Putin Deserves the Accusation
Despite all the claims, reasons or “evidence” Putin has cited in his televised address before launching his “special military operation” in Ukraine, he has absolutely no right to invade another sovereign country, (1) especially when the action has shown no self-imposed limit — like Deng Xiaoping did in 1979 with Vietnam — but all the way to the nation’s capital; (2) especially when Putin openly calls for regime change to the Ukraine military forces, and (3) especially when he talks about Russia’s big nuclear arsenal, which is simply not a smart thing to say and only provides ammunition for bad publicity.
As an example where his logic is way off, Putin cited the rampant corruption in Ukraine: “It has literally permeated and corroded Ukrainian statehood, the entire system, and all branches of power.” I wish he had checked figures and facts first. According to Transparency International, in 2021, Ukraine received a score of 32 of Corruption Perception Index, and ranked the 122nd in the world, while Russia had a score of 29 with a ranking of 136th (higher rank indicates worse perception of corruption problem).
If corruption is a legitimate reason for military invasion, Ukraine should invade Russia, not the other way around. My point is to show how absurd Putin’s reasoning is, not to say we should take corruption scores and ranks literally. All international indicators are comparing apples to oranges, and they should all be taken with a grain of salt.
We may want to go back to the excuses Hitler used to invade Poland: “Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany.”
The Japanese used similarly excuses, even a dirtier trick, to invade China in 1931: The Mukden Incident, or Manchurian Incident, known in Chinese as the 9.18 Incident, a false flag event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for Japanese invasion of Manchuria, northeast part of China.
Putin should and could call for international investigations of all the claims he has made, not jump to military actions. Doing so simply makes him like the Nazi — and citing the reason of anti-Nazi helps little. Furthermore, if every country does what Putin does, all hopes of international rule of law will be instantly killed. This is the bottom line no country and no leader should cross — including the US. For that reason alone, Putin must be stopped.
Putin’s Address Deserves Attention
I took the pain to finish watching Putin’s hour long speech explaining his thinking and decision on Ukraine It is no fun nor easy to follow the English subtitles. So I read the full transcript here. It would be mistaken to ignore this rare opportunity of reading his mind and his way of thinking.
Perhaps not everyone has noticed the shortness of breath Putin shows when he talks, but everyone can clearly see how much anger and (long accumulated) frustrations Putin has with Russian’s Soviet past and also with the West, especially the US.
I found much of what Putin said not bizarre but understandable (empathy), which is not the same as believing his invasion is warranted (sympathy, see more details later). For one thing, the US is to be blamed for NATO expansion if you read George Kennan and Bill Perry as quoted in Thomas Friedman. In terms of invading sovereign countries, the US has also been a bad predecessor.
I can also understand the thing Putin said about Ukraine. For example, “Kiev tried to use dialogue with Russia as a bargaining chip in its relations with the West, using the threat of closer ties with Russia for blackmailing the West to secure preference by claiming that otherwise Russia would have a bigger influence in Ukraine.”
This is believable because it is just an easy or even clever step for Kiev to take advantage of the sensitivity the West holds toward anything in favor of Russia. It happens naturally just like both sides are now fighting an information war, spreading fake news not in favor of enemy but good for self.
Other things like the rise of far-right nationalism and Russophobia are similarly not out of the question (see evidences I find from open documents and reports later) in a country where the income level drops so much so quickly.
I also believe Russia’s national security concern deserves international attention and respect. But I will stop here because this issue requires discussion of a bigger cause that would have to be addressed in its entirety somewhere else.
If you believe in this recent interview, the “information war” that the US has put up in Ukraine may have forced Putin into action in order not to be seen as weak. However, after watching Putin’s speech, I doubt it has played a decisive role in the Russia invasion, given all the historical root and reckoning that Putin has laid out himself.
Once again, none of the those is valid reasons for Russia to launch a war with Ukraine. Notice as the most war-prone country in the world, the US has never had a war with any of its neighbors except with Cuba, which is really a conflict with the former USSR.
When Neither Side Is Clean in a Battle
All wars are messy because situations in all battlefields are nothing but complexity. Nobody wants to lose, and everyone is trying the best to win. That said, the Russo-Ukraine war is among the worst case because the warfare started in 2014.
During a long lasting war, not only can hatreds accumulate, but they often escalate. When winning become the top priority, other considerations often get pushed to the back burner, especially for “symmetric wars” between sovereign countries, more so than the “asymmetric war” like the one between Israel and Palestine. The former possesses far more resources than the latter that winning is almost guaranteed. Under those scenarios, the dominant side must impose some self-constraints to avoid large scale casualties.
