Of all that I have read on this war since it started, this is the best, a report well moored in reality. Thank you, David Patrikarakos.
Last edited 2 years ago by Tom Blanton
Jen Segal
2 years ago
I’m a gardener. The image of plants straining toward sky and sun and the woman determined to help them thrive is a simple declaration of hope and determination.
Wonderful, powerful piece. Thank you.
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
I’m reading the book Aftermath currently, about immediate post war Germany, and how their people coped and then progressed with getting the country back on its feet. It’s truly remarkable, and rather weird, how humans can tolerate such extreme circumstances, and then move on.
Hopefully we’ll see Ukraine recover and blossom like those plants.
Unfortunately I think they’ll eventually lose Crimea and Donbas for good. However Putin has forever lost the chance of bringing Ukrainians under Russias influence
Martin Logan
2 years ago
If Putin takes Odesa, he controls 25% of the world’s food. Then he can blackmail Europe, both with gas, and with food. This isn’t about Ukraine.
It’s about you.
Thank you Martin. Accurate and precise statements on geopolitics have been missing from the West for decades. We have been living in an affluent effete fool’s paradise for far too long.
He doesn’t control 25% of the worlds food, he controls 25% of the wheat that is exported. Remember most wheat is for domestic consumption, and wheat doesn’t make up 25% of the worlds diet. While it would be an inconvenience, it changes nothing for the west
The price of commodities are rising. If Putin reduces supply of food, especially wheat, how much will prices further and at what point will civil unrest start?For Europe, civil unrest in ME and North Africa will cause problems.
My grandparents and father fought the Bolsheviks and their offspring the Soviets. They stood firm and never accepted their garbage and their Oligarchs. They will be gone soon, Putin made his ultimate mistake. Their Billionaires need to be taken down in Russia as well as Ukraine other former Soviet puppets nations. Corruption
Martin Logan
2 years ago
This is an unmitigated disaster for Russia.
It will almost certainly lead to the fall of Putin. Moreover, he has eliminated all opposition, so now no one possesses the legitimacy to take over after he goes. Indeed, the Army has so disgraced itself that no one will obey any general.
As with 1917 and 1991, the nation will break apart. The only question is whether any significant group will try to put it back together again. If anyone does, prepare for some horrendous violence within Russia itself–violence that makes Bucha look like a garden party.
Dinamite
1 year ago
“Are There Any Military Targets Near Here”. “Yes” would be a surprising answer.
Andrew Giarelli
1 year ago
Powerful work here. Thanks.
Erry Moningkey
1 year ago
Great report.
Paul Smithson
2 years ago
“Russia has run out of words so it can only attack Ukraine”
How would the writer know this when all Russian media has been censored.
To be clear, I am not defending or supporting Russia. Not at all. I just find it odd that someone can write this sentence when they really can’t have a clue whether Russia has run out of words or not.
Having watched Putin and Lavrov speak via news channels in uncensored countries, it hasn’t sounded like the Russians have run out of words. It just sounds like Western politicians and media don’t want anyone hearing those words.
But surely if we want to bring an end to this horrible conflict we desperately need to be using words and not weapons.
What are those words that justify this unprovoked assault on Ukraine. Apart from the General confirming what we already knew, that this was never about NATO but a simple land grab of Ukraine and Moldova?
If you listen to the speech that Putin gave prior to this conflict, which hardly anyone has, then it is very clear that this wasn’t an ‘unprovoked’ attack. One can rightly argue it is wrong (I think ALL war is wrong) but to say it is is unprovoked seems to imply you are only going off what the Western propaganda machine is spewing out.
If we are to find a non-violent solution to this conflict then we must be establishing the real reasons and then using diplomacy to find a way forward. Unfortunately too many people are claiming to know why Putin did what he did when they have only seen one side of the propaganda wars.
There are two sides to any argument and if people refuse to listen to the other side, or are prevented from doing so through censorship, then any argument is impossible to resolve.
We spent two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan based on lies, propaganda and sabre rattling, (most of it coming from OUR govts and OUR media) and those exact three things will keep us in Ukraine for two decades of we don’t start demanding peace right now.
That would be the rambling speech where Putin decided Ukraine wasn’t really a country, and should be under Russian rule? The Ukrainians clearly don’t believe their country is part of Russia do they, and Zelensky has already offered to discuss neutrality and not joining NATO yet the Russians still shell cities full of civilians. There are two sides to every story, yet that doesn’t mean both sides are equally valid. Ukraine has done nothing to warrant the destruction Russia has put upon it, the blame for this belongs to Putin and nobody else.
