An unprovoked invasion
By Richard Galant
In the early morning hours of August 2, 1990, columns of Iraqi tanks crossed the border into Kuwait, taking over the smaller nation. The world’s response to Saddam Hussein’s surprise assault on a sovereign country was swift and ultimately devastating.
A coalition led by the US, with the support of the United Nations Security Council, attacked Iraq and restored Kuwait’s independence. But the consequences of the unprovoked war didn’t end there: For three decades, Iraq was required to compensate the Kuwaiti victims of Saddam’s invasion. Just this past Tuesday, the Security Council voted unanimously to confirm that Iraq had fulfilled its obligation after it paid out $52 billion.
It’s an accident of timing that within two days Russian President Vladimir Putin would announce that he had launched a war against neighboring Ukraine. He called it a “special military operation,” but it was in reality an unprovoked invasion. Democracies around the world condemned it. But this is not 1990, Ukraine is not Kuwait and most importantly, Putin is not Saddam.
After all, the Russian president presides over a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons. He promised “such consequences that you have never experienced in your history” to anyone who “tries to interfere with us…”
While NATO countries are strengthening defenses on the alliance’s eastern flank and the West is imposing severe sanctions, none are intervening directly in Ukraine’s defense. So the key question is: What, if any, is the long-term price Putin will pay? One outcome thus far: nearly worldwide condemnation of Russia for its president’s attack on Ukraine and a wave of sympathy for the people of Ukraine.
“The threat from a nuclear-armed dictator defying the international community and sending a massive military machine to crush its neighbor in the 21st century cannot be overestimated,” wrote Frida Ghitis. “The international community, led by the US, cannot be intimidated by a Russian tyrant who throws his critics in prison and invades his neighbors.”
Russian officials had repeatedly denied US assertions that it was preparing to invade Ukraine. But “in the end, Putin did exactly what President Biden told the world he would do: He launched an invasion of Ukraine on a runway of lies,” Ghitis noted.
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“The challenge for the West could not be clearer,” wrote Russia scholar Daniel Treisman. “If Putin succeeds in undermining Ukraine, he is unlikely to stop there. His distrust of the West and expansive view of Russia’s destiny are by now deeply entrenched. Our policy must raise the cost of eroding the international order.”
At a 2015 reception, Treisman “asked Putin about his planning for the occupation of Crimea. ‘I was even surprised at how well it went!’ he told me with a smile. The West must make sure he does not find it so easy this time.”
The sanctions
A UN Security Council resolution condemning the invasion was vetoed by Russia Friday, but international law expert Mary Ellen O’Connell argued that “the UN General Assembly — the body that includes all 193 member states — could activate the Uniting for Peace Resolution and meet in an Emergency Special Session to coordinate worldwide sanctions and other measures to enforce the Charter…The General Assembly can demonstrate to Russia in the current crisis how isolated it is and launch a global campaign of sanctions.” On Saturday, the US proposed such an emergency session of the General Assembly.
Do sanctions exact enough pain to stop an aggressor like Putin? Peter Bergen is skeptical: “Authoritarian regimes generally shake off even draconian sanctions at the expense of their own people. Look at Kim Jung Un’s North Korea today or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1990s; punishing US sanctions helped to immiserate the North Korean and Iraqi populations with scant consequences for their regimes.”
Such action wouldn’t likely shake Putin’s determination to dominate Ukraine, an impulse he made clear in his remarks Monday. “On the cusp of declaring portions of Ukraine as stand-alone ‘people’s republics,’ he embarked on a rambling, distorted and utterly chilling hour-long rewrite of Russian and Soviet history in a televised speech to his nation,” wrote David Andelman, who called it a “frightening insight” into Putin’s thinking that should alarm the Baltic states and other former republics of the Soviet Union.
“For the strongman, a government’s only meaningful source of legitimacy is strength,” wrote Franklin Foer in the Atlantic. “Borders are simply an expression of a nation’s might. A people’s sense of nationhood and its claims to its own history are meaningless if it is too weak to defend itself…
“If Putin is bent on provoking NATO into a wider war, will Biden join it? These are dreadful questions, where high ideals crash against terrifying realities, and they will define the Biden presidency.”
Looking at the potential downside for Biden, Julian Zelizer pointed to the damage Jimmy Carter’s presidency suffered as a result of his failure to persuade the Soviet Union to end its invasion of Afghanistan. “If this Russian assault on Ukraine continues for months and the humanitarian crisis turns out to be as bad as some expect, Biden’s inability to take stronger action could become a major liability going into the midterms and the 2024 election,” Zelizer wrote. “It will only be a matter of time before Republicans start reminding the public that a Democrat was in the White House both times Russia invaded Ukraine in the past decade.”
