(Image: Private Media)

They came over just before dawn, darkening the sky, portending terrible things… “How the US and Europe lost the post-Cold War!” “Vladimir Putin’s actions … [are] winning this hands down!” “Ukraine is closer to home than you think!” And on and on.

There has not been much else to throw into the fight. Indeed, The Times in London insisted that what Putin feared most were “Western ideas, not weapons”. Which is a good thing, because when it came to committing weapons to defend Ukraine, we have shied away. The resolute declarations from the West on the civilisational nature of this crisis are coming off the carrier deck at three-minute intervals. 

Mind you, Russian President Vladimir Putin has given them plenty to work with. It is one thing when the new authoritarians start to behave like James Bond villains. It is quite another when, as per Putin’s hour-long broadcast 48 hours ago, when they start to look like Austin Powers villains. 

In the standard “rambling” style, Putin dug deeper than Western and NATO incursion towards Russia’s borders, and made the “Russian empire” argument that there was no such thing as Ukraine, that its peoples had always been part of Russia, and that the Bolsheviks were to blame for policies of “Ukrainisation” in the 1920s before, under Stalin, they tried, er, something else. 

To say there is some truth to this will get me accused of being a Russian stooge, so let me say that there is no justification for Russia’s incursion into two self-declared republics in eastern Ukraine, and Crikey’s management and that of Launceston’s The Examiner join me in warning Mr Putin…

Got that on record? OK. Well, the beef of “Great Russians” everywhere is that in the 1920s, the Soviets set out on a deliberate policy of strengthening non-Russian nationalities in order to offset “Great Russian” chauvinism, which they thought might serve as a basis for a fascist counter-revolution (imagine!). Massive work went into standardising Ukrainian, Georgian and other languages, teaching the culture and pushing the idea of a union of republics. 

In the case of Ukraine, “Great Russians” have argued that there was a degree of invented tradition going on — that the area known as Ukraine had been occupied by a bewildering range of peoples, and that “Ukrainians” were really early Russians — the emergence of the “Rus” based around Kyiv, marking Russia’s founding (actually by Vikings, but leave that aside). 

This notion of a lost homeland and unity came to be deployed particularly during the Orange “revolution”, when a corrupt pro-Russian president was replaced by a corrupt pro-EU president after a flood of money, advisers and support from the US State Department, the EU, spy agencies, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, etc etc, helped the nascent movement arguably crookedly depose a crookedly elected leader.

For “Great Russianists” such as Putin — a fan of Stalin but not Lenin — that marked the initial form of recolonisation and manipulation from the West, which followed on from the Bolsheviks’ application of Western republican ideas to “Great Russia”. Ukraine joining NATO would then mark the final division, with Ukraine eventually joining the EU as well. 

To what degree is Putin dead serious about this, and to what degree is it a “mad dog” feint to make his relatively minor military action — the support of two small breakaway, Russian-dominated republics in the east, parts of which were fused with Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev when Crimea was reallocated to Ukraine in the 1950s? 

That is hard to know. If Putin is playing up to the mad autocrat image, he’s been doing it for a while now. The sleek, Western-style leader in a sharp suit and mildly repressive style is gone, replaced by the bare-chested-with-tigers kleptocrat sending stooges to poison dissidents in English tourist towns. He’s been more than two decades in power, and that will do things to your sense of reality. 

Would Putin be intent on dismembering Ukraine entirely had there not been talk of extending NATO in the giddy globalist ’90s? That is impossible to say, but in realpolitik terms we have certainly given Russia pretext to secure its field of influence and a buffer zone against Europe proper. The notion that Ukraine was “always part of Europe” is another propaganda product of the post-Cold War period, matching, perhaps exceeding, Putin’s “Great Russianism”. 

The op-ed squadrons lamenting that Putin has outplayed the West aren’t calling for a reexamination of how the West has operated these past few decades. It’s an attack on Western decadence, a lack of confidence in our own civilisation. In the next few days, they’ll roll out the next line of attack: that “wokeness” so weakened the West as to give Putin his head in extending Russia’s territory, with President Xi Jinping and China the next to have a crack. 

But the plain fact remains that Western expansion of the West itself weakened the cultural factors needed for Europe to have a warrior complexion. By presenting the West as the natural and inevitable order of the world, carried by capitalism and technology, the powers that be weakened the notion of collective defence of one’s particular homeland. 

If Russia invades fully, the West should certainly provide Ukraine with the means to fight. But who except Ukrainians would die for it? NATO’s power cannot really be extended because the opposition in Europe to full-scale war in Ukraine would bring down governments and possibly break up the alliance.

It’s an open question as to whether Western Europe would fight for Eastern Europe under the NATO command. Is NATO viable as an operative command at all? 

Indeed, the only place in Europe I’ve seen with real resolve to fight if need be was in Sweden and Finland, the former still with national military/civil service, a strong sense of collective nationhood created by a fair-ish economy and, of course, as woke as you can get. 

But no matter what happens, these inconvenient truths will be disregarded, and the op-eds calling us to war, or damning our weakness and wokeness, will continue. The question of Europe’s collective security, much less our collective security, will remain unresolved, no matter what the outcome in these faraway places on which we have all become instant experts.