If the Russians had managed to literally march into Kyiv in just a couple of days after Feb 24 to the welcoming arms of Ukrainians, the world might have a different set of consequences to deal with. Instead, more than three weeks after the invasion, the end is nowhere in sight. The Ukrainians under Volodymyr Zelensky have not only not welcomed Vladimir Putin’s liberating army, they are fiercely fighting for their independence.
Obviously, Putin has miscalculated. And he has sacked his intelligence people for feeding him with inaccurate information. The easy steam-rolling victory picture must have also been quietly whispered by Putin into the ears of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Beijing Winter Olympics. Such a “fait accompli” following a well-executed “military operation” would have been the perfect scenario to cap the “no limits” friendship between Beijing and Moscow declared in Feb 4. After all, Beijing values Moscow as an ally in its superpower contest with Washington.
The Russian leader must have calculated that such a quick victory scenario would have presented the West with a realpolitik situation which would invoke nothing more than perfunctory protest from the West followed by an acceptance of a world divided into spheres of interest or a Russian version of the Monroe doctrine. Wikipedia: “The Monroe Doctrine was a United States foreign policy position that opposed European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It held that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers was a potentially hostile act against the US. The doctrine was central to US foreign policy for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
A divided and weak West where the US is perceived as a declining superpower and Europe too tired to step up was what Putin expected to see and he probably sold some parts of that story to Xi Jinping.
If Ukraine had fallen without a fight, Putin is not likely to stop there. And the post Berlin Wall collapse peace dividend that has given the world so much peace to progress would have come to nought.
Instead, there are some hopeful signs that brakes to the disruption are slowly being applied.
One is the rare sight of a unified West – which the intellectually challenged Donald Trump, Putin’s second best friend after Xi Jinping, nearly tore apart – ready to slap crippling sanctions on the Russians and impose restrictions on Putin and his oligarchs. The US, European Union, Britain, Canada and Japan have disbarred Russians banks from SWIFT which is a messaging network that financial institutions use to securely transmit information and instructions through a standardised system of codes.
Another rare sight was an almost perpetually divided US Congress coming together as one to condemn the Russian invasion even as Washington announced the sanctions. Democrats and Republicans closed ranks.
Putin will do what needs to be done to achieve his subjugation of Ukraine. He has at his disposal 190,000 troops in and around Ukraine, as well as several hundred battle-hardened mercenaries. So he will cause tremendous damage. Do not forget too that Russia is still one of the two most powerful nuclear powers. A cornered leader with a finger on the nuclear button is a dangerous one. But there is a limit. Body bags from the Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 made that war highly unpopular. Ukraine may be a new quagmire. Ukrainians are, by some definition, also Russians which makes the invasion and killings even less tolerable.
Besides, the US has already earmarked aid for Kyiv and has reportedly supplied military weapons to the Ukrainians.
At this moment, China is the only one which may have much more to lose in the long term than Russia for almost prematurely declaring its no limits friendship with Russia so openly.
It has benefited from the peace dividend and an international system and rules-based order with which it is intricately linked.
Not to condemn the invasion has put in jeopardy almost everything Beijing has carefully built up as a responsible world power. It surely does not want to be seen to support a clearly illegal war and a pariah state.
It is not enough to be neutral.
Beijing must do more. And it may do just that, according to the US News and World Report.
On Mar 18, Xi Jinping indicated in the phone call between him and US President Joseph Biden that his country does not plan to send weapons to Russia in support of its brutal campaign in Ukraine. He and Biden agreed that “conflict and confrontation are not in anyone’s interest” and that “peace and security are what the international community should treasure most”.
US News quoted Susan Thornton, a career diplomat with deep experience in Russia and China, as saying:
“The result of Friday’s virtual summit shows China now openly considers its ability to maintain economic ties globally outweighs Moscow’s need for more deadly weapons to break the burgeoning stalemate in the former Soviet republic – and as such its decision will likely further anger Russia.”
Now, we wait to see how prepared Moscow is to alienate itself further from the rest of the international community. A 140 million pariah nation is an era away from a 300 million strong Soviet Union (plus its east European bloc) with a global reach that could almost do without others. Russia can be isolated.
Tan Bah Bah, consulting editor of TheIndependent.Sg, is a former senior leader writer with The Straits Times. He was also managing editor of a local magazine publishing company.