When the USSR collapsed in 1990, the imperialist powers in NATO swooped in like vultures. In particular, it was the still hegemonic US whose imperialism swooped in. They installed the drunkard Yeltsin as a stooge of US imperialism, and introduced red in tooth and claw Friedmanite Monetarist theories on the shattered soviet economy, destroying what was left of it. On the one hand, millions of Russians were left in a state of destitution, many literally reduced to having to scavenge from refuse to even find food to eat, whilst a tiny number of former soviet bureaucrats, able to associate with the US officials sent in to pick over the bones, were able to buy up soviet assets at knock down prices, often granted loans to do so, and who became the fabulously wealthy oligarchs, whose money feeds into the property and capital markets across the globe.
In effect, Russia was subjected to the same kind of dismemberment, and exploitation that Germany had been subject to after WWI, under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Trotsky, writing about the consequences of the Versailles Treaty, in creating the conditions for the rise of Hitler and Nazism, wrote,
"Fascism is a form of despair in the petit-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, Social Democracy and the Comintern was the prerequisite for fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism."
And,
"The democracies of the Versailles Entente helped the victory of Hitler by their vile oppression of defeated Germany. Now the lackeys of democratic imperialism of the Second and Third Internationals are helping with all their might the further strengthening of Hitler’s regime. Really, what would a military bloc of imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? A new edition of the Versailles chains, even more heavy, bloody and intolerable. Naturally, not a single German worker wants this. To throw off Hitler by revolution is one thing; to strangle Germany by an imperialist war is quite another. The howling of the “pacifist” jackals of democratic imperialism is therefore the best accompaniment to Hitler’s speeches. “You see,” he says to the German people, “even socialists and Communists of all enemy countries support their army and their diplomacy; if you will not rally around me, your leader, you are threatened with doom!” Stalin, the lackey of democratic imperialism, and all the lackeys of Stalin – Jouhaux, Toledano, and Company – are the best aides in deceiving, lulling, and intimidating the German workers."
(ibid p 21)
So, it is no wonder that the same kind of treatment of Russia, by NATO, and, in particular, US imperialism, produced a similar result, this time with the replacement of Yeltsin by Putin. History favoured Putin, because, he became President, in 1999, just at the time that a new long wave uptrend had begun. Having lingered at around $25 a barrel for much of the period from the 1980's, the price of oil, like the price of all other primary products began to rise sharply after 1999, as the increase in global trade and global GDP meant that demand exceeded supply. The price of oil rose to $80 in 2006, even before the effects of Hurricane Katrina, sent it surging to over $140 in 2008. Meanwhile, the policies of conservative social-democracy, pursued by Clinton, and Blair, followed by Bush and Brown, that had sought to develop national wealth on the delusional basis of ever rising prices of assets, came tumbling down with the global financial crash of 2008. That crash, which badly damaged the confidence of the conservative social democrats, also saw the further rise of China, whose autocratic regime seemed better able to weather that storm.
For thirty years, the US had dominated Russia, including reneging on its earlier commitments, not to expand militarily beyond Germany, as had been agreed with Gorbachev, in return for the reunification of East and West Germany. Now, the bear was fed up of being poked, and began to snarl. But, Putin is not stupid, and knows the limitations of Russia. He is the President of a country whose economy still bears the scars of the ravages of that earlier devastation under Yeltsin, which only in part simply reflected the bankrupt nature of the soviet economy that preceded it. Putin is the President of a country whose economy remains highly dependent upon earnings from the sale of oil and gas, a factor, which, indeed, hastened the fall of the USSR as oil and gas prices fell during the 1980's. The recent growing alliance between Russia, and China, which is itself the largest consumer of many of these primary products (indeed the largest consumer of everything) does not fundamentally change that in the near-term.
Russia had lost to the rag-tag, mediaevalist forces of Bin Laden and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, in the 1990's, though the huge amounts of finance and military hardware provided by the US to Bin Laden, including, most significantly Stinger Missiles, played a huge part in that process, and threw Afghanistan itself back into the Dark Ages. The Russians had been able to avoid land mines and other traps by moving troops using helicopters and planes, but once the US provided Stinger Missiles that option became even more dangerous than land based transport. Similarly, Russia even had difficulty in suppressing the terrorists in Chechnya. Similarly, as an indication of the likely reluctance of Russia to actually launch any invasion of Ukraine, is the experience of what happened in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008.
