The View of Putin’s War by Israeli Intellectual Yuval Harari By Richard Miller (London)
Hugh Fitzgerald reports on the view of Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari, that Putin has lost his war, whatever happens in the Ukraine. How so? The war is over the existence of the Ukraine people, and Putin has denied, in true communist form, that this ethnic group exists. However, the war has united the Ukrainian people was never before, reaffirming their sense of ethnic identity. “Putin won’t be able to hold it… There is no chance. With every passing day, he sows more and more seeds of hatred between Ukrainians and Russians — who didn’t hate each other before. They were family. This is hatred for generations. By his own hand, he is ensuring there is no chance of them uniting.” That is certainly true, but Putin is not really concerned about niceties like peaceful co-existence, since he intends to conquer the place by force of arms, and presumably maintain order at the barrel of a gun. Just the way the old USSR, which he misses, did.
https://robertspencer.org/2022/03/israeli-historian-yuval-harari-putin-has-already-lost-his-war
“The celebrated Israeli historian Yuval Harari argues that whatever now happens in Ukraine, Putin has lost “his war.” A report on his article is here: “Yuval Noah Harari: No matter what he does, Putin has already lost this war,” Times of Israel, March 5, 2022:
“Whether he pulls his troops back or attempts to bomb Ukrainian cities into submission, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already lost the war he launched against the country, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued.
“This war is not about conquering this city or that city. Putin can conquer all of Ukraine, that’s completely true,” Harari told Channel 12 news on Friday. “But this war is over the very existence of a Ukrainian people.”
Putin, he said, began the war “because he has a fantasy he’s built up in his head that there isn’t a Ukrainian people, that Ukrainians are actually Russians, that they want to be a part of Russia, and that only some small Judeo-Nazi gang in power is preventing it.”
Nothing has so united the Ukrainian nation, made its people so aware of themselves as distinct from the Russians, as Putin’s war. If there were many Ukrainians who before the invasion were well disposed toward Russia, there are none now. Putin has done the opposite of what he hoped: he has made Ukrainians feeling more distinct, and distant, from Russians. and what Putin calls “Mat’-Rossiya” (Mother Russia).
Putin believed that he’d go in, President Volodymyr Zelensky would flee, the military would surrender and the population “would greet the Russian tanks with flowers.”
Zelensky did not flee, but instead became a national hero and the international, symbol of Ukrainian resistance. And he will remain a symbol of that resistance, whether he lives or dies.
But he [Putin] was wrong all along the way.”
The past few days, Harari said, had proven that “there is a Ukrainian people; Zelensky did not flee; the Ukrainian military is fighting like crazy; and the population is throwing Molotov cocktails at tanks, not flowers.”
“Putin won’t be able to hold it… There is no chance. With every passing day, he sows more and more seeds of hatred between Ukrainians and Russians — who didn’t hate each other before. They were family. This is hatred for generations. By his own hand, he is ensuring there is no chance of them uniting.”
Putin’s fantasy, in which Ukrainians would turn out to welcome the Russian tanks that have arrived, in his view, to rescue them from “Nazis” (Harari’s claim that Putin has been blaming “Judeo-Nazis” is incorrect) whom Putin claims now threaten Ukraine, has exploded in his face. Not flowers, but Molotov cocktails are being thrown at those tanks; the entire male population of Ukraine, from 18 to 60 years, has been mobilized; schoolteachers, economists, and IT specialists have been learning to use weapons, from rifles all the way up to Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles; they’ve learned to construct steel anti-tank barriers, known as “hedgehogs,” and to bury mines in strategic places. In Kyiv, women without children have joined the fight. The entire country appears to have gone to war.
But Harari acknowledged that there was a real danger Kyiv and other cities would become the next Aleppo — the Syrian metropolis that was pounded by Russian forces, causing untold tragedy.
