YOU ARE NOT HERE

I’m sure we can all agree about much on the humanitarian side of this Russia/Ukraine thing. The attacks on civilian infrastructure, displacement of millions, untold deaths, and on all seem obvious and needlessly cruel. However, it all gets so much messier the more context is brought in, even just slightly more.

As a starting place, effectively everyone I know appears convinced that the Russian invasion was entirely unprovoked, there is unprecedented global consensus against Russian aggression, Ukraine is successfully defending its cities and winning both the physical war and the information one. Even if there are skeptics and critics to be found, this seems the overwhelming messaging received and shared by about a billion people, largely across Europe and North America. A billion people is a tiny and fragile minority.

News and social media analysis makes it clear that if you live on any other continent the view, unsurprisingly, looks quite different. Some parallel Russia/Ukraine with Israel/Palestine and wonder what's animating this unique level of concern and why we see so little of this outcry when non-Christian lands and lives are stolen. Others compare the present Russian invasion of Ukraine with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which the UK and US bombed and sent in troops – both too frequently killing civilians and in flagrant opposition to world opinion and against the backdrop of some of the largest anti-war rallies ever seen. They recall how 22 days into that unprovoked war the capital of Baghdad was captured (with mass looting, thousands of civilians dead, and accusations of despicable war crimes on all sides), and how with that the Americans promptly declared the end of operations (which didn't technically end for another eight years.) With this, foreign onlookers wonder how things could look so markedly different to anyone? And in such persistently glaring light, they wonder, as ever, how all of this sudden cacophony coming from the newsrooms of the West isn't read as impossibly ignorant and unreflective, or at lease transparently and unforgivably biased, to those the messaging is directed at? These are not terrible questions.

Still others note current events like the ongoing chaos in northeastern Ethiopia and the half a million souls lost there. They hold up this catastrophe and point to an absence of global outrage paired with the total lack of mobilization to aid those displaced and forced into starvation. And they can’t even find serious calls for interventions, sanctions, or condemnations at the UN General Assembly either. They might note all of the same with Yemen or Mozambique, too. Where are the African and Middle Eastern flags of solidarity? (And they might note as much even while recognizing that Kenyans aren't exactly opening their doors to two million displaced Ethiopians, nor are South Africans forming volunteer caravans to aid Mozambicans, even over five years of sustained conflict...)

Voices from Brazil, India, China, and South Africa may just happily recount so many instances of Russian support in the UN or their mutually-supportive non-interference pact with this other fledgling economy. And they might wonder about the long-term and if in another generation anyone (or even any large coalition representing half of humanity) will be able to offer any push-back at all to the morally and spiritually bankrupt would-be leader of the world.

Of course, some see this thing as nothing more than an exercising of the global war machine; a helpful justification for deeper 'defence' spending among Western nations. They might note how Russia-gate (those unrelenting years where nearly all US media overflowed with seemingly absurd and forever unfounded claims of a meddling Moscow) so nicely primed Western nations and flagged America’s intention for more visible interventions against Russia. They might note how such an “unprovoked and existential threat to our democracy” as “manipulating our elections” could easily become this generation’s “multiple independent sources of solid intelligence” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The radical (and seemingly hourly) insistence coming from politicians and intelligence officials alike that Russia’s actions were both unforeseen and unprovoked suggests some truth to this thesis. As made fairly clear in a piece from 2014, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Russia has tried to influence, control, and reclaim Ukraine regularly and by any and all means since its declaration of independence back in ’91. And if you listen to Putin’s skeptics (folks like Masha Gessen, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Garry Kasparov, or Andrei Soldatov) who have been warning us for decades, and contrary to the Western media consensus from the opening of this recent conflict, the man has been telling us how he wishes to be viewed and where this is going since he arrived on the scene. He continually tells us he’s a street thug turned Tsar; someone more loyal to the ideal of the Soviet Union than those who ran it and who has been positioned by fate as ‘the chosen one,’ here to undo the calamitous collapse of the once-glorious empire and return us all to a bipolar world in which Russian power is as feared as it is respected.

Other onlookers contrast the Western demand that Russia has failed and is flailing in Ukraine with Russia's stated goals. They note how it is the Western media who insisted Russia is primarily after regime change. They note how when America and friends went into Iraq with this aim they immediately cut off communications, bombed the presidential palace or parliament, and the like (tactics directed at actually beheading the enemy) and how we've seen nothing of the sort from Russia after several weeks. (Of course, it's unclear that flooding Ukraine with NATO arms won't have this exact result.) They note how Russia was not overly specific about their aims. We were told they sought to defend the Donbas region, which they seem to be doing. And Russia has demanded for years that Ukraine not be admitted into NATO but instead remain neutral territory. Other than this Putin highlighted a vague desire to demilitarize and denazify, whatever that may mean to him. (Something that will undoubtedly need doing when this war is over, given the endless billions and trainloads of arms being offered and the fascist iconography and slogans appearing seemingly organically everywhere Western cameras are turned.)

All I know is that a diplomatic solution is needed to end Russia’s push into Ukraine. And as far as I can tell, the basic compromises required were all left back in the opening days of the war. Without Putin again accepting the Minsk agreements, pulling out his troops entirely, and Ukraine’s return to neutrality, I can’t see a way out of what looks more and more like a US proxy war. And I just don’t see this happening given the sunken costs and the kind of messaging he’s been offering his people and the world. “We went, denazified, and returned home with a job well-done” is not something he will likely ever get to claim. And without that (just as with the US and its allies in Afghanistan) he will simply have to run out of cities to shell and grow tired of sending in troops to be maimed and killed. (That, or Putin would have to magically transform his entire worldview and life's mission.) How would any of this occur, given what we know?

If you take the not-less-than-thirty-year history of this conflict and add that to Putin’s psychological inability to step down, his happiness to see Ukrainian independence as a threat to Russia, and the (re)conquest of Ukraine as part of his divine mission; and then add Ukraine’s already-flattened cities, an unlimited supply of javelin missiles, and nearly-blank cheques arriving every week… well, the sum you arrive at is nothing like two parties primed for compromise. And what incentives do other active participants have for ending this? None, as far as I can see.

With the above context, I see this conflict as likely inevitable and decades in the works, and neither unpredictable nor unprovoked. So then, who benefits? Russia, I suppose, if it could win. But the conflict only looks like a giant mess for Russia. Alternatively, this whole shit-show conveniently helps America maintain its status as sole superpower. Taking on Russia on these grounds (including an unprecedented opportunity to pound its military, levelling otherwise-unjustified hyper-aggressive sanctions, and fomenting internal unrest or uncertainty sufficient to push those wealthy or educated or skilled and able to leave to do so, and in droves, etc) doesn't merely break Russia. This would also, obviously, fracture China's key ally (and thus the coalition forming America's only opposition on the world stage.) Further, with Russia hobbled and the combinations of Ukraine, COVID, and a multidimensional season of nationalism along with an ever-greater social- or eco-inspired desire for ‘Made Here At Home’, we have tremendous and previously unseen opposition to globalization and a real urgency to end the West’s self-made dependence on China. The consequence of this seem to me to be the easy and slow strangulation of the only other serious global power (that "existential threat” we’ve been hearing about daily for more than a decade now.)

I don’t know.

How convenient is all of this?

Are you being lied to?

What is being adjusted and redefined?

What's being concealed or denied?

And who benefits?