The Invisible Armada

30 March 2022

In this article I try to explain that, with respect to the war in Ukraine, we are living through a clash of self-interested policies, journalistic narratives and defence doctrines between the West, Russia and Ukraine that have gradually created the conditions for a war with very serious global consequences. I also try to propose some more rational, efficient and human rights-compliant alternatives for managing the conflict.

First, it is necessary to contrast the very different circumstances and perceptions of the conflict in the West, Russia and Ukraine itself. This is logical, since the history, geography, religions (sacred and profane), traditions, and of course the material means of existence of both social realities generate collective consciences with very different biases and therefore very different ways of understanding and valuing the conflict. The basic understanding of the war that we have in the West is that Russia, led by an unscrupulous despot like Vladimir Putin, has invaded Ukraine in order to annex it by force in what is an illegitimate war of aggression. The fact that Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and therefore has the power to paralyse any military intervention by the blue helmets, as well as the fact that Ukraine is not a member of NATO, leaves the country under attack completely defenceless against a military superpower that is indiscriminately bombarding its cities and savaging the civilian population. This perspective permeates through actions that range from the symbolic initiatives of cities displaying the colours of the Ukrainian flag in public places and individuals doing so on their social media profiles, to actions by governments aimed primarily at taking in refugees (who already number in the millions), sending arms so that they can defend themselves from the invasion without direct confrontation with third states, and punishing the aggressor power with harsh sanctions. There is an indisputable logic in this interpretation, as well as a desire to do justice and support a country that has been overwhelmed by a merciless military invasion. However, this is not the only interpretation of the nature of this war.

In addressing Russia’s perspective, we must consider that understanding others, especially when they are perceived as adversaries or enemies, is neither an easy nor a comfortable exercise. I would like to make it very clear that understanding the other side neither implies legitimising it, nor of course confirming all of its arguments, let alone agreeing with it. However, in order to manage a conflict without the options being limited to subjugating or destroying the adversary, it is essential to first identify what its motivations are, so that we can find counter-arguments and proposals that persuade it to change its policies on its own initiative.

First of all, it is striking how little knowledge there is in the West about the reality of Russia, which is the main reason why both the behaviour of its government and the support of its citizens seem incomprehensible to us. Let us remember that Russia is still a country heavily conditioned by centuries of Tsarism and above all by the 70 years of communism, having not completed its transition politically, economically or culturally, so that the circumstances of the fall of the Soviet Union continue to powerfully condition its present. During the USSR’s terminal crisis in the late 1980s, the so-called perestroika, the country was torn between two projects. On the one hand, that of President Milhail Gorbachev, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and author of works such as The Common European Home, Towards a Peaceful Future for Our Planet and Mandate for Peace. Gorbachev proposed a series of reforms aimed at turning the Soviet Union into a social democracy that would coexist harmoniously with the democratic welfare states of the EU in a common house stretching from Portugal to the Urals. On the other hand, his rival, Boris Yeltsyn, represented a nationalist, conservative and authoritarian political and ultra-liberal economic project. The West denied Gorbachev support and credits, deciding to back the dipsomaniac Yeltsyn, who went so far as to bomb the Russian parliament with the elected representatives inside it, because they were opposed to his decisions going beyond what was established in the Constitution. All this happened with the complicit silence of Washington, London, Paris, etc., who congratulated themselves on the fact that Yeltsyn had brought about the end of communism and the disappearance and division of the former Russian empire, whose borders had been inherited by the Soviet Union, which was fragmented into 15 new independent states in 1991. Instead of a European democracy, the new Russia became an impoverished country under a despotic president. This seemed a minor issue to the West, not least because it meant that the ruined Russia was no longer a danger to the West after almost half a century of Cold War. It was even amusing that the former communist enemy was welcoming the arrival of Western capitalist companies, with such iconic cases as the spectacular success of McDonald’s. Even the fact that Yeltsyn was a histrionic character with ordinary manners, who appeared drunk in his activities as head of state, in which he often brazenly touched the stewardesses, was seen from the West as something anecdotal and funny, because deep down Yeltsyn’s decadence fit perfectly with the worst stereotypes about Russia and symbolized the decline of its once formidable communist enemy.