The war seems to have entered a new phase. Putin has responded to the unexpected Ukrainian resistance by unleashing rockets and missiles into civilian buildings everywhere, including in Kharkiv and Kyiv. He has shown that, in his anger at being foiled from obtaining what he assumed would be a quick victory, he is now fully prepared to level large parts of Ukrainian cities. Civilians fleeing Mariupol, Irpin, and other cities are being deliberately shelled. Putin can achieve a military victory, but in so doing, he will only reinforce the tremendous will of Ukrainians to resist. And if Russian troops manage to conquer Kyiv, and then all of Ukraine in the next month or two, what then? Does Putin keep 200,000 troops – more than a quarter of Russia’s 900,000-man military – permanently in Ukraine? How much will that cost in men, materiel, money, and morale? What happens when the Russian soldiers comprehend how they have been used, in what they thought, as they crossed the border into Ukraine, was going to be a war to “free Ukrainians from Nazis”?
All over the country the Ukrainian resistance will fight on, civilians and soldiers both, counter-attacking against the invader wherever they can, laying mines, firing their Javelins at tanks and Stingers at planes. Snipers in cities will pick off Russian soldiers; they killed a Major General the other day. Volunteers from all over have been arriving to help the Ukrainians; some 15,000 so far. The Russian soldiers whom the Ukrainians have captured have expressed bewilderment at what they are doing in the Ukraine. They had been told they were going on maneuvers, and then found themselves crossing into Ukraine, told only that they would be rescuing the Ukrainians from “Nazis.” In the face of such massive resistance, the Russian conscripts are becoming ever more demoralized. They have seen for themselves the ferocity of the Ukrainian resistance.
Meanwhile, the attempt by Putin to prevent any information about the Ukraine war reaching the Russian public is bound to fail, as more social media sites that tell the truth will keep popping up, and for each one that is taken down by Putin’s men, several others will spring up. Cyberwarriors from all over the Western world will be enrolled in the effort to inform the Russian public about the war, the resistance, and in the places the Russians have conquered, the insurgency. Putin’s attempts to ensure that only the regime’s lies will be heard in Russia will be overwhelmed by the assault coming from thousands of European and North American cyber warriors.
When people like Putin come up against a cold hard reality they don’t like, he said, they tend “to try and break reality.” …
Putin will throw more troops into the war, intent on conquering all of Ukraine, but failing to realize that during the resulting Russian occupation, the insurgency will continue; he is planning on an endgame, but there is no end to the war he started, until Russian troops leave the country. Ukraine is not tiny Georgia, where Putin forced Tbilisi to give up Abkhazia and North Ossetia; there are 45 million people in Ukraine determined to fight. How many of Russia’s soldiers is Putin willing to lose in trying to put down such an insurgency by the Ukrainian people?
As for now, the iron grip of Putin’s regime on the media prevents the Russian people from learning the truth about the invasion of Ukraine. Any journalist in Russia who dares to report the truth, or even use the word “war” instead of “special operation,” can be sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. There are no independent news sources in Russia; the entire staff of the last independent news channel, Ekho Moskvy, or Moscow Echo, resigned en masse. Facebook and Twitter are censored. So far, the great majority of Russians support Putin’s policy; his propaganda is all they hear, and two weeks into the war, they still believe his nonsense about fighting “Nazis” in the Ukraine. But as more crippling sanctions are imposed on Russia’s economy by many different countries, as more crowds appear in the capitals of Europe denouncing his invasion, as the body-bags with dead soldiers, believed to now number over 10,000, appear back in Russia, as the Western powers find ways to transmit news to Russians, the way they did with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty during the Cold War, on social media sites that keep popping up to immediately replace those the Russian government takes down, in a whack-a-mole game where the West can keep going indefinitely, the Russians will begin to abandon support for an increasingly isolated and rattled Putin. First there were hundreds, then thousands, and now there are tens of thousands of Russian protesters in different Russian cities, with their signs “Ne Voine” (No To War), who are being hauled off to prison. But the numbers of the dissidents keep growing. What will happen when there are crowds of hundreds of thousands of Russians, protesting against that quite unnecessary war of choice that one man started?
