Putin's wars

Drawing red lines has gotten considerably more difficult in the last 20 years.  It used to be that you could say, if you cross my border, you have launched an invasion of my country, or if you attack me, you have declared war against me. 

But as we have seen in Ukraine in 2014 and this week, those definitions have shifted, or changed, or they don’t really exist at all…or something, anyway.  The great advantage Vladimir Putin has over the rest of the world is that he realizes this and is using it to his advantage.  The other advantage he has is that he is no stranger to waging war, having started at least two of them against republics that had been part of the Russian empire.

In September of 1999, first as Russia’s premier and then as its acting President after Boris Yeltsin’s unexpected resignation, Putin launched a war against the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.  Putin ordered a savage bombing campaign over Chechnya allegedly against separatist militants who had attacked neighboring Dagestan. There had been a series of so-called “terrorist” bombings of apartment buildings in Russia and parts of Chechnya that had killed Russian soldiers and their families.  International and even Russian investigations later alleged that the bombings were in fact “false flag” attacks by elements of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) which had earlier in 1999 been under the leadership of Putin.  Chechens claimed the bombing attacks had been ordered by Putin to win support for the war against Chechnya.

In October, Putin declared the authority of the Chechen president and legislature illegitimate and ordered a ground attack.  Fighting in Chechnya went on throughout the fall, reaching the outskirts of the Chechen capital of Grozny in November.  By December, Russian troops had surrounded the city and lay siege, shelling with artillery and rockets over the next two months, reducing Grozny to rubble before taking the city in February of 2000.  Two years later, the U.N. called Grozny the most destroyed city on earth, the Russians having done more damage than had been done to any city since World War II.

In May, Putin established Russian control of Chechnya and installed a puppet president and pro-Moscow government.  A new Constitution was passed in 2003 granting the Chechen Republic a veneer of autonomy but tying it tightly to Russia.

In 2008, Putin launched a war against the independent Republic of Georgia in support of two breakaway pro-Russian republics, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that were seeking to become part of Russia. Beginning in 2002, under Putin’s direction, Russia had begun a huge campaign of issuing Russian passports to the citizens of the two regions, laying the foundation for Russia’s claim on the breakaway republics.  By 2008, Russia was supplying two-thirds of South Ossetia’s budget, and nearly all its residents, as well as Abkhazia’s residents, carried Russian passports. 

Georgia was the first member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the organization of former Soviet republics, and was making noises about wanting to join the EU and NATO.  The conflict with Russia over the breakaway republics escalated until in 2008, a peace proposal was put forth by the EU, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and Germany.  (The OSCE has observers in Eastern Ukraine right now attempting to oversee what little remains of a ceasefire agreement.)  Russia refused to attend a European meeting seeking to implement the peace proposal.  In early March of 2008, South Ossetia and Abkhazia submitted formal requests to the Russian parliament to be recognized as independent republics.

In August of 2008, Putin accused Georgia of “committing genocide” against citizens in both breakaway republics and began evacuating Ossetian and Abkhazian civilians into Russia. Russia accused Georgia of “aggression” against the two breakaway republics and began sending “peacekeeping” forces, including tanks and artillery and rockets, into both regions.  A full scale war broke out, with Russia bombing the Georgian cities of Gori and Tbilisi.  Russia sent “peacekeepers” into the Georgian port city of Poti on the Black Sea and bombed Poti and other Georgian ports, sinking a half-dozen Georgian ships and plundering Georgian properties along the coast.  The Russian army deputy chief of staff would later deny any Russian forces had been anywhere near Georgian coastal cities, despite the damage evident to reporters and international observers.

Russia engaged in a campaign of information warfare against Georgia, escorting journalists into the war zone in an attempt to portray Russia as “saving” its own citizens in the breakaway republics.  Putin spent millions in an international effort to flood the media with propaganda blaming Georgia for the war.  Russia’s war against Georgia was also the first time a cyber-attack was put into use as an element of warfare.  Russia disabled Georgian government websites and commercial and government news websites to weaken the government and control the news narrative.

