SOAP BOX ISSUE #2: Vladimir Putin's War

I’ve made a tremendous mistake. With all the coverage surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I figured I would stay out of the way and focus on how politics are affecting Canadians in Canada. But that was wrong, and I was wrong. Ukrainians are Canadians and Putin’s incursion into their sovereign home is inexcusable and it is wrong to stay silent. I don’t have the time or the resources to start a live blog on updates in Ukraine, so I figured I’d approach it in a different way. I’d rather focus on giving some insight into the real problem here, which may I remind everyone is not the Russian people, but their leader: Vladimir Putin. (If you’re looking for a live update blog though, here’s a great one!)

First, we should start off with who Putin is and what he wants. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg) in 1952 while the Soviet Union was still one of the two global superpowers. Putin’s entire life has been connected to the Soviet state. His grandfather was a cook for Vladimir Lenin and alter Josef Stalin; his father served in the Soviet navy, and later in a demolitions battalion of the NKVD. Putin himself would graduate from Leningrad State University in 1975 with a degree in law which in turn would lead him to a career in the KGB: the Soviet Union’s security, intelligence, and secret police agency. He was mainly stationed in East Germany where he worked alongside the Stasi to steal western technological secrets. During the course of Putin’s life, he witnessed almost the entire Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, the partition of Germany, the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ultimately, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin essentially watched the union he had been taught to revere and had grown to love slowly lose it’s prestige and power as the world shifted further from a bipolar world to a unipolar one; one in which the United States was the de facto hyperpower.

This could not have been easy for him. To go from one of the two unquestionable superpowers in the world to just another world power while your archrival seizes control of global influence can’t be easy to stomach. Especially for a diehard Soviet like Putin. Especially after seeing some leaders actually try to improve relations with the West. Especially after watching the Chechens fight for independence and win! And I think, ultimately, that’s what got us here. It was this decline in Soviet prestige, power, and unity that caused Putin to act the way he has. He so desperately wants to restore the Soviet Union that he will do whatever it takes to achieve it, including invading sovereign states that have bucked their attachment to Russia. He remembers the “glory days” so fondly: Sputnik, hydrogen bombs, and Yuri Gargarin among others. Peace and prosperity.

Don’t just take my word for it. Take his! In his inaugural speech as Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister to the Russian duma, Putin stated his desire to end the revolutions that had been plaguing Russia and, more recently, spoke of how Ukraine had been entirely created by Bolshevik, communist Russia. This does not reflect the thinking of someone who understands why the revolutions happened or that the allure of being a part of the Soviet Union has long since waned. Ukraine voted for their independence in 1991, led a revolution against Russian-backed leadership in 2004, and then followed that up with the Euromaidan protests in 2013-2014. It is clear that the Ukrainian people value their sovereignty and value closer ties with the West and perhaps even NATO. Putin cannot stand in the way of this. His claims of “demilitarizing and de-Nazifying" Ukraine are incredible smokescreens for his true intentions. Stomping out Chechen resistance was step one. Slowly building up Russia’s global sphere of influence was an ongoing step two. Ukraine is simply step three. If he succeeds here, it could inspire him to push for a full restoration of the Soviet Union.

It is simply insane to think that one man would risk the peace and prosperity of the entire world to try and reinstitute a broken system of governance. But this is not a rational decision. This is emotional. This is vengeance, glory, justice even, in his eyes. This is what needs to be done. And make no mistake: the West is not innocent. The US waged a Cold War against the Soviet Union for 50 years if not longer. Their efforts at diplomacy, I mean real diplomacy; the kind that builds trust instead of demanding it; the kind that brings people into the fold instead of forcing them out of it, were either abject failures or non-existent. You cannot avoid war forever by constantly pushing someone to the brink of it and you cannot build trust without trusting in return. NATO expanded rapidly after the fall of the Soviet Union to include states in eastern Europe which could be reasonably perceived by Putin to be Western aggression. The issue with that is that you can’t fault these states for choosing their side. They didn’t ask to join NATO because it sounded cool; they did so because they feared future aggression from Russia, in fact the exact kind of aggression we are currently witnessing in Ukraine.

Ultimately, Putin must be stopped, and he will be. This is a war he cannot win, no matter how many lives, tanks, and bombs he throws at it. In fact, he may have already lost. The war has not ended as quickly or decisively as he expected, and Ukrainian citizens have not welcomed his troops as liberators as he hoped they would. Instead, they have fought for their homes, for their country, for their future and they have embarrassed Putin and his military in front of the entire world. Putin has caused crippling sanctions to be imposed on his people and closest circle and has even caused global news networks to pull out of his country due to insane media censorship laws. Those laws tell me he’s losing, and he’s scared of his citizens finding out. He’s scared of them seeing him as weak and losing them even more international prestige. The risk though, is that he doesn’t care and he’ll simply heavy hand his way back into the public’s “good graces”. It remains to be seen how this will unfold and what the legacy of this moment in history will be. It’s clear that this moment has been brewing for over 30 years and that regardless of what he might say to his people, this is what he wants. He wants to takeover Ukraine. If he cannot succeed militarily in occupying the entire country, he will settle for installing another (or maybe the exact same?) Russian puppet to lead the country closer to Moscow. The Ukrainian people will never let that work again. Slava Ukraini and Godspeed to the brave soldiers fighting for their freedom. We are all with you.

If you want to listen to a fantastic podcast episode that goes inside Putin’s thought processes, you can find it here.

If you wish you help out the Ukrainians fighting for their freedom, you can check out these resources here.