In 2000 he was succeeded in power by Vladimir Putin, who had been professionally trained in the KGB with the firm conviction that Russia was and should be a world superpower. Putin would continue and perfect the nationalist and authoritarian line marked by his predecessor, although in his case displaying a public image of absolute sobriety and correctness. In 2005, Putin declared that the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was not the Second World War but the collapse of the USSR. He said this precisely because it meant Russia’s disappearance from the world’s political elite, becoming a second-tier power. Despite suffering serious setbacks in his first years, such as the sinking of the Kursk submarine or alarming actions of Chechen terrorism that shook the world, Putin launched a long-term political project to restore Russia to its lost status. First, he subdued the opposition, silenced dissidents (often resorting to imprisonment or poisoning), used carrots and sticks with the oligarchs, and did not hesitate to raze Chechnya’s capital Grozny to the ground in order to end its de facto independence. Putin’s support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan led the West to turn a blind eye to the Chechen campaign, which Putin cleverly dressed up as an operation in line with the US-promoted war on terror.

In domestic politics, Putin was able to read the Russian mentality perfectly in order to promote himself as the leader and guardian of its national values. Through a permanent propaganda campaign extolling his virtues as an astute, inflexible statesman with a Spartan masculinity, he managed to join the list of strong men, fathers of the nation, to which his country is accustomed, from the tsars to Lenin and Stalin. From that leadership he has shown himself to be the great protector of the idea of Russia shared by most of its citizens: conservative, believing and patriotic in the face of a West considered to be in moral decline, atheistic, materialistic, individualistic, promoting homosexuality and abortion and bent on destroying Russia, the country of holy Moscow, the third Rome. This helps us understand how precise and studied, for example, both Putin’s speech on the 17th and his address at the mass meeting in the Luzhniki stadium a day later, in which he cited the Bible, the purification of Russia against traitors and undesirable ideas, and how the special operation in Ukraine reinforced more than ever the sacred unity of the people. None of this is the brainchild of Putin and his propaganda apparatus, but they are resorted to because they are pervasive in Russia’s political culture, academia, the press, the Church and the popular collective imagination. Such a mentality furthermore considers all Russians, including Belarusians and Little Russians or Ukrainians, to be one nation, so that Ukraine and Belarus are fictitious states hounded by both foreign liberals and the extreme right in these countries to turn them against Russia, into which they should be reintegrated after having been part of it for centuries, first in the Russian Empire and then in the USSR. Moreover, this line of thought has enjoyed the support of well-known Russian intellectuals of the last century, from the classics Ivan Ilyin and Lev Gumilyov to the current Aleksandr Dugin and Andrei Fusov.

As for Russia’s regaining international superpower status, this posed an enormous challenge for Putin. There is no doubt that the West took advantage of Russia’s weakness in the 1990s to stifle it definitively as a potential military rival: in the West, all former USSR satellites and a few more Slavic countries, such as Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, joined NATO, along with the three former Soviet republics of the Baltic. In this way, the United States was able to place its troops on the European border with Russia. Its eastern flank was controlled by US military bases in South Korea and Japan. To the south, Turkey is a NATO member and Georgia is a candidate, while the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq completed the encirclement, for to the north there are only frozen seas. Moreover, NATO insisted on the creation of a missile defence shield to render Russia’s nuclear arsenal useless, and conducted occasional military exercises near Russia’s border. The strangulation of Russia’s traditional sphere of influence continued through a series of citizens’ movements, known as colour revolutions, in several key countries on its periphery, such as Georgia (2004), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). All of them had the common goal of changing their governments to US and EU-friendly ones, with their financial, media and ideological support. Naturally, the gap between Russia’s self-perception as a great power and the unstoppable Western advance around it, threatening to take over not just Slavic but Russian-speaking countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, created a sense of defensive urgency and revanchism that Putin represents to perfection.

