CHECHNYA, GEORGIA AND UKRAINE

By William Urban

Chechnya is where the Boston Marathon bombers came from; Georgia is the tiny mountainous state in the Caucasus region, lying between Russia and Turkey; Ukraine is on the fertile steppe south of Russia, the name meaning “over the border.” None have had a happy history, but oil politics and Vladimir Putin’s desire to restore Russia to great power status have led to Russian invasions. George W. Bush took seriously the 2008 Russian attack that overthrew the pro-American government in Georgia, but he was too busy trying to defend his Iraq policy from Democratic party attacks to do more than fly Georgian troops back from Iraq and to provide some equipment.

Within months Sen McCain was ridiculed for saying that Putin would first subdue Georgia, then Ukraine; and Tina Fey was making fun of Sarah Palin, pretending that she had said she could see Russia from her back yard. It was cool then to think that Russia was a normal country, and Secretary of State Clinton pushing the Reset Button (translated.as “overcharged”) symbolized a new relationship with the former USSR. The incorrect translation wasn’t her fault because, unlike Condoleezza Rice, she had never studied Russian. According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton speaks no foreign language; and while Barack Obama remembers a bit of Indonesian from the time he attended school there, he says that foreign languages aren’t his thing.

Putin didn’t really care. He was fluent in German from his years as a KGB agent in East Berlin — ground zero of the Cold War. He knew how power operates, and he didn’t think much of the community organizer who had somehow become the leader of the free world. There may be been a bit of racism involved, too — that’s an unfortunate part of Russian culture — but basically he just despises amateurs.

At first President Obama thought that his charm offensive was working, but it wasn’t long before Putin’s body language showed how much he disdained his American counterpart. More recently, Putin has mocked him.

Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. Perhaps not that of Joseph Stalin, but certainly that of Nicholas II. His first strike was at Chechnya, which provoked little international furor. Chechen terrorists had struck at schools, hospitals and a large theater, and until recently was believed to have blown up apartment buildings. (Now it seems that the State Security forces — formerly the KGB — did so to justify the invasion that flattened the capital of Chechnya.)

Then it was Georgia’s turn. Unlike Iraq, Georgia did not have an insane dictator known for attempting to seize his neighbors’ oil resources, who repeatedly announced his determination to destroy Israel (and fired missiles there during the Gulf War), who used poison gas on opponents and buried others in mass graves, who bribed UN and European officials to evade the UN embargo and used the money to buy weapons and build palaces while leaving his people without proper medicines, who ignored UN inspectors so long and so blatantly that in 2003 everyone (except an obscure member of the Illinois legislature now in the Oval Office) believed that he had programs in place to develop more of these weapons. Even Saddam Hussein’s own generals believed that he had poison gas, and in 2009 550 tons of yellow cake uranium were transported from Iraq to Canada for storage. Georgia’s president liked America and wanted to emulate the customs that made us free and wealthy.

In short, there was no comparison of Georgia and Iraq, not even in the elections. In Georgia the president won 52% of the vote, while Saddam Hussein got a 99.9% approval shortly before being overthrown. Putin took advantage of traditional ethnic rivalries to send Russian troops “to restore order” and to protect the 48% who had not voted for the winner. This was the model for the Crimean crisis this year

Putin hadn’t expected to need to use force against Ukraine. In 2004 he had manipulated the presidential election to put Viktor Yanukovych in power. The public took to the street in what was called the Orange Revolution, and a pro-western president took charge. In 2014 Yanukovych, having won a contested election, reversed policy to move away from the European Union and to align his nation economically and politically with Russia. Once again the people flooded into the streets and drove him out of the country.

There had been massive government corruption and incompetence in Ukraine for over two decades now, but it was worse under Yanukovych. The current government has opened his palatial country home to tourists and school groups to demonstrate how brazenly he had ripped the system off.
Putin saw nothing wrong with this. After all, he took power by enriching a group of super-rich “oligarchs” who greatly resemble the tsarist nobles overthrown by the Social Democrats in March of 1917. (Lenin overthrew the new Russian Republic in November of that year.)

What should President Obama do now? Russia’s weak spot is the economy. If the price of oil goes below $110 a barrel, Putin is in trouble. For five years now Obama has been trying to keep oil prices high so that subsided wind and solar power might become competitive. Five years ago most of the world’s trouble spots were under control; now we can hardly count them. Five years ago the US was still a military superpower; now the Navy is taking cruisers out of service, cutting personnel, cancelling construction projects.

Putin has been watching. That is what is does well — after all, he was a career spy, trained in the hard politics of the communist era. Putin is also an opportunist — he can see how badly everything is going for the Obama administration.

Fortunately, Obama does not have to deal with the Soviet Union. There is no ideological pressure to spread Communism. All Putin wants, we hope, is to gather in the lost territories — Ukraine, Belarus (no problem there, since it’s run by a pro-Russian dictator), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (all NATO members) — and to dominate Europe. Certainly he wants to keep Cuba and Venezuela in his camp, Syria, too, and now perhaps Egypt also.

Putin has long term problems — a declining birthrate, alcoholism, crime, economic stagnation and ultra-nationalist nuts on his right — but if he can restore Russian pride and self-confidence, he might be able to turn those around.

Obama is giving him as much help as he can. Awkwardly, he doesn’t seem to know that he is doing it.

Review Atlas (April 3, 2014), 4.