A Ukraine Miscellany (VI): Mackinder's Pivot, Bucha, and Crimea

By demanding Russian rubles as the means of payment, Putin is attempting to 'blackmail' the European nations that still rely upon Russian gas. At least this is the argument we've been presented with by the mainstream media in the West. This is not only an unfair charge, it's incoherent.

First, Euros are basically worthless to Putin as the sanctions regime has cut off his opportunity to do anything with them. He can't meaningfully deposit them, move them, or exchange them. So what do they expect him to do? Of course he wants rubles and in addition to seeking payment in terms that has some kind of functional value, he's undoubtedly desperate to prop up his currency. Blackmail? Just who is blackmailing whom?

Second, this touches on the incoherence of the sanctions strategy from the standpoint of the EU. The US and the NATO leadership want to sanction his regime in order to break it and yet the truth is that many of the nations of Europe cannot survive without Russian gas. This is why Macron and Scholz have sought a modus vivendi as opposed to all out war. And yet their hands have been forced by the US campaign and it will be interesting to see if Macron survives this episode. A couple of months ago he was at the zenith of his power and he may retain the presidency but at present with the first round of elections taking place – he suddenly appears a little shaky. The dubious narratives and machinations alongside the economic instability and pain (now compounded by the war) has placed his candidacy in jeopardy and has opened the door to Right-wing parties all across Europe.

In terms of history and the larger questions surrounding geo-strategic planning, we are forced to return to Hitler's designs on Russia and Ukraine – the latter of which (as a concept) has historically involved rather fluid borders. From Russian gas and oil to the black earth of Ukraine and the Kyiv's relation to the global economy, the reality that strategic planners have long noted once more comes to the fore. In the industrial age the region of the world roughly corresponding to Ukraine and Southern Russia (the old Pontic Steppe) is essential for any power that would seek to dominate the globe or at the very least control Western Eurasia. This in part overlaps with Mackinder's 'Pivot Area' and his theory that control of Eastern Europe was essential to controlling Eurasia and the larger World Island. Later thinkers like Brzezinski modified this and in the post-Cold War setting placed more focus on Central Asia which helps to explain why the US invested so much time and energy in the region – only to fail in the end.

Putin cannot control the Eastern European Pivot (which includes the Caucasus) or extend his power over the wider Eurasian landmass, but he can disrupt its politics and thus his hostile regime has long been unacceptable to the West and in particular the United States. This is not to say the West's agenda in the region is a reiteration of Nazi ideology. No, Hitler packaged his agenda in a specific way and related it to nationalist and racial narratives. And yet, the Lebensraum concept was not merely about German living space and dreams of Aryan ancestral lands. It represented a larger geopolitical strategy and understanding that antedated and transcends the Hitlerian epoch. This is why even though the Nazis do not hold power today (though elements of their ideology persist among the resurgent fascistic parties of the West), the basic geopolitical issues (outlined by thinkers like Mackinder) remain and this is why Putin has watched with horror the emergence of a unified German-dominated EU combined with the more recent historical enemy in Washington marching east under the NATO banner.

It's not June 1941 all over again, but an echo of it, a potentially dangerous sequel that he has feared and has tried to curtail. Instead, he has made a major miscalculation akin to Nicholas I in 1853. By some estimates, the Tsar had also been 'tricked' into the conflict that would become The Crimean War. The subsequent Russian defeat would reduce Moscow to a second-tier status for a generation.*

Even now, markets are in turmoil across the world, inflation is rising, and governments are in crisis. As always the politics of places like France, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Honduras, and Peru and elsewhere are connected to larger questions but at the same time their tensions and social crises are being amplified by the struggles and questions of resource control, fuel prices, fertilizer, supply shortages, and again – inflation.

While the West isn't after 'Lebensraum' in the capture of Ukraine (under the aegis of NATO), it is after its resources (and the control of them), and planners view Ukraine as a platform from which to launch its next phase in the campaign against Moscow. The war has amplified and accelerated the crisis and there's a real hope that Putin's regime can be removed and the map re-oriented.

