Putin “Doesn’t Understand the First Thing about Ukraine”
This week: hear Masha Gessen, John Lewis Gaddis, Monica Toft, and George Beebe in conversations on Russia and Ukraine. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
The Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, staff writer at The New Yorker, spoke with us early last week, as Putin was initiating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
You know, I’m not at all surprised, but I am sick to my stomach. I mean, it’s just this awful feeling. Sometimes during Putin’s tenure I’ve been not surprised but shocked. I’m not even shocked. I just feel sick. You know, my friends are thinking about their friends and loved ones in Ukraine, the heartbreak of losing connection with them.
And Vladimir Putin, Gessen tells us, “doesn’t understand the first thing about Ukraine.”
This is a country that has battled the demons of the post-totalitarian society, the post-Soviet state, and managed to create a government of the governed. Not a perfect one. It has a lot of problems, it has corruption, it has oligarchs, all of that. But it has social cohesion. It has a functioning judiciary. It has a political will to live in a better society . . .
I think for a lot of us Russians, it was the embodiment of hope. It was an example of what could be. We could be that, we could break out of this curse of the totalitarian legacy.
It’s a country where people have proved their willingness to die to be able to live in a democratic society. They proved it during their revolution of dignity in 2013-2014, when thousands of people camped out in the dead of winter for weeks on end in Independence Square in Kyiv, who stayed there when the regime opened fire on them. Everyone in Ukraine knows that more than 100 people died for them to be able to vote in open and fair elections. And finally, this is a country that has proved that they’re willing to mobilize and, again, die for their country when Russia attacked.
Realism Plus
A few years ago, the realist international relations scholar John Mearsheimer declared that “Putin is much too smart” to try to conquer Ukraine. Understanding of Putin’s intentions has varied widely, however. For example: Richard Lourie more recently discussed on Open Source Putin’s expansionist vision of “a kind of Slavic superstate with Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.”
The Russian invasion outright surprised some writers critical of Western liberal thinking about Russia; Matt Taibbi wrote in an apology to readers, “I have to admit, I didn’t see this happening.” In some cases, the surprise might have related to Mearsheimer’s view that “Putin is much too smart” for this. There’s been a conventional sense for a while that Putin has strategic brilliance, yet now Russia has initiated a scenario that parallels disastrous wars of history, including those waged by the US (even this past week, a former US president has called Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine “genius”).
Monica Toft on this week’s show, in a conversation taped before the full-scale invasion began, emphasized Putin’s intelligence, too. “Look, this is a smart guy,” she says. “And he has managed to play us basically like a fiddle.” Focusing on strategy and political maneuvering while also considering other kinds of thinking and feeling—like the expansionist “vision” Lourie describes, or the heartbreak and resolve Gessen observes—can elucidate a great deal about the present situation. There’s much to learn still about the moods and beliefs surrounding Russia’s invasion, that crime and blunder of terrible proportions.
Read: William James on Pluralism
Re: multidimensional thinking, here’s William James on pluralism as a means for getting back to the real:
Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness. Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion, ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen, only there do events come to pass.
Read: Anatol Lieven
We’re continuing our study of imperial calamities via In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and so we’re eagerly reading the work of Quincy thinkers. Anatol Lieven (who elaborates on the crime and the blunder of Russia’s invasion here) has a recent piece up at the Quincy Institute’s online magazine, Responsible Statecraft, on “what Russia wants, what the West can do”:
Whether Russia would have accepted a Western offer of compromise (if one had been made) involving a moratorium on NATO expansion and mutual arms limitation, we will probably never know, and this question is now academic. L’appetit vient en manger (“appetite grows with eating”) as the French say, and the more of Ukraine Russia now occupies, the more ambitious its goals in Ukraine are likely to be.
This week’s ephemeral library
Putin’s Bloody Folly. Stop pretending the left is on Putin’s side. A Humorous Ukrainian Writer, with Nothing to Laugh About. New studies point to a market as the site of the COVID pandemic’s origin.