Both places had Russian majorities, but were within Georgia. Both historically had autonomy, and it was that which was challenged by the Georgian government of Mikhail Saakashvili, who seemed particularly deluded that if he surrounded himself with sufficient EU and NATO flags, his military adventures would be backed by NATO and other western powers. He is now involved in Ukrainian politics. Having launched genocidal attacks on South Ossetia, in particular, as I wrote at the time, the response of “democratic imperialism” to these attacks, and to the demands for self-determination by the Abkhazians and South Ossetians, was in stark contrast to their response to the demand for self-determination by the Albanian Kosovans, itself stirred up by the gangsters of the KLA, who had themselves been armed and financed, by the US, via the intermediary of Bin Laden, and the response to it from Serbia. The same was true of the response of the social-imperialists too.
At that time too, it was claimed that Russia was going to use Georgian ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia and South Ossetia as the pretext to roll over the whole of Georgia. The speed of the Russian advance indicated it clearly could have done so, and NATO was not going to intervene. But, Russia did not continue to sweep into Georgia, having cleared the Georgian invaders from the territories, and so protected the citizens within them, it drew back.
A look at the reports on that conflict by the BBC's Tim Whewell, are in stark contrast to the rewriting of it in the reportage being put forward by the media today. The reality is that there is little incentive for Russia to occupy these other countries, because it has enough to do trying to rebuild its own shattered economy, without taking on responsibility for the shattered economies of these neighbouring states. Moreover, for Putin, he has enough to do trying to deal with the growing number of political opponents in Russia, not to mention the political opponents of his allies such as Lukashenko in Belarus. The quickest way for authoritarian leaders to get overthrown is to extend their reach beyond their grasp, and that is no doubt something that NATO imperialism is trying to provoke Putin into doing in relation to Ukraine today.
NATO seems to be trying to provoke Russia into attacking Ukraine in a high stakes game of chicken, a game which Ukrainians must have no appetite for themselves. NATO, for which really read the US, and its running dog Britain, has hyped things to a ridiculous level. They have withdrawn diplomats, and issued instructions for their citizens to leave Ukraine, on the basis of an imminent invasion, despite the fact that, much like the Endtimers and other catastrophists, they have been predicting this apocalypse now for months without it happening. The game seems clear, by this provocation, they want to force Russia to pull back its troops further inside Russia, at which point they would claim victory. But, with NATO having mobilised tens of thousands of troops and military equipment, having sent them half way across the world to sit on Russia's borders, what will they do if Russia does not pull back, and yet still does not respond to their provocations to invade Ukraine? They will no doubt, then try to spin the absence of any invasion as being the consequence of their threats to impose further sanctions and so on.
Ukraine has more than 300,000 soldiers, plus it has other forces organised in groups of right-wing and fascist paramilitaries. It is usually considered that, for any successful military offensive, a ratio of 4:1 of the attacking forces is required, which would require Russia to have at least 1.2 million troops available to attack Ukraine. According even to US imperialism, Russia has only 130,000 troops, currently stationed on its side of the border, or about a tenth of what would actually be required were Russia to be actively considering invading Ukraine, in the face of inevitable resistance. What is more, Ukraine has been provided with large amounts of the latest weaponry, by NATO imperialism. An attack by Russia, under these conditions would appear to be suicidal, and lacking any kind of identifiable gain from the inevitable losses. Indeed, the Ukrainian President seems to think that is the case too, not seeing any immediate risk of attack, and instead criticising NATO, and the US for its increasingly hysterical statements, and calls for all foreign nationals to leave Ukraine.
The US claims to be being open in its information, as a means of preventing Russia from launching an invasion on the grounds of a false flag operation. The US, of course, is the past master in staging false flag operations. If, Russia needed such a pretext it could simply point to the existing and ongoing attacks on Russian inhabitants of Eastern Ukraine by fascist paramilitaries. As far as the US photographs showing an imminent invasion force being assembled, they appear more like impressionist paintings, consisting of fuzzy images of who knows what. They are rather like the photographs of trucks provided in 2003 that were supposed to prove that Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons ready to be launched within 20 minutes, and which were complemented by cartoons to fill in what the photographs did not show. Even the late Colin Powell has admitted to being embarrassed for having fronted up that charade at the UN, which was used to justify that particular war launched by NATO imperialism.