The Bucha Massacre is being used as a mean of intensifying the conflict and it's being wielded by the United States as a force of compulsion and coercion when it comes to Europe – to bring nations into line and to bow to US energy and geostrategic policy. Massacres are part of war to be sure and while one has little trouble believing the Russian army capable of such crimes, the timing is suspicious and certainly has proven convenient. While I think it's a mistake to question the massacre's reality or the fact that Russians are committing terrible crimes, a plausible case can be made that questions the official narrative.

Putin is decried as a war criminal (and he probably is) and yet it's highly unlikely that he would have ordered or approved of such deliberate slaughter – knowing that it would only inflame and unify Western resolve. Unlike American leaders and top generals who are exonerated from any responsibility when American troops commit massacres – Western leaders have sought to personally indict Putin for these deaths. The West always dresses up American atrocities in the language of 'rogue actors' and the fog of war, but not so when it comes to Putin and Russia. They want to hold him personally responsible.

The Americans clearly do not want peace and in the face of political setbacks in Serbia, Hungary, frustrations expressed by Macron, reticence on the part of Germany – and abroad in India's refusal to break with Russia, the US is using Bucha as a means of pressure and intensification. If Putin recalibrates to a securing of the Donbass, then the war will move to the Donbass and continue. It cannot end until the goals are achieved but support cannot flag and so if need be there will be periodic crises and outrages (real or imagined) that the media will maximize.

One must condemn the Russian treatment of civilians and the murder and rape of innocents. Though the US has also engaged in these activities on a massive scale in its wars, they are largely forbidden topics in Western discourse. Massacres and atrocities are whitewashed. Rape, which has been common enough in America's wars is deliberately ignored and remains largely unaddressed though many have come forward and testified to this reality. It was widespread in Vietnam and it also occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq though those wars in their latter phases were conducted in such a way that American GI's had little contact with civilians, and again the media simply will not report these stories. It will not allow the public to entertain not 'supporting the troops'.

While the public talks endlessly about helping American soldiers deal with the trauma of war, by lionising them it fails to deal with the basic problem – the guilt that results from the fact that deep down these men know they're not heroes but instead are in anguish over the dehumanisation they witnessed and were part of. War turns people into animals and worse than animals and many people cannot deal with this – what they've seen, what they were part of, and in many cases what they did.

Christians have a mechanism for working through such questions and the ghosts that haunt us. Others turn to nationalism and cling in an idolatrous fashion to the narratives provided by the politicians and court historians as a justification for their actions. The public tries to assuage their consciences by sanctifying their participation in atrocity. In truth what they really need is to repent but such sentiments are not tolerated and anyone who suggests this alternative is subject to the most vicious kind of attacks imaginable.

Some anguish in guilt and others are simply reprobates who have abandoned all conscience and are effectively in the process of repudiating the imago dei. Eschewing the path of moral beings they become monsters and yet many such people live in nice houses, wear nice clothes, and are respectable members of society. Some wear their uniforms to church and bask in the adulation and applause they receive at the behest of the hireling clergy that lead such groups.

I was reminded of this recently as a regional news outlet is doing a series of stories on Vietnam and in particular the celebration of local veterans. They're having ceremonies and giving them new medals and the like. Some of these men while being interviewed are defiant – "I deserve these medals," said one man glorying in his non-reflection and unrepentance.

In the same broadcast as they condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of its civilians, they celebrate Vietnam veterans even while ignoring the actual events associated with the war, its false narratives, false pretenses, and the myriad atrocities committed by US soldiers during the war – the millions slaughtered by bombs, the concentration camps, the Free-Fire Zones, the body counts, the mass assassinations of the Phoenix Program, the chemical warfare, the napalm, the rapes, and mass murders – of which My Lai was but one of many such episodes. To the people of Indochina, the American military and its proxy regime in Saigon was little more than a reincarnation of Nazi Germany in Southeast Asia.