For the West, the decomposition of the USSR and the subsequent cornering of Russia were meant to isolate, weaken and definitively subdue its former Cold War enemy. However, such a policy has ended up creating a simmering resentment and boomerang effect, of which the invasion of Ukraine has been the latest episode. Thus, after Russia’s early interventions in Transdniestria (from 1992) and the subjugation of Chechnya (1999-2000), a new phase began in which the Russian army appeared much better armed and modernised under Putin’s command. The military actions in Georgia (2008) and above all in Syria, Crimea and Dombash (2014) were celebrated in Russia as the first successes abroad after a quarter of a century of humiliation. The intervention since 2020 to help a faltering Lukashenko in Belarus, as well as the one in Kazakhstan in January 2022, already heralded Russia’s determination to shore up control over its near abroad. Ukraine was the next logical target after the unsatisfactory limbo in which the Dombas was left after the 2014 Minsk agreements, as the clock was ticking against the small separatist republics in the face of Ukraine’s rearmament. Moreover, Russia’s deteriorating economy and highly questionable management of the

Covid-19 pandemic had contributed to a decline in Putin’s popularity that was highly desirable to reverse.

In addition to all of the above, it is important to add something fundamental, which is that in the face of the Western narrative on the war in Ukraine, Russia is not alone and isolated with the sole support of its now restricted channels, RT and Sputnik. Beyond its closeness to China, in countries such as Brazil, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines, Serbia, Venezuela, Cuba, Eritrea, South Africa and Kenya, there is a very high level of sympathy for Russia in the conflict. While their motives are nuanced in each case, they share its justification as a defensive reaction to the ever-tightening encirclement by NATO, which they perceive as a powerful military arm of the Western powers to subjugate the rest of the world. In this sense, they feel represented by Russia and Putin, whom they perceive as the only world leader challenging the arrogant Americans and Europeans and their neo-colonialist globalising imperialism. Furthermore, they condemn the hypocrisy of the West, the protagonist of invasions, occupations and overthrows of governments of impoverished countries, such as Vietnam (1959-75), Panama (1989) Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2000-2021) Iraq (2003-today) and Libya (2011), to name but a few of the best known. They find it outrageous that those who are now tearing their hair out over the conflict in Ukraine never considered condemning or sanctioning the protagonists of those aggressions, which caused so much damage to the countries that suffered them. They also denounce that Russian interventionism in its near abroad is extremely modest compared to the US doctrines of the big stick, national security and positive aggression, whereby the US has arrogated to itself the right to act militarily wherever its interests are affected, even in distant countries that have neither attacked the US nor pose a threat to it, as in the case of the aforementioned countries. Nor do they respect Western protests about the brutality of Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities, despite the use of hypersonic, cluster and vacuum bombs, following the Grozny doctrine, perfected by Russia in Aleppo, to destroy cities and thus prevent the dreaded urban guerrilla warfare. They counter-argue that this is no worse than the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Napalm bombs of Vietnam or the shock and awe offensive used against the urban population of Iraq, with bombing so intense that defenders were killed or exhausted, while civilians, however rebellious, were reduced to such levels of fear and misery that they were grateful for the relief of surrender.

As an illustrative example, suffice it to say that I am writing this article from Serbia, one of these countries, where the bulk of the written and audiovisual press supports the Russian thesis justifying the invasion, while denouncing the bias of the Western press. For example, at the league match between Red Star Belgrade and Kolubara at the Rajko Mitić stadium, the country’s most important stadium, on the 20th of last year, banners were displayed in several rows of the stands citing all the US military interventions in third countries, concluding with the English phrase “give peace a chance”. Although apparently anecdotal, I would like to add a personal experience from a few days ago, taken from among many others: an Orthodox pope, conversing with some parishioners, calmly said “Thank God for sending us Vladimir Putin”, which was received calmly by his interlocutors.

