ALSO SEE: Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Lucid (Substack)

The half-measures of Western democratic governments and the greed of Western businesses in Russia have helped Putin prolong this war to his advantage

It’s been a while since I wrote about the situation in Ukraine, and this post builds on the writing I have done on Russia’s imperialist war, from an early hope that Vladimir Putin’s invasion would “be a game-changer for democracy,” to a warning that “entrenched kleptocracy may delay regime change,” to a piece on the importance of information warfare for a regime founded on the idea that (to quote Peter Pomerantsev’s 2017 book), “nothing is true, and everything is possible.”

I am all too familiar with the destruction autocrats of the past have brought to the world, and the toll of democracies appeasing dictatorships in the present.

So it has been excruciating to witness the myriad hesitancies and half-measures that have marked and marred the response of Western democracies to Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Russia’s war on Ukraine does not just aim at territorial seizure and occupation. It is a Fascist-style attempt to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure and culture and any sense of its future as a sovereign democratic nation.

The Kremlin may call Ukrainians Nazis, but it is Russia’s mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children that eerily echo Nazi kidnappings of Polish children. Claiming young Ukanians is meant to bring “fresh blood” to Russia, compensating for its demographic decline, and interrupt the transmission of Ukrainian identity and history.

The ultimate goal of the “reunification” of Russia and Ukraine, to use the Kremlin’s term, is the complete suppression of Ukraine as a political, cultural, and economic entity. This totalitarian goal of the Kremlin is the frame for considering the moral, foreign policy and collective security failings of the world’s democracies as the situation in Ukraine has gone from hopeful to bad to worse.

The Costs of Half-Hearted and Partial Action

The multiple tragedies now unfolding in Ukraine could have been avoided had foreign powers acted in a unified and assertive manner to give Ukraine what it needed to repel the foreign invader early on. Western defense and intelligence analysts may have been surprised at the weak and dysfunctional nature of the Russian military, but discovering that weakness did not translate into massive aid to exploit the situation.

Many Western analysts also initially shared Putin’s underestimation of Ukraine’s president Zelensky, and did not anticipate the resolve of Ukrainians to fight and their skill at waging urban and hybrid warfare.

Knowing how autocrats weaken militaries through nepotism and corruption, it was obvious even to me (a non-specialist on the Russian armed forces) that the Russian military would not perform well and that arrogant Putin was unprepared for Ukrainian resistance capacities.

Putin had started this war because he was in a moment of weakness, not of strength. That is when autocrats do risky things. “In fact, the Russian president's formal lock on power, secured by his 2020 amendment of the constitution, has been accompanied by more, not less, violence against those who expose his corruption. This is a sign of insecurity, not of confidence,” I wrote in a MSNBC op-ed a few days after the invasion started.

So was the onset of "sudden Russian death syndrome”, or the purge of important elites in the energy sector that lubricates Russian kleptocracy. If Putin had been secure in his leadership, he would not have killed off over 50 people since the invasion started. Nor would he have had to later resort to relying on pro-Putin U.S. Republicans to engineer an advantage for him by delaying U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

It is tragic that foreign democracies collectively gave Ukraine enough weapons to challenge Putin and defend their territory, but never enough military and other aid to let Ukraine achieve a definitive victory.

Put differently and in realpolitik terms, foreign democracies gave Ukraine enough assistance to allow Putin to prolong the war, giving him a chance to replenish his military and find new suppliers of weapons and parts. China, Hong Kong, Turkey, India, and UAE figured among those suppliers in 2022-2023, but we also find Germany, South Korea, Italy, and Japan in the mix.

Refusing to arm Ukraine sufficiently, thus allowing Russia to avoid defeat, also gave Russia the time to sort out problems with its military leadership (which was not consulted adequately before the war started). Record numbers of Russian generals lost their lives early in the war, in part due to the need for their presence at the front to address low troop morale and inadequate training.

If you are an autocrat and your war aims include genocide as well as territorial occupation, every day you stay in the war and kill some of your enemy is a win. So we should call out those who are funding the Russian state, directly or indirectly, and doing business with this genocidal power.

Call Out the Enablers in Business and Finance

Why are foreign businesses still operating in Russia, which puts them in a position of subsidizing, through the taxes they pay to the Kremlin, Putin’s kleptocracy? Capitalist greed is a main reason. According to a Financial Times report, Western banks operating in Russia paid the Kremlin more than 800 million Euro in taxes last year alone —four times the amount they were paying before the 2022 invasion.

The top European banks listed by assets in Russia — Raiffeisen Bank International, UniCredit, ING, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo and OTP — had a combined profit of more than 3 billion Euro in 2023. Massive loss of life and the endangerment of democracy in Europe count for less on the balance sheet than those profits, evidently.

Perhaps those banks will be feeling differently now that the Russia has seized the assets, accounts, property, and shares of German and Italian banks (Deutschebank, Kommerzbank, UniCredit). Given the drop in Gazprom profits leaves Putin less to plunder, (see this Lucid essay on the place of Gazprom in Russia’s kleptocracy) that Putin would prey upon Western assets.

US banks are also part of the fund-Putin party, starting with Citigroup, which the Russian Central Bank lists as the biggest taxpayer among any Western bank in Russia. Citigroup did close its corporate and retail sectors in Russia, but it paid $53 million in taxes to the Kremlin in 2023.

As for JPMorgan, it has a long history of enriching dictators, starting with the House of Morgan’s $100 million 1926 loan to Mussolini. Although JPMorgan has been trying to extricate itself from Russia since 2022, it remains there (mostly due to an ongoing lawsuit by its former partner VTB) generating tax payments for Putin.

American hesitancy and inaction have marked the response of American and foreign democracies to this war, and it is sad that French President Emmanuel Macron stands out among leaders for being tough and uncompromising on Putin and Ukraine.

That’s why I agree with the assessment of Timofiy Mylovanov, President of the Kyiv School of Economics, that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s speech during a recent visit to Kyiv was unhelpful.

Blinken focused on Ukraine’s need to combat corruption, as though Ukraine were not in a situation of existential threat to the future of the country. “A major reason for the current Russian success and for people dying is the delay in U.S. aid,” Mylovanov pointed out. “[B]e[ing] lectured about slow progress in reforms while there is slow progress in helping with weapons” strikes the wrong note, especially when the U.S. cannot seem to decide if it is going to enforce sanctions against Russia.

We have learned nothing from history if we believe that caution will deter Putin. We have already seen that the longer the war goes on, the more emboldened Putin becomes. Russia has now initiated terrorist attacks in England, Germany, and elsewhere on foreign entities involved in arming Ukraine.

As things become more dire for Ukrainians, some European leaders are engaging in rueful reflecton. Czech President Petr Pavel recently observed that the “cautious support” Western countries provided to Ukraine was not sufficient to prevent an escalation of the conflict, and that long discussions among those countries delayed assistance, to Russia’s benefit.

We have one more chance to act decisively to save democracy in Ukraine and beyond, but we have to move fast. Ukraine is now “a devastated and depopulated country struggling to prevent a collapse on the frontline,” the journalist Leonid Ragozin commented on X recently.

This situation reflects a revitalized Russian military, but is also the consequence of a half-hearted and partial Western response to the invasion. Ukraine’s ruin is all the more tragic because it was so avoidable.