Rogue state Russia cannot be redeemed or rehabilitated

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If the Polish curse is geography and proximity to Russia, that applies just as much to Ukraine and its people. For dictators and autocrats hooked on historical fantasies this has long been territory to be rolled over, first one way, then the other. Ukraine is conquered land that is held until the next wave of war and upheaval, death and destruction, fighting and famine, catching a few decades of relative peace in between. Here come the Bolsheviks, the Communists and Stalin, then Hitler, then the Soviets again. And each time there were tens of millions of people caught in the middle trying simply to go about their lives before the next maniac gripped by an ideology turns up. Now, here come Putin and the Russians, rolling in much as the Germans did in the 1940s.

Invading the Ukraine didn’t end well for the Germans in 1941, although it proved to be an epic historical catastrophe for the Ukrainians. As the historian Kim Christian Priemel put it: “The loss of lives defies computation.” More than one million Jews were killed. As many as another three million souls perished in the war on Ukrainian soil, perhaps more. It is difficult to work out precisely when so much murder and mayhem was unleashed. Elements of Ukrainian society collaborated, most didn’t. And some 1.7m Ukrainians were transported to Germany as slave labour.

Ukraine had been the main prize in Operation Barbarossa when Hitler launched his invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. Its wheat made it the so-called breadbasket of Europe. There was livestock and coal mines and the Nazis wanted manganese and iron ore deposits. If Hitler was going to wage a climactic war of continents, Europe and Eurasia pitted against capitalist America, he thought he needed secure supplies of energy and self-reliance in food and industrial production.  

In Occupying Ukraine: Great Expectations, Failed Opportunities, and the Spoils of War, 1941–1943, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, Kim Christian Priemel examined the justifications made in Hitler’s circle ahead of the invasion.

Herbert Backe, who oversaw the German Ministry of Agriculture, thought that moving East could mean no more Western European food shortages. Backe was cautious about what would be produced by taking Russia, says Priemel: “In a briefing with Hitler, he told the Führer that if there were a territory of any use, it was Ukraine.”

In the event, during and after they invaded, the Nazis put their racial theories and appetite for slaughter ahead of practical concerns such as efficient production of food and steel. There had been various disjointed plans drawn up by the Nazis for getting Ukrainian industry going again once the Soviets were removed from the territory. The plans were designed to maximise aiding the German war effort. Laughably, a privatisation effort was even envisaged, ending Soviet collectivisation, maybe replacing it with private investment from Nazi-aligned industrialists. That didn’t happen, after it became clear the Russians had done too good a job in removing the industrial machinery and evacuating it and skilled workers into Russia. The Nazis concentrated their efforts on plundering what they could in terms of mineral wealth and food. After they had killed the Jews.

Dnipropetrovsk, sitting on the Dnieper River, below Kyiv, was a small but key city in central eastern Ukraine. When Albert Speer, young architect and Hitler favourite turned big cog in the German war production machine, first turned up to visit Dnipropetrovsk in January 1942, most of the remaining Jewish population that was too old or young to flee during the Russian retreat the previous year had already been eliminated. Some 30,000 were murdered in two days in September 1941 by Einsatzgruppe C, Kommando 5.

Conveniently, once again, Speer saw none of this or in 1942 didn’t hear anything about what had happened, or at least claimed not to. The journalist and author Gitta Sereny spent 15 years following Speer around, interviewing him for her book, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, all the while trying to get him to acknowledge he knew, and he must have known, about the Holocaust.

At one point Sereny mentioned Dnipropetrovsk, and the visits he made there, to one of Speer’s faithful friends and assistants. Was it not odd that he, or the rest of his retinue, had not picked up any clues murder on that scale had taken place? In his own memoirs Speer made no mention at all – none – of the death squads and murders of the Jews and others in Dnipropetrovsk, or in the many other such cities he visited. These people had simply vanished and what was left were shrunken populations and economic and military assets in someone else’s country, there to be exploited and stolen.

Sereny recounts the sense of shock when she told Annemarie Kempf, Speer’s secretary, about what had happened in Dnipropetrovsk, where those 30,000 had been buried in mass graves: “A whole lot of people we knew must have deliberately hidden it from us,” said Kempf.

The German Eastern front duly collapsed in 1943. The Nazis rolled out of Ukraine and the Soviets rolled back in. Dnipropetrovsk became a major industrial centre, with a focus on rocket research and nuclear technology. In 1991, the USSR disintegrated and Ukraine won its independence. 

Now, the cycle has started again. A few days ago, on Thursday, Dnipro (formerly known as Dnipropetrovsk, and renamed in 1990) was shelled for the first time by Putin’s forces. Seventy miles or so down the road is the birthplace of President Zelensky, the Jewish leader of independent Ukraine.

It’s not hard to work out the historical lessons the Ukrainians should draw from this doom loop of repeated incursion, invasion and exploitation. Something like it has been happening since the 15th century.

