Future Past – Winter 2022

Author’s note: This text was originally written in Winter 2022. I’m publishing it today, in 2024, untouched. It’s part of my “Future Pasts” series, so yes, some of the events depicted after the time it was written are not accurate, but it’s part of the idea. The text also directly follows this one, although they can be read independently from each other.

 

“if you don’t mind, I’d rather you tell me how the war started.”

 

The old man remained silent for a moment.

 

“If you ask anyone, they’ll tell you that the war started in the winter of 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.

That’s not exactly the case.

Yes, the actual war, the one that kills and destroys, did start in 2022, when Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. But Russia would never have won if it hadn’t started its undermining efforts years before. And I’m not talking about the events of 2014.

Putin went to war with the West as soon as he came to power. He never came to terms with the fall of the Soviet Union, and he has always regarded democracy as a weak political system unworthy of respect.

Everyone understood this fairly quickly when, as soon as he came to power, he turned the fledgling Russian democracy into a sad parody of the thing. But what few Westerners realized, comforting themselves with the idea that Russia would never regain the power of the Soviet Union, is that Putin had always been aware of this state of affairs. That was not his goal. At least not in the way the West thought.

Admittedly, Russia no longer had the opportunity to rise to the level of the other great powers, but to become number one, becoming stronger than the others is not the only solution. You can also overthrow those who are ahead. As a former KGB man, this kind of sabotage was even something Putin excelled at.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. You were still active during his first years in power, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was. The organization didn’t collapse until 2006.
But even though we sometimes worked on Russian soil, we weren’t really involved in geopolitics then, at least not directly.
Sometimes I wonder if we could have done something to stop him. We saw the threat coming, but it wasn’t a priority for us. By the time it became one, it was too late. Trying to survive the fall of the organization was my only concern during those years.”
“And the Others? Did they collaborate with him?”
“I never received a definitive answer to that question. It’s certain that they recruited a lot of former KGB members during the 90s. But there were also CIA defectors, Europeans, and also… Well, you know…

It’s in the early 2010s that Putin put into action the plan he had been preparing since coming to power.

In Russia itself, this led to the systematic repression of all political opposition, with methods that were subtle at first but that quickly became as brutal as those of his youth.

As far as the West was concerned, his strategy was to weaken it by using the values it held most dear: democracy and freedom of expression.

To be clear, it wasn’t Putin who destroyed democracy in Europe. It was essentially neoliberalism that turned it into a vulgar disposable consumer product like everything else it touched. Putin simply seized the opportunity. He wasn’t the only one; the fascists did too. Putin used them for his own purposes, and not just once. They were too stupid to see it.

Except, perhaps, those whose bank accounts were filled directly by Russia, but they weren’t going to complain.

At the same time, the Old Web (it was still called the Internet back then) had become ubiquitous. And in its final phase, the so-called social networks had become its heart. They played a key role in Putin’s enterprise of sowing discord.
Again, make no mistake, he had nothing to do with their creation or popularity. All he did was what he’s always done since his early days in the KGB: find the flaw in a system and exploit it to his advantage.

What we can blame him for is the rise of misinformation (we used to call it “fake news”) on these networks and then on the traditional media, which had also lost their vocation to inform, having all been bought up by oligarchs.
The goal was to attack the truth, not by muzzling it but by drowning it in so many lies that it was reduced to just mere noise in the midst of other noise. Putin’s first victory over the West was when all opinions began to have equal weight in public discourse. The most ridiculous ideas found themselves on an equal footing with reality and facts. And Westerners loved their freedom of expression too much to see the problem before it was too late.

Things came to a head in the late 2010s, when the disinformation campaigns began to bear fruit.

In the United States, Donald Trump was elected president. Many thought that Putin had managed to manipulate the election results. Of course he didn’t. To think so was once again to fail to understand his modus operandi.
Drowning public discourse in fake news and planting the right rumors in the ears of the right people, especially far-right editorialists, was far easier to pull off than altering the election results of a foreign and not exactly friendly country. Not only much easier, but impregnable and just as effective. That was all it took for the country’s most conservative and least educated fringe to make Putin’s puppet their new idol, and as you know, that signaled the beginning of the end for a country that had dominated the world for almost a century but where almost everything was hanging by a thread.

However, even if America had been the Soviet Union’s main enemy and there was a desire for revenge in Putin’s mind, even if it was his target because of its status as the world’s leading superpower, the European Union was in fact a much bigger problem for Russia. The EU was Putin’s true adversary. Especially when it began to expand eastward. Putin took this as a personal affront.
The fact that former Varsaw Pact countries joined was an insult in itself. But for former republics of the USSR to become part of the EU was unacceptable to him.

For the first few years, he said nothing. He seemed to accept this state of affairs, but behind the scenes he was even more active in Europe than in the US. When Ukraine truly became a democracy and began to look more and more toward the EU and NATO, Putin felt that a line had been crossed. It was time to act.”

“One thing I’ve never understood is that he was the main supplier of gas to the European Union at the time, wasn’t he? Why didn’t he just ‘turn off the tap’ and put pressure on the EU?”

“He left that threat hanging, and the Europeans focused on it for a while. But carrying out that threat would have been counterproductive. It was mainly a diversion. Don’t forget that this gas was a huge source of revenue for Russia. I’ll let you savor the irony of selling his enemy a much-needed commodity at a high price. Yes, the EU literally enriched Russia and helped Putin get the resources he needed to carry out his destabilization of the West. He also needed to sell as much Russian gas as quickly as possible, because even though he publicly hinted that he didn’t care about the climate crisis (in part so that he could continue to sell his gas), he knew that sooner or later the world would try to move away from fossil fuels and that it would be the European Union that would soon ‘turn off the tap’ of euros to Russia.”

