Putin’s delusional quest to reclaim Russian glory may turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan

On day ten of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, its President Vladimir Putin upped the ante by declaring that Western sanctions on Russia were akin to a declaration of war and warned that any attempt to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine would be tantamount to entering the conflict, the latter obviously a warning to NATO which, in any case, has already ruled out doing that.

The Kremlin remarked that the West was ‘behaving like bandits’ but that Russia is far too big to be isolated as the world is much larger than just the US and Europe.

The developments came even as Russian forces continued an intense offensive against Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol, Volnovakha, Chernihiv and inched closer to the capital Kyiv from the north, even as they encountered stiff resistance in Kyiv’s western suburbs.

In another grim sign of Putin’s plain disdain for the West, Russia on Saturday also blocked Facebook and some other websites and passed a law that allows authorities to imprison journalists for spreading information that goes against the government’s position, prompting the BBC, Bloomberg, CNN, CBC and other foreign media to suspend reporting in the country.

Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on Saturday that the number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion could potentially rise to 1.5 million by the end of the weekend from a current 1.3 million. "This is the fastest moving refugee crisis we have seen in Europe since the end of World War Two," Filippo Grandi told Reuters in a telephone interview.

It is, of course, clear from the day Russian forces invaded Ukraine that the latter does not stand a chance to repel them militarily, even if it’s the preferred outcome for most of the world.

Putin attributed the move to protect the ‘States’ of Donetsk and Luhansk which it officially recognized on February 22, besides an attempt to effect ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, a puzzling claim considering that there are no Nazis in the Ukrainian government. The current President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky is, in fact, Jewish, as was Volodymyr Groyman, prime minister of Ukraine from 2016 till 2019.

The history of the Jews in Ukraine, as a matter of fact, goes back over a thousand years. Jewish communities have existed in the territory of Ukraine from late 9th to mid-13th century and developed many of the most distinctive modern Jewish theological and cultural traditions such as Hasidism. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes the third-largest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.

Putin also seems to have conveniently forgotten that the Jewish community’s religious life was squashed by Soviet authorities. Going by historical evidence, Jewish identity didn’t exist in the Soviet Union, because it couldn’t. From the time of Stalin onward, the passports of Jews were stamped to mark them as such, just the way the Nazis behaved with them.

Putin, however, evidently believes that the Soviet Union saved the world from Nazism in the 1940s, and that the greatest number of Soviet sympathizers to the Nazis were in Ukraine. He is convinced that he can protect Ukraine and Russia from what he imagines to be a resurgence of Nazism in Ukraine, although there’s no evidence of any such resurgence.

An explanation for Putin’s world view is that there is no greater moment in Russia’s modern history than 1945, when the Red Army marched into Berlin, leading to the downfall of the Third Reich. That is the absolute high point of Russian pride and achievement and sense of mission and purpose and greatness. Russia not only withstood the Nazi onslaught after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941 — the largest and most lethal military attack ever waged in history — but also turned the tide and crushed Nazi Germany, though it wouldn’t have been possible, of course, without Western Allied forces taking on Hitler’s juggernaut.

This victory over Nazism penetrated the psyche of common Russians, helping them to some extent to come to terms with horrifying domestic events like the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinism. Putin, long before troubles with Ukraine started, has been making the defeat of Nazi Germany the cornerstone of Russian identity. However, his recent speeches indicate that he seems to have unduly magnified this threat from ‘Nazis’ in his mind. It’s as if he can’t stop fighting the Second World War over and over again.

Over the last few months, he has also been speaking of ‘genocide’ in Ukraine against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, which is nothing but delusional thinking. It is true that the Ukrainian government has made various attempts to declare Ukrainian the only official language of the country, even though there are many people who are native Russian speakers. This, ironically, includes Zelensky himself, who is said to be more comfortable speaking in Russian than in Ukrainian.

There is speculation that Putin’s isolation during the pandemic may have contributed to these delusions, but being in power for 20 years can foster a kind of hubris and a sense of being all powerful. He has eliminated domestic resistance in Russia, with no one to challenge him on the horizon. He is clearly surrounded by yes-men and living in an echo chamber, as autocratic rulers like to do.

It has, of course, been documented extensively that Putin’s actions are symptomatic of an obsession to slow down or reverse the disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet empire. What everybody thought was this miraculously peaceful and sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 turns out to have been the first step in a longer process. And Putin’s military campaign to that extent may well turn even more ugly and violent in the months and years to come.

So far as the current conflict in Ukraine is concerned, interventions being made by the panicking international community – Israeli PM Naftali Bennett’s surprise visit to Moscow on Saturday and being ensconced in a meeting with Putin for over two hours being the latest such significant development – may well lead to an uneasy ceasefire being enforced in the war-torn region.

It seems more and more unlikely, at this juncture, that Putin would be able to or allowed to literally go the whole hilt and conquer Ukraine in the true miliary sense of the term. The stakes would seem to be simply too high for the West to digest such an eventuality since it would, among other things, only whet Putin’s appetite for further territorial conquests.

The chances are good that Putin settles for sending just enough Russian military might into Ukraine to avoid outright defeat. The country would then become a quagmire just as Afghanistan was to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev after 1979 and to the U.S. and its allies after 2001.

The cost in human terms would still be shocking, not just for Ukrainians but also to Russian soldiers and ordinary Russians suffering repression and hardship due to international sanctions.

But Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin clearly couldn’t care less.

(Views are personal)