The Frightening Internationalization and Infantilization of the War in Ukraine

In the beginning the war in Ukraine was made to look like a civil war. The polite green men who appeared in the Crimea in February 2014 carried no national insignia, brought no declaration of war and made no demands to the Ukrainian government in Kyiv. The Russian annexation of the Crimea was quickly ratified by a sham referendum among the Crimean population. Soon thereafter armed militia men appeared in Eastern Ukraine, purporting to fight for the rights of the Russian-speaking population. They were conspicuously well-armed and the biographies of their leaders were at best of mixed Ukrainian-Russian content, often deeply rooted in Russian paramilitary circles. The cover of Ukrainian internal conflict was ripped away at the latest with the tragic shooting down of the Malaysia Airways flight MH 17 on 17 July 2014. Satellite images clearly showed the BUK system that had launched the attack crossing the border from the Rostov region in Russia and back again. Yet for many years thereafter, the war on Ukraine was not recognized as such because large parts of the world did not see its international dimension.

On 24 February 2022 Russia let all pretences fall. No more polite green men and no more men with mixed biographies. Instead, that day saw an all-out assault by land, air and sea. Still there was no declaration of war. Indeed, the very word ‘war’ with its connotation of two sovereign states on either side of the battle was banished in Russia. The special military operation was to imply limited engagement within a unitary framework. But this time the West called Russia’s bluff. The NATO powers rushed to help Ukraine, initially with words, but also increasingly with hard weapons. Putin never declared war on Ukraine, yet his pundits on television were quick to declare war on the entire West. They fantasized about nuking Berlin, invading Poland, annexing the Baltic states, and much more. Astonishingly, the myth of ‘Ukrainian civil war’ or the ‘justified intervention of Russia on behalf of its Russian-speaking compatriots’ prevailed in many circles in the West. Certainly, the illusion of a war that was happening far away and did not concern anything beyond the ‘two brotherly nations’ survived, even when cyber-attacks and hybrid warfare were already a documented reality. 

At the same time, the war in Ukraine was internationalized in the minds of many people by an unexpected geopolitical confluence of events. On 7 October 2023 Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel, slaughtering thousands and kidnapping hundreds of civilians and unarmed soldiers at observation posts near the border. Israel responded with a large-scale military campaign that killed tens of thousands and left Gaza in ruins. The fickle public attention turned away from Ukraine. Worse, it was very keen to draw analogies. The indiscriminate usage of terminology of ‘colonialism’ and ‘decolonisation’ fatefully bound the two conflicts together, while the images of the ruins of Gaza became indistinguishable from the ruins of Mariupol and Bakhmut. This was fatal, since the complexities of the Gazan conflict with its multiple victims on both sides rubbed off on the image of the Ukrainian war, which, however, had a clear aggressor and victim. Russia had tried very hard to claim some victimhood for Russian speakers in independent Ukraine and for itself as a country downtrodden by an arrogant West. It succeeded in a limited way through propaganda, especially among Russians at home and in the diaspora. Yet Ukraine had no history of aggression towards Russia, no terrorist movement and no claim on any Russian territory. The attack on 24 February was entirely unprovoked – except if one thinks that an application for NATO membership merits a full-scale invasion and bombardment of civilian targets. Once tanks rolled onto Ukrainian roads, Russia dropped its own rhetoric of victimhood in favour of a discourse of historical privilege and Russian power through strength.

In the rest of the world Ukraine and Gaza were often thought together, and mostly to the detriment of Ukraine. In the mind of the international left – and this includes a number of countries of the global south - the perceptions of the two conflicts became conflated through one important link: the delivery of arms by the USA and other Western powers. As criticism of Israel’s massive destruction of Gaza and its many casualties became more vocal and was increasingly shared by the political mainstream, the ‘other recipients’ of American technology were smeared as well. For many people on the left America never fought ‘good wars’. The mere fact that the US was on the side of Ukraine raised suspicions among many US-sceptics, if indeed Ukraine was a worthy cause for solidarity. Russia in this view was only doing what the USA had done to Iraq. And while the USA was condemned for the Iraq war, Russia emerged somehow vindicated from this superficial equation. Now, however, the USA was accused of being complicit in a genocide of the Gazan Palestinians. This increased exponentially the question marks over Ukraine. Ukraine’s case was at best read as a tragedy stuck between two empires, at worst reinterpreted as another American preposterous and self-interested interference. 

The right, too, used the prism of the Gazan war to push a twisted narrative of the conflict in Ukraine. Here the target was not imperial America but liberal America. Both conflicts were judged as symptoms of Biden’s weakness: They raged on, despite American efforts to rein them in. The Biden administration’s support for a Ukraine fighting for its survival was judged too timid and insufficient by some republicans. But that soon turned out to be a minority view. As Trump became first the GOP candidate and later President-elect on a platform condemning support for Ukraine and bragging that he would finish the war in a day (which everybody knew always meant appeasing Putin), these conservative voices fell silent or switched to the narrative of the alt-right. The new right-wing sentiment did away with the old fears over Russia. Rather the authoritarian turn and conservative values in the Putin era induced a sense of alliance with the aggressor. The war was blamed on Ukraine and its supporters – and in particular on ‘sleepy Joe’ whose cautious steps in providing assistance were considered pathetic, while a reorientation towards Russia promised the political iconoclasm and brazen, radical anti-intellectualism that was celebrated in these circles. Being with the strongman was cool. Fighting for the victim was derided as a boring obsession of those who were ‘weak’ and ‘woke’. 

The more complex the general global situation became in the three years after the full-scale invasion, the more simplistic and partisan its assessment by large parts of world opinion. This was not only a question of left and right but also of race, economic status and geographical situation. After February 2022 there had been a marked refusal of solidarity with Ukraine by countries of the global south and ethnic minority leaders in the West because of the whiteness of its refugees and its perceived privileged attention as a European nation. The intricate history of inner-European discrimination and hierarchies and the racist denigration Eastern Europeans suffered in the last two centuries was neither heard nor understood, even among academic and intellectual champions of decolonization. The Kenyan president alone spoke to the obvious danger that was set by an example of re-colonization for the entire de-colonized world. The reason for this reluctance to condemn a blatant aggression by a colonial power against a state that was once within its borders had many complex reasons, ranging from economic assistance to sentimental ties forged in Soviet times when many students from the global south attended Soviet universities – ironically most of them in Ukraine. The conflation of the Soviet state with contemporary Russia – and hence transferal of feelings of gratitude, guilt or political affiliation – was not exclusive to former beneficiaries of Soviet development aid. Lovers of Dostoevsky, anti-fascist memoirists of World War II, East Germans alienated from the West and peace activists of the Cold War era often forgot that Ukraine had contributed to the sacrifices for which Russia was now given credit. It turned out that the collapse of the Soviet Union happened in the mind of many people simply in one space: Russia with its capital Moscow whose name was often used as a synonym for a diverse and multi-ethnic country.

True simplification and infantilization began in earnest with the ascent of Trumpism and has reached a crushing crescendo in the last few days. Much has been speculated about the reasons for Trump’s love for Putin already during his first term. Yet as recent days have demonstrated again, it is futile to look for any elaborate design or conspiracy underpinning this love. Rather, Trump likes Putin, and agrees with him on Ukraine right now, because Putin is offering him a vision that is conveniently simple in its reasoning and familiar in its problem-solving through brute force and narcissist self-interest. It is not only Ukraine, but the whole world, which in Trump’s pronouncements is degraded to a sandpit of squabbling toddlers. Canada, Panama, Greenland have all become toys to be appropriated and exploited at will, if necessary by force. Gaza and Ukraine are pitched as minor squabbles that lack adult intervention. It only takes a straight-forward stern word to call everybody to order – or a sandpit bully who has more potent toys than the others. The straight-talking, at times foul-mouthed, Putin embodies these qualities, which Trump likes to see in himself. Facts and history are a nuisance when making new friends or asserting power.

