BIG READ: Ukraine’s fight is for the world as we know it

Ukraine has been fighting for its existence for almost 28 months since Russia’s invasion on 24 February 2022.

Data scientists, using satellite imagery augmented with on-the-ground reporting, have constructed an interactive mapping of the enormous physical damage Russia has wreaked on its neighbour.

So far, more than 210,000 buildings have been ruined, including more than 900 churches, hospitals and schools, which were supposedly protected in terms of the Geneva Conventions on war. Mariupol, just two years ago a thriving city of 500,000 people, has been reduced to rubble. A Human Rights Watch report summarises Mariupol’s decimation as “the crucible of Russian cruelty”, and a new submission to the International Criminal Court in The Hague charges Russia with war crimes for its deliberate starvation tactics in its 85-day siege of the city.

There is also clear evidence that a year ago Russia blew up the Kakhovka Dam in occupied Kerson Oblast (province) in southern Ukraine. The Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant was destroyed, an enormous area along the Dnipro River flooded and hundreds of thousands of people evacuated dozens of towns and villages. It was one of Russia’s “most serious crimes against the environment and people”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Russia has now ramped up attacks on power infrastructure throughout the country.

Human suffering

Consider the human suffering to date. In the fog of war, it’s unclear how many civilians have died (estimates are 10,300- 30,500), been injured, or made refugees. But a number proudly admitted by Russia’s so-called commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, is that more than 700,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped from their homeland and taken to Russia.

The scale seems unfathomable. And big numbers are numbing. In the 2007 essay If I look at the mass I will never act: psychic numbing and genocide, University of Oregon psychology professor Paul Slovic, explains why we feel more empathy reading about just 46 of these Ukrainian children in a New York Times exposé about how this was done and who was responsible.

It also explains why mass atrocities such as the Bucha massacre in April 2022 slip through our collective conscience. Fleeting television reports did not capture the horror, and awful events unfolded elsewhere in Ukraine. But 485 civilians and prisoners-of-war were murdered during Russia’s air assault regiment’s occupation of the town, many after being tortured or raped. Bucha is a half-hour’s drive from Kyiv.

When Russia invaded, how close did Ukraine come to being wiped off the map? In The Showman, a biography of Zelensky focused on his presidency in the months leading up to the invasion and the first year of the war, Time Magazine international affairs correspondent Simon Shuster concludes about the six-week Battle of Kyiv that “had it ended differently, the Kremlin could have replaced Zelensky with a marionette and pushed the edge of Moscow’s dominion right up to Poland’s eastern border”.

Another remarkable book, Diary of an Invasion, cuts through the soullessness of numbers and the obscurity — for us in SA — of faraway places. Written by award-winning Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, it is alternately harrowing and humorous, satirical and deadly serious. Until the war is long over and a true accounting can be done, it is the closest the world is likely to get to understanding the hour-by-hour, day-by-day impact on ordinary people of a 21st century war in Europe.

Kurkov’s diary chapter for March 28 2022 notes that Russian forces have been pushed back 30km-50km from Kyiv. He betrays a glimmer of hope, writing about the idea of planting vegetables in his garden “to live a normal life again”. Immediately he corrects himself: “In actuality, there can be no normal life for my generation now.”

URGENT PLEAS TO ALLIES

Nato was formed in 1949, and 75-year celebrations are scheduled at a Washington summit in July. Ukraine has never been a full member, but since 1994 has been one of 18 affiliated Partnership for Peace (PfP) countries. Nato’s official website has a portal dedicated to news updates, authoritative standpoints and supportive articles towards Ukraine, such as one headlined “An independent and sovereign Ukraine is key to Euro-Atlantic security”.

Precisely how Nato’s PfP arrangement has helped Ukraine is difficult to discern. Officially, co-operation was deepened after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. But in the last 18 months of crisis the most important aspect, US weapons, have been provided piecemeal.

As US naval war college professor Tom Nicols points out, it’s an irony of democracy that the latest $61bn package was approved in April only after a year’s stalemate within the US’s political system, procrastination caused by a handful of former president Trump’s acolytes delaying approval for purposes of domestic grandstanding. This despite the majority of experienced Republicans — hawkish, genuinely conservative — knowing that the cost of various weapons tranches is cheap compared with the cost of a wider war, and tiny compared with the price of a Russian victory.

“Ukraine needs more weapons, not GOP drama,” wrote Nicols in a scathing commentary for The Atlantic magazine.

The period of stalled US weapons support reversed Ukraine’s counteroffensive successes in the second half of 2022, and has now swung the military situation in Russia’s favour. What more could Nato be doing?

