring up trouble abroad has long been used as a distraction by governments in trouble at home.
Maybe the Ukraine has lots of grain, which Russia wants to keep its grip on, being a bit short itself, in return for giving them energy.
Maybe the Russians, or at least the ruling kleptocracy, fear what might happen when the west takes over the Ukraine, and fills it with all kinds of western subversion, subversion which might well spill over into Mother Russia and disturb things. And they have a point of sorts: we may all have cheered and whooped when the Soviet Union fell apart, and sent in lots of highly paid contractors to teach them how to be good capitalists, but the outcome has not been that great for ordinary Russians. One crummy regime has been replaced by another, crummy in a rather different way, but still crummy.
Following up the point of sorts, and remembering both the French invasion of 200 years ago and the German invasion of 75 years ago, maybe the Russians really do continue to worry about the aggressive intentions and plans of their neighbours. Maybe all those nuclear tipped (I guess) US battle groups cruising around the world really do worry them. Maybe they really do hope to maintain a glacis of client states around their southern and western borders, a glacis which can take the brunt of any future invasion. And what about the Chinese? Will their eastern borders be a flash point at some point in the future?
PS 1: the photo, which carries it own acknowledgement, is the closest google images came to my idea of an old style log cabin, Russian or Ukrainian. Couldn't find one of a of row of them in a mean & squalid village street of the revolutionary era.
PS 2: I wonder what happened to all the Germans who went to live in Russia during, say, the nineteenth century? No idea how many of them there were; certainly more than thousands, perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands.
No comments:
Post a Comment