Behind the curtain

Most magic tricks combine two strategies, one to produce the desired effect, and another to distract the audience from what is really going on. Russia is doing the same with recent statements that are clearly designed to raise regional tensions around Ukraine. 

First, the Russian government approved a list of 47 foreign states and territories whose neoliberal attitudes supposedly threaten people with “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” Those on the list are now officially designated as “enemy states.” Gone is any pretence of supporting a “multipolar” world. If you do not share Russia’s values, you are the enemy. 

Among those who apparently share Russia’s values are North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran. The common element across these regimes is that they regard the European Enlightenment as the ultimate evil. The conflict is thus elevated to a metaphysical-religious level, and whenever religion enters directly into politics, the threat of deadly violence is never far behind. Beneath all the talk of a new multipolar world is an eschatological vision of a total war to extinction between two opposites. 

Hence, soon after releasing his “enemies list,” Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine that expands “the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out.” In a pointed warning to the West, he announced that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state that is backed by a nuclear-armed one would be considered a “joint attack.” 

Moreover, the Kremlin reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to an attack on Belarus, which forms part of its “Union State.” In other words, any case where an enemy “creates critical danger to our sovereignty” is a potential casus belli for a nuclear conflict.

Such statements cannot but make us nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War, when both sides wisely avoided direct nuclear threats and announced that they would use nuclear arms only in response to a nuclear strike by the other side. Under the conditions of “mutual assured destruction,” nobody dared to raise the possibility of a nuclear first strike. But now, Russia is not only asserting its right to a first strike; it is even expanding the conditions for justifying it.

Of course, an actual Russian first strike remains unlikely. But in military matters, words are never just words. It is all too easy for one side to become trapped by its own rhetoric. After thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon, Iran’s delegate to the United Nations said that Israel had again “crossed a red line.” 

But at a time when “red lines” are being crossed regularly, such statements can only make the situation more dangerous. After all, there must be real red lines somewhere, but they may not be well understood, implying that we will not know where they lie until they have been crossed.

The obvious response to Putin is that he is the one who crossed the red line by issuing nuclear threats. Like those commentators who see the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war as a proxy war between Russia and NATO, he would have us believe that Russia was attacked first. Can this be true? Israel would say that it is just acting in self-defence in Gaza, the West Bank, in Lebanon, but much is riding on how one defines “self” here. If I occupy territory that is not mine and then proclaim it mine (like the West Bank, or parts of Ukraine), and if the people who live there resist me, am I acting in self-defence when I crush them?

This brings us back to the magician strategies of Russian state propaganda. By accusing his opponents of what he is already doing, Putin wants to divert attention from the fact that he has stolen land and declared it his own. If you accept that Crimea, Donbas, and any other area with “traditional Russian” values (perhaps the Baltic countries or Moldova?) is being threatened, or that the Ukrainian nation is some fanciful modern construct, you have fallen for Putin’s trick. 

Understanding Putin’s sleight of hand matters for the near term, because his combination of propaganda strategies has rendered rational peace negotiations practically impossible. When the terms of negotiation have been falsified from the outset, what progress can be made? Reflecting on the perpetual calls for peace in Ukraine, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič of Central European University is right to caution that, “Peace is all too precious to be left to peaceniks.” 

Add Putin’s third strategy of deception — presenting a brutal war of conquest as a defence of spiritual values — and his legerdemain looks almost insuperable. All our hope now resides in that “almost.”