The other major player in the war, Ukraine, is curiously the most ignored and forgotten, almost as a passive subject on the great chessboard of the international powers. While Ukraine shares historical, linguistic and cultural ties with Russia, it clearly rejects the assimilation that Moscow takes for granted. Its population has already experienced several episodes that marked differences and disaffection, such as the Holomodor famine (1932-34) brought about by Stalin; anti-Russian pro-independence reactions, from the anarchist ones of Nestor Makhno (1918-21) to the extreme right-wing ones of Stefan Bandera (1941-43); and the nationalist revival that surprised Moscow in the years of perestroika (1985-1991) after half a century of subtle Russification of Ukraine under communism. Independence in 1991, initially with close economic and political ties to Russia, brought with it a series of ill-fated presidents who flirted with Moscow, Washington or Brussels as they saw fit. Independent Ukraine became a dysfunctional country, where oligarchs emerged to monopolise the entire nation’s wealth, with the quality of life of the population plummeting. Political corruption was a common thing, to the utter bewilderment of its long-suffering citizens. Suffice it to recall the example of Viktor Yushenko, the democratic candidate promoted by the West in 2004 who, victim of electoral fraud, finally managed to become president thanks to the popular Orange Revolution and US support. After five years in power, his performance was so calamitous that he won less than 5% of the vote in the following and fair election, a world record for a re-election bid. Meanwhile, the winner was, in an unusual twist, the protagonist of the 2004 election fraud, Viktor Yanukovych, who thus returned to power until the coup that ended his government during the Maidan revolution of 2014.

Moscow understood that coup as part of the West’s strategy to capture the countries in its area of influence, and reacted by annexing Crimea and supporting the secession of Dombas, definitively breaking the dwindling Ukrainian sympathies towards Russia. Indeed, while Russia’s goal was always to keep Ukraine as a sister Russian nation, Ukrainians once again felt that Moscow sought not their friendship but their subordination, and they literally had enough of being arrogantly denied their national identity and treated as little more than a colony. During my time in Ukraine I saw the extent to which Russia’s policy of trying to keep Ukraine under control at all costs backfired, spurring a widespread patriotic revival. People decorated everything imaginable in the colours of the flag, from children’s swings in public parks to farm huts on construction sites; the most popular souvenirs became toilet paper rolls with Putin’s face on them; the recovery of the Dombas became the common cause of the entire nation; and even most Russian-speaking Ukrainians aligned themselves against Russia. Moreover, the Dombas war, which continues uninterrupted from 2014 to March 2022, generated a striking popular cult of the army and firearms, which could be easily purchased in shops and were even advertised on the bus shelters of city bus stops. This created an almost national crusading spirit among Ukraine’s citizenry, while despair at the ineffective and corrupt government of oligarch Petro Poroshenko, a disappointing outcome of the Maidan revolution, led to the extravagant election of a popular actor, Volodimirr Zelenski, as the new president in May 2019.

Perhaps it would have been time to turn Ukrainian policy around, but Zelenski, unable to put the country’s chaotic administration and economy in order, opted for perpetuating tension with Russia. Admittedly, negotiating the Crimea and Dombas issue, even within the framework of the 2014 Minsk agreements, would have been a very unpopular decision for his government. Moreover, Zelensky hoped that his open defiance of Moscow would win him support and protection from the US and the EU, something that has proven to be a very unrealistic expectation.

Time has shown that both the Western, Russian and Ukrainian strategies described above have led to a highly negative and damaging dynamic for all sides, detailed below.

First, Russia, confident of its overwhelming military superiority, has sought to make a swift victory that would intimidate NATO and bring Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit. In the end, in a strange exercise of unpredictability, it has found itself fighting a long war, which is predictable when trying to occupy a country of 44 million people and just under the size of France, which has been filling up with weapons for years, which is receiving even more from the West, and where apart from the army a large part of the population knows how to use them and is willing to do anything to defend their country. In addition, Russia is suffering enormous international disrepute for its attacks on civilian targets and the refugee crisis it has provoked, and remarkable diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions that are bankrupting it.

