Western analysts focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have resorted to geopolitical representations that link the conflict to a reaction by Russian President Vladimir Putin to US and European moves. For Ukrainian anthropologist Volodimir Artiukh, 36, a researcher at Oxford University (United Kingdom), these considerations miss the mark.
“The West, and especially the Americans, see everything as a reflection of what is happening in the US and Europe”, criticizes Artiukh, who holds a doctorate in sociology from the Central European University (CEU) and is dedicated to the study of migratory movements in the world. post-Soviet.
For him, the Russian attack “has less to do with direct threats from NATO and more to do with the perception of weakness of the main Western powers, such as the US and Germany”, which changed their leadership more recently and would be less articulate.
Artiukh believes that the advance of NATO does not serve as a single explanatory key to the war. Not only because there was no sign that Ukraine would be accepted into the alliance in the near future, but also because Putin’s attack is strengthening the military presence around Russia and the propensity of neutral countries to cooperate with NATO. “It’s the opposite of what a country afraid of NATO wants.”
The researcher assesses that an escalation of violence is possible before any outcome and does not rule out the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons. He also advocates that Europe and the US offer humanitarian aid “at least in the same proportion as they provide weapons of war”.
Artiukh’s family is trapped in Ukraine. “They couldn’t escape,” he laments. “I’ve dedicated myself to analyzing the conflict as well to keep myself emotionally distant from it. It’s very difficult.”
The expansion of NATO has been, for many, the key to explain the war. What are the limits of this analysis? NATO’s history goes back to the global scene at the end of World War II and predates the fall of the Soviet regime. In other words, NATO existed before modern Russia itself, and the relationship between the organization and the Russian state has been going on for 30 years.
Most of NATO’s expansion took place after the 2000s, during Putin’s tenure. And the first movements of this expansion did not give rise to any violent response from Russia. In recent years, there has been no significant expansion by NATO. And Ukraine was by no means close to becoming a member state. All political leaders express clearly: Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO in the near future. So, of course, this expansion contributed to increasing tension in the region, but it was not an immediate cause for the outbreak of conflict.
What were these causes then? Russian interest in controlling the foreign and domestic policy of neighboring states. And since Ukraine is the biggest of these neighbors in Europe, Russia wants to control it. First, it tried to do this indirectly, from 1991 to 2014. When those attempts failed, first the Russians invested in a proxy war. [instigada pela Rússia, mas da qual não tomou parte] and now they have arrived at a direct intervention.
It all boils down to the failure of Russian soft power in Ukraine and Russia’s inability to use economic instruments, which forced the country into military power and violence. The Russian attack has less to do with direct threats from NATO and more to do with perceived weakness by key Western powers such as the US and Germany.
As well? It was a period when the US presidential elections brought to power a leadership perceived as weak, Joe Biden. And in Germany, Angela Merkel was stepping down. So Russia saw this as an opportunity to do something in the hope that the West would not be able to articulate a unified and robust military response.
Would an attack motivated by the advance of NATO be any different? The invasion of Ukraine has led to consequences that contradict this supposed objective of stopping NATO. It dramatically increased unity around NATO and the militarization of countries around Russia. The Russian attack will likely lead to increased cooperation with NATO by formerly neutral countries such as Finland. It is the opposite of what a country afraid of NATO wants.
In addition to not solving anything, Putin created more problems. I don’t believe the attack was a reaction to NATO, but an action to reconfigure the security environment around Russia and to create an alliance with China.
What are the limits of this alliance with China? Russia is looking for its new place in the world for the next ten or 20 years. Russian elites believe that the world will be multipolar and that China will be the new great global power. Beijing is trying to remain neutral and has abstained from voting in the Security Council. There are signs that it might sell weapons to Russia and become a military ally, but we cannot exclude the possibility that Russia has also miscalculated this calculation, especially considering that Russian operations were based on wrong assumptions. Russia has very weak intelligence services these days.
weak? Yes, and it is a great paradox. Ukraine and Russia are very close linguistically and culturally. It was not to be expected that the Russians would have been so wrong in calculating Ukrainian resistance. Even though Russia is one of the biggest military forces on the planet, in quantitative and technological terms, they were not able to defeat the Ukrainian Army, which shows their intelligence failures.
