All-in
Last week, I wrote that Russia was "on the offensive and impatient" and would "act very soon." It did, but in a way that far exceeded my expectations. I thought Russia would make a direct military intervention to secure the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics (LDPR) it had newly recognized, and maybe help them to capture the large portion of their claimed territory still controlled by Ukrainian forces-a more offensive and riskier move that, I warned, would make it easier to create a political narrative detrimental to Russia. Unlikely, I thought, that Russia would engage in a military offensive west of Donbass, let alone aimed at Kiev.
Well, as I was writing that, Russia moved in a way that blew through all my-and just about everyone's-oh-so-shrewd calculations of how oh-so-shrewd Russia's strategic thinking would be. Russia mounted a broad, full-scale offensive-destroying military facilities throughout Ukraine, seeking to encircle and capture major cities, and moving on the capital itself. This is nothing less than an attempt to achieve major policy changes in Ukraine by military force.
Russia is insisting that Ukraine recognize Crimea as Russian territory, abide by the Minsk agreement (oops, too late) recognize the LDPR, officially renounce joining NATO and remove any extant NATO infrastructure, adopt a neutral stance, and eliminate the fascist political influence ("de-Nazify").
It is the Battle of Ukraine. This is a demand for a definitive redefinition of the Ukrainian polity that has emerged since 2014. "Regime change," if you wish, in a substantive sense. The Kiev government and its patron, the US, will not agree, and never would have agreed, to any of it, except by force.
Russia knows this. (It took them eight years to finally accept it.) Kiev knows this. The United States knows this. The only people who are being fooled and fooling themselves about it are consumers of Western media.
Russia has also, it is imperative to understand, gone all-in on this battle. Everyone has to get over how surprising that might be and confront how important it is. It means Russia will not agree to give up on its demands, except by overwhelming force.
That is because Russia considers this battle of Ukraine part of a larger war, a war for the future of the world: Will the world continue to be subject to the unipolar military, economic, financial, and ideological hegemony of the United States, or will we re-construct a multi-polar world in which the United States accepts a place within reciprocally respectful economic, political, and security relations?
For Russia, even before this battle of Ukraine, that world of unipolar US hegemony was fatal. It has meant the contemptuous and self-righteous disregard, the military encirclement, and the inexorable drive to weaken and dismember Russia. For fifteen years, Putin has been saying there is a limit to Russia's tolerance of this, and pleading with Western media to realize and report the danger in ignoring that.
Those who posit Russia's action as the result of some national or personal lust for war are jingoist fools. Russia understands, as Andrei Bezrukov, a former Russian spy in America, and now a member of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy says, that "the West succeeded in dragging us into this war"this is their tactical victory."
Russia has finally and reluctantly realized-correctly, I think-that the change can only come by force. It has entered the Battle of Ukraine as the first operation in a campaign to end the world of US unipolar hegemony.
Having entered that battle, Russia must win it. Winning it would eliminate the US/NATO threat from Ukraine itself, weaken NATO and US hegemony in Europe generally (despite any short-term intensification of rhetorical unity), and demonstrate the power of non-compliant countries (China and Iran are watching) to resist US power and reverse its encroachments. Losing it would mean that US imperialism, including its NATO arm, would be greatly strengthened, and would go to work fatally demolishing and dismembering Russia.
Russia just cannot afford to lose this battle. Any retreat from Ukraine without achieving its main objectives would effectively be a final surrender to the United States and its hegemony. Sanctions will not force its retreat.
The U.S. hopes that "sanctions from hell" will damage the capital and personal interests of Russian oligarchs and the Western-oriented elite so much that they will force Putin to back off (or, better, overthrow him). Not impossible, since Russia is an oligarch capitalist polity (crafted as such by the American-led shock-therapy capitalist restoration), but highly unlikely. Putin's strength and popularity were built on disciplining the oligarchy within a patriotic paradigm, and there is widespread support for standing up to the West-it was the Communist Party, Putin's largest opposition, that introduced the motion to recognize the LPR and DPR, and even Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's more Western-friendly predecessor, "brushed off sanctions imposed on Russia over the country's invasion of Ukraine. 'We are being driven out of everywhere, punished and threatened, but we don't feel scared.'"
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