“I see. And what about Ukraine?”

“Ukraine was bound to be the first battleground in this new, less and less cold war.
While Russia was secretly destabilizing the EU and the US with fake news and such, while pretending to cooperate on many issues, in Ukraine, in addition to the usual destabilization efforts, Russia was also active on the ground, creating more and more dissension between Ukrainians and the Russian population in the eastern parts of the country. There were even the first conflicts of 2014. A test run for Putin. How far could he go before incurring the wrath of the West? Quite far, apparently: the annexation of Crimea didn’t provoke much more than cries of outrage here and there.
So he knew he had a free hand and continued his undermining efforts.

Trump’s election had weakened the US; now Putin could turn his sights on the EU.

Using the same methods that got Trump elected, he enabled the “Leave” victory in the UK.
Brexit was the worst thing that could have happened to the Union at the time. One of its most important members more or less committed economic and diplomatic suicide, weakening the entire continent in the process. The remaining members began to have doubts. EU enlargement came to a standstill. The democratic debate took an increasingly unhealthy turn. The triumphant neoliberalism that ruled the EU had become blind. Blind not only to what was happening outside its capitalist blinkers but also to what was happening on the streets. Europe’s ruling classes had cut themselves off from the people. Europe’s right had never cared, and the left had gradually become disconnected from the real world as well. Weakened by the steamroller that was neoliberalism, leftist groups and parties simply couldn’t fight back. Especially since most of them were using the same modus operandi as in the 20th century. They simply didn’t understand that things worked differently in this new century, especially the games of power acquisition. They clung to the same methods of activism and campaigning that had sometimes worked 30 years earlier but simply didn’t work in this new world. They never got close to real power again, though they deluded themselves with an electoral victory here and there.

The fake news machine was in full swing, and it managed to reawaken the old fascisms that had been thought dead and buried for decades. Waking them up, putting them back on their feet, and opening far too many doors for them.”

“Didn’t anyone realize what was happening?”

“Of course a lot of people did. And that’s the worst part, I think. People went so far as to make fun of the “Russian trolls” without really understanding the impact they were having and how widespread their influence was. I think most people who made fun of them didn’t realize that they were real, that the ever-growing discord and division in society were actually being teleguided, not by bored teenagers in their bedrooms but by the FSB itself. It’s true that the FSB also manipulated incel teenagers in their bedrooms and other various conservative podcasters. They were the infamous useful idiots, just like the various right-wing politicians who had managed to get elected to positions of power thanks to Putin’s help. Some people suspected something, but they couldn’t do anything about it. Neither could the powers that be. The most cynical among them thought they could use this new public discourse to their advantage (this is how most American conservatives let Trump happen). The others simply downplayed it to hide their own powerlessness.

Then something happened that even Putin didn’t see coming. The first major pandemic of the 21st century, the COVID-19 pandemic. Without it, Europe might have been able to resist; who knows?

Russia was also affected by the pandemic, but less so than Europe and the US. Again, neoliberalism can be blamed: the civilization of “me” in a situation where “we” should have prevailed. Leaders were incapable of running their respective countries as anything other than a business and quickly found themselves completely out of their depth. On the other hand, misinformation was rampant.
The worst example is probably the anti-vaccination movement. Before the first pandemic, there were only a handful of them, and nobody took them seriously. A few years later, there were millions of them all over Europe and beyond. They bear a lot of responsibility for the fact that Europe and the United States failed to fight the epidemic while it was under control in some other places, including here for a while. And while it’s never been proven, I’ve always seen Putin’s discordian hand behind it all. Without the disinformation, the anti-vaxxers, and the minimizers, Europe would probably have been able to contain the pandemic. Without them, it might not have collapsed.

In short, by early 2022, the West was in total disarray, and it didn’t take much to tip it over the edge. Putin, like the great Russian chess players of the 20th century, had prepared all his moves in advance. He manufactured additional tensions with Ukraine, an excuse to act.

 

 

The invasion of the country began in February 2022. Nobody has ever defeated Russia in winter.
The war in Ukraine itself was very fast. The country was unable to resist, especially since part of the population was pro-Russian and welcomed the invader with open arms. Eight years after Crimea, the rest of Ukraine was annexed under the protest but inaction of Western governments and the almost total indifference of Western peoples.”

“And NATO did nothing?”
“It could not do anything without turning the whole of Europe into a battlefield.”
“But Europe became a battlefield. Isn’t that when it happened?”
“Not exactly, although it is an indirect consequence. I’ll get to that later.

Sanctions, embargoes, and all the rest began to rain down on Russia from all directions, but Putin had not said his last word. Of course, he eventually cut off gas supplies to Europe. I’ll let you imagine the effect on people’s morale: suffering energy shortages in the middle of winter and in the midst of a pandemic that was getting completely out of hand.

But after that, Russia left things as they were. It even calmed things down a bit with the EU, occasionally opening the gas valves as negotiations progressed, while maintaining a strong military presence in Ukraine, officially to keep the peace and unofficially to finish installing Russians in all positions of power. Russia seemed content with this new Cold War with the West. Observers and analysts thought that with Ukraine under his control, Putin had gotten what he wanted and would leave it at that. Little did they know what would happen next. Putin, of course, knew all the details. He had planned every step to perfection.
You also know most of what happened.”

“Yes, but I’d still like to hear it from you.”

“Hmmm, it’s getting late, and I’m getting a little tired. How about I tell you that part tomorrow?”

 

Photographic source: Kyiv City Council (CC 4.0)

 

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