The reporters and apparently most of the public completely miss the absurdity of the juxtaposition taking place on the broadcast. The very things they are condemning the Russians for, are being celebrated and memorialised when it comes to US soldiers. You cannot make this stuff up. Watching the news-stream, the sound of Orwell's clocks striking thirteen rings in my ears.

After Bucha, the Russians are being compared to Nazis and Putin has become the new Hitler. And as absurd as it is on multiple fronts, Zelenskiy is Churchill reincarnated and engaged in the same kind of media blitz. Conveniently the West ignored his recent speech to the Greek parliament in which he brought on a Greek-Ukrainian member of the Azov Battalion to speak. Having a fascist speak to their assembled government upset not a few people in Athens (as their country endured a terrible occupation by the Nazis), and yet most went along with it and applauded.

Bush's illegal and deceitful wars resulted in over a million deaths, generated new wars and over a generation of social upheaval and chaos. American troops committed atrocities of which there is abundant evidence but these things are whitewashed. The destruction of cities like Mosul, Fallujah, and Raqqa just to name a few of the worst examples are also sanitized. Reporters refer to the destruction but refuse to say that it was the result of American bombs as they likewise cover-up the American use of white phosphorus and the like – even while they accuse the Russians of doing the same. Much more could be said about the Yemen War which could not happen if not for American support and participation.

There are many lessons found in the Ukraine War but what it reveals about the media is perhaps the most telling and powerful.

We're going to see another round of media hysteria when Mariupol is opened up. Some have pointed to the activities of the Azov Battalion and the timing of the Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv suburbs which include Bucha. It's possible that this was a set-up but given the way in which the Russian military has propagandized their own soldiers, and the dehumanising nature of war – and in particular the undoubted anger and frustration of the Russian soldiers, there's little doubt that such rage has produced atrocity. It always does as the American soldiers in places like Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq can testify. I think it more likely that the West is simply engaged in opportunism. From the perspective of Biden and other architects of this war, Bucha was a gift and its one they mean to utilize to its maximum potential.

The people of Ukraine are suffering terribly but they're also being used. Putin is a war criminal but so are the leaders of NATO and especially the presidents of the United States. The power is in the media campaign and the immediacy of the images being seen. Al Jazeera was decried in 2003 for daring to show the suffering of the Iraqis – the blood and dead babies, and the US targeted and killed its journalists for it. And yet with this war the media wants you see the suffering on the ground. I don't want Putin to succeed but nor do I want NATO to score a great geopolitical victory. There is no happy resolution to this tragedy. People are dying as powerful men vie for control of the world and its resources. For all their talk of values and ideals, they live by none apart from the sword and the coin – power, gold, and glory.

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*This was also the context for the Russian abolition of serfdom in 1861, and the sale of Alaska to the rising power of the United States in 1867 – meant in part to block British interests out of Canada. Hundreds of thousands died for a geo-political chess game. Everyone had their angle but in the end it was the poor conscripts and civilians who suffered.

Incidentally, it's also noteworthy that the Kadyrov regime in Chechnya has played an active part in today's Russian campaign. The people of that region have been heavily propagandized and encouraged to support the Russian war. Does the ghost of The Crimean War hang over this campaign? It was during the 1850's conflict that a major uprising took place in the North Caucasus under the leadership of Imam Shamil – a name that lives on in the Caucasus and even haunts its dreams. Indeed one of the most notorious Chechen warlords of modern times was Shamil Basayev. Killed in 2006, his ideological descendants represent the most virulent strain of anti-Russian sentiment in the Caucasus and view the pro-Moscow Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov as a traitor worthy of death.

While the British and French never backed Shamil as he hoped in the 1850's, the US (largely through neighbouring Georgia) did back the Chechen insurgency of the 1990's and early 2000's – and by all accounts still backs it today even though it is but a shadow of what it once was. And yet given the present turmoil it wouldn't take much for it to be rekindled. This is also related to the issue of Georgian membership in NATO. At that point the West could openly funnel even more weapons into the Caucasus.