Putin, Biden and Ukraine… A tale of two egos.
How much is history the work of particular people, and how much just happens? I argue here that the war in Ukraine occurred largely because of the hubris and incompetence of two men.
Joe Biden is one of those men. His ego-driven decisions, namely unblocking Donald Trump’s veto on Nordstream II, and his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, made it inevitable that Putin would invade Ukraine. However, it was the other super ego — Putin — who made the incredibly disastrous decision to take all of Ukraine, instead of contenting himself with keeping the areas he already effectively controlled.
Essentially, hubris won out over common sense. Ukrainians and Russians will pay the price for this staggering incompetence for generations.
To make my argument I will briefly discuss both Russian and Putin history:
During the Yeltsin years, and Putin’s first terms as president, there was some hope that Russia would become a peaceful European partner. There would always be tensions, as there are between all European nations, but there was a realistic chance that Putin would lead Russia toward a competitive, but essentially cooperative role as an ally of the West.
There was even hope that Russia might join NATO.
This didn’t last. The reasons can be debated. Did American administrations and NATO not give Russia the respect it felt it was entitled to? Should there have been more aid to Russia, which was struggling after the breakup of the Soviet Union? Did the West miss an opportunity to make a friend, instead of the enemy Russia has become?
The answer is “maybe”. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, every American president tried to achieve a peaceful outcome. Regardless, it is water under the bridge now, and historians can ponder these questions. But the West has to deal with the reality that Russia is not our friend now. It means us harm and is determined to create a new authoritarian world order, with Communist China, Iran and North Korea as its allies.
And it was evident that things had changed when Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. Putin was particularly critical of the American invasion of Iraq. America preached non-invasion of sovereign nations, but then violated its own sermon when it suited its purposes. Putin had a point. When Putin took back the presidency from his puppet, Medvedev, he immediately embarked on a project to rebuild the Russian empire, and to undermine the West in every possible way.
A bit of Russian history and geography is necessary at this point: Russia and its various territories are by far the largest country on the planet. However, it largely lacks defences, like strategically placed mountain ranges and bodies of water, which act as natural defences for nations like Switzerland, Britain, and America. Russia is therefore extremely vulnerable to the invasions that regularly plagued its existence. Asiatic hordes, then Napoleon and Hitler, all swept over Russia’s vast open steppes and made life hell for Russians for a thousand years.
There are a half dozen easy land and sea routes by which Russia can be invaded. Ukraine is one. Poland, Georgia, Crimea and the Baltics are some of the others. Control of those weak points has been on the minds of every Russia czar from Ivan the Terrible and on. Putin is only the latest of those nervous czars.
And it is not hard to understand why the Russian psyche is preoccupied with the defence of the Motherland, and the need to control the weak entry points. The loss of 20 million or so of her countrymen in the last war — “The Great Patriotic War”, as it is known there — is constantly on the minds of every Russian. Putin is very much a Russian.
So, we don’t know exactly what was on Putin’s mind when he returned to the presidency, but it was certainly not warm thoughts toward the West.
Georgia was the first on his list. He invaded in 2008. Crimea was next, in 2014. It seems reasonably clear that by then Putin had decided that some Ukraine invasion would be necessary.
He began to accumulate a huge war chest. Fantastic sums of money went into that chest to outlast the international sanctions he knew would inevitably follow his invasion. The Wagner group flew in planeloads of gold from Russia’s African satrapies. The vast Russian gas and oil fields pumped out unbelievable amounts of fossil fuels sold to gullible Germans and other equally blind Europeans. Although no one — except Putin — knows how much is in that war chest, estimating it in trillions, not billions is reasonable. Suffice it to say that it is doing its job to carry Russia through a war that might last many years
Putin, in short, was biding his time since 2014. He considered the subjugation of Ukraine to be absolutely necessary for both the defence of Russia, and to restore the Russian Empire to its former glory. He knew that total control of western Ukraine was not possible. However, his plan was almost certainly to hive off the five eastern oblasts (he already had Crimea, and the effective control over much of the Donbas) and to keep western Ukraine permanently destabilized and neutered as a nation. He definitely did not want Ukraine to be allowed to join NATO, but Russian control of Ukraine was his main goal.