In May Zelensky challenged Nato to shoot down Russian missiles, pointing out that this would be neither a direct attack on Russia, nor violate Russian airspace, nor risk killing Russian pilots. “What’s the problem?” he asked. It’s an exasperatingly fair question, because while the West dithers about defending Ukraine, it has no hesitation in fending off drones and missiles directed at Israel by Iran.

President Joe Biden, at last, has acted concertedly. Five Patriot air defence missile systems have now been committed to Ukraine as part of a 10-year bilateral security treaty, hastily signed at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Italy. The treaty is a step closer to Ukraine’s Nato membership. Biden has also cobbled together the G7’s agreement to use $50bn accumulated interest on frozen Russian assets as a loan to Ukraine.

Albeit belatedly, by entrenching military support and guaranteeing funding flows to Ukraine, Biden is hedging against a second Trump presidency, which would almost certainly halt aid, kneecapping Nato in the process and further emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin. No wonder Zelensky has urged the West to do more. He knows his country is running out not just of resources, but of time before the pivotal November US presidential elections.

DISUNITY IN THE EU

The IMF projects Russia’s GDP to grow 3.5% for 2024, better than any of the world’s other advanced economies. War-related Kremlin spending and arms manufacture are key contributors, but so, too, are ongoing revenues from oil and gas which the West’s sanctions are supposed to curtail.

However, Europe continues to rely heavily on Russia’s energy supplies. Turkey, a Nato ally and long-standing candidate for full EU membership, is now a re-export hub for Russian commodities. Belgium, France, and Spain are still notably big purchasers of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia, contributing to its year-on-year value growth of 5% in sales to the EU in the first quarter of 2024.

The EU is investing heavily in renewable alternative energy sources, but its target date to eliminate dependency on Russia is only 2027. In the meantime, “European companies are making money facilitating Russian LNG exports”, says Benjamin Hilgenstock of the Kyiv School of Economics.

And so the EU is fraught with disunity, and Western leaders either discount or appease Putin’s aggression in the same way as events in 1938 ushered in World War 2.

Polish-American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum predicted this in her 2020 book, The Twilight of Democracy. She summarises the updated state of affairs: “We are now living in a world in which Russia is allied with Iran, China, Venezuela, North Korea and a few others. They have different goals and kinds of political systems, but they see themselves as aligned against democracy and particularly against the language of democracy — human rights, the rule of law, transparency — because those ideas are often used by their own internal opposition, which threatens their form of dictatorship.”

Ukraine, then, is the first battlefront in this larger war. And we should not think that in Africa we are shielded. Russia already has a significant military force on the continent, doing the bidding for Big Men leaders while they really serve Putin.

CALLS FOR REARMAMENT

“The EU is a peace project, and peace can only be secured through strength. We need to boost our defence industry, strengthen ties with like-minded partners, increase resilience and protect our citizens, which goes hand in hand with support to Ukraine — whatever victory takes,” wrote Lithuania’s prime minister, Ingrida Šimonytė, on X recently. The last three words are her feed’s home-page logo, coloured to match the Ukraine flag.

Lithuania has strong reason to support Ukraine. Like the other eight littoral Baltic countries that are members of Nato, its proximity to Russia makes it a front-line state. Though Estonia, Finland and Latvia share much larger direct eastern borders with Russia, Kaliningrad oblast is Putin’s Baltic enclave with a giant naval and airbase on Lithuania’s doorstep.

What would be Putin’s motive for an attack? Simply, as with Ukraine, the further restoration of the USSR’s territories lost in its humiliating dissolution in 1991. Estonia and Latvia have higher numbers of ethnic Russians among their populations, but Lithuania probably rankles Putin more, having been the first to pre-emptively and presumptuously declare independence, in March 1990.

Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, too, recently called for widespread rearmament of Europe’s military. After the Cold War “Europe didn’t just disarm, it deindustrialised in the defence field”, he said. Now, Russia’s imperialist aggression requires this to be reversed. Even the UK government, still caught in its Brexit version of Trump Republicans’ Make America Great Again (Maga) isolationism, now acknowledges the need to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP — by 2030.

By then it could be far too late.

LOOK EAST

Connections may be difficult to accept, but they are easily made. President Xi of China has taken note of the West’s slow and disjointed response to Russia’s aggression. To an extent he has been ahead of the geostrategic game’s curve. China’s New Silk Road, formally called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), was launched in 2013 as an ambitious plan to extend economic influence and power throughout Asia and central and Eastern Europe.

The BRI has morphed beyond that; today, depending on interpretations of memorandums of understanding, between 146 to 151 countries have signed up, including 44 in Sub-Saharan Africa and 22 in Latin America and the Caribbean. China’s access to resources and control of global trade routes is happening under the West’s noses.

