Pulling the plug

Picture: Reuters

I dabble in politics at my peril with this blog. Worse, dabbling in geo-politics. I’m just not intellectually equipped to process any sort of cogent argument, either to present as my own or replay that of others. But I do know, as if anyone else needed convincing, that the situation in Ukraine stinks. There: hardly the most sophisticated statement you'll read on the subject, but it does.

Amid the back-and-forth on the international reaction, with a consensus of world leaders condemning Russia’s menaces towards its independent democratic neighbour saying “this is a disgrace - we should definitely do something” (or “down with this sort of thing”, to quote from Father Ted), the response has so far been somewhat tentative, even if stern words and some actions have been proffered. As is the glacial progress of these things, Russia’s toes in south-east Ukraine have been met by initial sanctions by the US, the UK and the EU, but there is also a sense of things not too far too soon 

There is, though, an ominous sense that Vladimir Putin has only just got started. Ever since he annexed Crimea in 2014, and continued to invest in his military capabilities at a staggering rate, it is increasingly apparent that he has set his mind on reshaping Russia, petulantly repositioning himself on the world stage as a man who should not be ignored, or both. Some observers say that the events playing out now have been in his game plan for years. Of course, at time of writing, the official line is that Russian forces are merely “peace-keeping” in the so-called ‘breakaway republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, but with every public proclamation Putin makes, it is pointing towards the possibility that he has the entirety of Ukraine in his sights.And then what? Or, rather, and then who?

This afternoon Putin secured the permission of the Russian parliament to use force abroad, an ominous procedural development that merely seemed to confirm the inevitable. In a press conference, he once more referred to Ukraine’s potential NATO membership, pontificating on the country’s nuclear ambitions, not that I - or anyone in Ukraine - had any idea that it had any. Ah, the nuclear spectre. Believe it or not, there are actually people within Putin’s sphere of influence who believe that it would win a nuclear confrontation with the West. I’ll return to that shuddering thought later in this post.

It all ladders up to an increasingly isolated and even paranoid president. Which is a worrying flag to his state of mind. His rambling speech on Monday night to a rooted, rictus-grin collection of Kremlin apparatchiks provided sinister. apparent riffing on Ukraine’s cultural heritage. This had some equivalence to the Nazis dehumanising Jews and other minorities at the outset of the Holocaust, denying them an identity, later re-enacted throughout an occupied Europe. Effectively, Putin has now denied an entire nation its identity, effectively branding Ukraine a non-state and, effectively, an extension of Russia itself, rather than a separate, independent democracy which is the eighth most populous in Europe and the continent’s second largest after Russia itself. CIA reports that Putin's thugs have already drawn up a ‘kill list’ of Ukrainians incompatible with Russian state values, like homosexuals and political activists, is a frightening echo, not just of the Soviet past but of fascist Germany’s darkest days.

Whether Putin follows through with a full occupation of Ukraine or not, there was enough in his Kremlin unloading on Monday to suggest more of his inner psyche. Some have hinted at mental instability, of a paranoid loner increasingly isolated by COVID-19 (the ridiculous long table and cavernous meeting room for his security council was no posture - this was social distancing on an irrational scale). There is the suggestion, too, of the “ticking of time”, as the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK mentioned on the BBC’s Newsnight, hinting at Putin facing up to advancing age (he turns 70 in October) and, perhaps, a sense of impotent unfulfilment in the 22 years since he first became president. We know he’s a macho narcissist, with his preposterous bareback, shirt-free horse riding publicity pictures from holidays in the Russian wild, depicting a rugged huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ outdoors type (and, curiously, always pictured alone) rather than the more wholesome custom of world leaders being photographed with wives, children and pets, or pointing at fish in Cornish markets.

This raises the prospect of Ukraine being Putin’s last hurrah. After two decades quietly (or not so quietly) seething about Mother Russia being deprived of its empire, he has possibly been building to this. It’s hard not to meander off into trivialisation by comparing him to a fictional Bond villain: but while 007’s last onscreen adversary, Saffin, who hatches a maniacal plan to kill everyone with nanobots, was a somewhat underdeveloped character in No Time To Die, the parallels with a seemingly insecure figure like Putin can be easily drawn. At the end of the day, most despots resemble cartoons in some way, shape or form. Which makes our acceptance of them as entertainment ever-so-slightly worrying.

So what's the solution? Hawks are pushing for direct confrontation, but that can be interpreted in one of two ways: economic sanctions being one, pushing NATO to its extreme eastern edges being the other. For the first to work, analysts say, they need to be comprehensive and punitive. Here in the UK, that means Boris Johnson finally tackling the Russian money swilling around London. But will he act? Will he address the Russian donors to his own party, who supported his election in 2019, and who are rumoured to have been involved in the Vote Leave campaign before it? Will he clamp down on the City of London being used, quite blatantly, as a money laundering market for Putin's chums? 

I have to declare an interest here: my football club, Chelsea, has enjoyed unprecedented success since 2004 when Roman Abramovich bought it and invested millions of his fortune into the club. And while no one, least of whom me, has ever questioned his motives (and certainly not the outcome), should all of the oligarchs operating in the UK not be punished to send a signal back to the Kremlin? Boris Johnson mistakenly told the House of Commons that Abramovich was “already facing sanctions”, a point later clarified as incorrect. But more forensic examination of other Russian millionaires with business and political interests in London certainly provides a platform which politicians on all sides of the debate want to see cracked down on.

Then there’s the second scenario: NATO building up its forces in the Baltic states, in Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Hungary, all of which could soon sit on a border with the redrawn Greater Russia. Too provocative, say some, especially with Putin flexing his nuclear muscles with “missile exercises” in Belarus at the weekend and further rambling today about Ukraine which, of course, gave up it’s Soviet-era nuclear arsenal 30 years ago as it became independent. In exchange, Russia, the US and the UK guaranteed Ukraine’s security in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. That, like the Minsk Agreement, now appears to have been torn up or, at least, is hovering over the shredder. For now, the consensus that Putin is not prepared for a hot war with the West, either philosophically or strategically. But if a cold war returns, we go back to a state of being that I grew up in fear of - the Cold War becoming hot.

In the film The Hunt For Red October, the former submarine commander Skip Tyler tells Jack Ryan: “When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Well, this thing [the Red October] could park a couple of hundred warheads off Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it till it was all over.” It’s a line that has been brought abruptly back to me, along with the anxiety I had as a teenager. When my brother got married and moved out, I moved into the back bedroom of our house. Its window faced west, and in the distance I could see planes coming in to land at Heathrow. Although, 15 miles away from the airport and the planes still tiny specs, I knew that Heathrow’s proximity put me and my family in the direct path of any conflagration caused by a direct nuclear strike on it. It gave me recurring nightmares. A resurgent, belligerent Russia might just bring those nightmares back.