One Chechnya Does Not a Donbass Make
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.
New Europe’s Own Cuba
Russia’s assault on Ukraine was planned so as to drive Kiev to sue for peace and relinquish its claims to Crimea and the Donbass but the universalist West’s decision to weaponise Ukraine into an anti-russian proxy crusade, ruined the plan.
Moscow has, now for months, opted instead for an attrition model aimed at avoiding russian casualties and material destruction. However, as the Kremlin builds up its forces in Kherson, in preparation for an offensive, the endgame grows nearer.
The seats of globalist revolution in Washington and Brussels having decided to take charge of revolutionary Ukraine more directly, may soon find themselves with a politically defeated country along with a financially and militarily collapsed one. In this case, NATO may decide to salvage the reputation of the regime it has glorified by imposing a partition which would see Galicia detached from the rest of the former SSR, as a salvaged and ‘free’ West Ukraine.
This territory would likely serve as a showcase of the advantages of the atlanticist model of ‘sexual tolerance’, ‘shared sovereignty’, ‘multi-cultural society’ and ‘smart power’ diplomacy focusing on ‘moral interests’. This would entail joining the EU and NATO formally as a path for military reform and development funding. As Europe’s local ‘lighthouse of liberty’ (à la Israel and Taiwan), the purpose of Lviv would be to serve as a military platform for intelligence gathering in eastern Europe and ideologically appeal to the oppressed masses of the tyrannical russophile regimes in Belarus and Ukraine proper.
At this point, the similarities with the III Reich mount as well: a recently established state attempting a top down artificial ethnic homogenisation, led by an artist politician, supported by most of continental Europe, obsessed with wunderwaffen as a means to win a war against an older larger conservative empire, mildly enamored with a vaguely defined pagan origin, sexualising its population under the guise of a modernist ‘new man’ ideology, forced to retreat to a catholic mountainous bastion and relying on complicit foreign powers for the escape of much of its morally tainted and illegally enriched leadership.
Nevertheless, this atlanticist Cuba would be a source of potentially severe dysfunction: polish troops would most certainly dominate the allied contingent mobilised to West Ukraine and the regime’s political debt to Warsaw would clash with the heretofore project of ethnic exclusivity for Ukrainians, orthodox refugees would meet similar intolerance from the catholic and protestant minorities of the west, the G7’s financial resources would be scarce in a post-war world mired in economic depression, the progressive ethos would do little to seduce the traditionalist eastern populations and would find it much harder to ingratiate itself to the more intolerant and rural denizens of West Ukraine than it did those of the greater Kiev.
New Europe’s Cuba might turn instead into a segregated Northern Ireland living in civil strife, under constant martial law and undergoing draconian economic austerity. Conversely, Russia will have just reacquired the most industrialised littoral half of Ukraine, already prepared for infrastructural interdependence with Mother Russia.
Winter is coming for New Europe but in the East, there is a Russian Spring on the horizon.
The only other possible example of a ruinous proxy war where the patrons of the war effort end up worse than their intended target is perhaps the USSR’s and Cuba’s participation in the Angolan Bush War. South Africa did suffer regime change but it was brought about more through Western sanctions and moral pressure than by socialist military harassment and ideological condemnation. Namibia remained within Pretoria’s sphere of influence and while the MPLA would eventually win the Angolan Civil War, it would do so without Moscow’s help. Indeed, the USSR spent money it could ill afford to waste and would eventually undergo regime change due to economic crisis. The fall of the USSR hurt Cuba politically and financially with Havana going on to see much of its population starve and go into exile. The Castros would not only waste funds but would also leave the conflict militarily defeated by the smaller more nimble apartheid military prowess.
The atlanticists seem bent on following the cuban precedent.
There Will Be Finlandisation
The collective West has acted autistically since the end of the Cold War, a problem russian and third world officials have complained about for decades. The perspective of the ‘leaders of the free world’ has been one of an end of History which leaves the North Sea individualism heirs as the frontrunners of the global moral race.
This translates into the followers of Fukuyama ignoring, dismissing or undervaluing the views and concerns of those they deem morally unworthy and overestimate the importance of their own initiatives and views.
This was evident in the run up to the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and Libya, for instance. NATO became an aggressive power, clearly without ever anticipating that one day the humanitarian justification and the ignoring of the UNSC, might be used against its interests. The R2P doctrine was well and good but only in the hands of the anglophone centred circle. Kosovo’s independence can be recognised but if Russia recognises other separatist regions, that is ‘revanchism’. The UK can conduct counter-insurgency campaigns in Ulster or Malaysia but Chechnya does not qualify.
