Biden's Gambit
Sacrificing Ukraine to checkmate Russia is a colossal strategic error for the U.S.
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
– U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917.
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.
– Prime Minister Winston Churchill's remark to Premier Joseph Stalin on 30 November, 1943.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them[.]
– George Orwell on “doublethink” in his classic dystopian novel 1984 (1949).
The thesis of this article is the Washington establishment intentionally sacrificed Ukraine to Russia's invasion. It remains to be seen whether short-term political and profit interests motivated elements in D.C. to sacrifice Ukraine or, in the alternative, that Washington miscalculated in thinking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in America’s long-term geopolitical and strategic interests.
But we do not need to wait for the dust to settle to conclude Russia and U.S.-led NATO share responsibility for the war in Ukraine. While western condemnation of the war in Ukraine was swift and widespread, it is less fashionable in the current political climate to also condemn the U.S. policies that laid the foundation for war and encouraged—indeed coerced—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Battle lines have been drawn and failure to toe the line draws allegations of being an ignorant parrot of the Kremlin's mis- and disinformation or, worse yet, of being a traitor, agent, or propagandist working on Putin’s payroll. (See "echoing Putin's talking points," "siding with Putin," and “circulating Russian propaganda and "disinformation”; see also GCHQ’s playbook to spread propaganda through psychological operations on the internet and the NSA’s use of online propaganda in Ukraine in 2014.) Hermann Goering, one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state, said it best during his trial for war crimes before the Hague.
Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
If we expect Russians to hold Putin to account for his actions, we better be willing to do the same to our own governments. Thankfully, some brave souls have expressed their dissent from western revisionist propaganda:
Bryce Green in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (“What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” 28 January, 2022; “Calling Russia's Attack 'Unprovoked' Lets U.S. Off The Hook,” 3 March, 2022.)
Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times (“This Is Putin’s War. But U.S. and NATO Are Not Innocent Bystanders,” February 21, 2022.)
Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker (“Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine,” 1 March, 2022.)
Ted Galen Carpenter in Newsweek (“The U.S. and NATO Helped Trigger the Ukraine War. It's Not 'Siding With Putin' to Admit It,” 7 March, 2022.)
Three of the authors above have already drawn rebukes in Bloomberg, an establishment propaganda outlet with 360,000 subscribers and over 100 million readers, listeners, and viewers. This despite all of the authors, save Mearsheimer, opening their pieces by reaffirming mainstream myths in a preemptive mea culpa for expressing moderately divergent opinions. Compare:
Greene: “Many governments and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law”; and
Friedman: “Putin is the most powerful, unchecked leader since Stalin, and the timing of this war is a product of his ambitions, strategies, and grievances”; and
Carpenter: “Vladimir Putin’s . . . monstrous act of aggression . . . an over-the-top response to any Ukrainian or NATO provocation[.]; with
Mearsheimer via Chotiner:
If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. . . . [T]his is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate.
[. . .]
[W]hen push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.
But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now.
It would also be wonderful if Americans could influence our politicians and policy. But we have, statistically speaking, zero control over our own borderline fascist corporate oligrachy, its big brother mass-surveillance state, and the foreign policies that advance their special interests. It would be grand to live in a real democracy with economic justice and freedom for all. But “it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
The notion Ukraine will somehow succeed where every other nation has failed, by becoming a prosperous democracy instead of yet another low-wage, high-rent, no-dissent vassal state of the international establishment, is pie in the sky. The kinds of people who believe in these delusions are the same ones who think displaying moral outrage and virtue signalling disapproval of Putin and Russia will somehow contribute to peace in Ukraine. But, as realists like Mearsheimer understand, “That’s not the way the world works.”
Worse than being useless, people who call for an end to hostilities in Ukraine based on propaganda-fueled bias and doublethink, rather than realist views of the war, are creating obstacles to peace and making it less likely the suffering of Ukranians and Russians will end anytime soon. The black and white narrative—that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unprovoked; that Putin is a self-isolating madman willing to risk nuclear war for his Stalin-esque ambitions; that the west is siding with the righteous cause of Ukranian democracy and sovereignty against the greatest threat to Europe since Hitler—is a childish, counterfactual cliché born from ignorance, intellectual laziness, and susceptibility to believe Five Eyes propaganda. Repeating such nonsense provides political cover to forces for war and is a condemnable offense to peace.
The starting point of any reasonable view of the war in Ukraine must accept as axiomatic the west “overthrew democratically elected leaders . . . because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave,” as Russia’s current invasion further evidences. Finding a diplomatic solution to the war requires a more mature approach. Any serious analysis will put the war in Ukraine in its proper context: the historical contest between NATO and Russia. Limiting the scope of our inquiry to events following Russia’s invasion on February 24 would be to ignore the circumstances that led to war. But there can be no understanding of Russia’s motives and objectives without considering the underlying circumstances. And there will be no diplomatic solution without recognition of and consideration for Russia’s position.
At first glance, one might mistake the war as a tragic failure of western foreign policy. Millions of Ukrainians have fled for their lives. Russian artillery is hitting positions just a few miles from NATO territory.
