Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings up a raft of short-and long-term local and global scenarios. Many of these are dire, most have profound and long-lasting implications for the global post-Cold War security architecture, and all will demand adroit leadership and diplomacy.
While many commentators have been raking over the history of Russia and Ukraine, and the reasons behind the invasion, the urgent question for the world’s fragile body politic is this: if this is the end of the post-Cold War era, what does the future look like?
It may not seem so from the southernmost tip of Africa, but the worst-case scenario — that of radical escalation and a nuclear confrontation — is firmly on the table. At the beginning of the invasion Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a dire threat to Western nations, telling them they would face "consequences greater than any you have faced in history" if they attempted to stop his march towards Kyiv.
He followed that up this week with an announcement that he was putting his nuclear forces into "special combat readiness". Had the US matched the move — President Joe Biden chose to ignore the announcement — we would be in the shadow of superpower confrontation.
As it is, Russia’s gun is loaded and cocked. All Putin needs, it would seem, is an opponent who is ready to enter into a slanging match and he would have a target.
That means we look at the many other scenarios on the table, with the possibility of nuclear conflagration hanging over the globe. It is a sobering spectacle.
It is unclear what scenario will play out — perhaps de-escalation, or little fires and conflicts everywhere in an uncertain world of super-fluid alliances and takeovers. But there are many aspects we should consider.
The first place to start is our politics and SA’s place in the making of a world where national sovereignty is respected, and where the country is clear-eyed in taking an ethical and moral stand in international politics.
SA and the missing moral universe
If the world were coming to an end and the only way to save it were for SA to take a moral and ethical stand, none of us should expect to survive.
The country’s response to the Ukraine situation has been an embarrassment similar to our quisling actions on Zimbabwe and Sudan, where we stood with dictators and murderers Robert Mugabe and Omar Al-Bashir against the suffering of the ordinary people of those countries.
In typical fashion, President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC have now apparently berated international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor for condemning the invasion of Ukraine in SA’s first formal response last week.
Then Ramaphosa, his office and the ANC issued statements blaming Ukraine for being invaded by Russia, and coruscating Biden for not meeting Putin without an assurance that there would be no aggression against Ukraine. On top of this, SA officials reportedly joined the Russian embassy to celebrate the Russian military as it entered Ukraine.
The entire thing has been extraordinary. It is diplomatese — more buffoonery, to be fair — without a moral or ethical compass.
SA’s obsession with Russia, based on alliances during the struggle against apartheid, is misplaced. It illustrates an inability to realise that the Soviet Union is dead, that the world has moved on and that new challenges have come with new responsibilities.
If there is anything that the ANC’s hapless and immoral foreign policy stances have illustrated, it is that the party firmly believes it is still in the bush in Angola and the year is 1982. That makes the ANC unfit for purpose.
SA’s stance is also based on a poor grasp of history and geography. Both the Russian Federation and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union, which supported the ANC; the Ukrainians, who are being abandoned today, were part of the Soviet support for the ANC. None of the ANC’s leaders seems to realise this fact, choosing instead to conflate the Soviet Union with the Russian Federation.
The upshot is that Ramaphosa is now seeking some form of former president Thabo Mbeki’s "quiet diplomacy" in Ukraine. We’ve seen this before. You can’t stand with dictators. It never works — at some point they devour you, as Mugabe wrecked Mbeki’s coddling of him. Our moral voice in the world is diminished, if not destroyed. We supported Sudan at the UN and helped its murderous dictator escape the law. We indulged Mugabe.
By doing so we destroyed whatever credibility we may still have had.
Will China join the land grab?
Then there is China. Unlike Russia, which has been licking its wounds and playing catch-up to Western economic and technological advances since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, China has been on the rise.
Its economy has been rampant for decades, while its political, military and diplomatic might have been catching up and even surpassing those of the US and Europe.
China is SA’s top trading partner, followed by Germany, the US and the UK.
The much-vaunted Russia, which political leaders here have been claiming as a liberator, is anaemic in comparison. SA imported R9.2bn worth of goods from Russia in 2021, less than 1% (0.7%) of total imports. It imported R321.09bn in goods from China over the same period.
This resurgent economy and political power has never accepted the sovereignty of Taiwan (officially the Republic of China) and has constantly deployed fighter jets over the island of 24-million people merely to menace its citizens. And when it gained control of Hong Kong, for example, it took an iron fist to pro-democracy movements.
