Russia's Hunger Weapon

Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale, describes what he sees as the Kremlin’s plan to drive the Third World poor into Western countries to break European support for Ukraine:

Russia has a hunger plan. Vladimir Putin is preparing to starve much of the developing world as the next stage in his war in Europe. In normal times, Ukraine is a leading exporter of foodstuffs. A Russian naval blockade now prevents Ukraine from exporting grain. If the Russian blockade continues, tens of millions of tons of food will rot in silos, and tens of millions of people in Africa and Asia will starve. The horror of Putin’s hunger plan is so great that we have a hard time apprehending it. … Putin’s hunger plan is also meant to generate refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, areas usually fed by Ukraine. This would generate instability in the EU.

Newsweek says a Russian state TV host claimed the West will eventually be forced to lift sanctions imposed on Russia amid a global famine threat. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russian state-controlled media outlet RT, said she heard from people several times in Moscow that: “All our hope is in the famine.” Pain is seen as the Kremlin’s friend. Russia may be hurting, but in Moscow’s estimation, it can stand suffering longer than the West can. In one of those movie moments when an antagonist boasts, “I’m not afraid of pain. Are you?” and proceeds to slash himself, “Putin said… that Russia had barely got started in Ukraine and dared the West to try to defeat it on the battlefield.”

“Everyone should know that, by and large, we haven’t started anything yet in earnest,” he added. “At the same time, we don’t reject peace talks. But those who reject them should know that the further it goes, the harder it will be for them to negotiate with us.”

Retired Australian general Mick Ryan believes “Putin, Lavrov and his defence and intelligence chiefs have cobbled together an alternative theory of victory for Ukraine. It goes – in the broadest sense – something like this…”

…it has drawn the Ukrainians into a war of attrition, something they avoided in the Battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv. As such, this is the first element of the Russian theory of victory: destroy the Ukrainian Army faster than it can be rebuilt… holding the south is the 2nd element of Putin’s theory of victory because it slowly strangles Ukraine economically… And holding onto the southern regions, the Ukrainians are becoming increasingly dependent on international economic aid. Time is Putin’s weapon.

Holding the southern Ukrainian coast also makes it possible to implement the hunger plan, as Timothy Snyder noted. And the Kremlin might have calculated its effects well. Foreign Policy thinks Germany and France are war-weary already. Germany in particular wants “to manage rather than confront Russia.” On the whole, socialist Europe in its bones wants the whole Ukrainian unpleasantness to go away so it can go back to the really important things like climate change, income redistribution, diversity, inclusivity, and equity. Vladimir is a distraction but really not a fundamental factor in the grand scheme of things. If only the boorish Putin could but be persuaded to get out of the way of progress, then things could go back to “normal.”

But Putin might be trapped by his own actions and therefore unpersuadable. The one obvious flaw in the hunger plan is that famine can also destabilize the Chinese and Russian spheres of influence, as events in Sri Lanka proved. “Myanmar, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are absolutely key nodes in China’s Belt-and-Road-based economic plans. In all three of these countries now, dramatic domestic shifts have created a reality where Chinese investment is neither as welcome nor secure. Quite momentous shifts.” What further instability can do to Russia, China, and the West cannot be so easily foretold. We can become prisoners of our own devices.

NOW – Protesters storm the presidential palace in Sri Lanka's capital.pic.twitter.com/Wv6oQ10kBQ

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 9, 2022

Putin himself may be ultimately powerless against the forces he is reportedly planning to unleash. Just days before the Sri Lankan president fled the angry crowds, Gotabaya Rajapaksa “asked Russian leader Vladimir Putin to supply the small South Asian country with discounted fuel,” a move he hoped would save him. But neither the Kremlin nor Beijing could save him and perhaps they may learn in the end that chaos is nobody’s servant, that it has a mind of its own. Like the loose cannon of Victor Hugo’s famous short story, Russia’s rumored hunger plan, as with the war in Ukraine itself, may go where it will. In Hugo’s telling, the pitiless cannon heeds naught:

A cannon that breaks its moorings suddenly becomes some strange, supernatural beast. It is a machine transformed into a monster. That short mass on wheels moves like a billiard-ball, rolls with the rolling of the ship, plunges with the pitching goes, comes, stops, seems to meditate, starts on its course again, shoots like an arrow from one end of the vessel to the other, whirls around, slips away, dodges, rears, bangs, crashes, kills, exterminates. It is a battering ram capriciously assaulting a wall. Add to this the fact that the ram is of metal, the wall of wood.

That no plan survives contact with reality is a truism everyone should know but is often forgotten. Politicians think they are in control—until they realize they’re not.

Books: Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order by Richard Fernandez and 17 others. In this timely and necessary book, Michael Walsh has gathered trenchant critical perspectives on the Great Reset from eighteen eminent writers and journalists from around the world. Victor Davis Hanson places the WEF’s prescriptions and goals in historical context and shows how American politicians justify destructive policies. Michael Anton explains the socialist history of woke capitalism. James Poulos looks at how Big Tech acts as informal government censors. John Tierney lays out the lack of accountability for the unjustified panic over the virus. David Goldman confronts the WEF’s ideas for a fourth industrial revolution with China’s commitment to being the leader of a post-western world. And there are many more.