Ukraine — "The Crisis!"

Part I: When Elephants Fight, It is the Grass that Suffers

The map of Ukraine is a guinea pig in profile.

Italy is a boot, Croatia is a boomerang, Michigan is a mitten; Ukraine is a chubby, fat-cheeked rodent. (But an enormous rodent: It is by territory the largest country in Europe, other than Russia itself.)

Ukraine-Piglet’s ears tickle Belarus, and just behind them, on the Ukraine-Belarus border, is the sad town of Chernobyl, still radioactive 35 years after the nuclear power plant disaster; picture a scalp patch of itchy ringworm. The ancient Ukrainian capitol of Kyiv is not far south, about where you’d imagine the eyes.

Our guinea pig gazes upon Poland; sniffs at Hungary and Slovakia; hugs Romania and Moldava to its chest. She stands proudly over the Black Sea, which on the map is a mirror-image, guinea-pig-sized expanse of blue, stretching south beneath her paws.

Crimea? That’s the pudgy hind paw. (Or it was, until Russia chopped it off). It extends into the Black Sea. The heel of the paw includes the seaside resort of Yalta, where giants like Stalin, Churchill and FDR met to design a post-war planet. The toes include Sevastopol, home base to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

And Russia? Well, every guinea pig has an owner. Picture Russia holding our guinea pig and petting it lovingly, from shoulders to buttocks. Or if you’d rather, picture Ukraine-Piglet as having turned its back to Moscow.

Don’t overthink it. It’s geography, we’re just getting oriented.

‘Prepare for Impact!’

Ukraine keeps squeaking for America’s attention. This time two years ago, the country provided the U.S. Congress with an exotic, Eastern European backdrop for the theatrical performance of Donald Trump’s “first impeachment trial” (as we now must call it, since a second followed months later over the January 6 Capitol rioting). The Ukraine impeachment, briefly summarized —

— what’s that? You need my politics first?

Sure: Healthy contempt for all of them.

Otherwise, unlike many voices coming at you, I have no financial disclosures, no party agenda, and a real full-time job as an ER doctor (which means that if my views aren’t commercially fashionable, I can cheerfully be ignored).

For 10 years, during the Boris Yeltsin / early Vladimir Putin eras, I lived and worked in Russia. I had wandered in from middle-class America to check out the collapsing Soviet Union, and ended up staying. Among other things I edited The Moscow Times (back when it was an influential Kremlin watchdog), covered the war in Chechnya for the Los Angeles Times, and married a beautiful local girl, who to this day can’t figure out if she’s Ukrainian, Russian or American (she spent her childhood in rural Ukraine, grew up in Russia, later moved with me to the United States). Life has granted us family in Ukraine, Russia and America, which keenly informs my interest.

Back to “Ukraine — The Crisis!” At the moment, it feels like an artificial and strident U.S. government freakout.

But the backstory can be easily summarized:

• Ukrainians can’t agree on what Ukraine is. Should it, to borrow an Americanism, “celebrate its diversity”? Or should one of its main ethnic groups dominate to define the national character? Should it cultivate a relationship with Europe, Russia, both, or neither?

• Russia needs safety; and at some level, feels it has a historical right to the eastern, more Russified part of Ukraine.

• NATO needs marketshare; it is a blob of corporate bureaucratic irresponsibility, mindlessly trying to expand its territory. Its member nations are sucked along behind it.

• Moscow and Washington have thus meddled in Ukraine’s affairs for nearly 20 years, a time of violent protests, at least one coup, and an outright “Ukrainians vs. Russians” civil war that has, over eight years, killed more than 13,000 people.

Kenya’s ambassador summed it up poignantly with an old African saying. At an emergency UN Security Council meeting last week to discuss the Ukraine crisis, he recalled how Africa, once upon a time, was also laid waste by U.S.-Soviet proxy wars. And he pleaded with America and Russia to spare poor Ukraine, saying: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

We’ll delve more into the backstory next time, because for now we’ve got President Joe Biden warning that Kyiv could be “sacked” at any moment. “Prepare for impact!”, he apparently bellowed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in what must have been one hell of a diplomatic phone call.