The subversion of Ukraine by the atlanticist nomenklatura has contaminated Kiev and much of eastern Europe with this very same perspective. When the Euromaidanistas started cheering the occupation of police stations and army depots by the revolutionary crowd, they had no answer to what they thought the opposition to them might feel entitled to do once the precedent was set. Time and again, autistic policy and action are undertaken with complete disregard for the views of the other parties.
Russia being closer to the West, it had to endure the double standards sooner and is also turning the tables on the West earlier than the rest of the world. Nevertheless, judging by the hissy fit the West is throwing, it seems it has not yet learned its lesson and is on the process of damaging its relations with much of the rest of the world as well.
The USA unilaterally decided to abandon the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty. It was also the West that refused to dismantle NATO, following the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty along with the USSR. Worse still, Brussels went ahead with five successive expansions against Russian objections and all the way to the borders of the Russian Federation. NATO has countered that it has not any significant forces closer to Russia’s borders but this is disingenuous. NATO has indeed mobilised often to the Baltic Air Police mission, it has installed surveillance facilities on the borders with Russia, it never stopped its surveillance flights and, of course, the armed forces of Russia’s neighbours are indeed NATO assets, as are their bases and territories.
NATO has outrightly deceived Moscow on several occasions: 1) certainly when it changed its mind about expansion 2) with Kosovo the NATO states had Resolution 1244 approved so as to post facto legitimise the intervention under the motto ‘illegal but legitimate’ and then proceeded to violate it, in turn, by recognising Kosovo’s independence and violating Serbia’s territorial integrity, 3) Brussels persuaded Moscow to pass Resolution 1973 approving a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011, only to violate that too by sending ‘little green men’ to aid the rebels in overthrowing Gaddafi and then blatantly lying about it for months until the dictator was killed 4) in Ukraine specifically, the Weimar Triangle served as guarantors of the agreement signed by Yanukovych and the opposition, but then had no qualm reneging on it, less than 24 hours later when the opposition stormed the presidential palace and chased the Ukrainian President out of Kiev 5) Kiev never even attempted to implement the Minsk Agreements which provided for measures such as a cease-fire, demobilisation, direct negotiations between Kiev and the Donbass rebels and political referenda throughout the country on a future federal framework of administration 6) Mink II had to be negotiated following renewed fighting and added the obligation of constitutional reforms on the part of Kiev but as with Minsk I, the West never pressured Ukraine to implement it.
On the contrary, NATO refinanced, rearmed and refortified Kiev’s positions in the Donbass, also largely ignoring Russia’s warnings of support for the rebels, should Kiev attempt to retake the region by force a third time. Observing the military build-up in preparation for a new offensive, the russians went to the americans directly, to offer a frozen conflict in return for an official NATO disinvite for Ukrainian membership: this would have allowed the rebels a certain degree of autonomy and proximity to Russia without risking Ukrainian territorial integrity à la Crimea in 2014, as well as having guaranteed effective Ukrainian control over the segment of the Donbass it had already conquered, eschewing the possibility of having to abandon the fortifications it had already invested in.
Washington DC dismissed the offer outright. Moscow proceeded with the official recognition of the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, concluded a military pact with them and warned Kiev that any attack on the republics would be met with the utmost military resolve. Kiev ignored and continued its artillery duels with the rebels leading to Russia’s offensive of February 2022.
Even after the political disaster of a Russian campaign against the most important Brussels protectorate in the continent, the atlanticists persist in their self-delusions imagining anti-Putin coups in Moscow, believing themselves capable of blackmailing Russia economically through ineffective sanctions that harm them more than the Federation, and add insult to injury by failing spectacularly in persuading the rest of the world to join them in their boycott of the Russian economy, only to see their diplomatic standing decreased for naught.
This is where finlandisation comes in. Moscow has committed itself to two seemingly incompatible policies: sovereignty and denazification. Putin can injure Ukraine’s territorial integrity without affecting its sovereignty but he cannot denazify Ukraine without overthrowing its government. The solution might be finlandisation as this would assure the neutralisation of what will be left of Ukraine while allowing the residual regime to decide its own fate. It would be politically unsustainable for such a regime to continue to tolerate its ultra-nationalist elements while deserting the West, disarming, negotiating with Moscow the amputation of its own territory and future economic issues such as the provision of energy. While there is still no hint of a movement against the Zelensky dictatorial regime, be it on the streets or in the hallways, the Ukrainian Presidency has been busy conducting purges of the government’s inner circle.
As previously mentioned, such a coup would stand little chance of success without the complicity of the Ukrainian military and Russia…
The Westphalian Post 