The Russian war dismembering Ukraine has sent shockwaves rattling Montana.
Through video conferences and church vigils, courthouse rallies and economic reactions, echoes of the war 5,400 miles away have an impact here. And those ripples may grow into waves as the battle evolves.
“Free-thinking people with open minds know we’re in a different 21st-century world and need a new way of dealing with global problems,” said Clint Walker, a Russian studies professor at the University of Montana. “But the question is, how do we get there? We’ve fallen back on this Cold War model of U.S. dominance and spheres of influence.”
Walker was one of several experts sharing perspectives on the Ukraine situation through a UM Mansfield Center online gathering last week. Although the war was barely a week old, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat of nuclear action against opponents outside Ukraine revived memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In an age of worldwide social media, this conflict has a more immediate presence than past crises. Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred in 2001 and the United States began its attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Last week, Missoulians were in conversation with former University of Montana colleagues now connecting from Moscow and a refugee center in Poland.
UM alumna and Ukrainian professor Oksana Nezhyvenko spoke to the Mansfield Center audience of several hundred on Wednesday, just a day after she crossed the Polish border with her 1-year-old daughter. Her husband could not leave Ukraine. She said the Russian effort to justify the attack was mind-boggling.
“When I watch Russian TV, I start believing Ukrainians eat children,” Nezhyvenko said of Putin’s claims that the attack was to “de-Nazify” the Ukrainian government. “Their media is so sick, we cannot believe what is happening.”
Putin’s attempt to sell the war to his own people appears mostly successful, according to Russian author and professor Alexander Pantsov, who was also on the Mansfield Center conference. A national opinion poll taken there last week reported Putin’s popularity actually rose from about 60% to 70% after the war started.
Financial firepower
A globally coordinated campaign of economic sanctions against the Russian government and Putin’s inner circle of wealthy oligarchs is intended to reverse that attitude. That includes cutting many Russian banks out of the SWIFT interbank communication network, which blocks financial transactions and wire transfers for their account holders.
The United States barred the Russian central bank from making transactions in dollars, which prevents Russia from using its foreign currency holdings to prop up the value of its ruble. And U.S. officials have prohibited many individual Russian oligarchs close to Putin from traveling or conducting business.
However, the impacts may take a while to affect the general Russian population. Pantsov said in Moscow, people are having difficulty getting cash from banks, and the value of the ruble has fallen from 71 to the dollar last October to 150 now.
To date, Russians have not been reporting impacts on everyday life, such as food or fuel shortages. That may be due to the lack of places to report — on Wednesday, Russian authorities blocked transmission of the last independent television network, TV Rain, and one of Moscow’s oldest radio stations, Echo of Moscow.
Many of TV Rain’s editorial staff have already fled the country, and other journalists have gone into hiding to avoid dissenter dragnets.
While Russian forces launched their multi-pronged attack on Feb. 24, military harassment of Ukraine has been active since 2014, when Russian-backed militias occupied the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula by force. Those conflicts have accounted for more than 14,000 deaths.
“It’s frustrating to me that the West has basically told Putin for years, ‘One more step, and you’ll get in trouble,’ and then ‘Oh, no, he took two steps,’” said Ukrainian-Missoulian Eduard Shokur, who has been following events closely.
Shokur agrees with many international analysts that Putin appears set on re-establishing Russian international status equal to what the Soviet Union had in the 1970s, and that economic sanctions would have little effect on his ambition.
But short of actively sending NATO or U.S. forces into combat in Ukraine, Shokur acknowledged that imposing financial blockades on both Russia and outside economic sectors that support Russian interests is worth doing.
“I don’t think the European Union or the U.S. can strategically bomb Russia,” Shokur said. “But we should inflict as much pain as possible. We can’t be defeatist.”
Mary Sarotte, a professor of historical studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., told an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School last week that Putin’s mind probably can’t be changed. He sees himself as a martyr, so the best diplomatic efforts will be to persuade his inner circle and other Russian elites.
“It’s hard to know where this ends,” Sarotte said. “This is probably unlikely, but my hope is that the people around Putin realize they’re increasingly becoming a much bigger version of North Korea, and they don’t want to live in North Korea. So, if there’s some way to make the people around him see a better future without him … that would be one resolution that would be better than a lot of bad options.”
Montana impacts
Economic sanctions may have effects on the global crisis. They affect Russia’s ability to financially pay for its actions, which range from soldier salaries to revenue for natural gas and oil no longer sold or contracted (which make up about 60% of the Russian economy).
That destabilization could doom Russia’s gross domestic product, which is already smaller than Canada’s or Italy’s, to slip even further toward inconsequence. It ranked 64th in the world in 2021.
However, sanctions will trigger recoil reactions on the nations that launched them.
In Missoula, S.G. Long Financial Research Director Rob Richardson noted that the war and sanctions will pull huge amounts of Russian and Ukrainian wheat out of the market, opening opportunities for U.S. farmers. But Russia and Ukraine also export significant amounts of fertilizer that’s now missing from the world market — and raising the future cost of crops. That’s already reflected in price increases for grain and meat now.
“We’re also overnight seeing impact at the pump,” Richardson said of the war’s effect on energy supplies. “Most places are seeing 20% to 30% increases in gas prices. Diesel futures are going to climb.”
All that aggravates inflation, which has already taken off through the economic turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic. Short-term debates over the cost of fuel and food could have long-term impacts on bigger issues like the balance of fossil fuel to renewable energy development.
While Russia’s economy lags most of the developed world, its No. 3 rank for global oil and gas production gives it critical influence over other nations. But a rush to replace fossil fuel sources now runs counter to international efforts at reducing global warming from burning coal and petroleum.
That could impact Montana, where the competition to open more public land for oil and gas exploration, prop up failing coal mines or develop wind and solar alternatives has become a major political battleground. Those political divides filter up to national politics as the United States heads for midterm elections this fall.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy won election to the presidency of Ukraine in 2019, defeating pro-Russian Petro Poroshenko in a landslide. Former U.S. President Donald Trump attempted to get Zelenskyy to investigate current President Joe Biden’s son — an effort that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment before Congress.
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte was Montana’s congressional representative at that impeachment in December 2019, and voted against the proceeding. Then-Montana state auditor Matt Rosendale, also a Republican, campaigned against the impeachment in his successful bid to replace Gianforte as congressman, when Gianforte won the governorship.
Rosendale went on to be one of three members of the House of Representatives to vote against a March 1 resolution declaring support for Ukraine and demanding a withdrawal of Russian forces.
Senators Jon Tester, a Democrat, and Steve Daines, a Republican, joined a similar Senate resolution in February condemning Russia for the attack. However, the Senate failed to pass a February package of Russian sanctions out of committee over partisan divides. Daines and Tester on Friday both announced support for a bill blocking Russian gas and oil imports to the United States (which gets about 8% of its petroleum from Russia).
None of that rancor was noticeable inside Missoula’s First United Methodist Church last week, which has been offering a noontime vigil for anyone to silently contemplate the fate of Ukraine and the larger world.
Pastor John Daniels said the midday quiet time has drawn so much interest, the church plans to keep its doors open through the coming week.
“It’s a way of calling attention to the wrongness of all this pain that’s happening,” Daniels said. “Prayer is our biggest thing right now. That’s what this is all about.”
