How The War For Kiev Ends: Silver Linings From Ukrainian Invasion?

A response to a polyglot friend. Did Putin save NATO?

Roman Dmowski

“There is no human power capable of stopping an independent Ukraine, torn from Russia, from becoming a playground for the criminal classes of the entire world, for whom there is very little room left in their own countries; capitalists in search of capital, industrialists, technicians, dealers, speculators, men of intrigue, and the initiators of every possible form of prostitution: Germans, French, Belgians, Italians, the English, the Americans—they would all find favor amongst the local Russians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks and, above all, amongst the most important of groups in Ukraine: the Jews. An independent Ukraine would pull in all of the powers of the world and rival the League of Nations for the amount of international interests that would swarm over the country. All of these dynamics, with help from the more clever and self-interested of the Ukrainians, would become the elite of the new nation-state. It would be a unique elite, because no other country on Earth except for an independent Ukraine could claim for itself such an international motley crew of knaves.” — Roman Dmowski, founder of Polish nationalism, on “The Ukrainian Question,” in 1930.

A polyglot friend of mine sent me an email as to what he expects to play out in Europe now that Russia has invaded Ukraine.

(I, too, am a polyglot and ping between different nations’ press. My remarks follow his and I have lightly edited what he has to say. ) 

My friend writes:

After listening to German and Dutch news podcasts, some of my observations about the war in the Ukraine.

I think that there are a couple of big silver linings to this awful situation.

First.  The Oligarchs Judenrepublik has been put out of action for the time being.   The oligarchs have thrown their money bags into their private jets and run for their boltholes.  Zelensky may talk tough but the nation which he was allowed to run will not be the same.   I see partition in the future.  The Jewish recolonization of Eastern Europe has been derailed for the foreseeable future.  

I think this might go too far. My view — and this might surprise a lot of people — is that Naftali Bennett is the man to watch. And what a busy boy he has been. He met recently with Vladimir Putin and with Mike Pence — so with Russia’s greatest strategist and America’s dumbest patriot. 

Bennett, I think, has a problem. He wants to thread the relationship betwixt Russia and America whilst his predecessor middle-manned between China, Russia, and America. 

It’s often noted how the politics in the Anglosphere track each other across the world. I remember having a conversation with Peter Thiel after Brexit where he expressed the view that Trump was more likely to win. The rise of Trump tracks the rise of Boris Johnson, and so forth. 

The fall of Trump and then the end of Netanyahu (brought about by American proxy Naftali Bennett and Russian proxy Gideon Saar) and the pressure against Zelensky in Ukraine all seem quite closely linked. These are a certain type of Likud-type leader, nationalist publicly but quietly backed by China. Their time is up, I’m afraid. 

Trump, like Zelensky, is a kind of actor, and he, too, is a construct of the mob (though which mob has often been the debate with Trump and whether or not a mobster-turned-confidential informant could still be a good president). For what it’s worth I suspect that both Zelensky and Trump will survive but there will be a blood sacrifice — Kholomoisky (and the oligarchs) with Ukraine and the failson of Jared Kushner. 

A friend of mine met with Zelensky and Kholomoisky and said that Zelensky is a nonentity. Does he now have a good scriptwriter? That much seems obvious — stagecraft is statecraft — but eventually you run out of material and need to change out the writers. 

Partition seems obvious but so, too, does neutrality. There are democratic, pluralistic and market-oriented examples. It’s not NATO or Russophilia. We could Finlandize Ukraine. 

We cannot allow these dangerous criminal corners of the world to persist. They become a hotbed of criminality. Donbass has to be taken over and integrated into the world. 

Of course a serious country must never allow the Victoria Nulands of the world to become proconsul of Ukraine. Conflicts of interest have a way of generating real conflicts and ethnic nepotism leads often to nepotism and corruption. 

Second.  The demographic catastrophe of 2015 is being reversed.  