Bravery in Kyiv
In Kyiv, Olesia Markovic’s husband woke her up on Thursday with news that Russia was firing shells at Ukrainian targets.
“Kyiv is facing a new reality,” Markovic wrote. “Lots of people left in the morning, causing traffic jams on exit roads from the city to the south and west. We — my husband and eight-year-old son — decided to stay. Watching the live feed of traffic on TV we figured that it would be safer to stay home. Especially given that all infrastructure in Kyiv — electricity, internet, mobile phone connection, subway — still worked just fine…”
“We have packed the necessities — folder with documents, laptops and carriers for our three pet cats in case we hear the shelling siren and have to go to the bomb shelter.” Her son got a day off from school “and doesn’t seem concerned — after all, random school closures became the norm during lockdown. He took a choco-spread sandwich and went to the living room to watch Ironman (his favorite superhero) while we remained glued to our phones and updates of war.”
Friends have offered her sanctuary in the US and many other countries, but “what is much more important now is to build a safety net for Ukraine. That means calling on the international community for help — diplomatic solutions, sanctions, pressure on Russia — anything that would make a dictator stop in his tracks.”
“In the meantime, Ukraine will stand strong. It’s not the first time in our history that we resisted a threatening empire. Over the last 100 years we survived through Soviet-orchestrated famine, GULAGs and attacks on Ukraine’s intellectual elites.”
In the western Ukraine city of Lviv, Michael Bociurkiw wrote Thursday, “The streets were empty and quiet but as the first rays of daylight emerged, anxiety and fear had begun to take hold: air raid sirens blared across the fortresses, churches and quaint cobblestone streets of Ukraine’s cultural capital. A male voice instructed people to shelter in place and turn off their gas connections. People started to form long lines at bank cash machines and head to the markets while they were still open.”
“While the full-scale invasion may have shocked some Western leaders,” Bociurkiw noted, “the least surprised were the Ukrainians themselves, expressing an ‘I told you so’ attitude. Ukrainians always knew the sanctions threatened by the West were going to be too weak, and not go far enough in deterring this awful reality.”
In Russia, police locked up more than 2,000 demonstrators protesting Putin’s war. “This is not a popular war among the Russian public,” wrote Mathew Schmidt. “It’s important for Westerners to understand that ethnic Ukrainians are a large minority in Russia. Millions of Putin’s citizens have friends or relatives staring up the barrels of Russian guns.”
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A national hero for Ukraine
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a comedian-turned-politician whose popularity had declined sharply before this crisis. But, as Jay Parini wrote, “The past week has transmogrified Zelensky from a rapidly dwindling presidential figure into a national hero on a massive scale. He has shown himself to be a man who has dug into himself and found an inspiring store of courage. When the United States offered to evacuate him from Ukraine, he stood his ground, saying, ‘The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.'”
“He has posted several videos online, and they’ve inspired a fierce defiance among the Ukrainian people. In one video titled ‘We are here. We are in Kyiv. We are protecting Ukraine,’ Zelensky can be seen surrounded by his top advisers. ‘We are all here. Our army are here. Citizens and society are here,’ he says. ‘We are defending our independence, our state, and it will remain so.'”
“Zelensky, a fluent Russian speaker, has also appealed to Russians in another video, urging them to ‘just stop those who lie, lie to you, lie to us, lie to everyone, to the whole world. We need to end this war. We can live in peace, in a global peace.'”
“His gifts for communication and his remarkable grasp of social media make him a formidable opponent for Putin,” Parini noted, “even though the army he commands, in sheer numbers and resources, pales beside Russia’s.”
Addressing Putin, Christian Caryl wrote in the Washington Post that “over the past few years, Ukrainians (and the rest of the world) have seen more and more clearly the crass divide between your protestations of pan-Slavic brotherhood and the cynicism and corruption of your regime. Your speeches in recent days, in which you depicted Ukrainians as citizens of a half-imaginary country whose fate should be determined by the Kremlin, will only deepen the rupture between Russians and Ukrainians… You can try to seize power through force and fear and lies — but you have already lost the war of ideas…even if you try to terrorize Ukrainians into accepting a pro-Russian leader as your proxy, that effort will not endure, either. Ukrainians have been through that before.”