Moskva

Lisa Van Dusen

April 11, 2022

The biggest non-lethal news in the war on Ukraine this week is that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, a man known for having never met a lie he didn’t like, told the truth. In an interview Monday with Rossia 24, Lavrov said that Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is “meant to put an end” to US-led global domination. Lavrov being Lavrov, he couldn’t resist a little timely, projection-based spin: “This domination is built on gross violations of international law,” he added, the cries of anguished Ukrainians echoing in the background.

There are three important points to note about Lavrov’s brush with truth.

The first is that, in a context defined by escalating human rights violations and propaganda provocations seemingly designed to drag NATO and the US into a military conflagration, this belated clarification of Russia’s real casus belli removes the “seemingly” from that description. After months of peddling a series of false rationales for launching an invasion of a democratic neighbour and misleading the world with what I like to call catfish diplomacy, Russia has finally admitted that this isn’t about the past — with either NATO or Ukraine — it’s about the future. It’s about an attempted endgame to two decades of covert operational attacks on democracy in general and the United States, as the democratic superpower, in particular. When Lavrov says the invasion of Ukraine is “meant to put an end” to US domination, what he’s really saying is that it is — as are so many recent acts of sabotage, treason, larceny, violence, misrepresentation and misinformation — meant to put an end to democracy.

The second is that it specifically identifies the US as a strategic target at a time when the presidency of Joe Biden — the most prominent, outspoken proponent of democracy in the world — is under attack ahead of both the November midterms and the 2024 presidential by the usual anti-democracy suspects, including a couple who’d prefer not to see Biden run again. Lavrov’s rare truth is the throwing down of a gauntlet meant to be impossible for Biden to ignore, and the taking up of which would suddenly multiply the possible outcomes of this operation.

A global balance of power dominated by genocidal non-democracies is not an alternative order, it’s a barbaric corruption cartel.

The third is that, in the upside-down, ass-backward world of anti-democracy propaganda, an overt assertion of world domination intentions after years of covert skulduggery may actually be an admission of weakness. Russia has been leaving a trail of genocidal, humanitarian-intervention justifying evidence to provoke a war-of-the-worldviews escalation that will drag in other players on both sides. Lavrov’s escalation of rhetoric may be an admission that the military campaign is failing.

Above all, amid a daily deluge of performative and propaganda narrative scammery, any truth is welcome.

As has been obvious since the turn of this millennium, war is not what it used to be. The incremental, systematic degradation of democracy through manufactured narratives, borderless and virtually ubiquitous propaganda and intelligence corruption has produced a dangerous shift away from democracy and toward totalitarian surveillance states with astonishingly few shots fired.

The same borderless intelligence corruption that has provided the covert infrastructure for the surveillance, hacking and narrative warfare deception and spoiling operations of that campaign against humanity — democracy being a proxy target for human rights and freedoms and therefore human beings — creates an unprecedented conundrum for NATO, the EU and Biden as the president of the country Russia has finally identified as its real target in this war.

The United States has not only an internal democracy degradation problem but the weaponized treason problem that fuels it, most spectacularly obvious in the presidency of Donald Trump but evident across a number of ongoing narratives. The US intelligence community’s litany of democracy degrading “failures” over the past two decades — including the admission in 2019 that it “slept” through China’s 20-year transformation from “peacefully rising” industrializing developing nation to cyberpoaching, debt-trapping, coercive diplomacy-deploying, hostage-taking, democracy-undermining, domination-seeking authoritarian menace, with regular, often diversionary, assists from Russia — creates a known unknown in any strategic calculus.

When Russia does everything it can to escalate its invasion of Ukraine into World War Three, it is doing so knowing that “dragging in other players on both sides” isn’t as simple or straightforward as it was in, say, World War Two, when the delineations of both “players” and “sides” were less blurry and more reliably labelled.

Which puts Biden — as the now-explicitly identified target of a larger operational war that specializes in, among other outcome curations, lose-lose propositions — in the position of either authorizing an escalation that could end up on the list of 21^st-century intelligence “failures” including, most recently, Afghanistan, or of being seen as not doing enough to stop a genocide.

It puts Russia — and its partners in what Lavrov has now identified as not classic irredentism but a proxy attack manufactured to resolve a diabolical, Marvel-esque world domination plot — as perpetrators of crimes against humanity including civilian atrocities, sexual violence and forced displacement as a means of tactical manipulation. It’s not the worst thing these actors have done, but it does reveal so much about their ambitions. A global balance of power dominated by genocidal non-democracies is not an alternative order, it’s a barbaric corruption cartel.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor and deputy publisher of Policy Magazine. She was Washington/international affairs columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.