How do you evaluate the arguments used by Putin for the invasion, such as the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine? I don’t really understand these concepts and how they would be operationalized. Demilitarization is often the consequence of a peace deal, and that has translated into simply bombing Ukraine. Denazification is also difficult to understand. For the Russian elite, the Ukrainian president is a puppet of the powers of the West and, simultaneously, of Nazi and fascist forces in the country – even though Zelensky is Jewish, which makes the reasoning strange.
It is true that there is a movement of fascists in Ukraine: they are not numerous, but they are influential, and they are integrated into police units and the Armed Forces. This is not an uncommon story in Europe. The rise of fascism has occurred in countries like Germany and even Brazil. It is an ideological justification that is easy to explain to the population due to the memory of Russian resistance to fascism. “We are not fighting Ukrainians, but fascists.” And nobody needs to prove anything.
Could Putin be looking to restore the borders of the former Soviet Union or even the Russian Empire? Putin is known for saying that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great disasters of the century. At the same time, he is enchanted by the Russian Empire, especially by Tsar Alexander III. [um conservador]. The way he talks about Lenin and the Russian Revolution… It seems that the October Revolution [de 1917] it was the worst thing. Putin blames Lenin for destroying the Russian Empire by fragmenting its unity, creating states like Ukraine that had some independence. For him, Lenin planted a bomb in Russia, causing its destruction. So it is to that time of the empire that he would like to return.
And not the times of the Soviet Union… Putin is a liberal in economic terms. If you look at how the Russian Central Bank conducts conservative monetary policy and at how the state works in terms of cooperation and labor regulation, or even if you look at Russia’s extreme inequality, you will see that it has nothing to do with the Soviet history. Today we have the same level of inequality as at the time of the empire.
Putin’s project is imperial and will not offer an alternative ideology of modernization. He will offer protection, or even enforce protection, for leaders like Belarus. [o ditador Aleksandr Lukachenko] and from Armenia [o premiê Nikol Pashinian], who want to protect themselves from the West. States that are not Russia’s clients and do not want protection will be controlled by other means, either indirectly, as when client states were ripped away from countries like Georgia. [em 2008] and Ukraine in 2014 [quando da anexação da Crimeia]or directly, simply attacking and occupying territories, as the Russian Empire did in the 19th century.
How does Ukraine enter the disinformation war waged in parallel to the battles in the territories? Ukraine has been in conflict with Russia since 2014 over the annexation of Crimea. Since then, the two countries have heavily repressed the free press, albeit in different ways: Russia was more systematic and Ukraine was more selective. The media landscape has become very impoverished in both countries and has been taken over by one-dimensional views and much more propaganda than news and analysis.
Countries have spent the last eight years in information wars, when they also adopted the concept of hybrid warfare. Although Ukraine and Russia were not in direct military confrontation in these eight years, as in 2014, they say they are in a hybrid war because they used all possible means except direct military intervention. This has created an environment of paranoia where all ties in your life are based on security, which makes everyone prone to seeking out spies, traitors, etc. It is in this environment that these countries have been for almost a decade. And this leads to a totally unhealthy informational landscape, to the detriment of any critical analysis and any effort towards a peace commitment.
What world will emerge from the war in Ukraine? There are two possibilities. First, and most likely, is Russia destroying Ukraine’s defenses and occupying a significant part of the territory or even all of it, installing a puppet leadership or even several repressive governments that would essentially be police states. Russia itself will become an even more authoritarian regime and see its economy fall into a deep recession, which leads to general discontent.
The second option is for Russia to lose and have to sign some temporary peace agreement. Russia will have to withdraw troops and face the turmoil that is expected to emerge internally, which includes a political crisis in the Kremlin because, basically, Putin will have achieved nothing and will still have lost a lot with the sanctions. What will happen to Ukraine in this scenario is totally unpredictable, but it must be accompanied by a political and economic crisis.
Ukraine’s GDP is expected to drop by as much as 50%, and the country is in a hole. You already have huge debts with the IMF [Fundo Monetário Internacional] and other international creditors. How the country gets back on its feet depends on how supportive the West is.
X-ray | Volodymyr Artiukh
Anthropologist and researcher at Oxford University, UK, where he works on the project Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy after (Post) Socialism. Born in Ukraine in the 1980s, he holds a PhD in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest (Hungary). He studies labor and migratory movements from countries of the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine and Belarus.
