USSR

There is something quite eerie about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is eerie beyond the obvious injustice of a big power assaulting a sovereign state and attempting to dislodge a democratically installed government.

I thought about it for a while and realized the real oddity of this invasion. Russia initiated a war of annexation native to the 20th century but fought in the 21st. Its final goal is to reinstate some version of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), itself a facsimile of the old Tsarist Russian Empire.

Europe has not seen an invading army of this scale since the close of World War II. It is a retro army in every aspect: its armored columns, its strategy and its tactics. It now flounders because of that.

It is retro (and retrograde) in its objective: install a puppet government on a fiercely independent people. By doing so, Vladimir Putin intends to intimidate the neighboring former Soviet bloc countries such as the Baltic republics, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia into virtual submission to Moscow’s will.

This is an invasion Putin initiated on a set of wrong assumptions. He envisioned a quick war that presents the rest of the world a fait accompli. He underestimated the will of the Ukrainian people to resist. He did not expect countries such as Germany, Denmark and Sweden to rally to support the Ukrainian resistance with lethal weapons. In many major cities across the globe, people have taken to the streets to denounce Putin’s war.

The Ukrainian people have mounted a valiant resistance in defense of their sovereignty and their democracy. Several Russian attempts to roll into the major cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv have been repulsed. This invasion is not going to be as easy as Putin assumed.

If Russia initiated a war imported from the 20th century, the G-7 countries have responded with a strategy distinctly 21st century. They have initiated sanctions on Russia that will paralyze its financial system and cut off her enterprises from their international markets.

Although there will be some lag time before the effects of the sanctions take effect, they will be debilitating. After sanctions were imposed on Russia after Moscow annexed Crimea eight years ago, a Russian official admitted the country’s GDP shrunk by five percent. The forthcoming round of sanctions will be more severe.

There is a lesson from Russia’s failed Afghan intervention that Putin did not learn. In this modern world, puppet governments cannot thrive.

Even if Russian tanks and commandos eventually succeed in crushing Ukrainian armed resistance, its objective of regime change can never be accepted by the Ukrainian people or by the international community. A pro-Moscow puppet government will meet democratic resistance and cannot rule.

Rather than intimidate the neighboring Eastern European states, Putin’s invasion galvanized them. Little Lithuania is a leading voice demanding more severe sanctions against Moscow. NATO rapidly beefed up its presence in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. Small states such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Czech Republic, Portugal and Israel have sent much needed military supplies to Ukraine.

Last Sunday, Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces on highest alert. The goal here is obviously to intimidate the rest of the world with the prospect of a escalating and widening conflict. He gambles with his nation’s survival.

Raising the specter of nuclear war is the surest sign that things are not going well for Putin’s troops on the ground in Ukraine. Captured Russian troops complain they have run out of fuel and food. Putin’s generals assumed the invasion would be over in hours. They did not bother to set up the logistics line to support their expeditionary force.

Putin’s biggest miscalculation involves a distinctly 21st century weapon: the precision-guided, shoulder-mounted anti-tank missiles. Notwithstanding Russia’s absolute control of the air, Ukraine’s army and civilian militia are laying waste to Putin’s tank columns using this small but effective weapon.

The bad news for the tyrant in Moscow is that several countries are rushing to resupply the Ukrainians with their own stocks of this lethal portable device. It is perfect for a valiant people resisting an invasion from another century.

Putin, whose mental competence has come under increasing question, fails to understand that formerly subjugated peoples would rather die fighting than return to Soviet tyranny. The rejected USSR can no longer be resurrected on nations that have already found democracy.

“Foreign” debt

The CNN presidential “debate” was an utterly boring exercise featuring sophomoric questions that failed to evoke differentiation among the candidates present. All the candidates stayed safe, giving rehearsed responses to predictable questions.

Only one candidate gave an imprecise response. Asked to identify the figure 11.7 trillion, all the candidates correctly replied “national debt.” Only one candidate – Leni Robredo – answered “foreign debt.”

All the other candidates let it pass – either out of graciousness or lack of confidence to get into a debate on public finance. But the distinction is important.

Over the past three decades, our finance authorities worked hard to reconstitute our public debt. We paid down expensive commercial borrowings by floating bonds with fixed rates. Today, about 70 percent of our national debt is locally sourced and mostly denominated in pesos.

The remaining “foreign” loans are largely borrowings from multilateral agencies such as the ADB and the AIIB or from bilateral lending from friendly governments on ODA terms. Reconstituting our national debt is the most solid collective achievement of all the post-Edsa administrations. The mainly “local” debt defines how it must be managed.