They can see living-costs escalating, jobs evaporating and the coming collapse in markets — principally in the bond market (whose interest-rate level defines the value of all other risk assets). Seeing this, these imperilled politicians may have concluded that triggering fear is the only way to divert from their own failures, and perhaps allow them the hope that they can survive the election cycle.
Survival is a key motivation, but likely too, the Elites’ psyches are sustained by two propositions that are false, yet seemingly ring plausible to the political class.
The first fallacy is that Russia launched a preventive war in February 2022 to seize Kyiv and roughly 60 percent of Ukraine.
Earlier events in Syria explain the reality: Russia officially entered the Syrian civil conflict in September 2015, following a request from President Assad. The Russian intervention proved to be of limited scope — a very limited air deployment (28 to 34 aircraft) and the minimum of combat special forces (Russia’s contribution comprised mainly military advisers, forward air controllers and military police).
Russia’s presence in Syria was intentionally symbolic — a statement of serious intent, rather than a desire to engage in ground war. In fact, Moscow’s aim was the
avoidance of direct ground combat. Nonetheless, Russian airstrikes — with the backing of Iranian ground troops — helped the Syrian Army push the jihadist forces out from Aleppo. This led to a Russia-Turkey brokered truce at the end of 2016, and to the Astana peace process starting shortly thereafter.
Putin’s approach to Aleppo clearly defined the model for his initial tactics in respect to Ukraine. Russia deployed an
estimated 15,000 to 30,000 men outside and around Kyiv, during the initial assault in early 2022. The European narrative that this force was intended to seize Kiev in early 2022 is laughable — 40,000 troops might fill a city piazza, but can they take a city of more than three million inhabitants? Ridiculous.
Nevertheless, European and American commentators — including US commentator
Robert Pape — claim that since the attempt to seize Kiev collapsed, combined with the
imputed corollary that Putin had expected that his symbolic show of ‘serious intent’ to cause NATO to back off, suggests — Pape claims — that Putin is caught in an
escalation trap. Pape argues that Putin sought a quick victory in 2022, but having failed, is ‘trapped’ by now having to climb an escalatory ladder with ever worsening prospects of success — hence Putin fails. ‘It is a matter of time only’.
Far from being a failure, Moscow’s show of force in Syria, small as it was, worked — Astana was the model drawn from Syria. By the end of March 2022, the Istanbul Process had produced the
Istanbul Communiqué, a framework for a settlement with Ukraine. This latter initiative failed for one reason only — Boris Johnson torpedoed it — and Russia was forced to re-group, which it successfully did, albeit at the price of a long war of attrition and the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives.
No, it was Boris Johnson who took Europe into an escalatory trap.
Europeans, it seems, have underpinned their ‘success story’ for war on Russia firstly on the notion of the imputed Kiev failure, and secondly, on the exaggerated reliance on financial sanctions. The former French Finance Minister Le Maire, in a moment of elation,
declared “all-out economic and financial war against Russia”. He insisted that sanctions would suffocate and collapse the Russian economy — in practice Russia after 2007 switched to a national (self-sufficient) economic model and still prospers.
So who has trapped whom? The West’s imagined core premise the Russia was trapped into escalation from the moment the non-existent plan to seize Kiev failed has turned the situation back-to-front.
It was the West’s mistaken analysis that has trapped the West into an escalatory staircase of actions that risk inadvertently taking Europe to a war with Russia — a war that no European wants.