Citing satellite images of 100,000 Russian troops mobilized near the Ukraine border, the U.S. government has begun evacuating embassy staff and families, advising Americans to flee Ukraine, and making our own demonstrative small troop movements — 8,500 here, 3,000 there — not into Ukraine, but into neighboring NATO countries like Poland. This is purely symbolic stuff: Militarily pointless, but generating headlines.

What do the Ukrainians say? After all, it’s their country. Ukraine’s president disagreed with Biden in that phone call, which by report “did not go well,” and has since publicly asked America to stop whipping up “panic.”

“I’m the president of Ukraine and I’m based here and I think I know the details better here,” he said crossly. Yes, Zelensky says, there are more than 100,000 Russian troops just over the Ukraine border, as well as the still-smoldering Russian-stoked civil war inside Ukraine. But Putin amassed the same amount of troops on the border last spring ahead of diplomatic negotiations, then drew them down; then brought them back in the fall. So the troops have been there off and on for many months, and things have generally been off-and-on tense for years.

“If you only look at the satellites,” Zelensky said, “you will see the increase of troops. You can’t assess whether this is a threat, an attack or a simple rotation.”

Here’s a U.S. government-approved map of Russian troop locations as of January 24. Red dots mark new unit deployments, brown dots permanent military units:

As we study this map, let’s immediately stipulate that Ukraine is indeed shaped like a guinea pig. (I mean, if you wanted to counter that it’s more like a capybara I’d easily agree, but that’s so obscure.)

Consider two more maps. The yellow / blue one on the left shows voting in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections: The yellow northwest majority-voted for Yulia Tymoshenko (who wanted Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO), the blue southeast for the ultimate winner, Viktor Yanukovych (more favorable to Russia). The yellow-orange / red map on the right shows languages spoken at home: Yellow / orange is Ukrainian or a Ukrainian-Russian creole; red is Russian. Again we see the same northwest / southeast divide.

Russians, from the man on the street to the man in the Kremlin, surely look at maps like this and think: “Oh c’mon. We’ll take the bottom half.” And in fact Russia long ago moved in that direction, having seized Crimea outright and sponsored eastern separatists eight years ago.

One could easily imagine a further Russian march all down the coast, to cut off Ukraine from the Sea of Azov and link “the Russian mainland” with Crimea:

And Yet: Could ‘The Crisis’ Be Easily Solved?

Putin and his government have stated they do not intend an invasion.

And annoyingly, the White House last week abruptly clarified they misspoke when they called an invasion “imminent” — as press secretary Jenn Psaki newly parsed it, “imminent” was the wrong word and “we stopped using it because I think it sent a message that we weren't intending to send, which was that we knew President Putin” would invade Ukraine. “We still don’t know that he’s made a decision.” (This pattern — shrill cries of “prepare for impact!” followed immediately by “or maybe not!” disclaimers — continued all weekend.

The Russians also say — as they have for years — that they can’t have NATO set up shop in Ukraine; that they have asked Washington in writing for guarantees regarding this; and they look forward to talking more. So, these troop movements — which are indeed meant to be threatening — are in the context of Russia seeking a strong diplomatic negotiating position. If they can’t negotiate to keep Ukraine out of NATO, they might just take it by force.

So the Russians are asking for an end to the mindless, and U.S. defense-contractor-driven, metastasis of NATO. What if we took them at their word?

Declaring that Ukraine cannot join NATO would in theory defuse the entire crisis. It would not be a radical move. In fact it’s what President Barak Obama always said. We would be reaffirming the Obama foreign policy. Doing so would be an excellent idea for every nation involved — Russia, Ukraine, and America. It could also be the start of reassessing NATO entirely. That would be win-win-win for you, me, and all of my family members everywhere.

