Putin’s Russia will choke on Ukraine

The Odessa opera house was full of the great and the good on 24 August last year, when the Black Sea port, Ukraine’s third largest city, celebrated Ukrainian Independence Day.

Transported by the music and splendour of the neo-baroque building, the crème of Odessa society along with a few curious tourists – including two South Africans – thoroughly enjoyed the show including excerpts of Russian operas by Godunov, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Glinka.

Russian culture runs deep in this city founded by Empress Catherine the Great on the remains of a centuries-old Ottoman fort after decades of Russian military campaigns against the Turks. The operas may have been in Russian, but the speeches were in Ukrainian as was the rousing rendition of the national anthem, Ukraine is not yet lost, which ended the evening’s proceedings.

The passion of the singers, most of whom were native Russian speakers, was unmistakable in a country that had just recently shaken off decades of authoritarianism and was pivoting unsteadily towards the norms of a European democracy. It’s context that would be easy for most South Africans to understand, bound together as we are by a commitment to a fragile and unsteady democratic project in a multicultural and multilingual society. Of course, such layered loyalties are as anathema to nationalistic ideologues in Moscow as they are to the red-bereted, ethno-nationalist loud-mouths here.

On Maidan Square in central Kiev, the site where blood was spilt by demonstrators who battled for weeks with snipers to save Ukraine’s soul in 2014, we marvelled at the parallels with South Africa, reflecting on our democratic near-death experience at the hands of a corrupt president. Like the children of Soweto 1976, thousands of Ukrainians on the “Maidan” braved the bullets, many dying on makeshift barricades, to prevent the capture of their country by Putin’s henchman. Six months ago, on the Maidan, we felt the change was irreversible. The forces of good had triumphed. All we were doing was commemorating the sacrifice of the democrats. But how tragically wrong we were!

I watched Vladimir Putin make his rambling, incoherent, lie-ridden speech from the safety of my living room, now adorned with light-blue painted flowers, a tourist trophy from my summer holiday in Ukraine. His incontinent lies, his century-old grievances laced with fury, his undisguised hatred of the Ukrainian democrats reminded me of another leader from another awful era. Like Hitler, Putin holds international law, the sovereignty of nations, but more fundamentally the whole concept of a civilized society of nations, in total contempt. Like Hitler, he now seems to be in an unrestrained death spiral, upping the ante regardless of the cost, a law unto himself, determined to take his whole nation of 144 million souls with him. The result of Hitler’s death spiral was World War II, the destruction of Germany, the murder of millions in the “bloodlands” of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.

Timothy Snyder estimates that between Stalin’s man-made famines of the thirties, his purges, and Soviet massacres before and during the war, and Hitler’s murder of the Jews, the German “hunger plan”, and Nazi reprisals, 14 million people were killed in this region. Among the victims were my Polish-Jewish grandmother and my Polish-Catholic grandfather. A third grandparent suffered permanent exile in the Soviet Union. So, I wondered what the consequences of Putin’s spiral into destruction will be on Russia, the world, and on my children over the next decade.

But after witnessing the Ukrainian spirit in Odessa, Kiev, and Lviv, and the heroic last stand being taken by the country’s president and Kiev’s mayor, I believe the pacification of Ukraine, if successful, will be a drawn-out, bloody affair, costing the lives of thousands. Were these cities to be seized, democrats of every hue will be targeted for physical elimination, justified ludicrously by the “denazification” of a government headed by a president with Jewish origins. But 30 years of Ukrainian independence won’t be easily forgotten. Putin’s Russia will choke on Ukraine, a large, educated country of 44 million people, but perhaps not before he has attempted to further reconstruct the Soviet empire by invading little Moldova and Georgia, two terribly vulnerable non-North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries which don’t benefit from NATO’s Article 5 “an attack against one is an attack against all” security blanket, that must be seeing their fates in the grimmest possible light.

And the death spiral may not end with them, the Baltics could be next, militarily indefensible. Putin may gamble on a short war with NATO which both sides will avoid escalating for fear of a nuclear Armageddon, a fear more real now that Russia has put its nuclear forces on a high state of alert.

Given the sheer irrationality of the Ukrainian invasion, which represents such a break from the carefully calibrated Russian operations of the past, it feels like Putin has passed the point of no return. And in one of the many ironies of history, it’s now Germany, the architect of Europe’s destruction in the forties, which bears a special responsibility in preventing another cataclysm. German purchases of Russian gas, above all other nations, are bankrolling Putin’s war machine. Tens of billions of dollars of cash will keep coming to Putin, sanctions or no sanctions, until Germany weans itself off Russia’s Gazprom. This is now a historically responsibility that Germany bears towards Europe and the world. It must act now. And it seems like Olaf Scholz, the new Chancellor of Germany, has grasped the mettle, at least for now.

• Luc Albinski is the executive chairman of Vantage Capital, which recently has established an education investment vehicle targeting Central and Eastern Europe including Ukraine. Albinski is an active member of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre.