INDIANAPOLIS — The post-Cold War era has essentially ended now that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, an independent, democratic nation, on Wednesday. Europe is now experiencing its first fighter jet-to-fighter jet, tank-to-tank military invasion since World War II. There is speculation a full-style incursion could end tens of thousands of lives, and generate a brutal counter-insurgency.
Why should Hoosiers care about a war in a faraway place?
First, Putin appears to be detached from reality and on the course of a war criminal. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic writes of the kleptocratic dictator after he addressed the world on Monday: "Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope."
Carl Bildt of European Council on Foreign Relations, added, “If I compare with his speech in March 2014 when he annexed Crimea, this was far more rambling, all-over-the-place and unhinged. And also more dangerous. Now he questions the very existence of Ukraine as a nation. It’s a man with immense power who’s lost contact with reality.”
Putin blamed the events that led to an independent Ukraine on Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and when he announced the invasion Wednesday night, he talked of eliminating phantom “Nazis” from this neighboring state. It was chilling.
While former president Donald Trump applauded Putin's "genius" for placing "peacekeepers" in Ukraine, terming it "wonderful," the reality is that Putin is an unstable dictator who commands the world's second largest nuclear arsenal, and he used terrifyingly subtle words threatening to use them when he announced the invasion on Wednesday.
Russia is the second largest producer of oil. The $4 and $5 a gallon gas prices out on our West Coast are only days away from becoming a reality in Indiana after President Biden and allies announce further sanctions.
Then there are the cyber attacks that have already hit a number of Indiana counties over the past year (LaPorte, Lake and Lawrence), cities (Gary and Carmel), school districts (Eastern Hancock), hospitals (Greenfield), utilities and corporations.
Or as Dan Coats, former director of national Intelligence, told the Indianapolis Economic Club in June 2021, “Every day, foreign actors – the worst offenders being Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – are penetrating our digital infrastructure and conducting a range of cyber intrusions and attacks against targets in the United States. In regards to the state actions, Russia has been the most aggressive foreign actor – no question.”
Once malware and ransomware escapes into the ether, there's no telling where it will end up or the damage it can do.
NBC News foreign correspondent Keir Simmons describes an emerging “hybrid war” already engaging the United States. “What kind of battle this is?” Simmons asks, then answers, “A battle on all fronts.”
Former U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis added, “Putin may play a series of cyber cards that could lead to horizontal action against the U.S. and NATO assets. We could find ourselves in a dramatically escalated cyber warfare.”
If you're on an IT staff for a Hoosier municipality, school or university, hospital, utility or corporation, you might be lying awake in the middle of the night wondering what is going to come flying out of Putin's Pandora's box.
Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute and Council on Foreign Relations expects that unless the U.S. and NATO can ramp up the costs to Putin, he won’t stop at Ukraine, just as he didn’t stop after annexing Georgia and the Crimea, while taking over Belarus.
“The most immediate threat will be to the Baltic states,” Kagan explains. “Once Russia has completed its conquest of Ukraine, that question will acquire new urgency. One likely flash point will be Kaliningrad. The headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, this city and its surrounding territory were cut off from the rest of Russia when the Soviet Union broke up. Since then, Russians have been able to access Kaliningrad only through Poland and Lithuania. Expect a Russian demand for a direct corridor that would put strips of the countries under Russian control.”
The one uncalculated aspect of this dramatic incursion is if this becomes a Putin overreach – think LBJ’s Vietnam in 1965, Brezhnev’s 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or Bush43’s 2003 Iraq move that toppled Saddam Hussein and ignited a five-year insurgency. They were swamped by horrific optics, thousands of body bags and domestic unrest. All of these American and Russian leaders commanded sophisticated militaries; all ended up fighting brutal, asymmetric guerrilla insurgencies.
Or as former general and CIA director David Petraeus observed, Putin “lacks the troops and the popular support needed to succeed in taking over the country for any significant period of time.”
While Putin has up to 190,000 invasion troops, he won't have enough to occupy a sprawling nation of 40 million people, many who say they are willing to take up arms to defend their democracy and their freedoms.
The element I am concerned about is the type of insurgency that morphs into a prolonged terror campaign, and then results in the kind of genocide we witnessed in Bosnia in the early 1990s. This could unleash millions of refugees across Europe.
What we are witnessing is an end to an era of relative peace in Europe. Or as British author Robert Graves put it in his 1929 autobiography, “Goodbye to all of that.”
The columnist is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