But the failed policy hypothesis fits the case only in the popular sense that any foreign policy resulting in war is a failure. In terms of realpolitik, the war in Ukraine advances the short-term interests of the Kremlin and Washington simultaneously. The invasion will improve the domestic political positions of Presidents Biden and Putin, enrich the elite, and strengthen NATO vis-à-vis Russia if not China.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforces U.S. hegemony for the time being by hampering Russia’s economic productivity and diminishing the Kremlin’s military might. Further, the invasion has solidified NATO behind the U.S., prompted nations in the E.U. to increase their defense spending and look for American alternatives to Russian oil and gas, and enriched U.S. corporations and western special interests. As time will tell though, by using finance and economics as weapons of war to respond to a conflict they manufactured, the Axis of Earnings will inevitably make some countries reconsider the geopolitical risks of becoming wedded to the west, thus making China a stronger near-peer competitor to the U.S. in the long-run.
At the same time, Putin’s regime is strengthened by the west’s foreseeable response: isolating Russia economically and culturally. There will be fewer lines of communication between Russians and westerners, so less information will reach our comrades to counter the Kremlin’s propaganda. The obstacles to cooperation between American and Russian anti-fascists, libertarians, and anarchists will increase. Putin will use Russia’s war-time footing to crackdown on dissent, purge dissidents, and strengthen his grip on power. Far from rising up and overthrowing Putin à la Maidan, most Russians will view their sacrifice of blood and treasure as the cost of protecting the Russian state from NATO expansionism. And, of course, Russia’s national security and autonomy will be protected by denying the U.S. a potential staging ground in Ukraine for nuclear, hypersonic missiles.
It is no secret the establishment thinks war in Ukraine is a strategic win for America. The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by a researcher at the Atlantic Council titled, “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine: An invasion would be a diplomatic, economic and military mistake for Putin. Let him make it if he must.” The Atlantic Council is the preeminent pro-NATO thinktank directly funded in part by NATO.
The piece argued a Russian invasion of Ukraine would “forge an even stronger anti-Russian consensus across Europe,” leading to “another round of more debilitating economic sanctions.” War in Ukraine, a non-NATO country, was to NATO’s benefit because it would “likely [ ] spawn a guerrilla war” and “sap the strength and morale of Russia’s military while undercutting Mr. Putin’s domestic popularity and reducing Russia’s soft power globally.” From a cold-blooded perspective, U.S. foreign policy is successful, not despite the war in Ukraine, but because of it.
The actions of the executive branch of the U.S. government across multiple administrations strongly suggest the U.S. recognized war between Russia and Ukraine was in America’s strategic interests—and acted on this view. The evidence will show the Biden administration could have easily averted Russia’s invasion. Instead, Biden made the conscious decision not to negotiate with Putin, even though the White House knew full well that refusal to negotiate would lead to war in Ukraine. Washington’s decision begs the question: why would the U.S. choose a course of action that increased the probability of war instead of peace, if not because they (mis)calculated sacrificing Ukraine was in America's interests?
The instant analysis is built upon eight premises:
The U.S. has long sought an effective first-strike nuclear capability against Moscow to vitiate the Kremlin’s ability to retaliate.
NATO repeatedly expanded eastward, in violation of U.S. guarantees to Russia, culminating in President Bush's 2008 promise to make Ukraine and Georgia members of NATO.
U.S. intelligence, military officials, and subject matter experts on Russia have assessed—for decades—that Ukraine becoming a NATO member is perceived as a direct, existential threat by all Russian elites without exception.
The Obama administration recognized Ukraine would always be vulnerable to invasion by Russia because the U.S. cannot maintain escalatory dominance in the eastern European theater.
The U.S. did not tolerate democracy in Ukraine when it resulted in President Yanukovych aligning his country with Russia politically and economically.
The U.S. military trained neoNazis who constituted the vanguard of the 2014 coup against the Ukranian government, while U.S. officials covertly selected politicians to replace Yanukovych's administration.
The Biden administration rejected negotiations with President Putin in December 2021 knowing full well Russia would invade Ukraine as a result.
Elites in D.C. calculated it is in the long-term strategic interests of the United States to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia.
Dominic Cummings put it bluntly in a recent (paywalled) post on Substack: “Elements in D.C. are willing to fight Russia to the last Ukranian.” Similarly, elements in Moscow are willing to fight Ukraine to the last conscript. Cui bono?
Unilaterally Assured Destruction
Mutually assured destruction (“MAD”) is a doctrine of military strategy based on the presumption the two nuclear superpowers will annihilate one another in a large-scale nuclear exchange. The result is a Nash equilibrium where neither side has an incentive to launch a first-strike for fear retaliation. In this way, each side’s nuclear weapons deter the other side from a first strike to decapitate their rival. The MAD status quo has contributed to the fact the U.S. and Russia have not used nuclear weapons in over 70 years.
Unlike China and India, neither the U.S. nor Russia have adopted a “no first use” (“NFU”) policy. NFU is a promise to the international community a nuclear power will not be the initial aggressor in any nuclear exchange. There are significant differences between U.S. and Russian nuclear doctrine, however.