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russians had a brief encounter with democracy under Gorbachev and then Yeltsin. But the country eventually reverted to despotism under the rule of Vladimir Putin, a man akin to those who had ruled the Soviet Union for seventy years, beginning with the October Revolution of 1917. Ukraine, however, chose the democratic path, and has stuck with it. And the next time Ukrainians hold a free election, that most unlikely hero of our time, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and winner of a Dancing With The Stars competition, and now the symbol of Ukrainian resistance, will win in a landslide that even a despot would envy.
The Russian troops have already taken the cities of Kherson and Mariupol, and are brutally besieging Kharkiv and Zyiv, and a dozen other population centers, as the Russian tanks fan out across the country. 1.5 million Ukrainians—women and children, and boys under 18 and men over 60 — have already left the country.
Many hundreds of billions of dollars will now be spent on arms, offensive and defensive, not only by the 30 members of NATO, as an understandable reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also by other countries outside NATO that will have had brought home to them in particularly brutal fashion the need to prepare for military aggression from bad actors in their neighborhood. Outside of Europe, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and India will all be more zealous in building up their military against possible aggression by China, which has approved of Putin’s war. China has shown in its military exercises conducted so close to Taiwan, in its creation of artificial islands, and its seizure of existing ones in the South China Sea in order to buttress its claim to undersea oil and gas deposits, and in its ruthless suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, that the military danger it poses to its neighbors is growing apace. A supremely confident China, the world’s second largest economic power, with the world’s largest, rapidly-modernizing army, has seen how Putin so far appears to have gotten away with his invasion and conquest of Ukraine. All those countries in Asia that rightly feel threatened by China will be pouring money into defense spending, thanks to Putin’s war thousands of miles away.
“People thought ‘nuclear weapons are something from the sixties, there was some Cuban missile crisis…’ [But] it is here and now — it took three days from the outbreak of war to the beginning of threats with nuclear weapons.”
I’m not sure Yuval Harari is correct here. Worries about a nuclear war are unwarranted. On February 27, Putin publicly ordered a “special mode of combat duty in the strategic deterrence forces.” These forces include a nuclear triad of air, ground, and naval nuclear weapons; precision-guided long-range nonnuclear munitions; missile defense capabilities; and the command-and-control system that links them all. This was a bit of bravado, designed to scare the faint of heart, but this was no more than a military exercise, a rattling of cages. None of the Western nuclear powers have made any changes in their military posture as a result.
On the subject of Western sanctions on Russia, Harari said Russia has little going for its economy beyond its natural resources.
Not quite true. Russia’s main exports are: fuels and energy products(63 percent of total shipments, of which crude oil and natural gas accounted for 26 percent and 12 percent respectively); metals (10 percent); machinery and equipment (7.4 percent); chemical products (7.4 percent) and foodstuffs and agricultural products (5 percent). That is, almost 2/3 of its exports consist of oil and natural gas. European countries have shown their willingness to do without those Russian exports. Germany has surprised many by pulling out of the Nordstream Pipeline Project, and is now seeking alternative natural gas suppliers, from the U.S., Qatar, Algeria, and Israel. The Americans and Europeans are also planning on ending imports of crude oil from Russia.
“If the West is smart, what it should do is not just sanctions, but a ‘Green Manhattan Project.’ Green energy that will dislodge oil and gas from their central role. When oil prices go down to $20 a barrel, it’s the end of Putin’s regime.”
Undoubtedly this Ukraine war, and the interruption, by Europe itself, of Russian oil and gas imports, will cause European governments to speed up their use of renewables. They are already in a state of alarm from the latest report on global warming, Now they have another reason — a belligerent Russia, an unhinged Putin — to get off fossil fuels faster still. This accelerated switch to renewables should drive down long-term demand for, and thus the prices of, oil and gas. As Yoav Harari says, if oil is driven down to $20 a barrel, “it’s the end of Putin’s regime.”
