(Opinion) This terrible conflict in Ukraine that changed the world didn’t start in 2022. It didn’t even start in 2014. It started a decade and a half ago when Russia invaded Georgia and got away with it.
“Remember the red button?” a friend texted me when the first Russian bombs fell on Kiev. In the region that has been colonized and plagued by Russia for centuries, everyone remembers the red “reset” button: the gift of an elusive fresh start that Hillary Clinton gave Russian Chancellor Sergey Lavrov during their meeting in Geneva in 2009. .
Until then, the invasion of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, had been avoided, but with 20% of its territory occupied by Russia, the country’s sovereignty was dangerously undermined. The Georgian government, the United States’ closest non-NATO ally in the region, was warning of a new hybrid war. But after all the trauma of Bush’s foreign adventures, the United States was eager to move on.
When Clinton presented Lavrov with a red button, global headlines focused on the amusing fact that Americans managed to misspell “reset” in Russian and that made Lavrov laugh. But the region was left breathless: everyone who had experienced Russian oppression knew that what really pleased Lavrov was the fact that Moscow managed to escape having attacked the neighboring country.
Over the next 14 years, this would happen again and again. Many of us, myself included, did not think that Putin would carry out an invasion of this scale against Ukraine. Millions of us – Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians and Azeris – participated in dress rehearsals for the horror show that the Kremlin has now unleashed. And we know it didn’t have to come to that.
The primer Putin has been using to rebuild his empire has always been rudimentary. The alleged antagonists have always been an oppressed population and a US-backed “fascist” government.
But with each rehearsal, Putin adjusted the piece. In Georgia in 2008, Putin’s soldiers had dirty boots and rusty tanks, but first he tested his now-infamous cyber attacks. And he got out of it.
When Russian troops arrived in Crimea six years later, they had shiny new boots and new uniforms inspired by US special forces. And Putin, refreshed after his triumph at the Olympics in Sochi, was more confident than ever. He lied on a scale we had never seen before, telling the world that Russian soldiers were not Russian soldiers, and then he annexed Crimea. He also got away with it.
Then came Donbass and Syria, interference in American elections, the Salisbury murders and the poisoning of Navalny. And every time he got away with it, we found a new Putin – more brutal at home and more audacious abroad.
The United States and Europe spent millions against Russian disinformation. But unmasking him was not enough to counter the narratives Putin pushed forward using the powerful, multimillion-dollar media networks he continued to build, at home and abroad.
This network, which included big names like RT and Sputnik, but also hundreds of smaller websites and social media channels, masterfully capitalized on the existing fears and legitimate grievances of each audience they addressed.
The American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the disaster that followed, was a gift Putin used to turn any debate into another round of an exhausting counter-accusation, which in turn made Putin a hero to the European far left. .
He turned LGBTQ+ rights into a frontline of his domestic assault on the West, telling traditional Russians and their neighbors that their families and values were under threat. It worked. “I’m fighting because I don’t want to be forced to marry a man,” a pro-Russian fighter in Ukraine told me in 2014.
Eventually, this family values the narrative caught up in the West, turning Putin into an unexpected hero for the far right. Authoritarian populists around the world suddenly started asking for help: Kremlin-funded Sputnik was training state media officials from Georgia to the Philippines and India, and in 2020, Brazilian President Bolsonaro was repeating a myth about a supposed western plan to legalize pedophilia that I had first heard on Russian state TV back in 2012.
But what made Putin truly powerful was not the narratives he shaped or the territories he conquered. It was the West’s collective, complacent and stubborn refusal to accept that Putin was at war with them.
For years, the Western media portrayed Ukraine as a country “at war with itself”. What never was. It was disconcerting to me that after all these years, even before this latest invasion, that the debate in the West has focused on the hits and misses of NATO expansion rather than the fact that a sovereign country has the right to choose its own path.
“What will it take for them to wake up?” a Ukrainian soldier asked me when I interviewed him as a journalist about the shared ordeal of Georgia and Ukraine in 2015. Now we know the answer, but back then, as we sat in a cold and wet trench on the front line of the Ukraine war, we could not find it.
Private Dima was like every Ukrainian you see now on your TV screen: unshakable, determined, calm. He was 23 years old, a software engineer from Kiev who recently decided to quit his job and join the fight. His girlfriend was furious about it, he told me, but fighting wasn’t optional.
“They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they are the same values as Europe. We are fighting for them too. I wish they would realize that,” he said.
They realize now. The whole world is suddenly at the height of moral clarity. For anyone who has lived on the front lines of Putin’s hatred of liberal democracy, this display of Western unity and the resurgence of liberal values is an incredible relief. But it won’t last unless we also accept that this comes too late for many.
It is too late for Georgians who have never stopped losing lives and land, for countless Aleppo residents who died in Russian bombing, for 298 men, women and children who fell from the sky when a Boeing MH17 was shot down by a Russian BUK missile in 2015. , for thousands who have died in Donbass in the last 8 years and for countless others who are yet to die in Ukraine.
It’s too late for Dima, who was killed in combat in eastern Ukraine a year after we spoke and long before Europeans finally recognized that he was fighting for them.
The question he posed as to why the West took so long to wake up is still being asked by millions of people who live on the front lines of Putin’s hatred of liberal democracy around the world. It is the question that should inform whatever the West does with the new world order that will emerge from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Editor’s Note: Natalia Antelava (@antelava) is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Coda Story, which chronicles the roots of global crises, including disinformation campaigns in the former Soviet Union. She is a former BBC correspondent. The opinions expressed in this article are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