Second, the West, in principle a privileged spectator of Russia’s economic and military attrition without having to get involved in the war, is finding that taking in refugees, sending arms and sanctioning Russia is also costing it dearly and becoming increasingly unaffordable. In principle, sanctioning a state that flagrantly violates international law is a powerful and attractive alternative pressure measure to military intervention. The success of international sanctions against apartheid South Africa between 1963 and 1990 set a curious precedent, as it would end up being the exception that proved the rule. Since then, their application has never borne the expected fruits. I supervised Chidiebere Ogbonna’s doctoral thesis, which analysed the two most significant cases in recent decades, the sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the Ayatollahs’ Iran. In neither case did their regimes suffer from the sanctions, which were used rather as an excuse to justify all domestic problems and as a way of uniting the nation in the face of the damage done by measures imposed by foreign enemies. In the case of Russia, sanctions are causing it great economic damage, but they are being more of an unbalancing factor in the West itself than in Russia, driving up inflation and putting the economy on the brink of another major recession in less than a month’s time. In the case of Spain, the damage in terms of the tourism sector and exports, where Russia is one of our major clients, as well as spending on arms to be sent to Ukraine and the consequences of the conflict in terms of rising energy prices, are hugely damaging. In fact, virtually all economic sectors in all Western countries are being affected, with the major exception of the arms industry, which is a stock market darling and sees the armed conflict as a great opportunity, not a problem.

Thirdly, with regard to Ukraine, it is worth remembering that it is an extremely impoverished country, prey to rampant corruption and with an out-of-control foreign debt. I will share two illustrative examples of the precariousness in which its inhabitants live. The first is its pension system, at risk of collapse as early as 2020—as the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Denys Shmyhal, admitted at the time—despite the fact that 65% of pensioners receive less than 90 euros a month and have no access to a quality public health system. The second, I experienced during my stay as a visiting professor at Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, the country’s flagship public higher education institution. During the winter, the University cancelled classes and sent students home to study because it could not pay for heating, to widespread surprise and astonishment. Of course, given the circumstances, Ukraine’s strategy of spending the lion’s share of its budget for years on arms for a war against Russia that it could never win can only be considered erratic. Moreover, the reinforcement provided by the weapons sent by the West has not helped to solve the conflict, but only to make it longer and more destructive for both sides. The consequences of this dynamic are a growing death toll, increased material destruction and absolute collapse in all walks of life. In fact, all my Ukrainian acquaintances are already refugees or internally displaced persons, far from their homes, jobs and families. In short, the ruined Ukraine now finds itself fighting alone against Russia, with no real chance of joining the EU - given its levels of corruption and internal legislation - or NATO - as it is a country partially occupied by Russia - and becoming cannon fodder armed by and for the indirect benefit of the West and its arms industry to wear Russia down in an all-out patriotic war. Incidentally, the business of the military-industrial complex also sees a veritable economic honeymoon in the face of the multimillion-dollar budgets that are already being spent in the EU to reinforce its armies in the face of the Russian danger, despite the limited public spending of its members.

It is understandable that any country would resist a foreign invasion using all the resources at its disposal. There is no exception, from the Spanish guerrillas who resisted the Napoleonic invasion, the partisans who liberated Yugoslavia from the Nazis, French-colonised Algeria and Indochina, or the Afghanistan that fought against Red Army occupation, to today’s Ukraine. The policy of both Russia and the West in their duel for areas of power and influence is also logical. But were there alternatives that would have prevented it from reaching this point? The truth is that although pacifism, as a social movement, and peace research, as an academic discipline, have been working and offering ideas for decades, neither politicians, the press nor public opinion tend to pay attention to their proposals, which they consider well-intentioned but naïve and ineffective. Only when realistic policies and proceeding under the idea of military security have led to dead ends in terms of violence, material destruction and economic damage, as in the case of Ukraine, do those who have created the problem and feel unable to solve it seem to expect magic recipes from scholars and peace activists. For example, in our country, neither the executive, nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Defence have asked us for advice. Curiously, the Ministry of Social Affairs and the State Secretariat for the 2030 Agenda, which are far removed from the problem and whose document on the subject was not considered by the government, have done so. On the other hand, since this is an armed conflict perceived by most citizens as a struggle of good against evil, No to War has sounded to many like an empty slogan, which is perhaps why the demonstration organised in Madrid on 20 March by the AIPAZ platform, which brings together research centres for peace from all over Spain, barely attracted a thousand people in the face of general indifference.