Also the whataboutery by banging on about the mistakes of western nations in the past is nothing to do with this conflict
No one is provoked. It is entirely their decision to act. Full stop.
Russia is taking a sad angry and embittered approach to the end of its empire.
Credit to the British who managed it with very little bloodshed, and that only to ensure peaceful transitions. They evening announced a policy of withdrawal from empire. Can you imagine Russia/Putin making such an announcement?!?
Could you explain – so far no one has made any attempt to do so – Why wouldn’t every single one of your rather naïve arguments have applied to Hitler’s successive aggressions in the 1930s? The situations are similar in many ways, including the ‘protection’ and later gathering in all the Russians/ Germans (whether these populations wanted this or not) and the endless rehashing of dubious weaponised historical grievances etc.
Your whole comment is based on the false assumption that Putin says what he thinks. But Putin lies. Anyone who was naive enough to believe Putin before the war should understand by now that he was deceived.
You can listen to the Russian side as long as you want, but accept that it’s just lies and propaganda. We don’t know the real reason for the war and the Russians won’t tell us. Maybe Putin wants to go down in history as a great conqueror. Maybe he wants to conquer the Ukrainian gas fields. Maybe he wants to gain an industrial base to conquer Europe. Maybe he was afraid that without starting a war, the Russian hawks would dethrone him. Maybe he believed his own propaganda about how Russia was in danger. Maybe China was involved, wanting to weaken both Russia and Europe and test how the US would react before invading Taiwan. We don’t know and probably we never will. We just know that the reasons Russia gives (they keep changing) are lies.
Violence is indicative of a failure to communicate, ie running out of words. You answer your own opening question in your closing statement.
All the best.
Agree entirely. Appears to be the writer of this piece who has run out of words – mainly those that would go some way to placing recent events in historical context.
You cannot negotiate with them not because they lie, but because you cannot trust them to keep any commitment. Russia cannot, on principle, commit to anything and get anything in return from the other side, because everyone knows that Russia will break all its commitments when it suits it.
Sam McGowan
2 years ago
Look at a map, Russia doesn’t need Mykolaiv. In fact, Russian troops are nowhere near the place. By the way, a civilian with an AK47 is no longer a civilian – they’re a target.
Russia wants to strangle Ukraine in its crib.
It cannot do that without taking Odesa, and thus stopping all Ukrainian agricultural exports. Then Putin controls much of the worlds’ food supply (your food, BTW).
Moreover, a successful nation with many native Russians speakers is an existential threat to Putin’s regime. If Ukraine lives, Putin’s Russia dies.
It’s as simple as that.
We might add that Putin is the existential threat to Russia. He’s ruining the country.
rk syrus
2 years ago
Is anyone of the mind of Professor Mearsheimer that NATO expansion and American idiocy are the sole reasons Putin was forced to act? Does Putin have more justification for his special military action than America and Britain did for their Iraqi special military action which cost how many Iraqi lives? (Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 to 1,033,000 excess deaths).
Putin is winning, will win, and the West (the Anglosphere the 11 members of the G-20 which agreed to sanctions, 9 told America to suck it) will have to negotiate with a very popular, successful, and intelligent modern tsar of Russia and respect that ancient nation’s status as a great power.
If anybody still believes this invasion happened because of NATO then in my opinion they’re a simpleton. Russias general has now said the plan is to take southern Ukraine and the east of Moldova. It’s a land grab pure and simple
No. That’s just rubbish.Mearsheimer is a fool.
The Americans have completely out-manouvered Putin and forced him into a catastrophic error in Ukraine. They have the Russians now tied down in a “can’t win” conflict in Ukraine with minimal support to Ukraine which can be be further ramped up as needed.
Russia’s military has now been exposed as a joke.
Meanwhile, NATO expansion to add Finland and Sweden is almost certain. At this rate, Russian shipping won’t be able to leave the Black Sea or Baltic.
Everyone knows that Russia is a declining power. The dempographics don’t lie.
Mearsheimer has gone from having an interesting point of view from the position of ‘realpolitik’, to become a full on Putin apologist. This idea that so many have, on Left and Right, that only the West and specifically the US have agency, is just silly on the face of it. (I’m not sure how the West manages to be both weak, effete, cowardly and pusillanimous, and a dark threat to Russia AT THE SAME TIME, but that seems to pretty much sum up the position of so many critics on this subject).
Putin was razing cities to the ground in 2001, so I think we could have seen back then – some did – what kind of regime he was running.