It should be explained here that “NATO expansion” per se is not the explanation for what Putin chose to do. (He did not invade the other former Soviet satellites, like Poland, Lithuania and the rest when they chose to join NATO.) The real reason is that Putin refuses to acknowledge that Ukraine is a sovereign nation. To Putin, Ukraine joining NATO would be an absurdity, because to Putin Ukraine remains — contrary to reality —part of Russia. “NATO expansion” was just the excuse he used to justify his invasion to his Russian subjects.
Biden gave Putin his opportunity to invade. One of Biden’s first actions on assuming the presidency was to remove the effective block that Trump had enforced on the Nordstream II pipeline, which ran under the Baltic Sea, and bypassed Ukraine. The importance of Trump’s action, and Biden’s reversal cannot be overemphasized. If Nordstream II had been completed, Russia would have been able to completely bypass Ukraine when transporting its natural gas to Germany, and other European nations. Revenue from gas and oil sales is absolutely vital to the Russian economy. Sabotage to pipelines within Ukraine that would have been inevitable following a Russian invasion would have severely impeded Putin’s money flow. With Ukraine bypassed, and the pipeline under the Baltic Sea restored, Putin did not have to worry about the inevitable disruptions that would have happened regardless of whether he took Kyiv.
The second major signal to Putin that the time was right for invasion was Biden’s incredibly incompetent Afghanistan withdrawal. We now know with certainty that it was Biden who personally insisted on withdrawing all troops, including everyone stationed at the Bagram airbase, to do some virtue signalling on the anniversary of 9/11. Biden did this against the advice of his generals. His rash decision had disastrous consequences
One was that Putin saw this staggering incompetence, and realized that he would never have a better opportunity to bring Ukraine back under Russian control.
Even then, Biden clearly signalled to Putin that if he only would be content with invading eastern Ukraine, the U.S. would not do much more than impose the token sanctions it imposed after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea.
But Putin wasn’t content with a bite of Ukraine. He wanted it all. That’s when he made his own fatal mistake — a mistake that dwarfed Biden’s by a country mile. Instead of marching into eastern Ukraine, and easily taking control there, he decided to take “the whole enchilada”. He decided to take Kyiv.
This was a mistake of massive proportions. The West could not possibly let the blatant invasion of a sovereign nation stand. The entire post-war consensus — Pax Americana — has been that powerful nations must not be allowed to invade weaker ones.
We have no idea yet of how all of this will play out. Russia’s best and brightest are leaving the country in droves, and the “wartime economy” it has been forced to revert to will likely set it back decades. In fact, whether Russia will even exist as we know it, when all the dust has settled, is unclear.
Consider: Putin already had Crimea in his control when he decided to take Kyiv. The eastern oblasts had already been so thoroughly destabilized by almost a decade of partisan war that Russian troops would probably have been welcomed as liberators. (It would have been somewhat reminiscent of how the Nazis were initially welcomed as liberators when in 1941, they marched into a Ukraine that Stalin had savaged.)
But still, Putin decided that he must take Kyiv, and the rest is now becoming history.
As stated, how all of this will turn out is unknown. At some point both sides will probably decide that negotiations are necessary to save what is left of their countries. The loss of men has been staggering. Property losses, and the loss of materiel cannot even be estimated now. It is simply enormous. For those concerned about “emissions,” all the electric cars in the world won’t make up a fraction of the emissions, pollution and environmental damage occurring every battle day. The war is a continuing tragedy.
Every war has its heroes and villains. World War II has Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. For the Ukraine war we have Zelenskyy as a probable hero. And we have Biden, with his disastrous Nordstream decision, and Afghanistan withdrawal, as one of the reasons why Putin started the war in the first place.
But we have Putin’s hubris, and resulting incompetence ultimately to blame for the continuing disaster that is the Ukraine war.
First published in the Western Standard here.
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