In Ukraine’s case, demilitarisation and neutrality with the relevant guarantees of assistance in the event of invasion would undoubtedly have been the smartest policy from the outset. They had a very good basis for this in the 1994 Budapest agreements, in which Russia guaranteed the country’s sovereignty in exchange for the handover of the Soviet nuclear arsenal that remained in Ukraine. Ukrainian demilitarisation and neutrality would have allowed Russia to stop seeing Ukraine as a security risk, as it would no longer be susceptible to being a wedge for NATO penetration into its near abroad. Moreover, the Minsk agreements signed by Russia and Ukraine in 2014 envisaged reasonable constitutional reforms for Ukraine that would guarantee the rights of Ukrainian-Russians, as well as an autonomy status for Dombas ensuring Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which was a good basis for negotiation. Under the circumstances, it is unrealistic for Ukraine to aspire to regain Crimea, as the port of Sevastopol is unrenounceable for Moscow, the local population largely wishes to remain in Russia and, after all, the fact that it has only belonged to Ukraine since 1954 would make the loss more acceptable in the eyes of public opinion. The solution proposed in Minsk ended up being blocked because both sides refused to give up their policy of maximums. On the one hand, Russia saw itself as capable of preventing Ukraine from being rearmed by the West through a rapid military operation until it could take over Dombas and join NATO. On the other hand, Ukraine’s long-term goal was to regain control of the entire country without concessions, combining anti-Russian and patriotic sentiment among the population with the hope that NATO and EU support would intimidate Russia. Both forecasts failed miserably. It is regrettable that it took 33 days of war and countless deaths and material destruction before these avenues of Ukrainian neutrality in negotiations began to be explored.

In perspective, Ukraine is not at risk of invasion by its EU neighbours, while Russia will always be militarily much more powerful than Ukraine, so it does not really make much sense geopolitically for Ukraine to have an army. However, in a demilitarised Ukraine all defence funds could at last be invested in the much-needed health, education, pensions and infrastructure sectors, something much more useful and necessary for the Ukrainian citizenry. A neutral and demilitarised country runs practically no risk of invasion, as it poses no threat to any neighbour, but it could in any case have civil defence plans, a discipline as rich as it is unknown to the general public, in which citizens could be trained as an alternative to traditional military service. For example, works such as that of Anders Boserup, Andrew Mack and Gene Sharp can be consulted. The combination of war and sanctions is proving increasingly damaging and ruinous at the global level. Sooner or later a peace agreement will have to be reached, and the possibility of neutrality and demilitarisation is still the most acceptable to all, bearing in mind that at this point in the conflict all sides would have to make painful concessions. There are two huge hurdles to overcome for a future peace agreement that no one should forget. Firstly, no country will ever agree to cede a single millimetre of its national territory without exhausting all its options to keep it, and Ukraine is determined to regain its pre-2014 borders at all costs. Secondly, that states always strive to reunite all members of their nation within their borders, and never give up on incorporating territories populated by their brothers outside their borders. This is what Russia is trying to do in Georgia, Belarus, Crimea and now in trying to extend its borders at the expense of Ukraine, in what many see as a situation similar to the one that ended up splitting Korea in two.

It is urgent to reach an agreement because the human drama of war, deaths, displacements, widespread impoverishment, enmity and resentment between nations increases with each passing day. It is also because it increases the risk that the war will spread beyond Ukraine’s borders, since, unlike other recent conflicts that have been equally or more bloody, such as those in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Syria, this one could have unknown global consequences, with threats that seemed to have been forgotten since the Cold War, such as the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and even the possibility of a Third World War.

Peace negotiations can also be an opportunity to give due prominence to entities such as the UN and the OSCE, whose good offices can be of great use in reaching and legitimising agreements. They can also be an opportunity to involve not only Russia and Ukraine, but also indirectly involved powers such as China, the US and the EU, in order to lay the foundations for a common security framework that avoids further escalation of tensions that could lead to new armed conflicts. Mediators should also take into account the proposals of both peace research and humanitarian NGOs. Their knowledge and experience can be of great use in reaching agreements that put an end not only to the direct violence of armed conflict, but also to structural and cultural violence. Regarding the former, this would go beyond the cessation of hostilities to focus on combating inequality, poverty and corruption. Regarding the second, it would allow for the reconstruction of the damaged relations between the peoples currently in conflict and work on paradigms such as human security as an alternative to military security, which has led to levels of international tension comparable to those that preceded the world wars.