Russia’s military doctrine outlines two and only two scenarios in which Russia will use nuclear weapons: (1) to respond to a nuclear attack on Russia or her allies; and (2) in the event the existence of the Russian state is threatened by conventional weapons. Russia’s nuclear doctrine is therefore explicitly defensive.
In contrast, the U.S. has adopted a policy of strategic ambiguity that does not specify the conditions that would trigger the U.S. to use nuclear weapons. U.S. military doctrine considers the use of nuclear weapons “only in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, our allies, and partners.” What constitutes an “extreme” circumstance or a “vital” interest is ambiguous. The only explicit U.S. policy is “negative security assurance,” under which the U.S. promises not to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state that is a signatory of and in compliance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (“NPT”).
What is clear, however, is U.S. nuclear doctrine does not rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons first. Nor is U.S. first-use limited to situations to ensure the survival of the United States or to respond to a nuclear attack on the U.S. or her allies. On the contrary, the U.S. nuclear umbrella extends beyond responding to a nuclear attack to protect the vital interests (undefined) of the U.S., her official NATO allies, and other partners (undefined).
Almost every U.S. administration in the nuclear age has planned a nuclear first-strike against Russia to decapitate the Russian state. Early plans called for the destruction of Russia before the Russians could develop nuclear weapons.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the United States had a nuclear weapons monopoly, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower entertained and then rejected Joint Chiefs of Staff studies suggesting a preventive war against the Soviet Union before it also obtained such weapons, according to recently declassified Pentagon documents.
Knowing that the Soviets were developing hydrogen weapons that could destroy the United States, Eisenhower later approved plans calling for a preemptive nuclear first strike against Russia if it began a conventional war[.]
The Kennedy administration expanded and diversified U.S. planning for a first-strike against Russia during the 1961 Berlin crisis. The initial plan, SIOP-62, called for the massacre of 54 percent of the Soviet population and the destruction of 82 percent of the U.S.S.R.’s buildings.
[Carl] Kaysen and [Henry S.] Rowen finished their first-strike study a few weeks later. On September 5 Kaysen, who had taken over the drafting of the plan, sent General [Maxwell D.] Taylor the resulting thirty-three-page memo, titled "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin." It included a very detailed description of the existing U.S. nuclear-war plan. SIOP-62, as the plan was known, called for sending in the full arsenal of the Strategic Air Command—2,258 missiles and bombers carrying a total of 3,423 nuclear weapons—against 1,077 "military and urban-industrial targets" throughout the "Sino-Soviet Bloc." Kaysen reported that if the SIOP were executed, the attack would kill 54 percent of the USSR's population and destroy 82 percent of its buildings.
According to a 1982 article in Science, the Reagan administration “put forth the idea the Soviets cannot be brought to the bargaining table unless they feel threatened. The idea is embodied in plans to build weapons with a ‘first-strike’ capability[.]” President Reagan flatly lied to the Russians about his and U.S. historical plans for a first-strike capability less than a year later while developing yet another nuclear delivery system.
Arguing for the MX missile before the American Legion, the President denied that it would pose a first-strike threat to the Soviet Union. This idea, he says, “runs counter to the whole history of America. Our country has never started a war, and we have never sought, nor will we ever develop, a strategic first-strike capability.”
After initially entertaining the idea of adopting NFU, President Obama reaffirmed in 2016 America’s right to use nuclear weapons first. Most recently, in December 2021, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) reiterated the U.S. would not “rule out” a nuclear first-strike on Russia while Putin was seeking to negotiate with the U.S. over Ukraine becoming a NATO state.
Such stupid and dangerous comments from ignorant fools should draw scrutiny over the wisdom of the ironically named Carnegie Endowment for International Peace openly praising western strategic thinking for incorporating “political attitudes” on the “operational advantages of the first strike.”
Strategic thinking in the West has benefited from the deep involvement of independent legislatures, free discussion between political scientists and military experts, the broad availability of defense information, and the regular movement of civilians and military personnel between government posts and the academic world. This provided for less biased views on the intentions of the opposing side and brought political (rather than military) attitudes to the trade-off between the danger of inadvertent nuclear war and operational advantages of the first strike.
In summary, America has a long and unbroken history of Republican and Democrat administrations seeking a nuclear first-strike capability against Russia.
Enemy At The Gates
It is perfectly rational for Russia to presume America is seeking a first-strike capability because the U.S. might in fact use such a capability in some circumstances. But even if the U.S. never intended to nuke Moscow and no administration would ever do so under any circumstances, the Russians would have no way of knowing as much. The mere threat of being able to wipe out the Kremlin would subjugate Russia to the will of America for the rest of eternity.
It is perfectly clear an attack on Moscow emanating from Ukraine is exactly what Russia fears. Speaking on December 21, 2021, two weeks after Biden had formally rejected Russia’s “red-line” over Ukraine joining NATO, Putin laid out the implications for Russian national security should Ukraine join NATO and become a staging base for missile launch systems. Putin made it painfully obvious Russia would not tolerate the possibility of a missiles with a five-minute flight time to Moscow.
It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.
The United States does not possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have it[.] They will supply hypersonic weapons to Ukraine and then use them as cover . . . to arm extremists from a neighbouring state and incite them against certain regions of the Russian Federation, such as Crimea, when they think circumstances are favorable.
