GEOPOLITICAL LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

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“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”  Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

 


Russian President Vladimir Putin used a series of statements to justify the invasion of Ukraine. He claimed he was protecting Russian-speakers from an alleged "genocide" and that the goal was to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine. These statements mask a clear ambition for territorial expansion to challenge the post-Cold War order. Putin invoked a sense of historical resentment and national humiliation over the "greatest geopolitical tragedy" of the 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent expansion of NATO into the former Soviet bloc.

 

Ahead of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many Western nations were similarly hesitant to directly confront Russia, largely due to economic dependence on Russian energy and a general reluctance to engage in a major conflict. This perceived lack of resolve, particularly after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, may have led Putin to believe that a full-scale invasion would not be met with a strong and united military response. The European Union has committed the same mistakes as in the pre-World War II period.

 

Putin failed; he miscalculated his strategy by anticipating a quick conflict. Russia's goal was to quickly conquer the capital, Kiev, and overthrow the government, assuming that a quick victory would prevent a protracted conflict and a strong international backlash.

 

Putin is not the only player on the international stage seeking, with China's help, to blow up the great central empire that is the European Union. Washington broke the promise made to Moscow in the final months of the Cold War: if the Soviets had accepted German unification, there would have been no NATO presence east of the German border.

 

By this logic, even NATO's first enlargement in 1999, which brought Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into the Alliance, should be considered the cause of the subsequent devastation unleashed by Russia against Ukraine.

 

Putin wants to recreate the Lenin-Stalin Soviet empire that imploded in 1991. The European Union's military disarmament was one of the triggers that led to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Putin also took advantage of the nation-building the US has exported to Arab countries without much prospect of success.

 

Putin has used his military power to occupy territories—first in Georgia in 2008, then in Ukraine in 2014, in Syria in 2015, and finally in Ukraine for the second time in 2022—paving the way for the ongoing tragedy in Eastern Europe.

 

The European Union has finally emerged from its ideological rut and has initiated a military rearmament program to send the unequivocal message that Russia cannot structure its own sphere of domination in Eastern Europe at will and that the European Union does not accept Moscow's role as an imperial power.

 

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the US and EU's policy of "escalation management" has been shortsighted, while Russia has pursued a revisionist policy aimed at calling into question the end of the Cold War.

 

A "deal on Ukraine" that effectively confirms Russia's territorial gains and allows it to assert the right to shape Ukraine's systemic transformation in the future—and perhaps even to fully absorb the country in the future—would represent 1991 in reverse, allowing Russia to exploit the new distribution of power and its alliance with China to its advantage.

 

Ukraine could become Russia's "Vietnam" because two factors support this argument: Ukrainian resistance and US and EU military aid, which effectively levels the playing field and prolongs the conflict. Russia's economic resources are finite.

 

Russia's Nietzschean will to power must be counterbalanced by the decadent, liberal, nihilistic West. This philosophical perspective holds that Russia's actions are not simply about territorial acquisition or security concerns, but rather a primordial and irrational desire for self-assertion.

 

Russia seeks to forge a new geopolitical path and refuses to be assimilated by a Western system it considers spiritually bankrupt. The Kremlin's rhetoric, particularly in questioning Ukraine's legitimacy as a separate state and promoting the idea of a "Greater Russia" or "Novorossiya," can be seen as an attempt to establish a new morality of creative, active, and aggressive will to power.

 

The conflict is framed as a monumental struggle between competing "wills": Russia's desire to assert its power and unique identity versus the West's desire to maintain its global moral and political order.

 

QUARTAVEL ©

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