Asked what he thought of comparisons between Putin’s campaign and Adolf Hitler’s expansionism that launched the Second World War, Harari said he was not a big fan of the rush to compare the two, though he acknowledged that “there are certain similarities.
However, he stressed, “There’s a very big difference. Hitler had an ideology, and the German people were to a great extent united behind this ideology. Here it’s a war of one man only. It’s not a war of the Russian people. The Russian people don’t want this.”…
It’s not accurate to say that “the Russian people don’t want this.” Most Russians are still behind Putin. Right now, out of a population of 145 million, fewer than ten thousand Russians have staged protests. How could most of them not support Putin, given that his version of events, with this “special operation” undertaken to rescue Russia’s little brothers, the Ukrainians, from “Nazis,” is the only version they now hear. It would be truer to say that “while the vast majority of the Russian people still support the war, with each day more of them have become the war’s opponents, filled with shame and chagrin” as they learn the truth from social media.
Now that the oligarchs’ luxury apartments in London and Paris have been declared off-limits to them, now that their luxury yachts and private planes are being seized, now that their children are being denied educations in the West, the oligarchs are growing unhappy with Putin’s war, but most of them, so far, continue to declare their loyalty to the man who has made their obscene fortunes possible; he’s the godfather of the oligarchs’ criminal organization. They may be unhappy but they do not dare to express it, for Putin is quite capable of seizing their fortunes. “Imagine they go to complain to Putin,” said a diplomat from a European country where several Russian oligarchs own large assets. “They say, ‘Can you please revise your policy? I lost $4 billion of my $5 billion’. Putin says, ‘Do you want to keep the $1 billion?’”
The Americans think that the oligarchs can pressure Putin to stop the war. They are wrong. Putin made a deal long ago with the oligarchs: they could keep their wealth, but only so long as they either supported, or kept silent about, Putin’s policies. They face the seizure of everything they possess, if they dare to publicly express their opposition, or even worse. Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, dared to question Putin’s policies, and ended up spending ten years in jail. He now lives in exile, in London, stripped of almost all of his wealth. Other oligarchs who have run afoul of Putin have also ended up in prison, or in exile, or dead. With Khodorkovsky’s example very much in mind, few oligarchs are willing to speak out.
He also suggested that a potential silver lining of the war could be “an end to the culture war within the West: left against right, liberals against conservatives, Fox News against CNN.
“One of the most optimistic things that happened to me in the last few days was I was switching between CNN and Fox News and suddenly they looked the same. They suddenly understand that there’s something infinitely more important, and infinitely more terrible than what they’ve been afraid of over the past few years, and they can unite around it. The moment that happens, there’s no need to fear anyone. The Western world is far stronger than the Russians and even the Chinese.”
Is it really true that the political abyss that separates the woke progressives on the left of the Democratic Party from the Republicans has been bridged? CNN and Fox News can agree on opposing Putin’s war in the Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean that they agree on anything else, from mask mandates, to critical race theory being taught in the schools, to Biden’s handling of the economy. Those differences remain. And as soon as the Ukraine war ends, or even just subsides into a slow grinding down of Ukrainian forces by the Russians, so that the war no longer monopolizes the evening news, and is no longer the main topic on social media, while the West’s attention turns elsewhere, those differences will reemerge.
The notion that the culture wars that have riven opinion in the West will be healed by the joint effort undertaken to oppose Putin’s invasion strikes me as fantastic. It’s a little like the predictions of a united Western world, never again to be sundered, after 9/11; European nations expressed sympathy for, and solidarity with, the United States, but nothing concrete resulted from those sentiments. America continued to contribute the lion’s share of NATO’s budget, and none of the other 29 NATO members offered to raise their defense spending as a result of the terror attacks in New York and Washington. This time, Putin’s War should lead — but will it? — to lasting changes in the defense budgets of NATO countries. Still, we’ve been disappointed before by our NATO allies. This time, don’t get your hopes up.”
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