Ukraine

and Russia

This newsletter is coming out a day early because I wanted something out ASAP that can be used as a quick guide to understanding the profoundly serious situation in and around the independent country of Ukraine. Let’s start with a quick history review.  

During World War II, Ukraine suffered immensely under the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. I will talk more about the podcast, Gaslit Nation in the March 4th newsletter  but one of the podcasters has produced an excellent movie about this time, called “Mr. Jones”  and it is about the man who exposed Stalin’s famine in Ukraine.

The Russian Empire started to fall apart prior to World War I but the Bolsheviks held it together until 1991. I am sure you all remember how the Soviet Union then fell apart almost overnight. It was a miracle that there was no major war or bloodshed. Perhaps, the war was just postponed. Ukraine, like many other former republics of the Soviet Union, became an independent country at that time. Today, three of them are members of NATO and Ukraine could be the 4th.

The current leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer and many who study him say that he is extremely bitter about the loss of Soviet power and would like to put it all back together. There are also those who speculate that he would like very much to see the US fall apart like Soviet Union while he rebuilds his grand idea of “Greater Russia.”

Beginning in 2013, there were protests in Ukraine known as Euromaidan. The protests were pro-democracy, anti-corruption and led to the removal of a president who was basically a Russian puppet. By early 2014, Yanukovych and other high government officials fled the country. How had Yanukovych even become the president of Ukraine? Well, that is where it gets interesting.

For Putin to get Ukraine back into his “Greater Russia” vision, he had to break its ties to the West. He hired Paul Manafort to help with the kind of misinformation campaign needed to get Yanukovych in power. This is an interesting story by itself, but it is fair to say that it was Manafort’s later role in Trump’s campaign that began to raise red flags that Trump would be sympathetic to Putin’s cause and all evidence from the Mueller Report says that was the case. This is really the story of the Russian interference in the 2016 election.

If you also remember, the phone call that led to the second Trump impeachment was to the current president of Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky was democratically elected and took office in May of 2019.  On that infamous phone call, Trump threatened to withhold military aid that was key to protecting Ukraine from Russia. He wanted Zelensky to create an unwarranted investigation into Biden’s son. Fortunately, a whistleblower let us know about this call.  

As I mentioned in earlier newsletter about the Grid, one big takeaway is that Russia always uses Ukraine as a test for whatever they want to unleash elsewhere. In 2015 and 16, there were two attacks on Ukraine’s power grid.  Behind the attack was the GRU (a descendant of the KGB), the intelligence arm of the Russian military. I mention this to highlight the long term repercussions possible if Russia is able to conquer Ukraine.

Some of the former Soviet republics, those with autocratic leaders are allowing Russia to re-insert itself. In 2014, Russia took Crimea away from Ukraine. This had been a contested area because it holds a mix of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. The areas of Ukraine that Russia so far is calling independent nations are also areas where there are some populations of ethnic Russians but also many Ukrainians.

A side note of interest on the time that Russian took Crimea is that The Internet Research Agency in Russia created a fake social media narrative. It created a FB group called the Heart of Texas, promoting Texas secession and tied it to the Crimean Russians wanting to secede from Ukraine. Apparently, this group fooled a lot of Texans.

I think it is fair to say that these last years have muddied any understanding that the average America has around Russia and Ukraine. When you have Fox News actively supporting Putin and his style of autocracy, you can expect confusion. But I think what we should do is perfectly clear. Ukraine is an independent nation that will fight to stay that way. They are a nation currently training grandmothers and young children to resist the Russians. In my mind, there is no doubt that NATO and the US should do everything we can to stop Russia.

We can deploy serious economic sanctions, we can work with Europe to see that all Russian oligarchs are forced to return home and tie up their money. We can provide the weapons that the Ukrainians need to fight Russia. We asked them to give up their nuclear weapons after the Soviet Union fell in exchange for a guarantee of protection and we owe that to them.

In the long run, as Anne Applebaum says, it is time to really fight the corruption that keeps Russia powerful. If we are serious about it, then we can no longer allow wealthy Russians to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami or to hide cash in dark money states like South Dakota. We must change our own system, and that will require overcoming domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from their dark money. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, and stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies.

Today’s autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of corrupt financial structures, security services  and professional propagandists.  The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another.

We are seeing the far left and the far right both resisting the idea that the US help Ukraine. I fear that this is as delusional as was the stance of those who wanted to accommodate the Nazis. Yes, this could lead to World War III, and we can only hope that no one uses nuclear weapons. But getting ahead of this and putting a stop to Putin right now seems prudent. Siding with the Ukrainian people is the moral stance. I can only hope that this could also be a chance for new alliances in the US to finally focus on defending democracy and the rule of law. This could be a big moment for President Biden and European leaders to reassert the moral base against oligarchy and corruption. Let’s hope that Congress is up for the challenge too.