Do they really think we do not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to Russia emerge? This is the problem: We simply have no room to retreat.
(Emphases added.)
Russia’s position is reasonable. Five minutes is not enough time for the Kremlin to verify an attack is underway and order retaliation. The U.S. would finally succeed in replacing MAD with unilaterally assured destruction. But how many people will go to the Kremlin’s website to read what Putin is actually saying rather than consuming garbage from western propaganda outlets?
Instead of printing the President of Russia’s security concerns regarding NATO expansion, Bloomberg is busy publishing asinine opinions arguing, “NATO enlargement actually provided Russia with far greater security than it could have provided itself.” (Emphasis original.) The argument is NATO helped promote peace in Europe and precluded the need for states like Poland to develop their own nuclear weapons. Nowhere is any reason advanced for why it is necessary, now, in today’s day and age when Europe is at peace with itself and its member states are signatories to the NPT, to further expand NATO into Ukraine over Russia’s legitimate security concerns.
The arrogance of western pundits to proclaim “NATO posed no military threat” to Russia without addressing Putin’s statements to the contrary reveals the complete incapacity of establishmentarian thinkers to understand Russia’s point of view. More likely, western propagandists are bad faith actors who have no interest in even listening to what Putin is saying, much less empathizing with Russian fears, before forming their biased view of what is in Russia’s best interests.
Putin’s comment Russia is not physically able to retreat any further is an analogy to the natural right and law of self-defense. The common law in most jurisdictions requires one to “retreat to the wall” before using deadly force in self-defense against an aggressor. That is not to say Ukraine is the aggressor in this conflict. Nonetheless, the argument Russia has no more room to retreat if Ukraine becomes part of NATO is valid once it is understood the U.S. has always sought a first-strike capability and that NATO exacerbated Russian fears by lying about its expansion to the east.
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised then-President of Russia Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” on February 9, 1990, as part of negotiations over the reunification of Germany. The Soviets agreed to give up control of East Germany on the basis NATO would remain far from USSR’s borders.
The U.S. broke its promise by adding Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO in 1999 as well as most of the former Soviet bloc five years later. (Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO in 2004). In 2008, President Bush guaranteed Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of NATO. If Ukraine and Georgia join NATO, Russia’s western border will be completely encircled except for Belarus.
Unlike the vast majority of Americans, John Mearsheimer sees the big picture.
I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.
[. . .]
With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. NATO expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.
I think the evidence is clear that we did not think [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible.
(Emphases added.)
The Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014 is a key turning point in Mearsheimer’s analysis. Western powers were happy to ignore Russian fears of NATO’s expansion eastward for decades until Russia decided to respond with military force. Then the establishment narrative suddenly shifted and, instead of recognizing our political leaders and so-called strategic-thinkers got it horribly wrong, we started calling Putin names instead of reassessing our institutional capacity to make sound decisions.
Laying The Bait
U.S. Foreknowledge Russia Would Invade Ukraine
Observers of the Russia-NATO relationship have warned for decades encircling Russia will cause the Kremlin to react violently. Carpenter, a senior defense fellow at the Cato Institute, outlined some of the warnings.
Russian leaders and several Western policy experts were warning more than two decades ago that NATO expansion would turn out badly—ending in a new cold war with Russia at best, and a hot one at worst. Obviously, they were not "echoing" Putin or anyone else. George Kennan, the intellectual architect of America's containment policy during the Cold War, perceptively warned in a May 2, 1998 New York Times interview what NATO's move eastward would set in motion. "I think it is the beginning of a new cold war," he stated. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake."
Kennan was speaking of the first round of enlargement that brought into the Alliance Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Later rounds, which added the Baltic Republics and other East European countries, were considerably more abrasive, and Washington's subsequent attempt to make Ukraine and Georgia members was contemptuous of Russia's core security interests. Moscow's complaints and warnings were becoming increasingly sharp as well.
Yet U.S. and European officials blew through one red light after another.
There is no chance the Biden administration was not privy to this point of view. Biden was Vice President when President Obama was arguing against the idea the U.S. should challenge Russia’s security interest in Ukraine.
Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.
Carpenter notes it was common knowledge amongst Obama’s military officials that Bush’s promise to make Ukraine part of NATO was a bad idea.
In his 2014 memoir, Duty, Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense in both Bush's administration and Barack Obama's, conceded that "trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching." That initiative, he concluded, was a case of "recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests."
And Roger Wright highlighted Biden’s own CIA Director explicitly warned Ukraine joining NATO was the “reddest of all redlines” for every Russian elite, not just Putin.
Not everyone would see the Ukraine crisis as a perplexing product of Putin’s eccentricities. Consider the current CIA director, William Burns. Back in 2008, the year George W. Bush fatefully badgered reluctant European leaders into pledging future NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns sent a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that included this warning:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Burns added that it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering Ukraine NATO membership—a move that, he predicted, would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
So Burns predicted 12 years ago that pretty much the entire Russian national security establishment would be inclined to make trouble in Ukraine if we offered NATO membership to Ukraine
I mean . . . c’mon man: how do you not see this invasion of Ukraine coming a mile away if you are the President of the United States? Lack of visibility is not possible. The Biden administration, like the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, received intelligence assessments concluding Russia was not bluffing about Ukraine being a redline, which, in plain English, means Putin would invade Ukraine unless the U.S. retracted Bush’s 2008 promise to make Ukraine part of NATO.