So the current crisis is, of course, not just about Russia and China. It is about illiberal elites and authoritarian regimes across the globe who may now see an opportunity to do the impossible: take what they have always believed is theirs.
If such a scenario comes to pass, what will the US, Nato or even SA do? Will SA, which kept quiet while Ukraine was invaded, do the same when another sovereign state faces the same fate?
The answer, sadly, is yes.
This scenario is already playing out. On March 1 a delegation of former senior US defence and security officials arrived in Taiwan on a visit that was heavily denounced by China. The rhetoric sounded eerily like what we heard in the weeks before Ukraine was invaded by Russia.
So, who is next? North Korea aiming for South Korea?
Putin misread the room — and may lose
The Russian leader, a law graduate and experienced former KGB spy, misread the potential international response to his actions. He thought his belligerence would cow the world. Crucially, he misread the response of the Ukrainian people.
Last week, when the first tanks trundled into Ukraine and the shelling of its cities started, the expectation was that it would be a swift, clinical and successful operation. Putin the strategist had, however, failed to read the mood among Ukrainians. With their doughty leader Volodymyr Zelensky leading the resistance and the propaganda war against Putin, ordinary citizens fought back.
Six days later, as the FM went to press, Ukraine was still resisting. No major cities had fallen into Russian hands. And volunteers continued to join the Ukrainian resistance, in formal and informal ways.
As historian Yuval Noah Harari writes: "The Russians may still conquer the whole of Ukraine. But to win the war, the Russians would have to hold Ukraine, and they can do that only if the Ukrainian people let them. This seems increasingly unlikely to happen."
So a long, bitter struggle lies ahead, with many casualties expected on both sides.
Putin also misread the US and Nato responses to his invasion.
His threat to destroy those who stand against him has seen traditionally neutral countries do exactly the opposite of what he had hoped to achieve with his bullying. Switzerland has dropped its neutral stance and adopted sanctions; Sweden, a neutral EU member that is not a Nato member, said it would send thousands of weapons and $50m in funding directly to the Ukrainian army; Finland, another neutral state, will deliver 2,500 assault rifles, 150,000 cartridges for the rifles, 1,500 single-shot anti-tank weapons and 70,000 combat ration packages to Ukraine.
Putin’s belligerence managed to get even Germany to completely reverse its restrictive arms export policy and send Ukraine 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles.
Even China seems to be cooling on Russia — Al Jazeera is now reporting that its state-owned financial institutions have been quietly distancing themselves from Russia’s beleaguered economy.
Russia’s losses are mounting. It has lost the global propaganda war to Zelensky. Its army looks increasingly amateurish, ill-prepared, ignorant. Videos of soldiers looting shops, running out of petrol and dying in the snow paint a picture of a rag-tag outfit that’s more gang than disciplined army.
Meanwhile, anti-war protests are a daily feature of life in Moscow. Sanctions are biting. Russian oligarchs such as Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich are unloading assets — including the world-renowned club. Queues at ATMs are increasingly long as citizens withdraw cash. The rouble has crashed.
War, it turns out, is not as straight a line as Putin may have thought it is. There are consequences.
There may be no endgame
This means we are at the beginning of a long and bitter global confrontation. Even if the Russian invasion of Ukraine stays at a regional level, the new global dynamics it has unleashed will make for a dangerous and unpredictable global picture.
If Russia continues to suffer setbacks at the hands of the Ukrainians and their allies, this could set off a series of actions that lead to challenges to Putin in Russia.
Some leading Russian oligarchs have already spoken out against the Ukraine invasion and others may join in. That could set off an unpredictable internal crisis in the country, with implications for countries such as ours.
These scenarios exclude the nuclear option, which Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko — a Putin ally who has been in power since 1994 — has said is firmly on the table, given sanctions imposed by the West on Russia.
"Russia is being pushed towards a third world war. We should be very reserved and steer clear of it. Because nuclear war is the end of everything," he told the Russian news agency Tass.
That afternoon Belarussian troops reportedly joined the war, illustrating just how fragile, fluid and dangerous the situation is.
Given the global divisions and new dynamics that this action has spawned, it is clear that we are at the beginning of a new era of division not unlike the Cold War.
SA, by choosing not to stand for the sovereignty of Ukraine, may find itself on the wrong side of history.
Ramaphosa and the ANC have shown their colours by issuing statements blaming Ukraine for being invaded by Russia
— What it means:
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