Ukraine is a proxy for so much more than just this war.
There is a deep history to consider — going back to the cold war, going further back to the idea of a greater communist Russia, its Great Game with Britain and Iran to dominate the Caucuses, and even further back to the idea of Kievan Rus, the first Slavic state, established in the thirteenth century, with its capital in what is today Kiev.
Ukraine is at the centre of a historical clash that owes more to the post-cold war order than anything in the nineteenth century.
In the post-war period, NATO and the countries in the Warsaw Pact were toe-to-toe, divided by an ambiguous line between central and middle Europe.
But one side collapsed.
And the West, through the US-led NATO, expanded eastwards; it has every nation under its wing except Belarus, which stays pro-Russia, and Ukraine, which is deeply split between being pro-Russian or pro-west. Bosnia and Georgia are still keen to join.
However, Russia is not a socialist republic. For many, it is a ‘klepto-gangster-capitalist-oligarchic’ state ‘headed by a madman’, where ‘ordinary Russians suffer under the tyranny of a dictator’, lest they exhibit utter loyalty to what is presented as a rightful, nationalist cause that is regaining status in a world that has turned to neoliberal globalisation everywhere. We are all consumers now.
Ukraine has free and fair elections (to the extent that any elections in parliamentary democracies are free and fair anywhere in the world today), an open media landscape, and is pro-western. On the western side, the country has its closest ties to the West, whereas Ukrainians in the east are Russian-speaking, having been forcibly migrated there by Mother Russia over the years, in part to offset the challenge that Russia faces today.
Indeed, the West has encroached on Russian borders and expanded NATO against everything that was promised in the early 1990s. In some ways, Putin has a legitimate argument to resist this expansion, but he does not have any legitimacy to start a war on a country that is deeply divided as to whether it wants to tilt westwards or eastwards (even though the West has been pulling Ukraine in its direction).
But what has disturbed me about this whole episode over the last few days and weeks now is the disproportionate and asymmetric focus on Ukrainian refugees and how they have been welcomed as guests in neighbouring countries and how the people of colour there as students or workers have been stopped at the borders and, in some cases, told to stay and fight. This has been well documented, and we have all seen the videos, which were picked up by many commentators, including Moustafa Bayoumi, professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Trevor Noah of The Daily Show.
Does this amount to endemic racism among the self-selected journalists of mainstream television, print, and digital media news? Certainly yes, in part because it is also the time that western newsmakers see refugees of no colour or sharing religious backgrounds coming to their home countries. Let this be a reminder too that human suffering cannot be measured in threats to civilisation. It is at times like this that exceptionalism has no room.
Ordinary people are the ones who will suffer most. In Russia because of sanctions combined with their voices being entirely silenced by a leader who has absolute power, and in Ukraine, where they are getting bombed to hell and over 1.5 million people are on the move, possibly never to see their homes again.
At the same time, Putin effectively raised Grozny to the ground, and Russia also succeeded, albeit indirectly, in destroying the historically significant seventh-century city of Aleppo. It is arguably because of Putin that Assad is still in power. It is allegedly the case that because of Putin, so much disinformation went on to put Trump into power (although it was Trump who asked Ukraine to help him get dirt on the Democrats). It is believed Putin’s involvement in helping the Brexit vote tilt to leave has made Britain a distant voice in Europe. Putin is utterly demonised in the West.
While we might think that the West has been moving further eastwards against its original promises in relation to Russia, what Putin is doing now is outrageous and entirely uncalled for. But no two wrongs make a right, and the only people suffering are everyday people. The truth and endless human suffering are the perennial tragedies of war.
What happens next is still unclear. In some ways, the West will want this over with so it can concentrate on destabilising Putin from within. Meanwhile, Ukraine will be thinking about membership in both the EU and NATO. But the entire world will be worried about the coming months due to the hard-hitting effects of inflation, high interest rates, and unstable economies in the wake of the pandemic that has not yet been fully shaken off.
This war has come when the West has been least prepared for it — but in other ways, it should have seen it coming and never given Putin the upper hand.