Yet Biden rejected Russia’s redline and proposal to negotiate on December 7, 2021. In the days leading up to February 24, 2022, Biden went on to repeatedly warn U.S. intelligence concluded Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Yet Biden’s administration still did not enter into negotiations with the Russians regarding Ukrainian neutrality, preferring instead Russia win it through military force.
Zelenskyy Acts A Fool
On January 28, twenty-seven days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskky downplayed warnings from the U.S. and U.K. that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine.
Speaking to foreign reporters in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Friday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine's economy had been damaged by what he said was a false perception that Ukraine is on the brink of war, calling decisions by the U.S. and the U.K. to withdraw families of embassy staff a "mistake."
"They're saying tomorrow is the war. This means panic in the market, panic in the financial sector," he said. "How much does it cost our country?"
On February 19, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskyy gave a speech to the Munich Security Conference. Zelenskyy complained NATO had not yet set a date for admitting Ukraine. He then implied the Ukraine would restart its nuclear weapons program unless the west guaranteed Ukraine’s security.
I want to believe that the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 5 will be more effective than the Budapest Memorandum.
Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability. We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security. We also do not have part of the territory of our state that is larger in area than Switzerland, the Netherlands or Belgium. And most importantly – we don’t have millions of our citizens. We don’t have all this.
Therefore, we have something. The right to demand a shift from a policy of appeasement to ensuring security and peace guarantees.
Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. Today Ukraine will do it for the fourth time. I, as President, will do this for the first time. But both Ukraine and I are doing this for the last time. I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them. If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.
(Emphases added.)
Putin responded on February 21 three days before invading.
Ukraine has the nuclear technologies created back in the Soviet times and delivery vehicles for such weapons, including aircraft, as well as the Soviet-designed Tochka-U precision tactical missiles with a range of over 100 kilometers. But they can do more; it is only a matter of time. They have had the groundwork for this since the Soviet era. . . . In other words, acquiring tactical nuclear weapons will be much easier for Ukraine than for some other states I am not going to mention here, which are conducting such research, especially if Kiev receives foreign technological support. We cannot rule this out either.
If Ukraine acquires weapons of mass destruction, the situation in the world and in Europe will drastically change, especially for us, for Russia,” Putin continued. “We cannot but react to this real danger, all the more so since, let me repeat, Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.
Now Zelenskyy is calling Putin’s threats to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in response to NATO intervention a “bluff.” Zelenskyy may be a media darling but he is a professional actor not a professional politician or strategos. Far from protecting his population and playing his position, he has exacerbated Russian fears of Ukraine becoming pro-U.S., joining NATO, and developing nuclear weapons. Talk about waving a red flag at a bull . . . .
U.S. Helped Nazis Subvert Democracy In Ukraine
The February 2014 Euromaidan revolution was a complex and bloody affair involving all corners of Ukrainian society, from anarchists to neoNazis and everyone in between. The revolution led to the unconstitutional ouster of Yanukovych and the downfall of his Kremlin-aligned government; a civil war in Donbas; Russian military intervention in Donbas and Crimea; and ultimately the pro-E.U./U.S./NATO governments led by Poroshenko and Zelenskyy. The Jacobin summarized the background to and timeline of the revolution.
In 2014, the man forced to navigate these tensions, Viktor Yanukovych, was taking his second crack at the Ukrainian presidency. He had first been ousted after the 2004 Orange Revolution that followed widespread charges of vote-rigging in the election that brought him to power. Before running again six years later, Yanukovych had worked to rebuild his reputation, becoming the country’s most trusted politician.
By 2010, international monitors had declared the most recent election free and fair, an “impressive display” of democracy, even. But once in power, Yanukovych’s rule was again marred by widespread corruption, authoritarianism, and, for some, an uncomfortable friendliness to Moscow, which had made no secret of its backing him in the previous election. The fact that Ukraine was starkly divided between a more Europe-friendly West and Center and a more pro-Russia East — the same lines that largely determined the election — only added to the complication.
Yanukovych was in a tricky spot. Ukraine relied on cheap gas from Russia, but a plurality of the country — not, crucially, an absolute majority — still wanted European integration. His political career was caught in the same bind: with his party formally allied to Vladimir Putin’s own United Russia party, his pro-Russia base wanted to see closer relations with its neighbor; but the oligarchs who were the real reason he had gotten anywhere near the presidency were financially entangled with the West, and they feared competition to their grip on the country from across the Russian border. All the while, two geopolitical powers in the form of Washington and Moscow hoped to use these cleavages to draw the country into their respective orbits.
So, for four years, Yanukovych toed a fine line. He pleased his base with symbolic and cultural measures, like talk of unity or cooperation with Moscow in key industries — even if much of it went nowhere — along with more serious steps like making Russian an official language, rejecting NATO membership, and reversing his pro-Western predecessor’s move to glorify Nazi collaborators as national heroes in school curricula.
