Experts tend to have bet­ter focus than periph­er­al vision. In the case of the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine, there is con­sid­er­able evi­dence many of them had nei­ther. Vladimir Putin’s aims have long been obvi­ous, sub­tly framed by his his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive and steadi­ly but­tressed with means to fight back if they are opposed.

At a NATO sum­mit in Bucharest in 2008, Putin report­ed­ly looked then Pres­i­dent George W. Bush in the eye and said: “Do you under­stand George? The Ukraine is not even a state…we gave them the most impor­tant part of their country.”
Always there but often out of focus is the fact that one of the dri­ving fac­tors of Putin’s worldview and ambi­tions is reli­gion. His father was a good com­mu­nist athe­ist, but his moth­er had lit­tle Vladimir secret­ly bap­tised. He report­ed­ly still wears his bap­tismal cross. And there­in lies the vis­cer­al con­nec­tion to Ukraine. Russ­ian Ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty began in 988 with a mass bap­tism in the riv­er Dneiper in the city then called Kyev. In a fine his­tor­i­cal twist, it was ordered by Vladimir the Rus, a pagan who con­vert­ed to Christianity.
Vladimir the Pres­i­dent casts him­self as a defend­er of Chris­tians around the world. In 2019 a “Cathe­dral of the Armed Forces” was opened near Moscow. One of the mosaics cel­e­brates the “return of Crimea” to Russ­ian con­trol in 2014.
Putin has also made a use­ful (if arguably some­what blas­phe­mous) menage a deux with the Russ­ian Ortho­dox church. Last Novem­ber he dec­o­rat­ed Russ­ian Ortho­dox Patri­arch Kir­ill with Russia’s high­est hon­our, the Order of St. Andrew the First­born Apos­tle. The church leader returned the favour by declar­ing: “Rus­sia today is the true leader of the free world. We are devel­op­ing in accor­dance with our own path and, by God’s will, our path shall be successful.”.
By that mea­sure, the deity seems to have switched sides in the ‘Rus­sia vs the Rest’ strug­gle. In his 1992 State of the Union address, Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush said: “By the grace of God, Amer­i­ca won the Cold War.” 

                      FIGHTING BACK

Hope for the “good guys” com­ing out on top this time are being pinned on the grace of sanc­tions. The pos­si­bil­i­ties for that will keep eco­nom­ic talk­ing heads in busi­ness for weeks if not months. They would do well to bear in mind that Russia’s new Tsar has means and more than enough places to counter-strike.
Exam­ple one is Bosnia. The Day­ton Accord which end­ed the 1990s war there is in the process of being shred­ded. In 2004 the enclave of Bosnia that styles itself “Repub­li­ka Srp­s­ka” acknowl­edged that Serb forces com­mit­ted geno­cide when they killed some 7,000 men and boys in the town of Sre­breni­ca. A nation­al­ist group report­ed­ly fund­ed by Moscow has been putting up posters of Ratko Mladic, the Bosn­ian Serb gen­er­al con­vict­ed of the mas­sacre, and preach­ing the nation­al­ism that helped soak the Balka­ns in blood and destruc­tion in the last war on Euro­pean soil.
Russ­ian troops can’t occu­py or even back up Repub­li­ka Srp­s­ka, but they don’t have to do so.
A recent report by the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS) found that Russ­ian pri­vate mil­i­tary com­pa­nies (PMCs) are known or sus­pect­ed to oper­ate in as many as 30 coun­tries on four con­ti­nents. “PMCs and asso­ci­at­ed ener­gy, min­ing, secu­ri­ty, and logis­tics firms pro­vide Moscow a means to expand trade and eco­nom­ic influ­ence in the devel­op­ing world and build new rev­enue streams, par­tic­u­lar­ly from oil, gas, and min­er­al extrac­tion, to reduce the impact of sanctions.”
Ukraine was a prov­ing ground in 2014. PMCs were active in Donet­sk and Luhan­sk as part of Moscow’s doc­trine of “hybrid war­fare”. Then came Syr­ia and Libya. The most infa­mous PMC, the Wag­n­er Group, has been accused of human rights vio­la­tions that include rape, behead­ings and mass killings. As a proxy army for Putin, Wag­n­er doesn’t actu­al­ly exist in con­ven­tion­al busi­ness terms. “Rather, the name has come to describe a net­work of busi­ness­es and groups of mer­ce­nar­ies that have been linked by over­laps in own­er­ship and logis­tics networks.”.
The U.S. and the Euro­pean Union (EU) tar­get­ed Wagner’s sus­pect­ed own­er, Russ­ian oli­garch and Putin ally Yevge­ny Prigozhin with a bas­ket of sanc­tions. So far, they seem to have been less than effective.

                                 LESSON FROM THE PAST

Gain­ing and manip­u­lat­ing spheres of influ­ence by using region­al con­flicts is a tried-and-true Russ­ian tac­tic going back to the Sovi­et Union days. In the late 1970s, I wrote a piece on how West­ern diplo­mats and South African offi­cials con­sid­ered Vasi­ly Solodovnikov, the Sovi­et ambas­sador to Zam­bia, the “spi­der” spin­ning a web of com­mu­nism in the region by sup­port­ing black lib­er­a­tion groups in South Africa, Rhode­sia and Namibia.
Many years lat­er, over glass­es of vod­ka in his Moscow apart­ment, the avun­cu­lar diplo­mat laughed about my char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. “We knew none of them would ever become good com­mu­nists,” he told me. “We didn’t care about that. What we want­ed was trade and back­ing in inter­na­tion­al forums from whichev­er of them won.”
That West­ern experts tasked with watch­ing and inter­pret­ing Sovi­et pol­i­cy in the region missed the nuance is no big sur­prise giv­en the ethos of the Cold War.
The most sur­pris­ing thing about the inva­sion of Ukraine is not that Putin did it, but that it caught a good many experts look­ing at but not see­ing what he had on full display.
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