Bombing your (smaller) neighbour

Has Russia invited another Afghanistan on itself? Is this the beginning of Putin’s decline inside Russia? What is the level of death, destruction, and dislocation in Ukraine? Will Zelensky survive? How long can Kyiv and Kharkiv hold out? Can Russia keep provisioning its forces across Ukraine? Can frustration turn Putin’s mind towards unthinkable measures? Will negotiations start? Will Western and NATO powers manage to send fresh supplies of arms to Ukraine? Will bombings close to Ukraine’s active nuclear power plants lead to a radiation spike? 

A jumble of questions stir the mind. Even if one or two find early answers, more questions will quickly replace them. I will not offer any guesses in response.

Twelve years back I had made a brief visit to Ukraine. During that visit, and on occasions elsewhere, I’ve met wonderful Ukrainians. I have also met wonderful Russians, in Russia on a visit I made in the early 1990s, and over the decades outside Russia. 

A thought I first came across sixty years ago returns: “A nation’s finest defence is the respect and gratitude of its neighbours.” Surely even Russians who are ardent Putin-admirers must be asking themselves if invading Ukraine was the best way of earning Ukrainian goodwill. 

Or global goodwill. Or the goodwill of the people of Belarus (immediate neighbour to both Russia and Ukraine), whose prolonged restiveness vis-à-vis their authoritarian ruler may have been doubled by the use of their land for the invasion of Ukraine. As for the Ukrainians, the split forced on tens of thousands of families, with children, women and the elderly compelled to flee to Poland or Rumania and the men staying put to fight the Russians, will not be forgotten in a hurry.

Interviewed by Nirupama Subramanian for the Indian Express, a Moscow-based analyst of international relations, Alexey Kupriyanov, says that Indians should understand that just as they want a non-inimical Pakistan next-door, Russia desires a dependable Ukraine. “I am sorry for this analogy,” said Kupriyanov, “but for us, Ukraine is the same as Pakistan for India.” 

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ukraine-russia-crisis-russian-interview-7789421/

That may be true, but are there many Indians who think that invading Pakistan, and trying forcibly to replace its current government with one that is pro-Delhi, is the way to make Pakistan dependable? 

Clips emerging from invaded Ukraine confirm what I learnt directly on that 2010 visit: the people of Ukraine love democratic rights; they love to debate, discuss, argue, and vote; and they love their country. When they will recover their rights, or peace, or safety, seems very hard now to predict. 

The tragic disruption that Ukraine is going through (not for the first time in its history) is also likely to affect wider power equations, including the one between China and Russia. Kupriyanov, the Russian analyst quoted above, thinks (a) that China will continue to support Moscow; (b) that America’s focus on Europe, which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has compelled, will to some extent relieve the pressure that China feels; and (c) that China, however, “cannot recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk republics [of eastern Ukraine, recognized by Putin], because it can lead to the Taiwanese holding their own referendum”. 

There are additional questions. Such as, how long will Putin and his allies, including the oligarchs, be able to withstand the biting financial sanctions and SWIFT curbs that the U.S. and the major European powers have jointly imposed? 

At a different level, the invasion invites the world’s attention to the diversity that exists in almost every nation. Ukraine’s ethnic diversity seems to be one of Putin’s excuses for the invasion, but how many of our world’s nations, Russia included, are homogeneous in language, religion, or race? 

As commentators have pointed out, the fact that a number of Ukrainians speak Russian (in many cases as their first language), does not mean that they want Moscow to rule over them or detach them from their Ukrainian-speaking neighbours. 

Does nationhood demand homogeneity and uniformity? Does it require authoritarian rule? These too are questions, relevant for most countries, that the invasion of Ukraine underscores. 

Should NATO bases confront Russia right on its borders? That too may have been a reasonable question, but not one to be asked by raining missiles on Ukraine or sending tanks to it.