His biggest sop to Moscow, though, came early in his term, when he struck a deal letting the Russian Black Sea Fleet use Crimea as a base until 2042, in exchange for discounted Russian gas. Its hurried passage was marked by fistfights and smoke bombs in the Ukrainian parliament.
For all the charges then and since that he was a Kremlin puppet, though, there was a hard ceiling to Yanukovych’s eastward turn. His noncommittal stance on joining a Russian-led customs union of former Soviet republics, even when Putin dangled the prospect of even cheaper gas prices, frustrated Moscow. So did his outright rejection of Putin’s proposal to merge the two nations’ respective state-owned gas giants, effectively handing Moscow control of the Ukrainian pipelines it used to ferry almost all of its gas exports to Europe. In turn, Moscow refused to renegotiate the hated and one-sided 2009 gas contract between the two that had been struck by the last Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, Yanukovych worked with and publicly encouraged Western involvement in updating Ukraine’s natural gas infrastructure and insisted again and again that “European integration is the key priority of our foreign policy.” He kept working toward European Union membership, and to that end pursued a free trade agreement with the EU as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan the West urged him to take.
That financial lifeline came with a heavy price familiar to the many poor countries that have turned to the West for bailouts: the elimination of tariffs, a wage and pension freeze, spending cuts, and the end of gas subsidies to Ukrainian households. The grim potential of such Western-imposed austerity, on display for all to see in Greece at the time, was presumably worth it to Yanukovych if it kept Moscow’s nose out of his business.
It was all this that led the liberal Brookings Institution to describe Yanukovych’s foreign policy as “more nuanced” than his pro-Russian leanings had first suggested. It was also what wound up sealing his fate.
To halt this drift to the West, Putin performed a one-man good-cop, bad-cop routine, offering Yanukovych a no-strings-attached loan the same size as the IMF’s, while squeezing him with what amounted to a mini–trade blockade. With the EU failing to offer anything that would match the catastrophic loss of trade with Russia that Ukraine was looking at, Yanukovych made the calculated choice to go with Moscow’s offer. In November, he abruptly reneged on the EU deal, sparking the protests that would topple him from power.
While the deal’s rejection was the spark — with protesters crying “treason” and chanting “Ukraine is Europe” — the protests were about much more. As one Kyiv resident told the press, “If the deal is signed now, I won’t leave the protest.”
Demonstrators were fed up with the nepotism and corruption that pervaded Ukrainian society — one of Yanukovych’s sons is a dentist who somehow ended up among the country’s wealthiest men, another was an MP — as well as the increasingly authoritarian nature of Yanukovych’s rule. In fact, the other major sticking point for the deal was Europe’s demand that Yanukovych’s leading rival be released from prison over trumped-up charges, which he resisted.
Yanukovych’s response to the movement only further doomed him, first with a brutal crackdown in November that saw riot police violently disperse protesters from Kyiv’s Maidan (or Independence Square, in Ukrainian), then ramming through a set of oppressive anti-protest laws in January. Both moves only drew more people to take part, with state violence against the protesters and their release from prison becoming, respectively, the leading motivator and demand of participants by December.
But righteous though their cause may have been, the movement’s critics had a point, too. For one thing, the Maidan protests didn’t have majority support, with the Ukrainian public split along the regional and sociocultural lines that have long defined so many of the country’s political difficulties. While the western regions — where most of the protesters came from, and which had historically been ruled by other countries, some as late as 1939 — backed the protests, the Russian-speaking East, ruled by Russia since the seventeenth century, were alienated by their explicit anti-Russian nationalism, especially only one year out from the chance to vote Yanukovych out.
And they were resorting to force. Whatever one thinks of the Maidan protests, the increasing violence of those involved was key to their ultimate victory. In response to a brutal police crackdown, protesters began fighting with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bulldozer — and, eventually, firearms, all culminating in what was effectively an armed battle in February, which left thirteen police officers and nearly fifty protesters dead. The police “could no longer defend themselves’ from protesters’ attacks,” writes political scientist Sergiy Kudelia, causing them to retreat, and precipitating Yanukovych’s exit.
The driver of this violence was largely the Ukrainian far right, which, while a minority of the protesters, served as a kind of revolutionary vanguard. Looking outside Kyiv, a systematic analysis of more than 3,000 Maidan protests found that members of the far-right Svoboda party — whose leader once complained Ukraine was run by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” and which includes a politician who admires Joseph Goebbels — were the most active agents in the protests. They were also more likely to take part in violent actions than any group but one: Right Sector, a collection of far-right activists that traces its lineage to genocidal Nazi collaborators.
[. . .]
Right Sector led the January 19 attacks on police in Kyiv that even opposition leaders criticized, with one protester saying the far-right bloc had “breathed new life into these protests.” Andriy Parubiy, the unofficial “commander of Maidan,” founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine — a barely even winking allusion to Nazism — that later became Svoboda. By January 2014, even NBC was admitting that “right-wing militia-type toughs are now one of the strongest factions leading Ukraine’s protests.” What was meant to be a revolution for democracy and liberal values ended up featuring ultranationalist chants from the 1930s and prominent displays of fascist and white supremacist symbols, including the American Confederate flag.