I say these as a pretext for what I will say next. Given the international sympathy Ukraine has received lately, it is easy to feel surprised to hear problems from the Ukraine side, although there is really no reason to. Just because Ukraine is to be respected for resisting the Russians invasion does not mean their people or government do everything clean. There is no need to treat the country as a democratic hero or a “model citizen” in the international community. Ukraine has its fair share of dirty records just as Russia does.
Let me illustrate using public documents and reports provided by journalists with conscience, who deserve nothing less than golden medals in journalism.
This report by NYT showed that in 2014, “The Ukrainian Army appears to have fired cluster munitions on several occasions into the heart of Donetsk, unleashing a weapon banned in much of the world into a rebel-held city with a peacetime population of more than one million, according to physical evidence and interviews with witnesses and victims.”
“If confirmed, the use of cluster bombs by the pro-Western government could complicate efforts to reunite the country, as residents of the east have grown increasingly bitter over the Ukrainian Army’s tactics to oust pro-Russian rebels.”
There are more, much more. Read the Wikipedia page on Ukrainian volunteer battalions, which “Amnesty International said that they often acted like “renegade gangs”, and were implicated in torture, abductions, and summary executions.” What is more shocking is that these gangs were most “formed by the government agencies of Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Internal Affairs” of Ukraine.
This other Wikipedia page cites a May 2014 report by the United Nations “documenting cases of targeted killings, torture, and abduction, primarily carried out by the forces of the Ukraine paramilitary forces.[2] The UN also reported threats against, attacks on, and abductions of journalists and international observers, as well as the beatings and attacks on supporters of Ukrainian unity.”
Turns out, non-surprisingly, that Putin’s TV address painted a highly biased, one-sided picture, because the pro-Russian side is not clean, either. The aforementioned Wikipedia page cites another report by Human Rights Watch that says “Anti-Kiev forces in eastern Ukraine are abducting, attacking, and harassing people they suspect of supporting the Ukrainian government or consider undesirable…anti-Kiev insurgents are using beatings and kidnappings to send the message that anyone who doesn’t support them had better shut up or leave.“
Do not think this is just one time tragedy in 2014, as the same Wikipedia page cited areport dated March 3, 2016 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which described the miserable living conditions for people in pro-Russian separatist-controlled areas experiencing “complete absence of rule of law, reports of arbitrary detention, torture and incommunicado detention, and no access to real redress mechanisms”.
The Ukraine side was once again just as guilty, as the same report noted “allegations of violations perpetrated with impunity by Ukrainian law enforcement officials—mainly elements of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)—including enforced disappearances, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, and torture and ill-treatment.”
Fast forward to reports that are publicly available today but are deeply buried by the pro-Ukraine reports in the US. It’s a good thing that we have access to news from all over the world — if you actively dig them and refuse to simply take whatever the locally prevailing views are.
The following sentences are from this LinkedIn site posted by some French speaking guy. You can catch the video clip by clicking one of the links: “Today, March 1, 2022, Anne-Laure Bonnet, a French war reporter who has been in Ukraine since 2015, says: ‘I’m sorry to shock everyone, I have no political position, I don’t defend Putin but it’s the Ukrainian government that is bombing the Russian-speaking Ukrainian population in Donbass right now and it’s been going on for 8 years, I have videos to prove it!’“
I must claim that I first learned this from a Chinese source streaming a video clip from “CNews” in France. It is non-surprising because Beijing stands closer to Russia than to Ukraine. But that’s the beauty of diversity: We learn different things from otherwise unknown sources when people with difference views actively dig out things for you — as long as they are true and as long as we keep an open mind.
The whole TV interview of Anne-Laure Bonnet was in French but with English subtitle. As she has been stationed in Donbass area since 2014, she tells us that since 2014, Kiev has been bombing the region non-stop — still going on today, killing civilians including children, mostly Russian speaking civilians.
I highlight the targeted killing of “Russian speaking civilians” because that fits the definition of genocide. But as pointed out by this report of PBS, genocide requires that “the actions must be done with intent to eliminate an entire group of people.” If that proves something hard to do, the words “humanity crimes” would sure apply.
In sum, we should respect the courage of some (not all) Ukrainian people in fighting a stronger and larger invader, but the nature of the Russo-Ukraine war is invasion versus resistance, and in that sense justice is on the Ukrainian side. On the other hand, the war is not exactly between Christ and Satan. Ukraine currently stands as a failed country in its economy, corruption, and human rights records.
The best way of stopping a war is to preemptively present it from happening. I believe Ukraine shoulders its fair share of responsibility to make its relationship with Russia deteriorate so fast and so deep. Not meant to judge or to lecture but I do believe that holding a friendly — at least neutral and peaceful, not hostile or antagonistic — neighborhood relationship with Russia is a smart thing to do because it is good for its own people. Chinese has a famous saying: “A friendly neighbor delivers more than a remote relative can promise” (远亲不如近邻), regardless of how powerful the remote relative may be. At the end of day, a country is just like a human: Each must stand on his/her own, each must rely on his/her own strength endogenous produced, not exogenously given.