Attempting to reconquer Ukraine because NATO accepted some small Baltic nations – who had every historic reason to fear Russia, as did Poland – is an excuse, not a reason. Putin knows full well that NATO is defensive in nature and you would never get European support for any offensive stance. More likely he doesn’t want to see a successful, democratic liberal state develop on his borders which would be an implicit challenge to his rule. Screw what the Ukrainian people might want – even the Russian speaking part, whose cities have been destroyed around them!
You drag in the completely irrelevant Iraq situation, presumably to show the ‘hypocrisy’ of the West, though what that has to do with the Ukrainians isn’t ever told. On an obvious level, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’. Secondly, the motives were somewhat different, though many have done their best to try and show that Bush – and even more Blair – always intended a cynical war of conquest. As a matter of fact, experts at the time, including Hans Blix, the UN rapporteur, DID believe Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Thirdly, the US had no intention of staying in Iraq, as events have proved. You can undoubtedly say that this was a self-defeating geopolitical act as it led to the strengthening of Iran. Those population figures you give are simply fantasy, nothing like that number of people died as a result of the American invasion; some say many people died prematurely as a result of the previous economic sanctions, but those were agreed by the UN and the Security Council as a whole, and in any case there were all sorts of allowances for food and medicine.
Russia may well win this war, although your evident delight is this outcome is pretty nauseating. Where are the wishes of the Ukrainians in this? Russia has by far the greatest land area of any power in the world, and vast resources, so it could already be a ‘respected nation’ if it so chose. The borders with Ukraine and Belarus were agreed in a treaty in 1991 at the time the Soviet Union was dissolved. ‘Bring back the Tsars’ – unfortunately Russia has a history of brutal autocratic rulers, but we don’t need to cheer on the fact. We don’t need to look to Stalin; Putin’s hero Peter ‘the Great’ – worked tens of thousands of slave labourers to death in building St Petersburg, had his own son flayed to death etc etc.
The idea that Russia will be a ‘success’ – even in terms of a petro-economy, it doesn’t even manage to do so in the way that Saudi Arabia does – is ridiculous. It would likely become largely dependent on China, and since it stole vast territories from the latter in a number of ‘unequal treaties’ in the 19th century (rather larger than Hong Kong!), I’m not at all sure that even Russia’s territorial integrity would be secure.
Of all that I have read on this war since it started, this is the best, a report well moored in reality. Thank you, David Patrikarakos.
I’m a gardener. The image of plants straining toward sky and sun and the woman determined to help them thrive is a simple declaration of hope and determination.
Wonderful, powerful piece. Thank you.
I’m reading the book Aftermath currently, about immediate post war Germany, and how their people coped and then progressed with getting the country back on its feet. It’s truly remarkable, and rather weird, how humans can tolerate such extreme circumstances, and then move on.
Hopefully we’ll see Ukraine recover and blossom like those plants.
…as an independent country with its territory intact.
Unfortunately I think they’ll eventually lose Crimea and Donbas for good. However Putin has forever lost the chance of bringing Ukrainians under Russias influence
If Putin takes Odesa, he controls 25% of the world’s food. Then he can blackmail Europe, both with gas, and with food. This isn’t about Ukraine.
It’s about you.
Thank you Martin. Accurate and precise statements on geopolitics have been missing from the West for decades. We have been living in an affluent effete fool’s paradise for far too long.
He doesn’t control 25% of the worlds food, he controls 25% of the wheat that is exported. Remember most wheat is for domestic consumption, and wheat doesn’t make up 25% of the worlds diet. While it would be an inconvenience, it changes nothing for the west
The price of commodities are rising. If Putin reduces supply of food, especially wheat, how much will prices further and at what point will civil unrest start?For Europe, civil unrest in ME and North Africa will cause problems.
Ask the people in the poor half of the world. It will destabilize a good part of their world.
And ultimately that will affect us.
It’s modern imperialism.
My grandparents and father fought the Bolsheviks and their offspring the Soviets. They stood firm and never accepted their garbage and their Oligarchs. They will be gone soon, Putin made his ultimate mistake. Their Billionaires need to be taken down in Russia as well as Ukraine other former Soviet puppets nations. Corruption
This is an unmitigated disaster for Russia.
It will almost certainly lead to the fall of Putin. Moreover, he has eliminated all opposition, so now no one possesses the legitimacy to take over after he goes. Indeed, the Army has so disgraced itself that no one will obey any general.
As with 1917 and 1991, the nation will break apart. The only question is whether any significant group will try to put it back together again. If anyone does, prepare for some horrendous violence within Russia itself–violence that makes Bucha look like a garden party.
“Are There Any Military Targets Near Here”. “Yes” would be a surprising answer.