Is the BRI a Trojan horse for China’s form of authoritarian imperial aggrandisement, which will imminently include military aggression? Days after Taiwan’s recent elections, China held naval drills in the 180km Taiwan Straits separating the island from mainland China.

This, raged China’s foreign minister, was “strong punishment” for the “separatist acts” of an inauguration speech by Taiwanese President William Lai. This is Lai’s third term, so none of what he says is new or surprising to China. Xi has actually told the world he intends to reabsorb Taiwan. If China invades, it will be with Russia’s backing — reciprocation for Xi’s acquiescence in Ukraine. Will that be a red line for the US?

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov appeared via online connection at the recent Franschhoek Literary Festival. The audience was raptly attentive to his personal experiences or anecdotes of the war — the 24-hour traffic jams as hundreds of thousands of people fled to the west of the country, burnt-out tanks on highways, air-raid sirens, villages that have not had electricity for a year or more.

There was a hush when he recounted a chapter from Diary of Invasion, headed “Bread with Blood”. When visiting his weekend home in a nearby village, his family would enjoy bread from the artisanal Makariv Bakery, renowned even in Kyiv. The bakery was hit by Russian bombs on March 8 2022, killing 13 bakery staff and maiming nine. “Makariv bread is a thing of the past,” he wrote. Remembering and describing its shape, texture and smell, now, he says, “I taste blood on my lips.”

Kurkov’s book bypasses one issue that has started to loom fearfully, and it’s another elephant in the room, at Franschhoek. “Should we be worried that Putin is lunatic enough to use nuclear weapons?” I ask him. “Putin is 71 years old,” Kurkov reflects. “The older he gets the more aggressive he gets, and at some point, if he’s not stopped, he may decide to use tactical nuclear weapons.”

But he adds that Putin is surrounded by politicians “who would prefer to send the nuclear missile to Poland or a more remote country”, noting that targeting Ukraine would mean radiation spread across swathes of neighbouring Russian territory.

This is, of course, no comfort. “There is a small chance of this,” Kurkov concludes, “but I do hope it will not happen.” Days later, Russian nuclear war drills were reported to have started in Rostov-on-Don, just 100km from Ukraine’s southeastern border.

Kurkov’s discussion at Franschhoek was titled “An existential war”. As attendees file out to enjoy fine food and wines in the culinary capital of SA it strikes me that the war is existential not just for Ukraine.

HISTORY, WHAT HISTORY?

The ruin of a country, the sword of Damocles over all of Europe, the threat to Taiwan: it seems inconceivable that the collective wisdom of liberal democracies, built up over the past 80 years is again being forfeited to appeasement and isolationism.

Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s famous but now derided book, The End of History, was written to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union as the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets. It concludes with the words “the end of history is not a triumph of any particular nation or ideology, but rather a triumph of human nature itself”.

It took a while, but Russian émigré activist and writer Masha Gessen responded in a 2017 book titled The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, a cautionary window into how Putin’s form of rule has propagandised ordinary Russian citizens.

Towards the end of the literary festival session Kurkov expresses cynicism of the hiatus in weapons assistance provided by the West. He believes the delay was intended to pressurise Zelensky to negotiate a ceasefire by ceding territory to Russia.

WHEN COULD IT END?

Another numbing number: in February the World Economic Forum estimated the cost to rebuild Ukraine at $486bn. This seems a gross understatement in relation to the 210,000 buildings obliterated, the dams and infrastructure destroyed, the environmental damage wreaked. Of course, the cost to human lives is immeasurable and unmeasurable, but the theoretical figure will grow as the war goes on.

How long might that be? Absurdly, when Ukrainian counteroffensives in August and September 2022 regained towns in Kharkiv and Kherson and pushed Russian troops out of parts of the Donbass region, some military analysts celebrated the gains as a turning point and projected the war’s imminent end. Thousands of Russian soldiers had been killed, their forces shown to be poorly trained, undisciplined and badly led.

Since then Putin has won a landslide albeit sham election, and will be president until at least 2030 — feasibly until 2036.

“You can’t understand Russia with your mind,” writes Kurkov, quoting the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev, but adding, “how can one understand Russia at all, if your mind cannot help you with this task?”

In May Putin fired his long-time defence minister Sergei Shoigu, replacing him with an economics technocrat, Andrei Belousov, who is mandated to purge corruption in the military and streamline weapons production. It signals that Putin is settling in for a long war — one he didn’t expect but which he is content to pursue.

Slovic’s article about compassion being lost in numbers was first published in the research journal Judgment and Decision Making. Two weeks ago was the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Today, does the free world have leaders capable, courageous and resolute enough to make the similarly critical judgments and decisions that lie ahead? “You are the saviour of the people,” said Zelensky as he embraced a 98-year-old D-Day veteran at the commemoration. Will his country and people be saved anew?