Why is Bangladesh hesitating to call out Russia’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine?
As Vladimir Putin’s Russia continues its military march on Ukraine choking the beleaguered country on all sides, the UN General Assembly on March 5 overwhelmingly denounced this aggression with 141 countries in favour of the resolution. Only five countries were opposed, including Russia, supported by four others — but surprisingly not China — which abstained from voting.
The abstention list of 35 countries included India, Bangladesh, and other countries which are presumably reluctant to risk Russian ire over this overt aggression. Interestingly, most Muslim countries, notably in the Middle East (except Syria), and in Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, joined the censure resolution. Even three of our South Asian neighbors, Bhutan, Nepal, and Maldives, joined their voices to protest the Russian aggression.
The crisis that faces the world today from Russian invasion of Ukraine is of a momentous proportion that is fraught with the risk of launching a nuclear warfare, should Putin feel the threat of a resistance from Ukraine's neighbours. In fact, he had threatened European countries of a consequence that would be unimaginable to them should they even think of retaliating against Russia.
This is not a moment to take pause and ponder what triggered the Russian invasion and speculate on whether Russia was provoked to this act by Ukraine or its neighbours. It is time to prevent another catastrophe from happening without a blame game. It is time from throwing the world back to the days when big powers threatened each other with nuclear weapons, and one power invaded countries that were not toeing its way with it.
It is not too distant a time to remember for many of us when the former incarnation of present-day Russia, the Soviet Union, invaded Hungary (1956), and later Czechoslovakia (1958) in the name of quelling the uprising of people against their puppet communist regimes. The same country invaded Afghanistan two decades later to install its own favoured regime in that country.
Today, Putin wants a regime change in Ukraine because its president does not want to toe the Russian line, and the country seeks admission to a better economic union with 27 other countries within the continent. But Putin would not have Ukraine choose its freedom from Russian yoke, and would like to restore the glory and power of the former Soviet Union with the stranglehold that it had over 15 of the countries that comprised that empire.
The invasions that the former incarnation of present-day Russia made in the previous decades were not actively resisted by other nations, including the US, for fear of encountering World War III with dangerous repercussions of a nuclear war. The Soviet Union was a world power which held a nuclear balance with the west, and leaders were wary of a self-annihilating conflict in a world that had just recently come out of an eight-year long warfare that had killed millions and unleashed untold sufferings on people.
Fears of another World War diminished with the implosion of the USSR and freeing of many European countries from its iron clad control over them which abandoned dictatorship and embraced democracy.
Yet, fear of another kind — the domination of one country over another — started to emerge when other material considerations of control over energy sources and dictators reappeared in the global stage. Along with it also re-appeared state control by undemocratic forces to establish their ideology and overthrow of weaker regimes by the military, especially in the Middle East and Africa. In this chaos also emerged terror groups who tried to gain political supremacy through false ideology and the takeover of state power.
The alliances were newly drawn between those regimes controlled by autocrats and countries that sought access to the resources of these countries by giving legitimacy to the leaders through alliance. Russia and China were the leading countries which established such relationships with many countries that had powerful figures that had been catapulted to these positions.
Unfortunately, the US, the only superpower left after the demise of the Soviet Union, also had its share of siding with such powers in many cases.
The quest to seek new alliances and reestablish lost authority began in Russia substantially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It took a long time for Russia to re-establish itself as a solitary republic shorn of the 15 other countries that once embellished its size. It took a long time to recover from the economic downturn and other adversity that it faced from the shrinkage.
But what it did not lose was its military might and equipage that it had retained including its nuclear arsenal, most of which was within Mother Russia. And this military might and nuclear strength gave Russia the ability to act as a power to the countries that it befriended and helped later on. This strength would be leveraged and exploited by Vladimir Putin when he gradually climbed to power and slowly turned his semi-democratic country into another autocracy.
As a former officer of the KGB, the feared agency of state power, he had seen the fall from grace of the USSR and its turning into a mere “another state” informer of the Soviet Union. He regretted this fall and pined to reestablish control over the countries that formed the former empire. Ukraine was his backyard, and he would not let it out of Russian domination.
So, the Russian aggression in Ukraine is not so much as fighting for the rights over Ukrainian resources as fighting to establish Russian authority over the less powerful country. Putin is blind with rage that a country that he wants to be a vassal state like Belarus would like to remain sovereign free from Russian hegemony. He does recognize the rights of Ukraine citizens to choose their freedom to associate with countries that he detests. Russian aggression is stopping these rights.
The question before us is not whether we like to risk our relationship with a country which in its earlier incarnation supported our liberation struggle. The question is whether we would like to stand up with another country which is defending its sovereignty from a mighty aggressor. The question is not one of displeasing our own mighty neighbour which has a long history of association with Russia, and it imports heavily its defense equipment from it. The question is whether we would like to give up our courage and values to stand up against assault on sovereignty of nations and countries in order not to irk mighty neighbours.
We have to decide what we value most. We are a country that witnessed a bloody assault on our rights to exist as a nation and defended our territory against aggression five decades ago. We have a tradition for fighting not only for our freedom but also for other freedom-loving nations. We cannot yield to powers because they may not like our independent thinking. We should choose justice and freedom rising above fears of the mighty and powerful.
Ziauddin Choudhury has worked in the higher civil service of Bangladesh early in his career, and later for the World Bank in the US.
This article was originally published on Dhaka Tribune.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.
