Will the Russian people decide the outcome of the Ukraine assault?
By some estimates over 250,000 Russians have abandoned Russia. (1)
Above: Photo taken during the first week of protests across Russia against the attack on Ukraine. Courtesy independent.co.uk
Mirroring the resistance fighters of Ukraine are the dissidents of Russia. Both groups appear in the press “dormant” right now drowned out by pundits and Cassandras crawling over ‘what if’ scenarios.
Behind the dormancy lurks another “war,” a war against suppression.
It’s not Putin and it is Putin.
It’s not a global tragedy and it is a global tragedy.
The argument against economic sanctions being “effective” is that their course is long, is tenuous, and relies on the sacrifice of distant players. Sanctions do not remove suppression (2 New Yorker piece), people do. Where sanctions have been effective — South Africa comes to mind — people, South Africans — have been willing to overthrow suppression, ‘with no clear resolution ahead.’
The “long shot” in the case of Ukraine relies on Russian dissidents, those who are willing to overthrow suppression, with no clear resolution ahead.
Like sanctions, overthrowing suppression is the ‘long game,’ peppered with tales of courage that are leaked to the collective imagination. Movies are made of rugby matches in Durban, of lunch counters in America’s South. One surmises that sanctions to “be effective” don’t take time, sanctions buy time for the imagination to take hold and kindle sacrifice.
In Moscow one carries an anti-war sign and is greeted with a 14 day detention, trial and sentencing. If the world resists taking defiance seriously, Putin doesn’t. For Putin, dissidents are targets. (3)
Consider the Putin apologists who tout his frailty, ignoring the infrastructure of suppression in place today in Russia and orchestrated globally. Consider the oligarch henchmen who benefit from suppression and skirt international restrictions: a Zurich leak here, a Panama Papers leak there and evidence bubbles up for public observation.
Western attention shifted away from Kyiv on March 20 to China and to the future of Taiwan. America and her allies visited the suppression state of Asia for help in honoring sanctions against Russia, sanctions Putin calls an “act of war.” By playing this card, Biden and company touched on realpolitik: (to China) sanction us by trading with Russia and we’ll sanction you.
Like jailing a dissident, Putin uses threats to challenge America’s ‘conspiracy against Mother Russia.’ Here is correspondent Joshua Yaffa writing in the New Yorker:
“But there was also an element of historical messianism in Putin’s thinking, a pseudo-philosophical strain that ran far deeper than concern over Western armaments. In July, he published a six-thousand word treatise in which he proclaimed Russians and Ukrainians to be “one people,” but with a clear hierarchy: Ukraine’s rightful place was under the protection and imperial care of Russia, not led astray — politically, militarily, culturally — by the West. ‘I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia,’ he wrote. Only by acting now to rejoin the two people, as they were meant to be, could Putin prevent Ukraine from becoming irreparably European or even, for that matter, Ukrainian. Because concerns that happened it would be too late: Russia would indeed be occupying a foreign land.”
-Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege,” New Yorker, March 21
What is revealed on the road to accountability — what South Africans called “reconciliation” — is the silence of terror. Absent terror are moments of courage: Ukrainians stubbornly went about their business as tanks rolled in. Dissidents rode the Moscow subways with their anti-war signs, knowing that they would be greeted at the Kremlin Square stop with a 14 day detention and uncertainty.
Accountability comes later.
Always later.
March 21
Footnotes
1 NYTimes, March 18
2 Why Sanctions Too Often Fail https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-sanctions-too-often-fail