[. . .]
They may also have played an even more sinister role in the events that unfolded. One enduring mystery of the Maidan Revolution is who was behind the February 20 sniper killings that set off the final, most bloody stage of protests, with accusations against everyone from government forces and the Kremlin to US-backed mercenaries. Without precluding these possibilities, there’s now considerable evidence that the same far-right forces who piggybacked on the protesters’ cause were also at least among the forces firing that night.
At the time, men resembling protesters had been witnessed shooting from protester-controlled buildings in the capital, and multiple Maidan medics had said the bullet wounds in police and protesters looked to have come from the same weapon. A Maidan protester later admitted to killing two officers and wounding others on the day, and crates of empty Kalashnikov bullets were found in the protester-occupied Ukraina Hotel, the same place a decorated military pilot and anti-Russian resistance hero later said she had seen an opposition MP leading snipers to. The government’s investigation, meanwhile, which focused only on the protester murders, started out filled with serious flaws and irregularities.
The University of Ottowa’s Ivan Katchanovski has analyzed evidence that’s come out in the course of the investigation and trial into the murders. According to Katchanovski, a majority of wounded protesters testified they either saw snipers in protester-controlled buildings or were shot by bullets coming from their direction, testimony backed by forensic examinations. Closure on the matter is unlikely, though, since the post-Yanukovych interim government, in which leading far-right figures took prominent positions, swiftly passed a law giving Maidan participants immunity for any violence.
In short, the U.S. enflamed violent riots against Yanukovych after the democratically-elected President of Ukraine rejected the EU’s terms for ascendancy and accepted a trade deal with Russia. The riots were led by armed neoNazis and culminated in fascists sniping protestors and police alike in the Maidan massacre on February 20 that left 49 dead and 157 wounded.
The conclusion the Maidan snipers were neoNazis is supported by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski’s analysis of several hundred hours of video, trial and investigation testimony, ballistics, and forensic medical evidence from more than 2,500 court decisions.
[E]vidence includes testimonies of the absolute majority of wounded protesters, several dozens of prosecution witnesses, dozens of defense witnesses, and 14 self-admitted members of Maidan snipers groups. Videos presented at the trial showed that times of shooting of the absolute majority of protesters did not coincide with times of shooting by the Berkut policemen, who were charged with their massacre. Forensic medical examinations determined that the overwhelming majority of the protesters were shot from steep directions from the sides or the back. Initial ballistic examinations did not match bullets extracted from the bodies of killed and wounded protesters to the Berkut [police] Kalashnikovs. Forensic examinations of the bullet holes by the government experts for the Maidan massacre trial suggested that Berkut policemen were shooting in the Hotel Ukraina snipers above the Maidan protesters and in trees and poles. The analysis shows cover-up and stonewalling of the investigations and trials by the Maidan governments and the far right. The prosecution denied that there were any snipers in the Maidan-controlled buildings.
(Emphases added.)
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of U.S. involvement in the unconstitutional ouster of Yanukovych is the U.S. military trained and armed the neoNazis. An investigation by The Daily Beast found U.S. military and State Department officials did not “know precisely how” neoNazis from the Azov Battalion were screened out of training programs run by the U.S. military. The investigation concluded “in fact, given the way the Ukrainian government operates, it’s almost impossible” to ensure U.S. forces did not train neoNazis in Ukraine. However, that conclusion was not strong enough considering there is photographic evidence of U.S. military officers handing IDs to Azov neoNazis.
The Guardian described Azov fighters as “Ukraine's greatest weapon and maybe its greatest threat” in their reporting on the 2014 coup.
"I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia," said Dmitry, as we sped through the dark Mariupol night in a pickup truck, a machine gunner positioned in the back. "But Putin's not even a Russian. Putin's a Jew."
[. . .]
Dmitry claimed not to be a Nazi, but waxed lyrical about Adolf Hitler as a military leader, and believes the Holocaust never happened. Not everyone in the Azov battalion thinks like Dmitry, but after speaking with dozens of its fighters and embedding on several missions during the past week in and around the strategic port city of Mariupol, the Guardian found many of them to have disturbing political views, and almost all to be intent on "bringing the fight to Kiev" when the war in the east is over.
[. . .]
"Of course not, it's all made up, there are just a lot of people who are interested in Nordic mythology," said one fighter when asked if there were neo-Nazis in the battalion. When asked what his own political views were, however, he said "national socialist". As for the swastika tattoos on at least one man seen at the Azov base, "the swastika has nothing to do with the Nazis, it was an ancient sun symbol," he claimed.
Meanwhile, as the revolution was underway, the U.S. appeared to be choosing politicians to fill the anticipated void following Yanukovych’s removal from office. In a leaked phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland told Pyatt, “I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the . . . what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.” Arseniy Yatseniuk (a.k.a “Yats”) served as Prime Minister of Ukraine in the new government.
It is unknown whether the U.S. had a hand in selecting the interim President of Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchynov, the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine. In any event, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine under Yanukovcyh accused Turchynov of destroying official documents implicating Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine, in a criminal enterprise.
