Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 23 – The first
impulse of Western leaders whenever there is a crisis is to seek negotiations
on the principle that it is better to talk than to fight, but sometimes in
their rush to find common ground, these leaders make the problem worse because
their willingness to talk about a conflict has the effect of reinforcing the
mistaken view of the other side.
That is what is happening with
Ukraine, Kseniya Kirillova says, because Vladimir Putin does not view Ukraine as
an independent actor and believes Moscow and the West can reach and impose an
agreement on it because he and they are the real players and Ukraine is “an
object” (nr2.com.ua/blogs/Ksenija_Kirillova/Pochemu-s-Putinym-nevozmozhno-dogovoritsya-88784.html).
To say this is not to argue against
talking with Moscow at all but rather to insist that the way in which those
conversations proceed must recognize that Putin “does not understand” what is
actually happening and that the West must not take steps that reinforce “’the
parallel reality’” in which he lives as they are sometimes doing now.
Many people have pointed out that
Putin does not have an adequate understanding of other people and political
activity. In his view, Kirillova says, “people cannot engage in protests unless
they are given orders by the CIA, that the world is divided into spheres of
influence, and that Ukraine and a number of other countries are in principle
not on the map.”
That fundamental misconception about
reality, she continues, reflects the fact that “Putin in principle does not
understand what processes are and how they occur.” For him, “there are no
processes as such; there are only objects” which in his Chekist mind “can be
bought off, frightened and in the end administered.”
With such a view, “other people,
countries and entire peoples automatically disappear: they are transformed into
faceless entities which one can play with as in a mythical casino.” Thus, it is
“no accident” that Putin is doing everything to have the US and “especially the
EU ‘hand over’ Ukraine to him.”
The Kremlin leader is “simply
physically incapable of understanding that Ukraine is … not a sandwich … or a
land with serfs but a sovereign state” that is different from Russia and has
its own rights as such. How can anyone
hand over a country whose people have suffered so much because of what Putin
has done?
And how can anyone encourage him to
think that is possible?
That is or should be impossible
because to do that would mean that “from now on, the entire world order has
been irretrievably destroyed and that any country now can without risk of
punishment begin to divide it up, invading the territory of a foreign country
and threatening all the rest with nuclear weapons,” Kirillova says.
Too much blood has been shed and the
hatred of Ukraine to “Russia as a state” is so large that there is no
possibility of talking about “a rapprochement with the aggressor.” Otherwise,
as she points out, “Ukrainians will feel that the death of those near them was
for naught.”
“That is why
reaching an agreement with Putin is absolutely useless,” Kirillova says; “he
will demand the impossible by ignoring objective reality because his world, one
in which there are only objects is a static one” rather than one containing a
multiplicity of subjects who can and do act on their own.
Figuring out
how to proceed and deal with someone as inadequate in his understanding of the
world as Putin has shown himself to be is “a very important question, on which
the future of contemporary Europe can depend.”
At the very least, no one must do anything that reinforces his view that
Ukraine is simply an object to be traded among the great powers.
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