President Vladimir Putin’s military surrounds Ukraine and threats of another invasion have rattled the West.
Putin claims that Ukraine and NATO represent existential threats to Russia and the mobilization is necessary. This has resulted in a flurry of high-level summits between Putin, President Joe Biden and NATO. But Ukraine and NATO have been around for years, so why are they now suddenly existential threats?
They aren’t and Putin knows that. His existential crisis is internal and for a little more than a year he has been executing brutal crackdowns against Russian pro-democracy activists. All this sabre-rattling distracts attention from his predations, destabilizes his favourite whipping boy, Ukraine and unsettles the European Union.
Of course, political repression in Russia is nothing new but became global headlines in August 2020 when democracy activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned in Siberia. Moscow denied involvement. Immediately afterwards, Putin began imposing laws to prohibit protests and shut down groups and media outlets. Digital censorship increased.
Matters worsened for the Kremlin when, on Jan. 17, 2021, Navalny returned to Moscow and was arrested immediately, an event that was streamed live.
From a jail cell, he boldly called upon Russians to stage a mass protest against the regime because “they are afraid of you.”
Two days later, on Jan. 19, his team released a bombshell, two-hour documentary narrated by Navalny called “Putin’s Palace.” It takes viewers on a drone tour of Putin’s estate on the Black Sea, which Navalny claimed is 39 times bigger than Monaco. To date, it has been viewed 119 million times and became the most popular video on Russian YouTube in 2021. The video helped fuel unprecedented nationwide protests calling for Navalny’s release. On Jan. 23, hundreds of thousands turned out but were met by a brutal police force. Some 10,000 were arrested. Then on Feb. 3, a Russian court sentenced Navalny to 3 1/2 years in a penal colony.
Russia moved to outlaw Navalny’s political and activist networks — both peaceful movements — as “extremist” organizations. Their activities within the country were banned and members and financial donors faced possible prison time. Since then, virtually all of Navalny’s top-level aides and associates have fled abroad. (In the past 20 years during Putin’s reign, an estimated five million Russians have left the country, a figure the government disputes.)
Despite one invasion and plenty of tumults next door, Ukraine has remained a defiant, increasingly successful outlier even after 7.5 per cent of its land was seized and occupied by Russia in 2014. It has built the second-largest armed forces in Europe to defend itself from further incursions and continued to Europeanize. Most embarrassing, in January 2020, Ukraine’s minimum wages exceeded those in Russia and Belarus for the first time.
In April, Russia began amassing troops and tanks along Ukraine’s border for an exercise, but this caught the attention of world leaders and led to speculation that another invasion was imminent. A summit was held in June between Putin and Biden. Nothing much changed.
In July, Putin made a speech declaring that Ukraine, Belarus and the three Baltic states were part of “greater Russia,” and then a series of attacks began against foes. In August, Russia dramatically cut back natural gas exports to Europe, causing prices to rise stratospherically and a scramble for alternative supplies.
In September, thousands of migrants were funnelled through Russian puppet Belarus to help them illegally enter Poland. In recent days, cyberattacks have stricken Ukraine and there are unconfirmed reports that Russia is allegedly shipping more armaments to the border.
But these aggressions have backfired. The West is more united than ever behind Ukraine and NATO. The United States and others are sending military equipment and advisers to Ukraine, and did not budge or offer concessions in their recent talks with Putin. They have drafted crippling sanctions if Russia enters Ukrainian territory again. And Ukraine is resolute. “We are not panicking,” said Kira Rudik, leader of Ukraine’s reform party The Voice. “We are used to this situation.”
Dragging out talks has lowered the temperature, although this week, ironically, markets began to punish both Russians and Ukrainians as though war or draconian sanctions were imminent. To some, invasion talk was just a bluff to try to win concessions — a position based on the fact that the same number of troops are posted along Ukraine’s border as have been there for eight years. If so, the bluff was called so far.
Putin’s actual existential problem is that Russia grows restive and Ukraine is a shining example of a communist dictatorship that has free elections, increasing living standards, and is slowly getting out from under Soviet-style corruption. May that continue and may the West remain united.
Reproduced in cooperation with the author from Financial Post. https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/diane-francis-putin-is-threatened-by-ukraines-success
Also Diane Francis Newsletter on America and the World at https://dianefrancis.substack.com/about
