Change of plans
Putin is speedy, we have to give him that. A couple of days ago he was just declaring a couple of bits of Ukraine not bits of Ukraine, and now it’s straight up invasion. I suppose Trump is watching tv full of chuckles, exclaiming at how savvy and impressive his buddy is.
Putin says don’t worry, “Russia” has no plans to occupy Ukraine. Apparently it plans to smash it instead.
In a pre-dawn TV statement Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia did not plan to occupy Ukraine and demanded that its military lay down their arms. Moments later, attacks were reported on Ukrainian military targets. Ukraine said that “Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
Russia’s military breached the border in a number of places, in the north, south and east, including from Belarus, a long-time Russian ally. There are reports of fighting in some parts of eastern Ukraine.
But this isn’t occupation, it’s just attacking. Whole different thing.
If you occupy a country you become responsible for it. You’re supposed to feed the people, maintain order, and so on. So much easier (and more satisfying) to smash it to pieces and let it clean up your mess.
Really? I’m pretty sure the Nazis didn’t bother about feeding the French people, let alone the Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish etc people. They did “maintain order” but of course it was Nazi order, which included shoveling all the Jews onto trains heading east, slaughtering whole villages to punish rebellion, sending the contents of museums to Berlin, etc.
I mean under international law. See here:
Of course I wouldn’t expect Putin or his army to respect international law, but even so they’d have to make some effort to keep things under control, if only for their own purposes.
Perhaps it’s time to apply Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule” (you break it, you bought it).
We can help with that: there’s not really any such thing as a Russian oligarch who isn’t effectively a representative of Putin, so all assets in the west owned by Russian oligarchs should be seized, and proceeds held in trust for reparations to the Ukrainian government after the war.
Here’s a partial list:
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-oligarchs-that-own-western-companies-2015-2?op=1#mikhail-fridman-rwe-dea-11
Hey, it’s just a peace-keeping force, right? Putin has every right to be worried–someone said an unkind thing about borscht in Kyiv, so better safe than sorry, doncha know. Valid security concerns.
I wonder when he’ll start the invasion of Finland.
W a M @ 3 – thank you. That was a stupid comment of mine. Of course I knew that was what you meant. I meant to wonder aloud who/what was going to make Putin pay any attention to international law, but I didn’t manage to say that.
Still, even leaving aside international law, it’s probably easier to smash a country than to occupy it long-term — you don’t need to keep troops there, just murder a lot of people and destroy the infrastructure, then leave.
GW, I can’t imagine Russia invading Finland. It’s a question of how crazy Putin is. I doubt whatever small part of the Russian Army isn’t supporting the Ukrainian invasion could even take Finland – last time they tried it didn’t work great for them.
Maybe Finland could retake Karelia. And then join NATO.
Thanks, Ophelia, much appreciated.
I
Well, actually, they mostly treated the Norwegian people much better than those others. We were predominantly blond and blue-eyed, you see. Arians, in their view. And to be sure, they dealt with the resistance as mercilessly in Norway as elsewhere.
Harald,
There is a reason the otherwise-inoffensive Norwegian surname Quisling has come to mean something beyond a traitor in the English language, at least for those old or curious enough to have come across it in common usage.
Der Durchwander,
Little bit of trivia: there was a Quisling Clinic in Madison, WI, founded by a Norwegian immigrant doctor and his doctor sons of that name. No idea if they’re related to the Norwegian fascist. Elvis Costello referenced it in his song “Green Shirt”.
Today it’s an apartment building, renamed “Quisling Terrace”.
Also it’s not pronounced the way it looks in English. (Except in English I guess it is.) It’s more like Sheesling.
I am used to pronouncing it somewhat like Kvishling.
Here is a satirical stamp with his portrait made during the war. Value: 30 silver pieces.
Text: “Dishonour and contempt Quisling’s path has him brought.” Or something like that. It’s a play on a well known (in Norway) poem. On the same page, we learn that the name is a Latinisation of Kvislemark, a place name from Sjælland in Denmark.
More well known is a satirical drawing, made in 1944. Fourth drawing from the top on this page. It shows Vidkun Quisling (his full name) in Berlin for an audience with Hitler. He says, “I am Quisling”, to which the offices responds, “and the name?”.
Even better, you leave behind a 5th column with clandestine intel and arms support and they kill or terrorise absolutely anyone who looks sideways at elected office of public service who is not a pro-Russian kleptocrat.
Papito, I saw a tweet yesterday from someone describing themselves as a Finnish Leftist. He said that he and many other Finnish leftists, typically critical of NATO and the USA, strongly support intervention on behalf of Ukraine. He pointed out that if Russia succeeds in swallowing Ukraine or making it a vassal state, then inevitably other independent countries including Finland can be taken using the same reasoning Putin has applied to Ukraine.