Powerful work here. Thanks.
Great report.
“Russia has run out of words so it can only attack Ukraine”
How would the writer know this when all Russian media has been censored.
To be clear, I am not defending or supporting Russia. Not at all. I just find it odd that someone can write this sentence when they really can’t have a clue whether Russia has run out of words or not.
Having watched Putin and Lavrov speak via news channels in uncensored countries, it hasn’t sounded like the Russians have run out of words. It just sounds like Western politicians and media don’t want anyone hearing those words.
But surely if we want to bring an end to this horrible conflict we desperately need to be using words and not weapons.
What are those words that justify this unprovoked assault on Ukraine. Apart from the General confirming what we already knew, that this was never about NATO but a simple land grab of Ukraine and Moldova?
If you listen to the speech that Putin gave prior to this conflict, which hardly anyone has, then it is very clear that this wasn’t an ‘unprovoked’ attack. One can rightly argue it is wrong (I think ALL war is wrong) but to say it is is unprovoked seems to imply you are only going off what the Western propaganda machine is spewing out.
If we are to find a non-violent solution to this conflict then we must be establishing the real reasons and then using diplomacy to find a way forward. Unfortunately too many people are claiming to know why Putin did what he did when they have only seen one side of the propaganda wars.
There are two sides to any argument and if people refuse to listen to the other side, or are prevented from doing so through censorship, then any argument is impossible to resolve.
We spent two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan based on lies, propaganda and sabre rattling, (most of it coming from OUR govts and OUR media) and those exact three things will keep us in Ukraine for two decades of we don’t start demanding peace right now.
That would be the rambling speech where Putin decided Ukraine wasn’t really a country, and should be under Russian rule? The Ukrainians clearly don’t believe their country is part of Russia do they, and Zelensky has already offered to discuss neutrality and not joining NATO yet the Russians still shell cities full of civilians. There are two sides to every story, yet that doesn’t mean both sides are equally valid. Ukraine has done nothing to warrant the destruction Russia has put upon it, the blame for this belongs to Putin and nobody else.
Also the whataboutery by banging on about the mistakes of western nations in the past is nothing to do with this conflict
No one is provoked. It is entirely their decision to act. Full stop.
Russia is taking a sad angry and embittered approach to the end of its empire.
Credit to the British who managed it with very little bloodshed, and that only to ensure peaceful transitions. They evening announced a policy of withdrawal from empire. Can you imagine Russia/Putin making such an announcement?!?
Could you explain – so far no one has made any attempt to do so – Why wouldn’t every single one of your rather naïve arguments have applied to Hitler’s successive aggressions in the 1930s? The situations are similar in many ways, including the ‘protection’ and later gathering in all the Russians/ Germans (whether these populations wanted this or not) and the endless rehashing of dubious weaponised historical grievances etc.
Your whole comment is based on the false assumption that Putin says what he thinks. But Putin lies. Anyone who was naive enough to believe Putin before the war should understand by now that he was deceived.
You can listen to the Russian side as long as you want, but accept that it’s just lies and propaganda. We don’t know the real reason for the war and the Russians won’t tell us. Maybe Putin wants to go down in history as a great conqueror. Maybe he wants to conquer the Ukrainian gas fields. Maybe he wants to gain an industrial base to conquer Europe. Maybe he was afraid that without starting a war, the Russian hawks would dethrone him. Maybe he believed his own propaganda about how Russia was in danger. Maybe China was involved, wanting to weaken both Russia and Europe and test how the US would react before invading Taiwan. We don’t know and probably we never will. We just know that the reasons Russia gives (they keep changing) are lies.
Russian gobbledygook doesn’t help the situation one iota.
I don’t understand Russian either but subtitles are usually available David.
Violence is indicative of a failure to communicate, ie running out of words. You answer your own opening question in your closing statement.
All the best.
Hw does one communicate with Attila The Hun, Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame??
Agree entirely. Appears to be the writer of this piece who has run out of words – mainly those that would go some way to placing recent events in historical context.
The historical context being that Ukraine was once part of the USSR and Putin wants that to be the case again?
Russia will never run out of lies – or liars. Or apologists.
There is no negotiation possible with these criminal thugs. Get real.
You cannot negotiate with them not because they lie, but because you cannot trust them to keep any commitment. Russia cannot, on principle, commit to anything and get anything in return from the other side, because everyone knows that Russia will break all its commitments when it suits it.
Look at a map, Russia doesn’t need Mykolaiv. In fact, Russian troops are nowhere near the place. By the way, a civilian with an AK47 is no longer a civilian – they’re a target.
