The semblance of the title I have been thinking of since I listened to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speech at the Lviv summit with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, alongside the U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s immortal call to the last president of the Soviet Union in a speech in June 1987, delivered in the shadow of the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall,” is not a coincidence. This call that reminds – not only Russian President Vladimir Putin but all of us – of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is said to have had a lasting impact on Putin.
As a journalist, categorizing events according to their actual or potential hostilities, conspiracies or threats (what we call news-value), I guess I can sympathize and empathize with a person who, while climbing the governmental, bureaucratic and political ladders to the top in two different worlds (the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation) witnessed all sorts of actual hostilities, conspiracies and plots. Also, any exhortative call to a leader of a nation might have a connotation closer to admonition than to encouragement.
So, I have to clarify a couple of things before placing my call to Putin.
I personally am of the opinion that what the Russian troops, pouring over the Ukrainian border in February started is – as Putin termed it – a "special military operation,” not a war. We, in Turkish, call all conflicts, clashes and skirmishes a battle; in our daily parlance, even an excited discussion goes as a “verbal war,” so our daily newspapers and TV news bulletins kept calling the Russian operation in Ukraine the “Ukrainian-Russian War.” However, we should have known better. A country that maintains one of the largest air forces in the world – 4,173 warplanes and roughly 760 intercontinental missiles – would not waste 180 days when it declared war against a country that has only 225 aircraft in its inventory. God only knows how many of them have been operational since Ukraine has been facing political upheavals, economic disasters and is at the heels of ethnic dismemberment.
So, it is a “special military operation” that has settled into a war of attrition in the east and south of Ukraine, whose primary objective or intention is still unknown to the world. We all have different opinions about Russia’s reasons for the operations. I even read somebody was trying to explain it with Putin’s suppressed compulsion to save his mother from his father’s repression. But, as Freud has put it, “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.” If you have heavy mental baggage due to witnessing your world crumbling down in front of you when the entire Western world descended on your country, now when you see that the United States and the United Kingdom heaped $9.8 billion of military assistance on Ukraine, you could interpret it as the entire West is now ganging up on your federation as they did on the Soviet Union.
The Biden Administration has made no secret that the Russian Federation, alongside with China and the Islamic Republic of Iran were “hostile countries” to the U.S. How many times the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called his talks with the Russian Foreign minister Lavrov “frank and substantive” and how emphatically he said the two countries are on a “clearer path” to understanding each other’s positions on international issues, the central theme of the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy Document had been declared as the “growing political, economic, and military competitions” with Russia. The RAND Corporation report had emphasized two years ago that that “The U.S.-Russia strategic competition likely will be long-lasting” and “the states ‘in between’ Russia and the NATO are at the center of this competition.” The RAND thought that a conventional war was unlikely but Russian hostile actions below the threshold of war would continue. Hence, the enormous military aid to all the countries “in between,” especially those like Ukraine who do not yet enjoy the NATO umbrella.
That military buildup in Ukraine would have unavoidably made Russia extremely worried, especially following the aftermath of its unexpected move annexing Crimea and putting the Donbass provinces of Ukraine on the same route. Yes, we all saw that ethnic Russian people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine were revolting against the government for autonomy; but we could also see what was coming after the autonomy. This is not fortune telling: Russia was making provision for the worst. Should Ukraine join NATO, the Donbass region would keep the NATO bases and navies a little further away from Russian bases on the Black Sea.
Zelenskyy, the former actor and president of Ukraine, had accepted the Russian game plan on the Donbass region – whatever the game was being planned by the Russians. (Does this adjective "former" look redundant to you, too?) The Ukraine government acquiesced a series of international agreements seeking to end the revolts in the Donbass region. The first Minsk Protocol, drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format, was signed in 2014. The second Minsk agreement was signed the following year and consisted of constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbass and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.
Since then, three things happened: Zelenskyy changed his mind about the Minsk Agreements; Russia probably aimed to have them implemented starting that “special operation.” But it could not achieve what it was intending to do.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy and his wife had acquired worldwide fame in the fashion industry, thanks to the capitalistic world of Vogue magazine; the poor people who used to be provided by The World Food Programme (WFP), the food-assistance branch of the United Nations, faced the hanger of hunger because Ukraine, its major contributor, could not get its grains out of the country.
At this point, two major trends should be observed: The U.S. is preparing another military aid package of around $800 million to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, which surely would hearten Zelenskyy to keep (1) donning military fatigues and hoping to win the war, and (2) changing his mind about the conditions to end the war. When the flow of military assistance waned somewhat in the last weeks, Zelenskyy seemed accepting and sought an immediate cease-fire; but U.S. President Joe Biden was said to announce the decision of extra assistance using his Presidential Drawdown Authority, and Zelenskyy started saying that unless all Russian soldiers leave Ukraine no cease-fire agreement would be signed.
However, there is another trend we see in the “war theater”: The U.N. secretary-general and President Erdoğan, who helped start the outflow of Ukrainian grain from the blockaded Black Sea ports of the country, now have kicked off an even much bigger new initiative: To end the armed conflict in Ukraine.
Consequently, I am going to call on Putin to end this special operation. Without implying any exhortative connotations and with utmost empathy with the position of Russia in the face of Western hostility, I am of the opinion that he should give peace a chance and accept the assurances of the U.N. – not the five permanent members of the Security Council – and Türkiye’s assistance that would make Ukraine see the fact that those millions of dollars’ worth of armaments are not going to save its people from harm’s way. Erdoğan is an honest broker in this peace mediation; otherwise, this “special operation” is going to escalate into a real war.
The word for war in the Russian parlance is much scarier than its equivalent in many other languages.
