(Dobbs) Putting the Hurt on Putin
His people have to bear it, but we have to hurt them to hurt him.
Give Joe Biden some credit.
Back in 1990, President George H.W. Bush turned over every stone to create a coalition of 37 nations to kick Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. I spent some of that time myself in Saudi Arabia, watching planes and troops and tanks pour in, but no one knew how long it would take for the war to start.
It took almost six months.
When Russia threatened Ukraine, President Biden put together a coalition in weeks, a coalition of countries with a broad range of ideologies from every inhabited continent. There are nations led by democratic leaders, and nations run by autocrats. There are former Soviet republics and Iron Curtain captives, and nations long free. There are nations on the far side of the world, and nations on the very edge of the war zone.
Just stop and think how amazing that is. Only a month ago, few would have foreseen it.
The European Union, countries that at different times have been economic, political, and military rivals, is unanimously on the side of Ukraine. The United Nations General Assembly is almost unanimous too; it condemned Russia’s invasion by a vote of 141 to 5. Maybe most impressive is the specter of prime ministers from Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic taking their perilous train trip yesterday across the war zone to show support for President Zelinsky in Kyiv.
Nations of all stripes have come together over Ukraine. And it has been orchestrated by the president of a reinvigorated superpower, the United States of America. His coalition is not just fortifying Ukraine’s military forces, it is punishing Ukraine’s unlawful oppressor.
And what has made Biden’s job even harder than George H.W. Bush’s is, he has asked governments and corporations to act against their own self-interest— to forsake exports like energy from Russia, to relinquish investment income from Russia, and not just incidentally, to potentially provoke a menacing megalomaniac like Putin to retaliate.
Against an enemy army eight times the size of its own, Ukraine might still lose, but because of the economic hurt Biden’s enterprise has put on Vladimir Putin’s nation, Russia loses too.
The Yale School of Management has been compiling a list of companies that have stopped, or at the very least slowed down, their business with Russia. 380 of them, and counting. What Yale rightly calls “a mass corporate exit.”
Big names we all know about, restaurants like Pizza Hut, KFC, and Starbucks; retailers like H&M and Ikea, Nike and Adidas; manufacturers like Caterpillar and Philip Morris; energy giants like Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell. Credit cards from Visa, Mastercard, and American Express won’t work any more in Russia. All four of the big accounting firms— Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC— are pulling out. Google, including YouTube, have gone off the Russian grid. Likewise Sony, Apple, and Microsoft. FedEx, UPS, and DSL have stopped delivering, Airbus and Boeing have stopped sending parts.
And maybe most woeful to everyday Russians: no more Heineken beer, no more Carlsberg. No more Netflix.
And no more McDonalds or Burger King. No more Coke or Pepsi.
The cola wars take a back seat to a war far more serious.
So as a coalition to punish Putin, it is an unprecedented success. Almost universal condemnation from the outside world, almost universal economic pain inside Russia. But there are two downsides to these measures.
One is, the people most hurt in Russia are the ones who have nothing to do with this war but can least afford to absorb its economic blows. They not only have lost the creature comforts they only acquired about 30 years ago when the Soviet Union crumbled, but the value of their money— the ruble— has dropped, so that an item that might have cost a thousand rubles before the war now costs 1,200 or more.
The other downside is, these measures might put Putin’s back to the wall to the point where he lashes out and destroys even more than he’s already doing.
If Vladimir Putin is hellbent on denuding and defeating Ukraine, then the withdrawal of Western businesses and the sanctions against Russia’s banks and oligarchs still might not change the outcome of the war— sanctions fail to alter nations’ behaviors as often as they succeed— but it all weakens Putin’s position of strength. Hurting his nation’s consumer sector might not change the outcome either, but it weakens Putin’s base of support. Some analysts believe that discontent over the disappearance of creature comforts that citizens have gotten used to— McDonalds and Netflix and all the rest— could be Putin’s undoing. How can he convince his citizens that he is building a grander empire when the empire is cracking in every direction?
Back when I reported from the Soviet Union, then from Russia, there were reminders wherever I looked of its long hard history, of suffering under Stalin, under the Communists, under the tsars before them. The short way to put it is, the Russian people have never had much to smile about.
Now denied their creature comforts and their nation cast as a pariah, they still don’t. But if President Biden and his coalition are going to hurt Putin, they have to hurt his people too. For me, that’s tolerable, because Russia’s pain doesn’t hold a candle to Ukraine’s.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.