Avoid Extremes in the Heat of an Ongoing War
With so much anger, frustration and hatred in the world, the number one job for the global leaders is to dial down negative emotions to a controllable degree and then turn them into productive, pacifist energies to move the world forward toward peace and prosperity.
I wish the best for all the human beings living on the face of the earth! But the reality is that we are not particularly good at learning how to make peace and coexist, not to kill, to trash, to blame or label each other as evil spirits, and wish their countries to collapse like this essay by Michael Rubin has openly stated. The sad thing is that I know Rubin is far from alone, many Americans are thinking just like Rubin.
Speaking of human rights, keeping all sovereign countries intact and stable is to the best interests of human rights, also the best way to show democracy works because the consequences of country collapsing are too dire and too disastrous — especially to the ordinary people. We should never put ideology before lives and welfare of human beings.
Always ask the right question of what is the point of defeating Russia and China if doing so brings humanity disasters and massive loss of life.
Decision Science Helps
The other wrong thing to do is to trap ourselves into believing we can only shift between left and right, between moments of self-doubt and moments of self-glory like this essay by Bret Stephens tells us. We can do better because there is a better framework of thinking in decision science, which according to this brief introduction, is “an interdisciplinary field that draws on economics, machine learning, statistical decision theory, operations research, forecasting, behavioral decision theory and cognitive psychology.” Although decision science started from individuals and organizations, we can borrow the principles and methods to national and international decisions without requiring a leap of faith.
This helps because some people, including myself, are not interest in being left or right, liberal or conservative. We also do not like having to shift between moments of self-doubt and self-glory. We just want to find out the best, most efficient way of making decisions that are rational, well informed, inclusive, neutral and balanced, that can survive the tests of reality under uncertainty.
Instead of calling them left or right choices, we call them good decisions, mediocre and bad decisions. More importantly, good decisions can be learned while bad ones can be avoided or alleviated.
Following this logic, self-awareness does not have to be “a recipe for personal or policy paralysis” like Stephens told us, just like intellectual humility does not have to lead to “moral confusion.” The goal of learning from decision sciences is to have both self-awareness and decisiveness, intellectual humility and principle + fact guided goals. If self-awareness and decisiveness, humility and paralysis inevitably go against each other or go mutually exclusive, there is no point in learning decision making, and in even trying to be better decision makers.
Following this logic, a good diagnosis of the problems we are facing is always the first key step. In my view, the US in general does not have much problem with paralysis, but more with making self-righteous, spontaneous, rushed and ill-informed decisions. Instead of worrying about Americans being in self-doubts, we should worry more about being in false self-glory.
Zelenskyy Is Respectable & Likeable
I want to end this post by saying that I like Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, the current president of Ukraine, whose “leadership during the crisis won him widespread international admiration, and he has been described as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance” as points out by this Wikipedia page.
I first noticed Zelenskyy before the Russian invasion. Zelenskyy repeatedly told the west not to exaggerate the possibility of Russian attack, because that would cause panic and hurt the economy. Some may laugh at him now that Russians did attack, but I believe he did the right thing as a leader. Frankly not all the US allies would openly challenge the US in public statement — they really should because leaders should always put the best interests of their own countries first, above and beyond everything else. There is also no need for Biden to publicly predict the dates when Putin would attack. A much better way is to provide intelligence in private and let national leaders decide what to do.
I respect and like Zelenskyy also because he promotes “unity between the Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking parts of the country’s population.” I wish him best of luck in that front because that is the only right thing to do as a national leader.
He also “oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament,” something China should be doing for all politburo members, who currently enjoy de facto legal exemption in the country.
Finally I like Zelenskyy because he has repeatedly expressed his willingness to talk to Putin directly. Unfortunately the latter is unwilling to do the same to Zelenskyy.
All is not hopeless, however. Although western media reported how brutal the Russian military forces are attacking civilians, there are things on the brighter side. This report says the Russians have opened a special route for Ukraine civilians to leave Kiev freely and peacefully. This needs to be placed in the historical context that during the second Chechen war, both Russian government and terrorists killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
We should all celebrate the news that during the second round of talk both sides agreed to let civilians withdraw peacefully from the big cities surrounded by the Russian military.
I wish fewer countries would encourage their citizens to join the “Volunteer army” for Ukraine, simple because it only helps escalate rather than reduce casualties from the war. Sending in defensive weapons is a better and smarter thing to do.