UKR-TAZ

David Oks’s “Waiting for the Russians in Ukraine” is, while skewed in its bigger picture, true enough in most of its details. It also happens to be a microcosm of the world at large.

The dominance of personalistic parties, the thriving culture of corruption and retribution, the regional cleavage within Ukraine, and an elite formation process of economic privatization widely viewed as illegitimate have all conspired to cripple each attempt to establish a stable elite hegemony. Regardless of whether the attempts were of a patronal-regionalist character (Yanukovych or Medvedchuk) or liberal-nationalist character (Viktor Yushchenko or Arseniy Yatseniuk), they have resulted in a succession of ineffectual governments, which quickly lose their popularity as they are unable to deliver on much beyond symbolism. No single faction of the oligarch clans has been able to triumph over the others; neither have any of the liberal-democratic reformers managed to subdue the oligarchs as a class.

The repertoire of contention available to opponents of this system is narrow, and it centers on ideologically vague urban uprisings of a national-democratic character, always centered in the Maidan Square. These are the occasional flowerings of “democratic renewal” or “national salvation,” like the Orange Revolution in 2004 or the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, that briefly capture the liberal imagination. But this results only in some elite circulation. Ukraine’s political economy is largely unchanged, and business as usual eventually returns. 

Ukraine is, in all these details, a basketcase. (And all the more so to an economic reductionist.)

But none of these features are unique to Ukraine, and many are more broadly, even globally, systemic. Business as usual is the problem of the world (which is why climate change, for instance, isn’t being solved). The oligarchic class works hard everywhere to retain its privileges, with occasional openings to new elites and new privatizations. (The radical privatization of industry marking the end of the Soviet Union was nothing compared to the privatization of datafied cognition marking the opening of the surveillance capitalism frontier.) Personalistic parties, or party-states, with varying degrees of authoritarian vertykal, rule kleptocratically in their own patronal-regionalist spheres (not always several in a single country, as in Ukraine, but sometimes quite singularly, as in Russia, China, and elsewhere).

The liberal imagination is captured by occasional bursts of democratic energy, and more often than not these defuse soon enough into business as usual. Democracy works mainly to shift the deck chairs around (to circulate elites, as Oks puts it) and to air out some views (and some flatulence), not really to redesign the architecture.

And life goes on: young people go on dates, people joke, drink, discuss Eurovision, muddle through. As Oks asks rhetorically, “what could they do?”

Not every city provides the space and background for life to go on as well as it does in Kyïv.

The piece is nevertheless worth reading, if only to remind ourselves what Ukraine is up against when Russian armies are not on the doorstep.

At the beginning of this past week, I still believed that Putin’s military maneuvering around Ukraine was a form of grandstanding and sowing panic, with the goals of gaining a few more international concessions, asserting a stronger presence on the global stage (in part to reassert his “strength” to a wavering domestic audience), and perhaps biting off a bit more of Donbass. Full-scale war, involving an invasion of Kyïv, seemed to me an incomprehensibly crazy idea, too crazy even (I hoped) for Putin.

(As regards the Biden administration’s announcements of imminent war, they really do appear to be a well considered strategy of “calling Russia out” so as to avert an invasion, rather than egging them into war. That’s a long conversation, for another time.)

My perception has changed over the course of the week. Hearing Putin’s accusation of “genocide” by Ukraine stuck in my craw when I heard them uttered in his meeting with Olaf Scholz. The accusation is ridiculous, and could only be taken as an attempt to create a new narrative pretext for invasion. (Get ready for the social media blitz, especially if you hang out on Telegram, VKontakte, Parler, et al.) But it is not new, and it was at least reassuring to see that western governments cared enough to take note of it. One day we will be analyzing how well Biden/Blinken’s “‘we see what you’re doing’ (even if you know we won’t do much about it)” strategy worked…

By yesterday, though, after listening to Putin’s and Lukashenko’s speeches in their joint press conference, hearing about today’s joint Russian and Belarusan nuclear “exercises” (which include ICBMs and cruise missiles), seeing the beginnings of the DNR/LNR’s announced evacuations of their own “citizens” to Russia, and tuning in to some increasingly hysterical Russian media conversations, I became pretty confident that full-scale war is imminent. Putin has simply judged the likely costs — in lives, and in sanctions — to be inconsequential compared to the perceived gains of becoming a global strongman. The West does not have the belly to be drawn into a global war, and enough people and states around the world (China, among others) are prepared to let him have what he wants. And he relishes that information war that will accompany it all (with the Tucker Carlsons of the world lapping at his feet).

I have many friends who advocate peace and diplomacy. (I do, too.) Today’s Trilateral Contact Group meeting on Ukraine did not happen because the Russian side did not show up. That raises the question: what happens to diplomacy when one side refuses it? Of course, peace requires trying harder. But at some point that can end, too.

If an invasion of Ukraine goes forward, and if, as I suspect, it goes on for a while, the only hope I see is that it will overextend the Putinist state to the point, ultimately, of collapse. (He is, after all, deeply misjudging Ukrainians’ readiness to resist a Russian takeover.)

As Russian sociologist and lawyer Sergei Davidis said in a recent interview with Open Democracy, the hope is that “All this darkness will somehow lead to a collapse…” That, to my mind, would be a moment of great danger, but also a moment of genuine possibility — one in which it will be exceedingly important for global civil society to act to help Russia come together again as a post-Putinist society. (Needless to say, and as happened once before in the early 1990s, there will be others moving in with other agendas…)

At the moment, the Russian anti-war movement is small and inconsequential because of the many factors that limit its expression. That movement will also need our help as this madness unfolds.

It took Valentine’s Day for me to get it:

Putin is to Ukraine as Kanye is to Kim Kardashian, with Pete Davidson being the European/western boyfriend.

Do all crazy wars build up around V(alentine’s) Day?