Russia wants to strangle Ukraine in its crib.
It cannot do that without taking Odesa, and thus stopping all Ukrainian agricultural exports. Then Putin controls much of the worlds’ food supply (your food, BTW).
Moreover, a successful nation with many native Russians speakers is an existential threat to Putin’s regime. If Ukraine lives, Putin’s Russia dies.
It’s as simple as that.
We might add that Putin is the existential threat to Russia. He’s ruining the country.
Is anyone of the mind of Professor Mearsheimer that NATO expansion and American idiocy are the sole reasons Putin was forced to act? Does Putin have more justification for his special military action than America and Britain did for their Iraqi special military action which cost how many Iraqi lives? (Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 to 1,033,000 excess deaths).
Putin is winning, will win, and the West (the Anglosphere the 11 members of the G-20 which agreed to sanctions, 9 told America to suck it) will have to negotiate with a very popular, successful, and intelligent modern tsar of Russia and respect that ancient nation’s status as a great power.
If anybody still believes this invasion happened because of NATO then in my opinion they’re a simpleton. Russias general has now said the plan is to take southern Ukraine and the east of Moldova. It’s a land grab pure and simple
No. That’s just rubbish.Mearsheimer is a fool.
The Americans have completely out-manouvered Putin and forced him into a catastrophic error in Ukraine. They have the Russians now tied down in a “can’t win” conflict in Ukraine with minimal support to Ukraine which can be be further ramped up as needed.
Russia’s military has now been exposed as a joke.
Meanwhile, NATO expansion to add Finland and Sweden is almost certain. At this rate, Russian shipping won’t be able to leave the Black Sea or Baltic.
Everyone knows that Russia is a declining power. The dempographics don’t lie.
Mearsheimer has gone from having an interesting point of view from the position of ‘realpolitik’, to become a full on Putin apologist. This idea that so many have, on Left and Right, that only the West and specifically the US have agency, is just silly on the face of it. (I’m not sure how the West manages to be both weak, effete, cowardly and pusillanimous, and a dark threat to Russia AT THE SAME TIME, but that seems to pretty much sum up the position of so many critics on this subject).
Putin was razing cities to the ground in 2001, so I think we could have seen back then – some did – what kind of regime he was running.
Attempting to reconquer Ukraine because NATO accepted some small Baltic nations – who had every historic reason to fear Russia, as did Poland – is an excuse, not a reason. Putin knows full well that NATO is defensive in nature and you would never get European support for any offensive stance. More likely he doesn’t want to see a successful, democratic liberal state develop on his borders which would be an implicit challenge to his rule. Screw what the Ukrainian people might want – even the Russian speaking part, whose cities have been destroyed around them!
You drag in the completely irrelevant Iraq situation, presumably to show the ‘hypocrisy’ of the West, though what that has to do with the Ukrainians isn’t ever told. On an obvious level, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’. Secondly, the motives were somewhat different, though many have done their best to try and show that Bush – and even more Blair – always intended a cynical war of conquest. As a matter of fact, experts at the time, including Hans Blix, the UN rapporteur, DID believe Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Thirdly, the US had no intention of staying in Iraq, as events have proved. You can undoubtedly say that this was a self-defeating geopolitical act as it led to the strengthening of Iran. Those population figures you give are simply fantasy, nothing like that number of people died as a result of the American invasion; some say many people died prematurely as a result of the previous economic sanctions, but those were agreed by the UN and the Security Council as a whole, and in any case there were all sorts of allowances for food and medicine.
Russia may well win this war, although your evident delight is this outcome is pretty nauseating. Where are the wishes of the Ukrainians in this? Russia has by far the greatest land area of any power in the world, and vast resources, so it could already be a ‘respected nation’ if it so chose. The borders with Ukraine and Belarus were agreed in a treaty in 1991 at the time the Soviet Union was dissolved. ‘Bring back the Tsars’ – unfortunately Russia has a history of brutal autocratic rulers, but we don’t need to cheer on the fact. We don’t need to look to Stalin; Putin’s hero Peter ‘the Great’ – worked tens of thousands of slave labourers to death in building St Petersburg, had his own son flayed to death etc etc.
The idea that Russia will be a ‘success’ – even in terms of a petro-economy, it doesn’t even manage to do so in the way that Saudi Arabia does – is ridiculous. It would likely become largely dependent on China, and since it stole vast territories from the latter in a number of ‘unequal treaties’ in the 19th century (rather larger than Hong Kong!), I’m not at all sure that even Russia’s territorial integrity would be secure.