When Angela Merkel declared “Wir schaffen das”, she unilaterally made what appeared to be a century changing decision by letting in one million Arab men.   The short and long term damage due to that decision was obvious to every average European who was denounced as racist by pointing this out.  Vladimir Putin is reversing this.   The EU expects seven million refugees.  I have heard some commentators say this is a low ball estimate.   At least two thirds will never return.   That marks a demographic earthquake, all of it positive.

The EU countries have decided to grant any Ukrainian an automatic one-year stay.  This gives them the right to work, send their children to school,  obtain health insurance and access the social welfare system.  In other words, these mostly English speaking, educated European Christians will get all the tools they need to set up a new life.   The Yugoslavian experience with war refugees teaches that most will stay.

The 2015 Million Man Muslim March has actually prepared the Europeans for the Ukrainians.

In 2015, Europeans, the Germans in particular, organized hundreds of volunteer and non profit groups to handle the Syrian refugees.   As one of the German journalists for Deutschlandfunk in Berlin underscored, those organizations continued to operate and have sprung into action.   The refugee flood will be much larger but the basic infrastructure is in place to handle it.

The German journalists and the head of a refugee non profit in Dresden, Germany, noted that the Europeans are very enthusiastic about helping the Ukrainians.  This stands in sharp contrast to the ambivalent reaction to the arrival of a million Muslim men in 2015.   Naturally, one of the journalists calls this racism.  But it does not matter.   The Europeans, whether in Poland, Hungary or Holland, view the Ukrainians as brothers.  Consequently, the willingness of the Europeans to bear the burdens of the new refugees (such as accommodating them in their homes) is much, much higher.  

I am looking forward to future reports of Ukrainian teenage boys beating the shit out of Turkish and Moroccan teenagers who are trying to bully them.    

I suspect that we both know the end game of this war.   The Russian army will slowly but surely take all of the territory east of the Dnieper River.  The Ukrainian army may be destroyed in this process.  The Russians probably hope encirclement will force surrender.  After which, Zelensky, or whoever is head of the government, will negotiate a peace which partitions the country.

I predict that the Russians will take everything East of the river, including Kiev, and will offer Poland, Hungary and Rumania parts of Western Ukraine.  The Poles consider Lvov one their cities.   And the Hungarians burn with indignation about the treatment of the Hungarian minority in the Carpathians.  

In 1939, Poland and Hungary ripped off sections of a helpless Czech Republic.   They may be tempted again.

When I visited some Hungarian nationalists in 2016 they told me that they expected that one day the Hungarians outside of Hungary might be united. There are, after all, some 3 million Hungarians living outside the present borders of Hungary and many of them are in modern day Ukraine. 

The Age of Empire: China, Russia, AUKUS and the EU?

I was frankly surprised by the outbreak of hostilities because I expected the low-profile Olaf Scholz to cut a deal between Kiev and Moscow. The Germans have always done good business with the Russians.  Given the stakes, I thought Scholz was making an August ’39 Von Ribbentrop trip to Moscow to get an agreement.  I was wrong.

I was not terribly surprised. When you understand that Scholz is a product of the CIA and Merkel was a product of the FSB a lot of German politics makes more sense. Merkel tried repeatedly to make Germany a client state of both China and Russia. When she left Scholz (and the CIA) took over. This was a welcomed departure. 

An ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend — it’s cool, don’t worry about it and I sure don’t— went to work for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and his career is essentially over now that he joined the wrong side. The Germans are particular that way. They keep lists.

The European reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been nothing short of forceful and historic.  The left of center German coalition threw out a half century of policy by doubling the defense budget and exporting weapons to Ukraine.   The Dutch raised 110 million Euros in telethon on March 7th. Both Eastern and Western European countries are closely working together. Observers note they have never seen such unity and quick decision making. 

The question for you, Charles, is where does this lead in terms of your projected Age of Empire?  Are the Europeans going to move closer to AUKUS?  Or when this is all over will they be further away from the US and perhaps moving towards a rapprochement with Russia?

