The soul of the West hangs in the balance, as Russia bombs Ukraine

HALIFAX—Ukraine’s pop-star president, the guy in the T-shirt, says if Ukraine goes down, it’s not just the end of one country. It is the end of the world. In other words, if Ukraine dies, ask not for whom the bell tolls. You know the rest. It is true that war leaders deal in hyperbole, but Volodymyr Zelensky has a point. As he said, Ukraine is the border between the civilized world, and what used to be known as the evil empire; between democracy and brutal dictatorship. Vladimir Putin, the villain of this piece and more than a few others, is proving to be a one-man geopolitical pandemic. Despite all the death and destruction Putin has already caused, French President Emmanuel Macron warns that the “worst” is yet to come in this unprovoked and savage war against a sovereign, democratic state. Putin certainly has the nightmare weapons to do it, from cluster bombs to exothermic flame-throwers, thermo-baric explosives, and all the usual death machinery of war—infantry, fighter jets, tanks, and artillery. And as he showed in Syria, the Russian president is not afraid to use banned military weapons, no matter how heinous. Putin learned an important lesson in 2014 when he invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula, unleashing a ragged war in eastern Ukraine that has lasted eight years and claimed 14,000 lives. The United States and its Western allies condemned Russia. They invoked targeted economic sanctions against individuals in both Crimea and Russia. They issued statements of support for Ukraine. But they did not intervene militarily to protect and guarantee its sovereignty, and more importantly, its people. The result? Putin learned that the West would not fight for Ukraine. Russia has now used its uncontested land grab in Crimea as a key staging area for a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine. It is a war that could create five million refugees and kill 50,000 civilians. This time the target is not Sevastopol, it is Kyiv. The reaction of the United States and its NATO and EU partners has been eerily similar to their response to the annexation of Crimea. More economic sanctions, more denunciation, and a concerted effort to isolate Russia on the world stage. True, cutting off the Russian Central Bank from dealing in U.S. dollars, “immobilizing” its assets in the U.S., and removing some Russian banks from SWIFT, are truly draconian measures. They have never before been invoked against Putin; and are sure to drive inflation higher in Russia, cripple the country’s purchasing power, undermine if not destroy the rouble, and drive down foreign investment. But there is a hitch. The U.S. central bank sanctions include a carve-out for energy payments. And not all Russian banks have been kicked out of SWIFT. In other words, Putin can still be paid in foreign currency for Russia’s oil and gas. With oil well over the hundred dollar a barrel mark, Russia will make a windfall on those sales. And who knows how high oil prices will go? So far, there is no sign that severe sanctions have done anything but make Putin double down on his outrageous invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces continue to inexorably close in on the country’s key cities, including Kyiv, in what has been called by U.S. intelligent analysts, the “slow annihilation” of Ukraine’s military assets. Despite Putin’s denials, civilian targets are also being ravaged by intense shelling. So if the goal of the sanctions, the shaming, and the isolation of Putin and his band of thugs and oligarchs was to stop the invasion, it hasn’t worked, at least not yet. The best that can be said is that the Russians have agreed to a safe corridor for civilians leaving the country. But no one should forget that sanctions come with unintended consequences. For one thing, they tend to punish people in the sanctioned country who have little or nothing to do with state policy, innocent people. UNICEF, for example, found that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died because of harsh sanctions imposed on Iraq by the UN and supported by the United States, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Those findings, though the subject of dispute, were later confirmed by a number of groups, including the Geneva International Centre for Justice. Nor are sanctions a one-way street. The sender as well as the sanctioned will feel the bite of these measures. Inflation is arguably the most important issue facing average people in both Canada and the United States. By driving up the price of oil, that inflation will only get worse. Supply chain interruptions will also increase at a time when grocery shelves are already missing familiar products. In an integrated world economy, no one gets away unscathed when the fundamentals of global business change. And even if, over time, the sanctions work, what if the net result is an isolated Putin driven into the arms of China? What if China becomes the buyer of last resort for Russian wheat and energy? What if the two countries conspire to set up a course of their own, buying and selling securities and commodities in a non-dollar currency? If your neighbourhood is Asia, how tempting would it be to work with Peking rather than New York, even if the deals weren’t denominated in U.S. dollars? In 2011, NATO made a military intervention in Libya to enforce a ceasefire in that country’s deadly civil war. The mission was sanctioned by the UN and included imposing a no-fly zone. It was all done to protect innocent civilians who faced slaughter by the regime of the now deceased Muammar Gaddafi. As a result of the NATO led coalition’s efforts, Ghadaffi was deposed. Compare that to Syria. In 2012, then president Barack Obama stated that if Syria used chemical weapons against its own people, that would be a “red-line” for the United States. After Assad killed 1,400 people with sarin gas, Obama waited a month before making a deal with Russia to remove all chemical weapons from Syria. After that was done, Assad started killing people with chlorine gas. He is still in power. To punish Russia for brutalizing the Ukrainian people is one thing. To stop Russia is another. So what will it be for Ukraine? Cable TV and sympathy? The Libya or the Syria treatment? The soul of the West hangs in the balance. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times