By then, the invasion of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi had been averted, but with 20% of its territory occupied by Russia, the country’s sovereignty was dangerously crippled. The Georgian government, America’s closest non-NATO ally in the region, was warning about a new, hybrid war. But after all the trauma of Bush’s foreign adventures, the United States was eager to move on.
As Clinton presented Lavrov with a red button, global headlines focused on the amusing fact that Americans had managed to misspell “reset” in Russian and that it made Lavrov laugh. But the region gasped for air: everyone who has experienced Russian oppression knew that what really pleased Lavrov was that Moscow got away with murder.
Over the next 14 years, it would happen again and again. Many of us, including me, didn’t think Putin would launch an invasion of this scale against Ukraine. Millions of us — Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians and Azeris — have all participated in dress rehearsals for the horror show that the Kremlin has now unleashed. And we know that it did not have to come to this.
The playbook Putin has been using to rebuild his empire was always rudimentary. The supposed antagonists were always an oppressed population and a “fascist” government backed by the United States.
But with each rehearsal Putin tweaked the play. In Georgia in 2008, Putin’s soldiers had dirty boots and rusty tanks, but he first tested his now infamous cyber attacks. He got away with it.
The United States and Europe spent millions countering Russian disinformation. But debunking his propaganda was not enough to counter the narratives Putin had pushed using powerful, multi-million dollar media networks that he kept building, at home and abroad.
America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and the disaster that followed was a gift Putin used to turn any debate into another round of exhausting whataboutery, which in turn made Putin a hero for the European far-left.
But what made Putin truly powerful was not the narratives he molded or territories that he grabbed. It was the complacent, stubborn refusal of the collective West to accept that he was at war with them.
“What will it take for them to wake up?” one Ukrainian soldier asked me, when I interviewed him as a journalist about Georgia’s and Ukraine’s shared ordeal in 2015. Now we know the answer, but back then, as we sat in a cold, wet trench on the frontline of Ukraine’s war we could not find it.
The soldier, Dima, was like every Ukrainian you now see on your screen: stoic, determined, calm. He was 23, a software engineer from Kyiv who had only recently decided to leave his job and join the fight. His girlfriend was furious with him, he told me, but fighting was not optional.
“They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they happen to be the same as Europe’s values. We are fighting for them too. I wish they realized it,” he said.
They do now. The whole world is suddenly high on moral clarity. For everyone who has lived on the frontlines of Putin’s hatred for liberal democracy, this show of Western unity and the resurgence of liberal values comes as an incredible relief. But it won’t last unless we also accept that it already comes too late for far too many.
It is too late for Georgians who never stopped losing lives and land, for countless residents of Aleppo who died in the Russian bombardment, for 298 men, women and children who fell from the sky when a civilian Boeing MH17 was shot down by a Russian BUK missile in 2015, for thousands who died in the Donbas in the last 8 years and for countless others who are yet to die in Ukraine.
It is too late for Dima, who was killed in eastern Ukraine in fighting a year after we spoke and long before Europeans finally recognized that it was them he was fighting for.
His question why it took the West so long to wake up is still being asked by millions of people who live on frontlines of Putin’s hatred for liberal democracy all around the world. It is the question that should inform whatever the West does with the new world order that will hatch out of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
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