But it would be lose-lose-lose for Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. And the White House, like the rest of Washington, remains in the grip of Russiagate madness, paranoia and groupthink. So if you suggest such a course of action — suggest re-affirming Barak Obama’s foreign policy — you can expect to see your patriotism and good-faith maligned by the White House:

“If you are digesting Russian misinformation and parroting Russian talking points, you are not aligned with longstanding bipartisan American values,” according to press secretary Psaki.

So there.

It’s much the same reflexive “shut up, filthy commie!” attitude over at the State Department. Witness the back and forth about another startling U.S. government allegation, this time that “Russia” might be preparing to make a fake video. As The New York Times reported (emphasis added):

“The video was intended to be elaborate … with plans for graphic images of the staged, corpse-strewn aftermath of an explosion and footage of destroyed locations … While it is not clear that senior Russian officials approved the operation, it was far along in the planning and the United States had high confidence that it was under serious consideration, officials said. Russian officials had found corpses to use in the video, discussed actors to play mourners and plotted how to make military equipment appear Ukrainian or NATO-supplied.”

Skeptical journalists are few and far between these days, but some were annoyed by all of the caveats: A video is planned, considered, intended — but not actually being made? And not actually approved by anyone in power? Actors have been “discussed” — but not hired? Corpses have been “found” — meaning what exactly?

This led to a testy exchange between a reporter at the Associated Press — my journalism alma mater, go AP! — and a State Department spokesman. The AP asked for evidence; State countered with indignation, and eventually closed the discussion thus:

STATE: If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments, and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that’s for you to do.

AP REPORTER: Solace? I don’t want (unintelligible) … What is that supposed to mean?

History Repeats Itself as Farce … So Far

If you’re a bit older, your unease about suddenly preparing for war abroad — “because Putin!” — might involve a memory of how, 18 or 19 years ago, we were sold another war abroad — “because Saddam!”.

One year after the World Trade Center and Pentagon terror attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush went before the United Nations to warn, in his trademark word-salad syntax, that “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger … The first time we may be completely certain he has a — nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one.” Or as his national security adviser Condoleeza Rice more memorably put it, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

At that point we were knee-deep into Afghanistan. The Taliban had admitted it was hosting Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda associates, and had refused to hand them over or bring them to any sort of justice. So we invaded. Fair enough. (By the way our invasion of Afghanistan was applauded and assisted by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin; in fact, a year earlier Putin, the first world leader to call President Bush with personal condolences about 9/11, had asked about Russia joining NATO!)

For the Bush Administration, war in Afghanistan was not enough. Now we had to have another war, unrelated and more than 1,000 miles from the first — in Iraq. Never mind that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al Qaeda. He’s a foreigner, he could do anything! His nuclear attack on America is imminent! Well, perhaps “imminent” is a bit strong, as we don’t really know if he’s planning anything at all or if he even has a nuclear weapon — but prepare for impact! That was the public story. In private, as President Bush said in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Bush team doubted they’d find any nuclear or chemical weapons, and in fact were pondering false flag operations. For example, Bush told Blair, they could paint U.S. planes in UN colors, buzz Iraq, and try to trick Saddam into shooting them down and starting the war himself. (One wonders if they also “discussed actors” to play mourners, or “found corpses” to sprinkle amid the wreckage.)

Thus the Bush administration fast-talked us into its war of choice, one that left somewhere around 1 million innocent people dead, to say nothing of, for example, creating more than 4 million orphans, tens of millions of refugees, ISIS, etc.

That was a grand historical tragedy. America was railroaded into an entirely avoidable and senseless conflict, driven by secret agendas and obsessions of political bureaucrats within the Bush Administration.

This time around, our sudden indignant interest in Ukraine’s “Vladimir Putin problem” smacks of that similar abrupt obsession almost 20 years ago with Iraq’s “Saddam Hussein problem.” With one important difference: Today the U.S. president is not leading the dogs to war, but is startled to find himself dragged along behind them.

So What Happens Next?

