Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 24 – Tsar Aleksandr
III famously said that Russia has only two allies – its army and its fleet –
but now, according to Rashit Akhmetov, the editor of “Zvezda Povolzhya,”
Vladimir Putin is down to only one – Moscow television with its ability to
shape and direct Russian opinion.
In a lead article in that Kazan
paper today, Akhmetov argues that in the wake of the shooting down of the
Malaysian airline, Putin is “beginning to recognize that the ‘patriotic’ and
nationalist wave” he helped to generate’ “now can be thrown against himself
because it will demand a more aggressive policy which Putin and Russia do not
have the resources for.”
As a result, Akhmetov says, Putin
has only “one ally -- television” – on which he can rely as he tries to
extricate himself from his current problems in Ukraine and to survive in the
Kremlin. Russia “doesn’t have a fleet, and its army will suffer enormously from
the defeat in Donetsk (“Zvezda
Povolzhya,” no. 27 (707), July 24-30, 2014, p. 1).
The Kazan editor says that his
dependence on television will become ever more obvious because he “will be
forced to turn to the support of the West.” To cover himself, he will insist
that the West promise not to seek the return of Crimea to Ukraine. Only later,
Akhmetov suggests, Putin will “begin to purge those guilty of the Ukrainian
adventure.”
Those are Akhmetov’s
conclusions. They rest on a more
extended argument. He begins his article
by saying that the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner is “a turning point”
in history perhaps equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
in Sarajevo in 1914 which triggered World War I.
That is because, he continues, the
shooting down of the plane may have been the work in the immediate sense of the
secessionists in eastern Ukraine, but they would not have had the necessary
weapons system had Moscow not given it to them and would not have fired it had
they not convinced their Russian controllers that they needed to shoot down a
plane to prevent the defeat of the secessionist cause.
In the wake of the surrender of
Slavyansk by the secessionists, both they and Moscow were worried enough to use
ground-to-air rockets to shoot down Ukrainian military planes bringing in
supplies, actions that the secessionists have acknowledged in other cases. The real question is why was Russian
oversight so bad in the case of the Malaysian civilian airliner?
According to Akhmetov, the
secessionists made a mistake, but they succeeded in getting Moscow’s authorization
to shoot because they exploited the nervousness of Russian commanders and of
Moscow not only about the military situation in southeastern Ukraine but also
about what could happen in Russia itself in the event of a total collapse of
the secessionist project.
Unless they got authorization, the
Kazan editor says, the secessionists implicitly threatened that the Donetsk
Peoples Republic would “suffer a defeat” and be forced to “evacuate tens of
thousands” of armed men into the Russian Federation where they would pose a
threat to the political situation there.
Out of fear and in confusion, the Russians authorized the launch, and
the result was tragic.
In many ways, this represented a
playing out of the misconception Putin himself had about southeastern
Ukraine. As he repeatedly has said,
Russia won in Crimea without firing a single shot or without the loss of a
single life and without the imposition of Western sanctions. The Kremlin leader
clearly expected the same thing elsewhere in Ukraine.
But he failed to understand two
crucial realities. On the one hand, southeastern Ukraine is significantly less
ethnically Russian and significantly more integrated into Ukraine than was
Crimea, with 80 percent of its population being Russia and its anchor being the
Russian naval base at Sevastopol.
And on the other, while ethnic Russians
in southeastern Ukraine might have accepted the integration of their region
into the Russian Federation if the Russian army had come to occupy them, they
were not and are not willing to fight for that outcome. Because Putin
recognized that he could not send in the army without provoking a major war, he
thus found himself in a position where he could not win.
In short, Putin was pushed into a
corner, something that ensured that he would make mistakes because of his own
nature. As a KGB officer, Putin was
trained never to trust anyone. His suspiciousness of others, even those
nominally closest to him, represents a problem that may be even greater to his
future than any threat posed by the West.
And even before he became a Soviet
intelligence officer, Akhmetov says, Putin had a childhood experience about
what happens when someone is driven into a corner. As he has told journalists,
he drove a rat into a corner with a stick. The rat retreated until it had
nowhere to go and then it attacked.
“I once and for all time understood,”
Putin said, “what the phrase ‘driven into a corner’ means.”
Because he trusts no one, the
Kremlin leader could easily imagine that the leaders of the secessionists would
turn on him if they were allowed to go down to defeat. And because he can see
that they feel that they have been “driven into a corner,” Akhmetov continues,
they have all the more reason to come out fighting against the man they blame
for their predicament.
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