I have been listening to German journalists who are close to elite circles.   They are happy that Joe Biden is the president now. Many think Biden’s pressure pushed the German government to dramatically increase defense spending and finally abandon Nord Stream II.   They welcome America engagement in this crisis

But I have heard other voices. It is a public secret that the Americans are going to profit immensely from the cancellation of the Nord Stream II Pipeline. Instead of cheap Russian gas, the Germans (and Dutch) will be paying for much more expensive American natural gas brought in tankers.   The port of Bremen will now be built out to handle the increase in natural gas tankers.

Other Germans have noted that the Americans pursued a dangerous policy with regards Ukraine and bear responsibility for the war.

These same Germans may be thankful that Joe Biden is president but they see no guarantee that a Trump like successor will not replace him. In which case, they are convinced that a Trump II will abandon Europe to the Russians. 

Whether that assessment if fair to a Trump II, the perception will drive European policy towards dramatically increased defense spending and foreign policy coordination.    We need to keep in mind that the leaders of the European governments tend to be Gen Xers with a large contingent of millennials in their parliaments. They don’t have the same affection for the Atlantic Alliance which their Baby Boomer elders have.

For the time being, America and the Europeans will pretend to work together and relations with the Russian Empire will be terrible.

I think that there is a way back for the Russians but that path is post-Putin and also post-oligarch. 

What Putin did for Yeltsin — safe passage and no corruption charges — somebody may yet offer to Putin who, I have argued, might rightly be called out for selling out Russia to the Chinese. The looting of Russia will always follow the blacklisting of Russia. 

I’ve heard from Russian elite friends that they are waiting for him to make a mistake before he is cast out. He did not take coronavirus well. 

It’s not clear yet what Russia becomes once Putin steps down. Putin will die eventually. He is 69. Yeltsin died at 76. Khrushchev died at 77. When Putin leaves—and he will one day—there’s another way possible. 

We cannot allow corruption to run the world. 

The solution isn’t to sanction ordinary Russians but to offer them another currency — one that we control — that they can choose to use it. And no, that isn’t bitcoin. As it stands the only tool that the West offers is sanctions. That isn’t the humane option. 

I could see that currency helping to bring down the current regime and integrating it into the West. We could seize the assets of the oligarchs abroad and use that as the basis of a new currency or social service system. You can get by on a few hundred million rather than tens of billions. 

I can imagine an American-Russian alliance against China but it must be done by engaging directly and by changing American foreign policy. No more Victoria Nulands, please. No more neocons enriching themselves while they play a double game with the oligarchs who fund their think tanks and their houses of worship. 

The Return of Mitteleuropa

But what about ten years from now?

By then the millions of Ukrainian refugees will be good citizens scattered around the various countries of the EU.   And the Europeans will have endured a decade of inflation  to consider whether they want to pay much higher prices for gas, oil and wheat.   Generally provided by an America they may not trust to protect their interests. Even today, I listened to a German “Wirtschaft” podcast discuss the impact of a boycott of Russian oil and gas.  The Russians will sell their oil and gas to the Chinese.  The Americans can drill at home and the Europeans will have to make do.   The transition away from Russian fossil fuels will be bumpy.

I am not so convinced that the Ukrainians are going to be good citizens of any country. The American founders argued that some people don’t have the habits of free people. That is, more or less my point of view. Freedom is something you cultivate. It can’t be given to you. 

An unspoken issue here is how much of the American fossil fuel industry is gouging the American consumer. We don’t really know. I doubt very much that we will get good Russia policy so long as we have a would be speaker of the house who is from Kern County, a top oil producer, and his deputy from oil and gas producing Louisiana. Naturally I support a windfall profits tax — and plowing the proceeds into rare earths extraction. 

Ten years will also be enough time for a German led EU to take up the traditional working relationship between the Germans and the Russians.

