One Chechnya Does Not a Donbass Make

April 9, 2023 at 1:37 am (tWP) (atlanticism, chechnya, donbass, geopolitics, international law, nato, neocon, putin, russia, ukraine, universalism, west, zelensky)

During the 1990s, Moscow came close to being sanctioned by the West for its military operations in Chechnya and ever since the beginning of Russia’s military operations against Ukraine in 2022, some have suggested that Ukraine’s industrial heartland resembles the case of the Caucasus separatists. After all, if Russia can crush an insurgency, why does it reject Ukraine’s right to do the same?

Indeed, Chechnya was the main source of friction between Kremlin’s diplomats and their western counterparts due, allegedly, to human rights violations. Moscow was determined to fight the separatists as best it could because the breakup of the USSR was not meant to be an open invitation to secession. The administrative borders of the soviet republics were legally codified and were transformed into sovereign borderlines with any minor disputes being ‘frozen’ by Moscow peacekeepers. To have allowed the Chechen precedent would have opened the Pandora’s Box of Russian minorities across Russia’s frontiers – not to mention that the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic which was short lived, was characterised by internal tribal conflict, islamic radicalisation and, eventually, border disputes with Russia proper.

Sadly, the Kremlin had only the soviet created army as an instrument with which to solve the problem. The Russian army of the 90s was an army mired by corruption, it was cash strapped, one whose morale was in the doldrums after Afghanistan and finally an army whose tactical doctrine was based on numerical advantage. An army built on mass conscription and equipped to fight in the westphalian plains against a technologically advanced foe, was wholly inadequate to combat radicalised insurgents in the Caucasus. As a consequence, the soviet army fared badly and was initially bruised, being subsequently forced to resort to mass artillery devastation in order to dislodge the rebels from urban areas. Adding to this the corruption of high officials, long-established soviet totalitarian methods and the inexperience of the common soldier, and the effect on human rights was brutal.

In some ways, the Russian army which fought in Georgia against the Saakashvili government, was still an unprofessional army and bled in order to dominate the smaller Georgian force. Nevertheless, after the consistent investment throughout the past two decades as well as the Serdyukov reorganisation, the Russian army is today a more professional army than even its western counterparts. It is more well equipped and it is well trained, benefiting in addition from deployments to theatres such as Syria. In spite of this, both via ignorance and propaganda, many still imagine the Russian military to be the struggling conscript force of the 90s.

Georgia’s regime was not a reasonable one since it expected to be able to win a war against Russia with western help, during all time high oil prices. Yet, the Georgian state did not suffer Russian agression against its territorial integrity until it chose to unfreeze the conflict by killing Russian soldiers. The Russian army could have moved to conquer additional territory, take the Georgian capital and change the government but it was content to ensure that the secessionist territories were made safe, and withdrew. Ukraine is different.

The main problem with Ukraine is its danger for Russian strategic doctrine as well as its revisionist revolutionary regime. Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow was clear in demanding neutrality from Ukraine and Belarus in exchange for a consented independence. Kiev and Minsk were simply too close to Moscow and too integrated into Russian defence structures, to possibly integrate security arrangements other than Russian ones. It might not be the ideal solution but it was certainly a perfectly palatable one, especially considering that neither Ukraine nor Belarus had ever existed as sovereign states. Alas, Kiev’s actions have finally broken the fiction and not only will Ukraine cease to exist in its original 1991 form but Belarus too, will be further incorporated into Russia.

Apart from Ukrainian territory being too close to Russia for Russian anti-missile defences to be as effective, Ukraine has since 2014 transformed into a radical revisionist regime, and one antagonistic to Russia, at that. Kiev persecuted and purged the pro-Russian opposition, it forced the ukrainian language on its russophone citizens, began to revise topography (moving even to attempt to rename Russia as ‘Muskovy’ internationally), it chose to excise the Russian Orthodox Church out of Ukraine and established security pacts with anti-Russian states such as Poland, trying its best to adhere to NATO. At the height of the war with Russia, Kiev proscribed Russian literature and music, moving to either destroy Russian books or reclassify its artists as Ukrainian, as well as inviting jihadist chechens to integrate its military ranks and recognising Chechen independence – this to not mention all the human rights abuses and persecutions carried out by its nazi faction since 2014.

