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RUSSIA’S needless invasion of Ukraine has several explanations, one of which can be found in an old poem many of us have read in school. Alfred Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade refers to a genesis of sorts with its insight into Victorian Britain’s pronounced animus towards Russia.
It so happened that in the Crimean War of 1854-56, which forms the backdrop to Tennyson’s poem, British and French forces botched a near successful attempt to wrest the Black Sea port of Sevastopol from Russia. One faintly remembers reading of Queen Victoria’s rage and how she apparently cancelled a 500-pound annual contract with the British news agency that provided bad intelligence in the war. (If the media has been in bed with the state since long ago, who will punish the newspapers and TV channels for spreading falsehoods about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction among other unending equivocations?)
Britain’s obsession with Russia clearly has roots that are older than its pathological revulsion of Vladimir Putin, or at a previous moment, its hives-like allergic reaction to Soviet Russia. The Iron Curtain has come and gone but the habits it spawned are around. The recent hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan by the US-led alliance — including, not for the first time in history, the British troops — was timed with the flare-up on a different buffer nation bordering Russia. The farcical dispatch of a British warship all too briefly to the Black Sea showcased the force of habit.
See it from the perspective of a former KGB agent who was watching, not without dismay, the disintegration of the USSR from his post in East Germany. One can’t unring the bell of history, but Vladimir Putin does seem to have culled useful lessons from its passage. He was watching how Russia’s allies were hunted down when the Soviet empire began to shrink and then crumble.
One can’t unring the bell of history, but Vladimir Putin does seem to have culled useful lessons from its passage.
The first to be lynched was Najibullah, the last communist president of Afghanistan. Najibullah could have escaped with his life and taken the presidential treasure alonglike a recent leader did. Najibullah stayed put hoping to help with an orderly transfer of power. He was tortured and killed, and his body abusedasthe UN failed to protect him in their compound.
Putin watched two other friends of Moscow being taken out by Western-sponsored mobs. Saddam Hussein’s murder by a kangaroo court was dressed up as a latter-day Nuremburg, while Muammar Qadhafi was hunted down like an animal. And this wasn’t how dictators alone were removed, for Mohammad Mossadegh and Salvador Allende were popularly elected men overthrown in US-sponsored coups. Putin stepped in to forestall a similar fate for Basher al-Assad, and his move had a Ukraine angle, another reason for the West to hate him.
Crimea, not far back in history, was transferred from Russia to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian. Post-USSR Russia thus leased the Black Sea port it once owned, keeping a crucial access to the Mediterranean where it had important historical interests in Syria and Libya. It is not a coincidence that Russia joined the Syrian civil war in September 2015 after annexing Crimea together and the port city of Sevastopol in March 2014. That happened after the so-called colour revolution toppled Kiev’s pro-Russian government.
Antony Blinken as then vice president Joe Biden’s adviser on national security pressed for US involvement in the destruction of Libya. He was later disapproving of John Kerry’s near agreement to end the war in Syria if Assad (possibly with Russian help) destroyed the stock of chemical weapons in the country. Blinken, from his perch in the White House, used mealy-mouthedsophistry to row back from Kerry’s offer, saying that the idea was worth studying. This may have been the trigger for Putin to become wary of a Hillary Clinton presidency. That he could actually tilt her election, however, beggars belief.
Whatever the truth, Putin has been in the cross hairs of Biden ever since Clinton charged the Russian leader with sabotaging her election. Putin allegedly hacked Clinton’s emails and shared them with WikiLeaks, resulting in her defeat to Donald Trump by a very narrow margin. It would be understandable for anybody in her condition to go for Putin’s jugular. In the bargain, Biden got her crucial support to trip up Bernie Sanders who she hated, and he feared.
Putin’s bloody gambit in invading Ukraine was anticipated and discussed by two intellectual opposites — Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky. Both have opposed America’s targeting of Russia.
Historian Richard Sakwa, an East Europe expert, said: “Nato’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement.” Chomsky agrees. Rejecting the mindless wooing of Ukraine to join Nato while deploying Nato weapons ever closer to Russia’s borders with former Warsaw Pact countries, Chomsky told truthout.org: “There is a simple way to deal with deployment of weapons: don’t deploy them. There is no justification for doing so. The US may claim that they are defensive, but Russia surely doesn’t see it that way, and with reason.”
He recalled Mikhail Gorbachev proposing a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs. “The US rejected it: Nato stays, Russia’s Warsaw Pact disappears.” Kissinger’s warning came during the 2014 crisis. “Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them,” Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post presciently.
And while the media focus shifts, as it should, to the calamityunfoldingin Ukraine, the same scribes never quite told us in as many words about the body count from the Western-backed mayhem elsewhere, not least about the unending horrors stalking the people of Yemen and Palestine.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2022
