In most ways, Russia is a difficult nation to understand, as Russians are a difficult people to understand.
At the same time, they can stand astride the apex of the world in the fields of arts, music, sports, even culture, yet be the most despicable collection of louts on the planet.
They know nothing but strength, yet have struggled to attain it and keep it. They are a geo-political dichotomy, almost as if they can represent the very best, and the very worst of what man-kind can offer.
Plus, they’re just flat-out weird, in a neanderthal type of way.
They are the world’s most paranoid people, and that’s saying a lot. But they are, and they feel that everyone hates them, one of the few things they can manage to be right about.
If they had a choice between authoritarian government and democracy and freedom, they’d take the authoritarian approach every time, since they don’t have any historical clue as to what the other two things even mean, much less what to do with them.
They need a Strong Man as leader, someone who inspires fear, yet keeps them safe, a relative term when you eat a lot of potatoes and cabbage and live in poverty for the security that the Strong Man provides. And they have no problem with the Strong Man stealing from them to enrich himself and his collaborators, his cronies. It’s simply the way it’s always been done, and simply the only thing that they really know.
So in a manner of speaking, the bloody fools can’t help it. They just don’t know no better.
Russia, the country, is less a country than it is an empire. It is less a people than it is a conglomeration of peoples, all of whom are subservient to ethnic Russians, the top of the food chain. In times of war, it will always be these “lesser people” who do the fighting and dying, hopefully before any ethnic Russians are called upon to defend the Rodina, or Motherland.
Those ethnic Russians I’m referring to live in the traditional part of Russia proper, west of the Ural Mountains, on the plains that stretch from the Urals and to the borders of what we know today as the nations of Belarus and Ukraine.
This patch of land is difficult to defend, as it has no natural, physical and defensible formations, like mountains, seas, or anything that may serve as a barrier from potential invasion. As a result of that, Russia and the Russians have been seriously invaded many times over the centuries, but the most existentially threatening ones were by the Mongols, the Ottomans, Napoleon’s France, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
At somewhere in the area of 25 million people dead, no nation suffered war dead as much as the Russians did in World War 2. So, from a historical and legacy point of view, you can start to appreciate the idea that the Russians are a little paranoid about invasion by foreigners.
So their response is to be the ones doing the invading.
As I mentioned, Russia being essentially flat means there is little in the way of defensible natural barriers. So the Russians took out the maps, laid them on the table, and went through the effort of identifying physical barriers in the neighbourhood that could be used for national defence.
And two of them are in Eastern Europe, book-ending the Carpathian Mountains to the north and south. There are two gaps that exist in these areas through which the Russians have been invaded before. One runs from the northern terminus of the Carpathians to the Baltic Sea through Poland, and the other from the Southern Carpathians to the Black Sea and running through Rumania.
Russia would very much like to control these two choke points. They have before, and did so until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And today, they’d like to get them back.
The biggest problem with this is that two, well actually several, nations stand between them and these two choke points: Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the last four being NATO members. And if the Russians had their way, they’d extend their front lines right to the German border, since that choke point to the north is at its narrowest at that point.
The lands that exist between Russia proper and these choke points are buffer zones, or maybe crumple zones, that give the Russians the possibility to defend in-depth any invasion by a hostile power coming from the west. It’s been a strategy used against both Napoleon and Hitler, incrementally giving up land as they withdraw to the east, towards the Russian heartland.
That’s the thing when you invade Russia from the west and you’re hugely successful at it. At some point in your success, you look up and realize that your lightning advances have resulted in you penetrating so far east that now you’re literally surrounded by Russia. This is the Russian way, not so much to hold you off as much as it is to absorb you, draw you in, make you deal with the Russian winter, then strangle you when you over-extend yourself.
To make this all work, the Russians need these chokepoints and the land between themselves and those points. So far as the Russians would prefer, any Battle of Russia coming from the west should be fought in Poland and Rumania, and failing that, in Ukraine and Belarus.
But not in Russia.
Make no mistake, the Russians are still stinging from the humiliation represented by the fall of the Soviet Union. This was them at their zenith, their high-water mark, and it hurt the national psyche to lose that empire. All of the countries listed earlier were under the yoke of Soviet rule until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It was a big climb-down to lose the Cold War to the west, and most particularly, to the United States.
And of all those nations, only Belarus can be considered to be friendly to Russia today.
And all of this is before we start telling stories of the Russo-Japanese War, where the Russians were handed their lunch badly. The story of the Russian Fleet sailing around the world to exact revenge upon the Japanese is absolute pathos, a veritable Greek tragedy, only without any Greeks. If the Russians had any national pride before that event, it now lies at the bottom of the Tsushima Strait, courtesy of the Japanese Navy.
Demographically, Russian is in pretty bad shape, just like the rest of us. Their birth rate has gone down significantly, and the Russian leadership realizes that, in just ten to fifteen years, they may not have the manpower necessary for an ambitious campaign to regain these buffer lands, and regain those chokepoints.
What we see in Ukraine today is the last desperate gamble of a Russia who sees itself fading away due to population challenges and the weakening of the country those changes will usher in.
Realistically, I don’t think they really have much of a chance. They just don’t have the military strength to pull all this off, and nuclear weapons will get them nowhere. And even if the Americans decide to go powder their noses and stay out of their way, the rest of Europe has more than enough military potential to defeat the Russians all on their own.
What we are witnessing today is the last gasp of Imperial Russia. Putin has presided over the place since the fall of the Iron Curtain. His historical sense of humiliation has prodded him to go after it now, while he feels he still can.
He’s wrong, and in his flawed calculations, he has hastened the collapse of not just the empire, but of Russia proper.
Hubris and a sense of humiliation are a bad mixture in any dictator, let alone one with a gigantic superiority complex derived from a giant inferiority complex.
It will not end well for the Rodina. Putin’s ego will be the death of it.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 