Pity poor Joe Biden. He likely has PTSD from the wild national ass-whipping he received over getting us out of Afghanistan. It was the best thing he ever did. We repaid him for it with a childish and petulant temper tantrum.

Barak Obama and Donald Trump had both solemnly promised to end our longest war, and then just shrugged and went off to play golf. Both men failed us — horribly — and should be reminded about it — often. (Only George W. Bush failed us worse).

Joe Biden, for all of his flaws, ended the Afghan war in like an afternoon. Our spasm of outrage at the chaotic mess of its final October days was eye-rollingly insincere. Evidence of said insincerity: In the three months since we left, the Taliban are methodically settling scores, the Afghan currency is in free-fall, and the UN says 98 percent of Afghans are hungry — 98 percent! — but it ain’t headlines. The pious thing Americans say about this is: “Of course I wanted the war to end, but the way the actual ending was handled was too incompetent for my taste.” In actual fact the chaos, as Biden himself correctly noted, was inevitable — because the mission to stand Afghanistan on its feet had failed a decade ago, back when Biden was Vice President. If the patient can’t stand without assistance, the patient is going to fall down when the assistant walks away.

Last month, still punchdrunk from his Afghanistan beatdown, Biden made a “meh” comment about the Russian troop movements at Ukraine’s border. He got pilloried, with political enemies shrieking that he had offered “a green light to Russia” to invade.

The White House immediately panicked and over-corrected, and now the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Now a Russian invasion was “imminent” (but not imminent per se), but “prepare for impact!” Troops were decoratively rearranged. The Ukrainian President may be irked and feel he has no control over events, but already our national security mandarins are pouring weapons from U.S. overstock inventories into his country. (Yes, let’s dump a bunch of shoulder-launched missiles into Ukraine — a notoriously corrupt nation known as a center of excellence for black market arms deals. (What could possibly go wrong.)

So far, America’s approach feels bumbling, improvised and erratic — driven by murky national security interests, and with a president struggling to keep up. Russia’s approach, in turn, feels more calculated and coherent. One suspects the Kremlin believes it has a winning position in a carefully played chess game, and their only concern now is that their opponent keep playing chess, instead of freaking out and sweeping the whole chess board to the floor. (Then again, Washington is not the only cesspit of political intrigue; Moscow has its own national security lunatics to keep on the leash. What if Putin had to read The New York Times to learn of a planned video hoax by someone in his military intelligence services? What if he was furious about it — or frightened by it? What if Putin becomes like Biden, and finds himself stumbling along behind events, instead of cooly directing them?)

Scott Ritter, who made his name as a UN weapons inspector, was once described by The New York Times as “the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.” His foreign policy analysis is usually trenchant, and his read on the Ukraine crisis may well be correct:

“In the weeks and months ahead, Russia will be the one dictating the outcome of this crisis — which will be a resounding Russian victory. … The primary purpose of Russia’s military buildup is to expose the political, military and economic impotence of the U.S./NATO partnership by a range of crises — independent of any military incursion into Ukraine — for which the U.S. and NATO have no viable response other than to give in to most, if not all, of Russia’s demands for security guarantees.”

That would likely be a best-case scenario for all three nations involved. To repeat: Yes, it would be good for America to see Russia win this round of diplomatic chess and to see NATO checked. Biden could in fact take the initiative — pretend that NATO works for us, and not the other way around — and shut the crisis down tomorrow by reaffirming Obama’s foreign policy, that we will not go to war over Ukraine. Corporate media would throw another tantrum, but it would be politically popular and the right thing to do.

Instead, we are bumbling along, hoping that freelancing national security mandarins — from the banks of the River Potomac to the berega Reka Moskvy — don’t bluster and blunder us into a shooting war.

Or worse. A nuclear weapons exchange is always highly possible, particularly as long as America and Russia insist on keeping hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at each other and on hair-trigger alert.

But more on that next time.

Coming soon:
“Ukraine — the Crisis!”
Part II: Donald Trump, NATO’s Top Critic — and Best Salesman