The only accurate part of this article is "I don't know everything". Putin has just made his imperial ambitions clear by comparing himself to Peter the Great and his Ukraine war to the Great Northern War that lasted 21 years. His puppet in the Duma just introduced legislation to cancel the USSR's recognition of Lithuanian independence. He said there are two kinds of states: sovereign and colonies, with Ukraine defined as the latter.
Since I forecast the invasion on February 14 I've written 19 articles on this war informed by expert knowledge of Russian history studied for the last half century. Your article bends facts out of shape to fit a none of the above wishful thinking anti-imperialist narrative that's not offered on our world's geopolitics menu. Welcome back to June 23, 1941 when Churchill said he'd ally with the devil himself to defeat Hitler Harry Truman said it's a shame both sides can't lose, but changed his mind on December 7.
The upshot: history's menu offers you a choice between bad (America's planetary empire and alliance network) and worse: Putin's reversion to 18th and 19th century Tsarist Russian-style geopolitical darwinist genocidal empire building. You are, in this article, by default, what the Bolsheviks called a useful idiot, one of a long line that includes Lincoln Steffens (I have seen the future and it works), the UK socialists GB Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb and fellow traveller and third term FDR VP Henry Wallace.
Russia is a land-based colonial empire built by subjugating peoples on its periphery. The latest, but not final, stage of the ongoing divorce between the empire’s ethnic Russian core and its subject peoples happened with the implosion of the USSR. Russia’s futile neo-colonial war to reconquer its former subject Ukraine is the latest round in this divorce process. It won’t be the last. Putin’s useful idiot populist right and the anti-interventionist “all empires are the same” whataboutist left are equally useless for understanding this process (though certainly not equally malevolent).
Unhappy Whataboutist Customers in the Geopolitics Restaurant
Geopolitics is like a restaurant in which nothing on the menu looks appetizing (https://medium.com/politically-speaking/the-menu-in-the-russia-ukraine-restaurant-bad-vs-worse-a6c4c309a652). The views of the isolationist national populist right and the anti-interventionist left converge on the Ukrainian page of this restaurant’s menu.
Glen Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, and Medium’s own viral Jessica Wildfire are now on the same page as Trump, Tiki-torcherer Tucker, MTG, Marine LePen, and Viktor Orban.
Medium’s own Andrew Tanner says all empires are alike: “Empires are all the same. Their people all believe themselves to be special, but they are wrong.”
This simple map of “wise guidance” by Russia’s land-based colonial empire of its subjugated republics and oblasts refutes this Whataboutist delusion. The commodities that fund the war machine are almost all in non-Russian regions.
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1509986205315780610
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1509986205315780610
Tanner, the military veteran “all empires are the same” whataboutist, sees no difference between:
The British Empire and the Japan of Unit 731’s prisoner experiments,
America’s Philippines and German-occupied Southwest Africa and Poland
The fates of interned Japanese Americans and Europe’s Jews.
Bad vs worse nuance and distinctions between great power rivals are harder work than whataboutism’s easy, lazy one color paintbrush.
You know it’s time for an evidence-based intervention by the chef de cuisine in the Bad vs Worse Geopolitics Diner when you see headlines like:
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi: predictions of an imminent invasion had been proved “baseless and embarrassingly incorrect.”
Medium’s own Jessica Wildfire: Vladimir Putin Has Already Won, but Nobody Wants to Admit It. Russia is too big to fail.
Anyone who says Russia is too big to fail knows nothing of Russia’s long history of state failure in warfare (Crimean War, WWI, the Russian Revolution and civil war, WWII from 6–12/1941, Finland 1939–40, Afghanistan, the Cold War) without a more powerful western ally.
Putin Has Left Us with No Good Solutions At All. He gave us an impossible choice.
Trumpkin Candace Owens: “there is quite literally no Russian threat.”