When Russia decided to crush the Chechen rebellion, Moscow was not seeking to prevent Chechens from being muslim, it was not attempting the rename the topography and its goal was not to erase Chechen history. In fact, by severing the ties between Grozny and the Arab sultanates, the Russian State may very well have salvaged Chechen heritage from Salafi fundamentalists.Then and now, Moscow acts as a conservative power seeking only to reestablish the status quo. Had the Salafi Chechens won independence, they would not have stopped at Chechnya and Ingushetia but would have, eventually, engulfed the entire Caucasus in war. Similarly, the cost of a Ukrainian victory in the Donbass would be a defeated Russia being surrounded by a reinvigorated NATO which would, in time, lead to world war. Russia’s goal of reestablishing Ukraine’s neutrality is in fact an attempt at preserving the buffer between Moscow and the Atlanticists – a policy prescription sure to preserve stability for the benefit of both parties.

Conversely, if the Minsk Agreements failed and the independence of the Donbass became inevitable, it was by no means a likelihood that other Ukrainian regions would follow – especially considering the regime’s heavy handed policies enforced by its nazi groups – but the opposite was true of Chechnya. Minsk itself is evidence that Moscow sought a negotiated settlement for the conflict whereas the Chechen rebels did not and neither did Kiev, ultimately. Moscow offered Ukraine a way out of the secessionist conflict but no one ever extended the same courtesy to Moscow, even when Moscow lost de facto control of the Caucasus republic.

Crimea and Kosovo are also precedents worthy of mention. Russia only moved to capture Crimea and aid Donbass separatists after the revolutionary regime itself chose to mobilise the military against the pro-Russian easterners. Months earlier, when the pro-Atlanticists had taken over police stations and army depots in the West, the Yanukovych government had faced such actions with complacency. As for the Maidan shootings, it is well established that both sides fired their weapons …whereas only one side counted nazis in its midst… In short, the Kremlin merely reacted to gradual western escalations, it did not initiate them. Kosovo is an additional example of an escalation on the part of the West; one which Russia fully retaliated against with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In part, the annexation of Crimea, Donetsk, Lughansk, Zaporozhia and Kherson, takes place precisely because Moscow does not wish to stretch its support for separatism and because the West – in its hypocrisy – would never consent to recognise their independence, anyway. Russia does not pursue revisionist policies but it does take full advantage when the West opens precedents.

Similarly, Russia’s goals in Ukraine have consistently been modest and conservative. Putin has acted so as to salvage the status quo ante of 2013, not to redraw the map of Europe. This, however, is very much not the objective of the western Atlanticists who have moved to overthrow regime after regime in eastern Europe, who have politicised the state bureaucracies of the West with equally ideological agendas and plan the dissolution of Russia at this very moment. It was the West that prevented the Kiev regime from negotiating peace with Russia at the outset of the conflict and it was Moscow that made sure to always recognise Zelensky as the leader of Ukraine and negotiated with his government from day 1. As much as it pains the West, the neocon project of a League of Democracies under US tutelage is as much an extremist folly as the Caucasus Emirate.

All these points are not to obviate from pointing out that Russia is a much larger wealthier more advanced power than Ukraine and that Kiev should have studied Thucydides: “to succeed best one must not yield to one’s equals, [one must] keep terms with one’s superiors and be moderate towards one’s inferiors”. To provoke Russia is a mistake, to provoke it while inferior is terrible judgement but to do so while Russia is at its financial and military height, can only be interpreted as a death wish.

The analogy between Chechnya and the Donbass ends at them being anti-separatist campaigns. The legal, political and strategic differences are too many and too wide for the argument to hold any basis.