The first and most obvious lesson is that no matter what is proposed in any peace talks with the Russians, Ukraine being armed to the teeth against the Russians forever, or as far as can be envisaged, is non-negotiable following a Russian withdrawal. Russia cannot hold Ukraine or its warrior people, even if it pulverises every building. So, Putin looks for a deal. The Israeli government, curiously uninterested in anyone else’s security and keen to maintain a good relationship with Russia to manage the Syrian situation where Russia rules, seems to favour something close to Ukrainian surrender. Israel, involved from the start of the invasion as a broker, denies this interpretation.

The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is scheduled to meet with senior Chinese officials on Monday in Rome, it is understood. That may be an encouraging indication China wants Putin to be offered a way out. The Chinese Communist Party leadership may be ghastly, but they’re not stupid. They must realise that in doing a deal with nuclear armed Putin they have tied themselves to a toddler who has eaten far too much sugary ptichye moloko.

Whatever emerges, in the way of compromises on Crimea and the eastern terrirories, the overwhelming bulk of Ukraine must be independent and heavily armed. That means an extension, after Russian withdrawal, of military and intelligence support from the countries who have done most to help, the US and the UK, and from EU states now awake to the danger. Without it, Putin or a successor will simply try to disrupt Ukrainian society post-war via assassination and more penetration of institutions. Ukraine will have to be armed and vigilant against these threats for decades, for there can now be no reliable guarantees – none – with Russia.

The lesson for the rest of us in Europe, and in lamentably poorly led America too, is that in this latest misadventure Russia has confirmed, once again, it is preconditioned to be a rogue state. In its various incarnations it has been fixated on this idea it must be a great power able to do as it wants.

After its disastrous performance from 1914 in the First World War, in 1917 it inflicted Bolshevism and then Communism – the other worst ideology invented by man, next to Nazism – on the world. When that collapsed because it made no economic sense, Russia pivoted into oligarchy and gangsterism, out of which emerged Putin. And here we all are.

With this track record and following the Ukrainian denouement, Russia will have to be isolated properly. Even the sudden appearance of a sensible leader will not be enough. Such a figure could be bumped off the following week. There is no German style reconciliation and reawakening possible, because Germany, perhaps the source of Europe’s greatest culture, understood it was in the wrong after 1945 and rethought. Russia thinks it is right. Nothing shakes the delusions, not even phone calls from Ukrainian relatives explaining the truth. 

In the New Yorker a few days ago, the Stalin scholar Stephen Kotkin was interviewed. I recommend reading the whole exchange, because he strips away the sentimentality and nails the problem with Russia. 

“Way before NATO  existed – in the nineteenth century – Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the 1990s. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.”

Kotkin also made the point these regimes that keep appearing in Russia are not Russia in its entirety. Russian literature, music and ballet is evidence of a certain kind of greatness. But it seems there’s something else about the sheer scale of the place, its history, the weather, and its access to minerals and natural resources that means it now established as one of history’s most terrible neighbours, a gloomy country poor at innovation,  obsessed with everyone else having a downer on Russia, when countries such as Ukraine would most like to be left alone by Russia.

The author Bruno Maçães put it well on social media: “Russia has argued it is a great power and as a great power it should be allowed to systematically destroy its neighbours. Obviously this can now only be resolved by making it unambiguously clear Russia is not and will not be a great power.”

Europe weaning itself off Russian energy is only the start of the readjustment. For decades, the rest of Europe, Ukraine included, will have to work on the assumption that Russia is a rogue state that cannot apologise and so cannot be rehabilitated.

Facebook defeated, hooray

Away from the war, some good news. The collapse of the Facebook project to create its own digital currency, Libra or some other soothing kind of name, collapsed last year. In the FT Weekend magazine there’s a long account of how it happened. In summary, arrogant Silicon Valley types with too much money and insufficient understanding of politics (these are the people who hired Nick Clegg as a guru) thought that they could reinvent money and the global system. They were the latest bunch to try it, although Facebook’s crypto currency, that’s fully digital money, was supposed to be pegged to the still mighty dollar. Sensibly, US regulators and central bankers decided that allowing this lot to upend the global financial system, making Facebook virtually a country in its own right to rival states, was not going to be allowed.

What’s going on here? A fight for power. After the experience of the first couple of phases of the Internet, and what it did at speed to politics, culture, media, there’s a line being drawn. The Silicon Valley gang don’t, next, get to subvert and then control the global financial system. This is central banks and governments fighting back, on the taxpayer’s behalf. There will soon be more of this. In a war era, or a Cold War era, the nation state tends to get stronger and more controlling. This has obvious downsides for any of us who fear state overreach. On the tech giants, it’s a glorious development, and very funny too. Sir Nick Clegg, you’re not in charge. 

Reaction podcast: the course of the war

In the latest edition of the Reaction podcast, with colleagues Maggie Pagano and Alastair Benn, we discussed the course of the war and what has surprised us most since the invasion of Ukraine. Listen HERE.

What I’m listening to

I’m ashamed to say that until last week I had only dimly heard of the Ukrainian contemporary composer Valentyn Silvestrov. He resisted Soviet attempts to impose a socialist composing style and after Ukrainian independence became more interested in spiritual themes. It is said he’s still in Kyiv, the city of his birth in 1937. Hymn 2001, written by Silvestrov, has been played several times on Radio 3 in the last week and I now can’t stop listening to his compositions.

Have a good week.

Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher,
Reaction