Carlson: “Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
The MAGA monster of Putin’s a “savvy genius” meets anti-interventionist left in Glen Greenwald’s:
Invasion Intelligence a “Fraud”:
Greenwald retweeted a claim that the definition of the word invasion would be “muddled” in order to retroactively justify U.S. intelligence warnings. “The problem is that the CIA told the US media to tell everyone that they knew exactly what Putin was saying and deciding, and that he had decided on a full invasion of Ukraine,” Greenwald wrote in addition, “so they have to call it an ‘invasion’ otherwise this whole media/government act will seem like a fraud.” (Update, March 16, 2022: Greenwald, contacted via direct message for another story, argues that his “invasion” claim was not in error because the tweet was sent Feb. 23, before Russia actually invaded on Feb. 24.
And in anti-interventionist Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the fellow-traveler reincarnation of FDR’s third term vice president, Henry Wallace:
Surprising Fact: Elena Branson, charged Tuesday by American authorities for allegedly acting as a Russian agent, made donations to only one American politician, according to election filings by the Daily Beast: Gabbard.
Tangent: The Kremlin sent a memo to state-run Russian media calling on outlets to use as much footage of Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson sharing his controversial stances supporting Russia and criticizing the U.S. and NATO as possible, according to Russian government agency documents obtained by Mother Jones and published Sunday. Aside from former President Donald Trump, Carlson and Gabbard have emerged as perhaps the two most prominent Russian sympathizers in the U.S. — Forbes, March 13, 2022
War and the Soviets’ and Russia’s Useful Idiots
Russia’s scorched-earth genocidal war on Ukraine also wages war on the worldviews of both the isolationist right and the anti-interventionist left. WWII did the same to their political ancestors with the Nazi-Soviet pact signed on August 23, 1939, Stalin’s 1939–40 Winter War on Finland, the German invasion of the USSR and Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack. No contortionry could rehab slogans like the Father Coughlin’s and Lindbergh’s “don’t fight the Jews’ war” and the left’s “don’t flight the imperialists’ war” of August 23, 1939-June 22, 1941. Vaporized by the heat of geopolitical reality, they’re like amputees who still feel pain in the leg that’s no longer there.
So who is this writer and why should I listen to him?
Always ask this question of any writer, which obligates me to answer it:
I’ve lived in Latvia since 2005, speak conversational Russian and Latvian.
I invested in a Ukrainian marketing funnel and CRM tech startup called Sanity Desk (https://sanitydesk.com), now relocated to Warsaw. It was founded by a West Point grad and former West Point history professor who served two tours in Iraq mentored by H.R. McMaster.
I’m also in regular contact with a retired British Lt Col colleague at Riga Business School who worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense since 2014. I therefore have much more access to facts on the ground strategic, cultural and historical knowledge than any of the evidence-free bloviators quoted above.
I’m in daily contact with a Ukrainian software entrepreneur who coordinates the territorial defense of 11 villages 9 km west of Kyiv in Bilhorodka. https://www.facebook.com/SamuelPNCook/videos/741383420186013 is the link to the Borderlands podcast and a retired US special ops veteran do every Thursday evening (10:00 pm EET).
Where we live in Jurmala, 22 km from Riga, is old Soviet nomenklatura paradise where Brezhnev and Kosygin had their villas. A large part of the Russian entertainment industry owns real estate in Jurmala, including the beachfront former Soviet sanitarium we live in. I understand how these people think because they’re our neighbors. The villa owned by the son-in-law of ex-Kazakh kleptocrat (president) Nazarbayev is right under our balcony.
I’ve studied Russian history for half a century, since a 1972 summer course at Georgetown with a class full of CIA and defense intelligence agents after my third year of high school. Because I’ve read more books about Russia than most of you will in three lifetimes, you don’t have to.
As you've already admitted "I don't know everything", try listening to experts much closer to the problem who have information accumulated from half a century of understanding how Russian history actually works instead of publishing fantasy.