The term Potemkin Village actually originates from Russia, and the visit of Catherine The Great to Crimea. Even were we to accept the US fuzzy photos, as genuinely showing something, Putin would play a clever game were he to have erected such Potemkin villages along the border, causing US imperialism to scurry to spend large amounts of money, and to expose itself further, in its claims of an imminent Russian invasion, claims that seriously undermine the credibility of NATO, as every day passes, without any such invasion materialising. One pundit claimed that Russia could not keep all of these troops mobilised on the border for ever without having to use them. But, why? They would not disappear if they were not in that specific location. They would otherwise be somewhere else in Russia. Unlike the thousands of US and other NATO troops that have been sent half way around the world to sit on Russia's borders, the Russian troops are sitting inside their own country! Its not them who cannot remain mobilised forever without needing to be used or withdrawn, or rotated.
For all intents and purposes, NATO is US imperialism. The idea put forward recently by Paul Mason that somehow NATO could be reformed into some kind of vehicle for working-class advance, and as a force for sweetness and light in the world, is ludicrous in the extreme. Exactly how are workers in puny little Britain, even if they were to be able to gain control of the British state going to reform NATO, which is under the control of the US? NATO is used to further the interests of US imperialism across the globe, and when the interests of US imperialism conflict with those of its European members, the US simply ignores them and acts on its own, with the UK lapdog yapping along at its heels. When the European members of NATO failed to be convinced by all of the supposed overwhelming evidence of Saddam's possession of WMD, the US and its UK puppet ignored them, and the US media ran stories talking about French cheese eating surrender monkeys, renamed French Fries to Freedom Fries, and other such childish nonsense. But, of course, the European states were proved right, and what resulted in Iraq, as has been the case with all of the other US so called “liberation from above”, turned out to be anything other than freedom for those at the receiving end.
And, here too, Putin has an obvious advantage in not invading Ukraine, but simply watching on as the US continues to pump out this hyperbola that everyday is seen to be ludicrous. The more the US does this, and tries to bind EU states to it, the more the US drives a deeper wedge between itself and the European members of NATO, who increasingly are being drawn to recognise the differing interests of the EU to those of the US, and need to create their own European Army as an alternative to the US controlled NATO. Time and again the US has asserted its interests as against those of Europe, as, for example, in its interventions in the Balkans, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, which have destabilised the borders of the EU, and its relations with its near neighbours. All of that directly undermines the EU economy, the largest single market in the world, and the main competitor to US imperialism. The repeated attempts to force Germany to scrap the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, vital to ensuring Europe's short-term energy security is an obvious example.
So, again, Putin has a clear motive to simply keep his troops sitting inside Russia's borders, to leave the Potemkin villages in plain sight for the US to photograph to their hearts content, and to allow the US to continue whipping up its level of hysteria to ever higher levels of absurdity. The longer that goes on, the greater the divisions between Europe and the US become, a process that would end as soon as Russian tanks rolled across the Ukraine border. The incompetent Biden has always been a cold war warrior from the day he entered Congress, and he has not changed his spots in his dotage. In the same way that his conservative social-democratic policies have opened the door once more to the Trump Party at home, so now his actions on the world stage are giving credence and support to Trump's equivalents in the Chancelleries of the world.
Does that mean that Putin is not going to invade Ukraine? Who knows? I certainly don't. That is the trouble with autocrats like Putin, no one can predict how they might act from one day to another, as they respond to events. By the time this post appears, Russian troops might be sitting sipping tea in Kyiv, though from what has been said above in relation to the lack of Russian forces required for that its unlikely. All that can be said is that, looking at those material realities, of relative military strength, looking at the lack of any real advantage for Putin in invading Ukraine, as against the advantage of not doing so, whether in making NATO look stupid, sowing further division within it, or just avoiding Russian casualties that would incite internal dissent, the chances against it are much greater than the chance of it happening.
So, as socialists, we can only deal with those factors that are in our control. We cannot control what Russia or other powers do. Indeed, as Trotsky pointed out, without actually seizing state power, we cannot even control what the British state does, but we can mobilise the working-class in Britain to demand that the British state withdraws British troops from Russia's borders, and when it refuses, we can apply a policy of revolutionary defeatism, seeking to use industrial action to cut off war supplies, and so on. We can call on workers in other countries, including those in Russia, to do the same thing, to pull back from the brink before the ruling classes of the contending countries send the world into Armageddon.
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