So Putin knew exactly what he was doing in 2014 when he seized Crimea and moved Russian troops into the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.  He had his information warfare program in place:  Russia was going in at the “invitation” of Crimea and the two Ukrainian republics.  Putin was “protecting” ethnic Russians and “saving” them from the horrors of being under the thumb of the “corrupt regime” in Kyiv. 

Does any of this sound familiar?  Donetsk and Luhansk “requested” to be recognized as independent republics by the Russian government last week.  The Russian Duma quickly did just that this week, followed by Putin sending “peacekeepers” in tanks dragging artillery pieces and rocket launchers into the two republics to “protect” people who were walking around carrying Russian passports, which he has been issuing at top speed for the last seven years.

Today, Russia began its campaign of cyberwarfare against Ukraine, shutting down government websites and disabling services of several major Ukrainian banks. 

Here is the problem the U.S., the EU, and NATO have with Putin:  he’s been doing this for a long time.  He knows that it works.  He knows just what buttons to push and then he knows the buttons he should push next.  Everything he does is deliberate, planned out ahead, and calculated to elicit responses he is ready for with his next move.

Today after the cyberattacks hit Ukraine, a White House spokesman told NBC News, “We consider these further incidents to be consistent with the type of activity Russia would carry out in a bid to destabilize Ukraine.”

No.  The cyberattacks are an act of war.  Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and its recent movement of more forces into the region is an act of war.  I was watching MSNBC earlier, and their excellent chief of international reporting Richard Engel was on the frontlines in a village in Eastern Ukraine when an artillery barrage hit near enough that the ground shook and he and the Ukrainian soldiers he was with took cover. 

You don’t fire artillery into villages occupied by civilians to “keep the peace.”  You do it as an act of war.  You don’t issue your own passports to the citizens of a foreign country because you’re feeling friendly and you just want them to have freedom of movement across the border.  You do it because you are going to take the territory where they live and declare it is yours, which is an act of war.

I get it why neither the United States nor any other NATO countries are going to commit combat forces to what is already a war over there.  Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO.  They are not part of the Article 5 defense pact, which commits all NATO countries to come to the aid of any other country that is under attack.

But the Biden administration and other NATO countries are going to have to get real about Vladimir Putin and his intentions in Ukraine.  He has declared war, and he wants to seize the entire country and install the same sort of puppet government he installed in Chechnya and in the two breakaway republics of Georgia.  He wants his empire back, and the West is going to have to start acting like that’s what the stakes are.

Pitty-pat sanctions against two Russian banks and a couple of oligarchs aren’t going to do it.  Biden and the rest of NATO, most especially the banking centers in the U.K. and Germany, are going to have to shut Russia completely out of the international monetary and banking systems.  They should ban Russia from SWIFT, the system of international electronic information and payment.  They should ban the sale or export of any technology above and beyond the common nail to Russia or any Russia-friendly country.  They should ban the sale or export of any aircraft or aircraft parts to Russia and its allied countries.  They should effectively ground all commercial flights from Russia or Russian-friendly countries like Belarus by denying them landing privileges anywhere in the West or in any other country willing to join in the ban.  They should seize the assets of any and all Russian citizens outside the country, not just oligarchs.  That means land, apartments, condos, houses, cars, private aircraft, and any government aircraft currently on the ground in the West.  They should ban travel by any Russian anywhere in the West or any other country they can convince to join the ban. 

And then they should inform Putin that all the bans will stay in effect until he removes his troops from Ukraine.  They should inform Belarus that the bans will remain in effect so long as Russian soldiers are on their territory.

Putin’s modern warfare is in fact the old warfare of tanks and artillery rolling into countries and seizing land.  We should be the progenitors of the new modern warfare -- locking Russia down within its borders and denying the country and its citizens the things and privileges of modern life they have enjoyed since the fall of the USSR.  When they decide to rejoin the world, they’ll get their stuff back.  Until then, they should pull on their snow boots and put on their fur hats and look at the blank screens of their laptops and TV’s and wonder what’s going on out there in the rest of the world.