When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he stated his goal was the demilitarization and denazification of the government in Kyiv. A justification for his unprovoked war of aggression that most of the world has rejected. In response, the U.S. and its European allies have invoked harsh economic sanctions on Russia including blocking the nation’s major financial institutions and cutting them off from the international SWIFT banking system. During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. will ban Russian aircraft from its airspace.
Several days into the war, with Russian troops meeting stiff resistance and unable to capture any of Ukraine’s major cities, Putin declared on Feb. 27 that he was placing his nuclear forces into “special combat readiness” status, sending a chill through the world. Many world leaders and commentators now openly question if Putin is a rational actor.
Thousands of opponents of the war have organized protests in Russia’s major cities, with reports that police have arrested more than 5,000 anti-war activists. At the same time, representatives of the Ukraine and Russian governments met for talks on the border of Belarus to discuss Ukraine’s demand for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian forces. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Mel Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a former CIA analyst. Here, he discusses his views on Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, the Kremlin’s objectives and options available to prevent a wider, more dangerous war.
MEL GOODMAN: What I really worry about is that the war is going so badly for Putin. There have been so many errors of judgment, of tactics, of logistical planning, of assumptions about NATO. Assumptions about the West. Assumptions about President Biden that have been wrong. Assumptions about the Ukrainian people. What will he do to compensate for his own stubborn policies that have brought the world to a real catastrophe?
And I think it’s going to get very ugly. The more strain he encounters, the more likely he is to to hit very hard, including civilian tactics, which he really hasn’t done. There have been some sporadic attacks, but nothing planned. We haven’t seen the the A-game in terms of cyber war, which I expected to see. The introduction to the use of military force. We really haven’t seen that.
So the next few days, I think, could lead to another one of these inflection points. Ironically, I think once the Russians do occupy the country — and I think that is their goal at this point — then I think the advantage moves to the Ukrainians, who will fight a guerrilla battle insurgency against the invader. And I don’t think the Russians are prepared for that. And there are already reports that a lot of Russian soldiers had no idea what they were being called up for or what they were being assigned to do. Some thought they were just going on out onto a military exercise, then found themselves in Ukraine.
And then over the weekend, with the news that he has declared a higher alert for his nuclear forces, that creates new concerns. Not that we haven’t seen nuclear alerts used for political reasons before. Henry Kissinger did it in the October War when he went to DEFCON three for no reason whatsoever. But he was worried about the domestic standing of the United States because Richard Nixon was in the worst days of Watergate, on his way to resignation.
We saw nuclear alerts in South Asia in 1999, a war between India and Pakistan that could have gotten out of hand. The Soviets had an increased nuclear alert in 1969, when they were fighting a war with China on that long 4,000-mile border. But what’s so concerning about this is that there’s a lot of conjecture, and I must say I’m part of it — that Putin has lost control of his mental faculties. If you look at the speeches he gave last week, the ones on Monday and Thursday, these speeches were pathological.
This brandishing of Ukraine as a Nazi state. One of the ironies in all of this situation and there’s so many, there are only two countries in the world where you can find a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister. One, of course, is Israel, and the other is Ukraine. All of the charges about Nazism that Putin is making and denying that Ukraine even has authentic statehood — that it’s not sovereign, it’s not independent, that it’s a pseudo state. This campaign that Putin is on is just pathological.
SCOTT HARRIS: Mel, from your point of view, what are the dangers of a prolonged insurgency in Ukraine fighting Russian troops in eastern Europe? What are the possible consequences for world peace here if we have a prolonged guerrilla war attacking Russian troops in Ukraine?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to see a prolonged war in Ukraine, which is bad enough. But we’re going to see a revival of the Cold War that’s going to be worse than I think what we lived through in the ’60s and ’70s.
I think in 1962, with John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, there was the realization that we came a lot closer to war than we were led to understand at the time, including the possible use of nuclear weapons. I can’t imagine that this crisis will end in a way that Biden and Putin would be able to sit down and really get back into the kinds of substantive discussions that we need for which there’s probably a lot of agreement. There’s a lot of agreement on disarmament; on reducing strategic weapons, there’s agreement on nonproliferation. The Russians have been very supportive of the Iran nuclear accord, which may be reinstated in the next week or two.
They’ve been supportive of putting pressure on the North Koreans to limit their nuclear program. Support on exchanging intelligence on Islamic fundamentalism. All that is going to be very difficult. Within the political environment in this country, we’ll move so far to the right that Biden’s hands will be tied. And because he has the image now, as you watch his popularity plummet — of being weak and ineffectual — I think he will not be inclined to make any conciliatory steps, even if this crisis could be resolved somehow, if he could be mollified and in some way.
So I’m very pessimistic about where we’re headed. And that’s even before you get into “what does this higher alert status for nuclear weapons really mean?” To quote Garrison Keillor, one of my favorite philosophers, “Things are going to get worse before they get worse.”
For more information, visit Mel Goodman’s website at melvingoodman.com and the Center for International Policy at internationalpolicy.org.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Mel Goodman (26:24) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