He also said that as a member of the active reserve he was voluntarily coming up to readiness status so that if called up he could leave immediately.
Who knows what is going to happen. If the West allows Russia to get away with this with no more than sanctions and verbal condemnation I think it (we) will be irreparibly weakened. Military intervention will almost certainly lead to massive loss of life on both sides and is uncertain in any case. it’s not as though Russia’s rebuilt military is a pushover and they have a reputation as being quite prepared to ignore conventions of polite warfare. Either way I think we’re in for a very rocky ride.
Harald – oh! Well since you’re Norwegian and I’m not I’m going to go ahead and say that’s how it’s pronounced then! I heard it said in Norwegian once and told myself I’d been saying it wrong all these years, but clearly I misremembered what I heard.
Ophelia,
To be fair, you’d have to pin down which dialect of Norwegian Harald speaks and compare that to which dialect you heard it in way back when — there are so many dialects that the country has two separate standard varieties. One is called Bokmal, lit. “Book Language”; i.e., the kind they speak in Oslo, based on what was considered literary Danish back when Denmark controlled Norway; and Nynorsk, lit. “New Norse”, something like a statistical average of the many dialects they speak in the rest of Norway, especially those in the western and northern fjords.
Quite a trick, for a country of just over five million people.
(I also heard a funny rumour about the Muppets from a Norwegian comedian — where, in pretty much every country outside of Sweden, the character of the Swedish Chef preserves his nationality, in Sweden itself he is called the Norwegian Chef. I am not sure if that’s actually the case, but it was a pretty funny joke.)
Rob,
Allowing Russia to occupy and absorb Ukraine is the best way to defeat the Russian military, despite the misery it invites upon the Ukrainian and Russian people, and all without any NATO forces firing a shot. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that Putin wishes to repeat 2008, where he blitzed to the capital of Georgia in a rapid show of force before retreating his forces to the breakaway pseudorepublics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are both today Russian in all but name.
Perhaps Putin will indeed march to Kyiv and then retreat to Donetsk and Luhansk, after having smashed the Ukrainian military with his own conventional forces. But there are good geopolitical reasons to doubt the soundness of this strategy when it comes to actually achieving long-term Russian security; unlike the Caucasus, where Putin has friendly allies to the south of Georgia and enough local force to repeat 2008 on Tblisi any time he wants, Ukraine will not be subdued by a flash in the pan. Any retreat by the Russians will be met with a swift NATO-backed rearmament by the Ukrainians, which will have rendered the entire exercise moot.
Thus, to secure what Putin doubtless believes are Russia’s long-term interests, he will likely be convinced — if he hasn’t become so already — that Ukraine must be subdued at least up to the Dnepr. And holding this territory will require committing pretty much the entirety of the Russian military that isn’t absolutely essential to defending Russia’s existing borders. And NATO will help ensure that this occupation is as costly for the Russians as possible; if you recall, occupying Afghanistan helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union, at a relative pittance to NATO. Russia today is far more economically feeble and its “rebuilt” military not nearly so robust as that of the Soviets before the Afghan occupation, while Ukraine is more populous and shares a direct land border with NATO.
As long as NATO does *not* engage in a conventional war on behalf of Ukraine, thereby galvanising the Russian people to support their government and get conscripted by the millions, Putin will have no more strategic manoeuvre with his army and will lack the domestic support to extend that army any further.
Thus, as sad as it is for Ukraine, the very best thing that NATO can do is to impose as many economic and diplomatic penalties on Russia as possible, and make sure the Russians are committed to holding an enormous hostile country until the holding of it breaks the Russian military for good and all. In short, Putin committing Russian forces in Ukraine means he will have no conventional means to threaten any of Russia’s neighbours again.
That does not mean he won’t try, using non-conventional means at his disposal; this may not be a comfort, in the final analysis, given Russian stockpiles of what the hawks still call “weapons of mass destruction” and Russian state-sponsored digital mercenary firms. But the fact remains that NATO is still a hegemonic military alliance encompassing the most powerful economies and armed forces in the history of the world, while Russia is an enfeebled kleptocracy that can barely afford to defend its borders. Putin has engaged in two decades of military adventurism in an attempt to secure those borders, and his current adventure is in the same vein, but with much higher stakes for him and for his people.
Rob, if Putin attempts to occupy Ukraine for more than a couple weeks, perhaps we’ll see a reprise of something like the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” How does the “Mannerheim Brigade” sound?
Nitpick – it’s the Lincoln Battalion, part of the International Brigade.
Thanks for the correction, Ophelia. I have fairly predicable national myopia.
So how about the “Mannheim Battalion,” part of the “International Brigade?”
The longer this goes on in Ukraine, the more likely it becomes.
It’s not your myopia, it got mislabeled early on and the mislabel spread and stuck, as they always do.