The New Neo

Commenter “MBunge” thinks I haven’t paid enough attention to Ukraine lately. This was his snarky effort to bring it up:

Hey! Any body remember that war in Ukraine? You know, the one everybody was so excited about because it was all righteous and what not? Well…

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
·
7h
Zelensky admits Russia now holds one-fifth of Ukraine, the largest country entirely within Europe. What he didn’t acknowledge is that Russia controls Ukraine’s industrial heartland, 90% of its energy resources (including all of offshore oil), and its critical ports and shipping.

I will give MBunge this: I haven’t written about Ukraine in a while.

The rest of MBunge’s comment is the needlessly snarky part: “all excited about because it was all righteous and what not.” What a way of trivializing and mocking what was actually deep deep concern and anguish about the suffering involved, as well as anger at Russia for provoking it (others disagreed and felt Ukraine provoked it, but all were upset by the war). And the “all-righteous” assertion is simply absurd; no one here said Ukraine was “all righteous” and in fact it has been acknowledged over and over that the country has a long history of corruption (as does Russia).

I’ve gone into the history of the two countries, both internal and their history with each other, many times. Suffice to say that neither is “all-righteous,” nor has anyone here said that Ukraine is. However, in this conflict and other recent ones, Ukraine is far more in the right than Russia – far more. MBunge and several others may disagree on that, but to characterize my position or the position of most of the commenters here as “Ukraine is all-rightous and what not” is a mocking mischaracterization.

But as I said, MBunge does have a point in that I wrote a lot about Ukraine and then stopped at least in the last few weeks. The reason is quite simple. At the beginning, there were three big surprises. The first was the enormous scope and ferocity/brutality of the Russian invasion, as well as Putin’s threats. The second was the defiance of the Ukrainians and their willingness to fight. The third was the fact that Europe supported them and to a certain extent has pulled back from its dependence on Russia. All these things were extremely newsworthy.

I had expected Ukraine to crumble from the start; that didn’t happen. But I never made predictions that Ukraine would win in the end – in fact, I steadfastly refused to make predictions and certainly would not have made that one. Most of the people here – and I’m included in that group – couldn’t see any good solution to this conflict. I still don’t.

At first there was some faint hope that internal forces in Russia might be able to dissuade Putin, but very early on it became clear that would not be happening. And I have never joined the chorus of “Putin is very sick and will die soon.” I just don’t see that as likely to be true at all.

It was quite a while ago that Russia stopped its offensive in so many regions of Ukraine and began concentrating on the ones it already had had a strong footing in (for example, ever since 2014, for the eastern regions). Once that happened, the war became less newsworthy in the sense of surprises, because it’s no surprise that when Russia concentrated its forces like that it would have the advantage. It doesn’t matter that the Russian military has such great flaws, it would still do well merely by attrition when it was in a much smaller area.

I still make no predictions, but I still see no good end here at all. I don’t know exactly how it will play out or when. I certainly plan to cover it when something extremely definitive and/or different happens. But till then I expect this slow chipping away at what’s left of Ukrainian sovereignty in the areas in which the fighting is occurring.

MBunge later wrote this (his first sentence is a quote from a comment I had written as a reply to him):

‘I think most people are well aware of it and have been aware for a long time that the next step for Russia would be concentrating on those eastern parts.”

Uh…I kind of think you’re gaslighting me here. There’s no “Ukraine” category on this blog but a search of “War and Peace” finds two posts on the subject in May after 15 in April. And if there’s one thing you CANNOT say about the majority of Ukraine talk here and in general it’s that there’s been much focus on long-term thinking or strategy.

Let’s not pretend that Ukraine has been the subject of a lot of sober consideration or debate. It’s been mostly “rah-rah” virtue signaling.

First of all, let me get one thing out of the way: there is a “Ukraine” tag on this blog, as well as a handy search function. When you do a search for “Ukraine” you get this. It’s a list of all my posts that mention the word. The first in line are those that have the word in the title, and then the next group contains all posts with the word in the body of the post but not in the title. They are listed in reverse chronological order for each group. They are 18 pages of posts (not all of them recent, of course). I believe that 12 posts are listed on each page (not sure and not interested in spending loads of time finding out). You do the math – that’s a lot of posts.

Take the first post in that list, and you’ll see that at the end of it there are tags and one says “Ukraine.” If you click on that tag, you’ll get relatively recent posts that I’ve tagged as being about Ukraine, four pages of them. I didn’t have the tag function until a few years ago, so the tagged posts for that topic only go back to 2019.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll respond to the rest of MBunge’s snarky comment number two. He wrote, “if there’s one thing you CANNOT say about the majority of Ukraine talk here and in general it’s that there’s been much focus on long-term thinking or strategy.” In fact, that’s one thing I can say, and I’ve said it before. I purposely didn’t focus – unlike a lot of writers – on troop movements and specific battles, or talk about specifics at all. With just a few exceptions, I purposely focused on the big picture: right and wrong, whether “winning” was possible and what that might look like, whether a war should be fought when things look dire, Europe’s and the world’s reaction, and what Putin might or might not be thinking and intending in the long run.

MBunge also wrote, “Let’s not pretend that Ukraine has been the subject of a lot of sober consideration or debate. It’s been mostly ‘rah-rah’ virtue signaling.” I can speak for myself, but I also think that for most commenters here, Ukraine has actually been the focus of an enormous amount of sober discussion and debate. No one here is “virtue-signaling” that I can see. That may indeed be occurring on the part of some people who as a kneejerk response post Ukrainian flags on their Twitter accounts, or something of the sort. But you won’t see that here and you haven’t seen that here, not from me or from the vast majority of commenters.

But yes, it was time to address Ukraine again. And so I have. I’ll add that I think this article published today on Ukraine is well worth reading. I haven’t finished it – it’s long – but I recommend it from what I’ve read of it so far.