By expanding his invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has taken the first historic steps towards the suffocation of his own authoritarian rule.
His regime could meet a graceless end but Russia and Russians will survive and hopefully flourish after some time.
That is because Putin cannot escape defeat in the full-on economic war declared by the US and Europe. On Saturday, President Joe Biden and his European partners imposed almost the full panoply of preplanned financial and other sanctions.
The measures will take some time to come into effect and their bite may take a little longer. But their slow grind will deeply harm the Russian economy and people’s livelihoods. Putin may retaliate but the scale and depth of the US and European economies is too big for the pain to be sharp beyond the short term.
Most likely, Putin will get the military victory and subjugation of Ukraine he wants as a balm for his many grievances against American policies and NATO’s eastward expansion. But it will be pyrrhic.
Banishment from the Western SWIFT banking communications hub is potentially devastating for Putin because it paralyzes bank transactions with the West. That could bring Russian exports and imports to a halt because of lack of routine bank financing for trade in foreign currencies.
Going back to manual and slower communication methods with banks is feasible but each transaction would be much slower and could still cause some pain. In any case, Western banks would cut off relationships to avoid violating the prohibitions.
Consumers everywhere in the West will suffer from inflation, Putin’s retaliation and higher energy costs but they have greater resilience because their richer governments can provide financial cushions for longer.
Blockage of Russian Central Bank transactions will also be very painful because it will sharply erode the utility of the $630 billion of national reserves on which Putin is relying to bail him out financially.
American and European Central Banks are the world’s biggest and most experienced. They will turn their backs collectively and individually to cooperation with Russia.
Over time, all of this will strangle Russia’s economy and seriously dent the pocketbooks of ordinary Russians, which is what matters most to people even those living fearfully in a dictatorship.
Mindful of their own power bases, elites surrounding Putin may not tolerate a situation that starts impoverishing citizens. The people are unlikely to rebel for fear of Putin’s police and secret services. But the elites may try to oust him and his system of governance if the repression turns bloody.
The precedent was set by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and the elites surrounding them. Similar impoverishment was the trigger that caused them to dismantle the totalitarian system of the former Soviet Union.
Until the last minute, Biden gave Putin room for diplomatic compromise to avoid this needless war of choice. And there was a Swiss media report today that talks for a cease-fire might happen in Geneva early next week with Swiss mediation. But nothing is certain.
Putin deliberately chose a tragically bloody path of suffering for Ukraine’s innocent people. The reasons are murky. Perhaps he is blinded by a hubristic desire to exhibit Russia’s military power rebuilt and honed under his rule since January 2000.
His broad hints of nuclear retaliation if any Western power opposes him militarily have raised the bar dramatically and brought all of us back to one minute before midnight on the doomsday clock.
Many people and governments around the world sympathize with his grievances against the US and NATO because they do not trust Washington. But none will overlook his flailing of the nuclear stick of annihilation of all life on earth.
Financial support from China will be helpful but President XI Jinping may start equivocating if his country’s trade with the US and Europe is jeopardized because of his violations of Western sanctions against Russia.
Nascent alternative methods in both Russia and China to bypass the SWIFT system and blockage of the Central Bank may work for transactions not denominated in dollars or euros. But Chinese prosperity still depends on trade in both currencies.
Xi will not run the risk of social unrest in China caused by shrinking pocketbooks of ordinary people for the sake of protecting Putin’s regime. He may let Putin go and look forward to a new normal with a Russian President who is not a destabilizing force in global geopolitics.
Putin insists unconvincingly that Ukraine is not a nation. Yet, Ukraine has been a modern nation for longer than the Russian Federation. Kyiv declared independence on August 24, 1991 while today’s Russia was founded on December 25, 1991.
Pressing peacefully for independence, some 300,000 Ukrainians formed a human chain between Kyiv and Lviv on January 21, 1990. Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum formalizing independence from the Soviet Union on December 1.
Over 90% voted for independence, with majorities in every region, including 56% in Crimea where 75% of the population is ethnic Russian.
Putin’s rage at humiliations he thinks successive US Presidents heaped upon Russia and his pride in new generation Russian weapons apparently blinded him to reality. The combined military strength and resilience of the US and its 29 NATO allies is far greater, and their combined wealth is nearly 20 times bigger.
Prolonged banishment from the financial and trade systems of the world’s richest countries is not a tenable option for Russia if Putin wants to continue in power until 2036. Compromises will have to be made quickly.
Image by ? Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay
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