The internationalization of the conflict has now progressed to the phase where Russia and the USA are sitting on a table with Saudi Arabia (which capitalized on its crucial role in the talks between Israel and Hamas), discussing an absent Ukraine. It is an odd picture, given that both Putin as well as Trump and Biden are part of the Cold War generation, for whom the anti-polarity between Moscow and Washington was an axiom. But maybe we should see this picture not as an anti-thesis to Cold War times but as its logical consequence. Already Orwell knew that a 180-degree inversion of facts and sentiments was easier to sell than a gradual and nuanced change in position. The animosity of the Cold War always contained both outraged hostility as well as the possibility of raptured admiration. There is a bond between Americans and Russians, forged by a strange mixture of introverted oblivion to the world and claims to superpower status, which can be activated with the right propagandist message. The shared experience of Americans with Ukrainians struggling for centuries to survive as a nation is much more limited and any solidarity relies on shared values in freedom and democracy. This is not a currency trading high in Washington right now. 

In general, the West found it almost as hard to give mental credence to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union as Russia itself. Famously the US State Department predicted a Ukrainian break-up in 1991, while giving a better prognosis for Russia. But it was Russia that was soon challenged by independence movements in the 1990s, most violently demonstrated by the Chechen attempt to break away from Moscow’s influence. Washington, and indeed the entire West, clung to Moscow, as the sole heir to the Soviet empire, right up to 2022 and beyond, for reasons of greed but also for reasons of fixation with the former foe. Russia loomed too large in the collective imagination to be abandoned, even if Obama (who was socialized far from the Cold War) called it a regional power. What happened to the rest of the former Soviet Union was always a secondary concern except for a number of personally invested politicians or when outright war, such as in Georgia in 2008, drew short-lived attention. The fact that Trump cannot avert his devoted gaze from Moscow is thus not surprising, but rather a new low point in a long historical continuum.

The third player in this fateful duo is often overlooked. China was once the junior partner in the Sino-Soviet alliances of the 20^th century, but asserted its own independent position even when economically it was near collapse. Now as an economic and nuclear power it has played a quiet but substantial role in the internationalisation of the Ukrainian conflict. It made up for Russia’s lost trade with the West and provided technology for the arms industry. It is, however, also credited with signalling to Russia that any usage of nuclear weapons would not be tolerated. The employment (and supposed almost complete annihilation) of North Korean soldiers in Kursk and the Donbass indicates not only that Asia is already part of the war but also hints to where North Korea sees its future. The sacrifice of its soldiers comes for the prize of knowledge of the modern battlefield. China itself makes its own analogies in the Ukrainian war. Russia plays out an interesting test case for an invasion of Taiwan. So far the message seems to be that brute force will win even if at a cost. The new ‘friendship’ between Putin and Trump is likely to present China with yet another set of (more complicated) calculations, while for Russia, Trump offers a possible route out of Chinese dependency. Both China and Russia love the rhetoric of the ‘West’ as one big political and, even more importantly, moral and ideological entity. While never a particularly accurate description of the diversity of the ‘West’, for the first time in decades this image is plainly false. The West is no more. At least not for the moment. 

Ukraine and Europe are now forced to think of each other in a more nuanced way. Since Trump will in all likelihood stop miliary aid and Ukraine will refuse to accept a peace settlement on Russia’s terms, the war might now retreat from a global agenda into a European one. This is a frightening aspect given the financial and security implications. But it might also mean that what happened can be discussed on its own terms without the global noise that is endangering to obscure what is really a quite simple situation: a large country with many resources and powerful weapons attacked a smaller, less powerful one in order to annex territory and people in a quest to ‘be great’ again. On 24 February 2022 this was the truth. And it is the truth three years on.