Germans and Russians have always been able to do business, regardless of their alleged ideological differences.    Catherine the Great invited Germans to Russia, giving freedom of religion and freedom from military service.  They numbered in the millions by 1914.   German businessmen flocked to Russia in the 19th century.  Among the most well known is the German archeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy.   Schliemann made his money as a cloth merchant in St Peterburg.  In particular, he supplied the uniforms for the Russian army during the Crimean War and was instrumental in helping the Russians import raw materials for the war industry by finding ways around the British blockade.  After German unification, Bismarck cemented this working relationship with a formal treaty, linking Germany, Austria- Hungary and the Tsar. 

In the 20th Century, the Germans and Russian Bolsheviks signed the Rapallo Treaty in 1922 to reestablish working relations on multiple levels.  The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 took that cooperation to new heights.   Willi Brandt’s Ost Politik in the early 1970s represented another attempt at strengthening this long-standing relationship. 

The Germans are in Mitteleuropa and have always been torn between a Western and Eastern orientation.   One part of Germany wanted a Germany firmly turned  Westward, embracing liberal values and good relations with France and Britain.   This view won in 1871, with Bismarck’s Reich.  It “won” again in 1949, with the establishment of the Bundesrepublik with its capital in the Rhineland.   And it apparently won again in the 1990s when Helmut Kohl pushed through his dream for common currency, the Euro. 

But the other part looked East for German expansion.   In his Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler explains this position with a stinging critique of Bismarck’s foreign policy.  In particular,  Bismarck's close embrace of Austria Hungary lashed Germany to a weak power incapable of helping Germany achieve its goals.  It would be useless in a war with France or Russia.   Hitler thought Bismarck should abandon Austria Hungary, let it beak up and absorb the German speaking areas into a German Empire.   Losing Austria Hungary would be more than compensated when  Germany formed a strategic alliance with the British Empire.  The English had to fend off  Russian expansion in Asia and needed German help.  Germany wanted to expand in Eastern Europe and could only do that with the English support against the Russians.   That was the policy that Hitler pursued in the 1930s.  Had Churchill not become Prime Minister, he might have pulled it off.   

It should be obvious that the Germans are not doubling defense spending to create a new Wehrmacht and conquer Lebensraum for German settlement.   Nevertheless, if you look at the map of Europe which emerged after the Fall of the Soviet Union, it almost perfectly matches the Treaty of Brest Litovsk imposed by the Germans on the Russian Bolsheviks. Ironically, the Germans got what they wanted without firing a shot.    

I am not sure that the Germans and the EU they lead will be able to resist the siren song of Russia.   The stakes are too high.  The Russians have too many natural resources.    The path way to the Chinese market goes through Russia.   And the American Empire may not be viewed as reliable. 

Ten years from now, Putin will be living in retirement, feted in Russia like Churchill was after 1945.  A new generation of Russian and European leaders will begin to rediscover the cooperation which enriched both of them. The Europeans may conclude that linking up with Russia is the best path forward. And if you think that this Ukrainian War will short circuit that move, you only need to look at the 20th century to see how fast the two sides can find each other.

It’s hard for me to imagine Putin in retirement and I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination. Can intelligence officers even retire? My experience with them more or less testifies to them retiring only upon death and even then their sons usually take on the obligations. Putin has no sons — at least officially — and it hard to imagine him having heirs. Après moi, le déluge, indeed. Putin then isn’t crazy; he’s just your typical boomer who cares not a whit what happens after he’s gone.

But one way to guarantee that America does not shape the future of Russia is to punish the every day Russians trying to get to work on the Moscow subway. This’ll simply create a new generation of Russians who work in the gray. I must say that I like the frame of Putin as Churchill rather than Putin as Hitler — it is quite counterintuitive — but the leadership of Churchill led to the (alleged) collapse of the British Empire.

Can we really withstand the second collapse of the Russian Empire and all the attendant refugee crisis? The last time the Soviet Union collapsed we got the Russian mob and its ally, Jeffrey Epstein. One shudders to think what we might get this time around.