Imagine, just imagine, that 100,000 troops of a powerful enemy country mass on one corner of Nigeria’s border for several weeks. Maybe they will invade, or maybe they won’t, as their country’s leaders repeatedly insist. Their presence is however enough to cause panic all around. Civilians will run away from that border area. Our troops will be busy digging trenches and erecting barricades. Foreign investors will run away. Commerce will come to a screeching halt. Children will stop going to school. Workers will find reasons to dodge going to work. Mass and social media will talk about nothing else. I am putting Nigeria in the shoes of Ukraine.
During our school days when it was part of the Soviet Union, it was called The Ukraine on all world maps. I don’t know at what stage they decided to drop the “The”. We read a lot about Ukraine in Economic Geography. It is the gateway to the Caucasus, “bread basket of the Soviet Union,” as well as home of Donetz industrial basin, known in the textbooks as Donbas.
Ukraine was so rich that when Adolf Hitler invaded USSR in 1941, he ordered his Generals to direct their main push towards it in order for Germany’s war machine to get hold of Ukraine’s food and oil. German Generals advised otherwise. They said in war, you go for the enemy’s strongest troop concentrations, which in that case was Moscow. If you defeat an enemy’s strongest troop concentrations, then you can pretty much do what you like with the country. But Hitler, who attained his highest military rank of Corporal in World War I, insisted on having his way. The result was military disaster at many points.
Seventy-six years after World War II ended, here we are again, with the world’s superpowers poised to fight over Ukraine. What we have ongoing is the most serious threat of a major war since the Cold War ended in 1989. US President Joe Biden is whipping the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] back to life, from its comatose state during the Trump years. He is also trying to whip America’s West European allies back in line, after they were shunned during the Trump years. Any “ally” would be foolish to want to deploy forces to support US-conceived crises situations after what happened in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan where, respectively, WMDs turned out to be a hoax, chaos ensued, ISIS sprung up, US troops escaped and Taliban is back in power.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a master gambler who must be relishing the current situation. Western leaders are scratching their heads to guess his intentions. Will he or won’t he invade Ukraine? Before his election in 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a television comedian. Still, what he said at a press conference last Thursday cast Western leaders as the comedians and himself as a real-life actor. He told them not to create undue panic; he does not seem to believe that Russia will invade his country. His Foreign Minister earlier said that Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, 100,000 of them, are not enough to carry out a full scale invasion.
Zelensky said something equally important, that Putin can achieve his aim without an invasion. Keeping such a large number of troops on the border, for American spy satellites to take pictures of them every minute, is enough to destabilize Ukraine and cause panic in the West. Putin’s main demand is that Ukraine should never join NATO, which has been expanding eastwards since the Cold War ended. It has already brought into its fold many former East Bloc countries. If Ukraine joins NATO, that means troops and missiles from NATO nations could be stationed on its soil, which Putin sees as a direct and immediate threat to Russia.
That Western, especially American, leaders refuse to see his point of view is the highest historical duplicity. Remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1961? President John Kennedy blockaded Cuba and risked an all-out nuclear war with USSR in order to stop Nikita Khrushchev from stationing nukes in Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida. There is a Hausa adage that the local barber does not like the sharp feel of the blade on his own scalp. The US will tolerate no hostile nukes in Cuba, but it could potentially station troops and nukes in Ukraine, right on Russia’s border.
Western leaders are threatening “grave consequences” against Russia if Putin’s troops cross the border into Ukraine. What are they talking about? Right now the US is rushing arms to Ukraine, but it says they are “defensive weapons.” Pray, which weapon is defensive? The same machine gun, tank or APC that can defend you can quite as easily go on the offensive against your enemy, even though Ukraine admittedly has no desire to start a war against Russia.
In another breath, Western leaders say that their threat against Russia is economic and financial, including to shut Russia’s entire banking system out of the world financial order called SWIFT. Of course Russia could also switch off its crude oil and gas supplies to the world. International oil prices would shoot through the roof. As for gas supplies, it recalls to mind a car sticker that citizens of oil-producing western Canada once spotted against their eastern Canadian compatriots during the energy crisis of the 1970s: “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark.”
By now some of my own compatriots in Nigeria will be saying, “You this Mahmud, what is your own if Westerners and Russians shoot each other in Ukraine and beyond? India is still there to buy Nigeria’s oil and China is still there to supply all our needs for manufactured goods. Our Anchor Borrower’s rice fields are still there to feed us, so what is your own?”
My concern is that Big Power grandstanding could easily spin out of control. Once this kind of confrontation starts, no side will want to back down. Biden especially, because after the debacle in Afghanistan, one more debacle in Ukraine and he should kiss his 2024 re-election chances goodbye.
As for Vladimir Putin, he must be making some hard calculations. Russia swallowed Crimea from Ukraine eight years ago and the Westerners only huffed, puffed and imposed feeble sanctions. If it comes to a shooting war, will the Europeans really put their troops in harm’s way? Many Europeans will say, damn it, Ukraine was part of Russian Empire for 150 years before the Bolsheviks came along in 1917, so what’s the big deal there?
We must be afraid that a war involving the Big Powers could start as a conventional war but if one side suffers major losses, it could resort to “strategic” weapons, i.e. nukes. Most of us in Nigeria probably have no inkling what a nuke can do. Our youngsters are busy with “Not too young to run.” Do we know that with a nuke, you are “Not too young to die”?
Let me lift a passage from David Bergamini’s 1971 book Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy about what the first ever nuclear bomb “Thin Boy”, dropped by a US Air Force plane, did to the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
“The atomic bomb exploded 1500 feet above the city of 245,000 people. A ball of fire 250 feet in diameter hung over Hiroshima. In an instant, 64,000 people were set ablaze or crushed by crumbling buildings. Light from the blast was seen 100 miles away. The accompanying thunder levelled 6,820 buildings. The entire city center caught fire at once and a spout of ash [mushroom cloud] shot into the atmosphere… Power supply was knocked out and Hiroshima’s water pipes ruptured in 70,000 places. Of the 45 hospitals in Hiroshima that day, only three were left standing. Of the 290 doctors living in Hiroshima that day, 26 survived the blast. Of the city’s 1780 nurses, only 120 were uninjured. Six months after the attack, the death toll stood at 90,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers. Since then, many more people have died from radiation diseases.”
The American nuke “Fat Boy,” dropped on Nagasaki three days later, was three times more powerful than Thin Boy. Today’s nukes are known to be 1,000 times more powerful than “Fat Boy,” so make your own calculations. Anyway, we can take solace in the label once pasted on a bottle of hot, concentrated sulphuric acid. It stated, “If you drink this, you will not live to regret it.”