According to WikiLeaks, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Oleksandr Medvedko ordered former Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko to arrest Yulia Tymoshenko's teammates – Oleksandr Turchynov and Andriy Kozhemiakin – for destroying the documents of the Security Service of Ukraine in which the connection between Tymoshenko and the criminal businessman Semion Mogilevich was proved.
Turchynov stepped down as interim president following the election of Petro Poroshenko, an infamously corrupt businessman-turned-President. A few months later, Poroshehnko’s government officially incorporated the Azov Battalion into the national guard, as reported by Vice.
The U.S. lifted a ban on sending arms to the Azov Battalion in 2016 before reinstating it in 2018. The Grayzone discovered details of U.S.-made weapons that American companies supplied to Azov fighters during the moratorium on the ban.
The story of how American arms began flowing towards the Nazi-inspired militia began in October 2016, when the Texas-based AirTronic company announced a contract to deliver $5.5 million dollars worth of PSRL-1 rocket propelled grenade launchers to “an Allied European military customer.” In June 2017, photos turned up on Azov’s website showing its fighters testing PSRL-1 grenade launchers in the field. The images raised questions about whether Ukraine was AirTronic’s unnamed “customer.”
Two months later, the pro-Russian military analysis site Southfront published a leaked contract indicating that 100 PSRL-1 Launchers worth $554,575 — about 1/10th of the total deal — had been produced in partnership with a Ukrainian arms company for distribution to the country’s fighting units.
In an interview last December with the US-backed Voice of America, AirTronic Chief Operating Officer Richard Vandiver emphasized that the sale of grenade launchers was authorized through “very close coordination with the U.S. Embassy, with the U.S. State Department, with the U.S. Pentagon and with the Ukrainian government.”
Finally, this January, the transfer of the lethal weapons to Azov was confirmed by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL). Aric Toler, a DFRL researcher, asserted that “the US Embassy did absolutely help facilitate this transfer, and I’m not sure if they were aware that Azov would be the first to train with them.”
As NATO’s de facto lobbyist in Washington, and one of the most fervent advocates in Washington for arming the Ukrainian military, the Atlantic Council was an extremely unlikely source for such a disclosure. While the think tank’s motives for exposing Azov’s use of American arms remains unclear, its researchers wound up highlighting a truly scandalous episode of semi-covert American support for neo-Nazis.
A day after the Atlantic Council reported on Azov’s acquisition of American arms, the Ukrainian National Guard insisted in an official statement that the grenade launchers were no longer in Azov’s possession. Meanwhile, the heightened scrutiny prompted Azov to delete all photos of its soldiers testing the weapons.
Not only did the Atlantic Council explain why America should let Russia invade Ukraine in the WSJ, they argued for the U.S. to arm Ukrainian forces they knew incorporated neoNazi elements. It should come as no surprise then to see the NATO flag held next to the swastika by Azov fighters giving seig heils.
This is the background as to why Putin has repeatedly described the war in Ukraine as a battle against Nazis. But that claim exaggerates the scale of neoNazism in the Ukrainian armed forces, the vast majority of whom are not fascists. Anonymous Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian anarchists purportedly wrote an article describing events on the ground in Maidan. According to their estimates, the Azov Battalion comprised 70 to 800 fighters in 2014.
After the Maidan, the right wing actively suppressed the rallies of pro-Russian forces. At the beginning of the military operations, they started forming volunteer battalions. One of the most famous is the “Azov” battalion. At the beginning, it consisted of 70 fighters; now it is a regiment of 800 people with its own armored vehicles, artillery, tank company, and a separate project in accordance with NATO standards, the sergeant school. The Azov battalion is one of the most combat-effective units in the Ukrainian army. There were also other fascist military formations such as the Volunteer Ukrainian Unit “Right Sector” and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, but they are less widely known.
Putin’s exaggerated claim the Ukrainian government and military is filled with Nazis is hyperbole but there is a kernel of truth in his characterization. Paramilitaries like the neoNazis in this picture . . .
. . . became official elements of the Ukranian military, seen here using a school as a forward operating base . . .
. . . seen here in official NATO propaganda . . .
. . . seen here wearing the Nazi SS insignia . . .
. . . seen here in action defending Kiev, while wearing the same exact insignia as the Christchurch shooter who killed 51 people and injured 40 at the Al Noor Mosque in New Zealand.
U.S. and Israeli propaganda was quick to denounce Putin’s allegations as “false” . . .
. . . while the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University noted Azov battalion’s clashes with Russian forces are inspiring western neoNazis to gain combat experience. The concern for U.S. national security is neoNazis might export their experience from the battlefield in Ukraine and use it to commit acts of violence in the homeland.
Founded in 2014, the group promotes Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazism through its National Militia paramilitary organization and National Corps political wing. It is notable for its recruitment of far-right foreign fighters from the U.S. and Europe as well as its extensive transnational ties with other far-right organizations. In 2022, the group came to prominence again for fighting against Russian forces in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.
In 2020, two members of the U.S. based neo-nazi group, Atomwaffen Division, were deported by the Ukrainian government after they attempted to set up a local affiliate and join the Azov Battalion.
It goes without saying the fact a country has a domestic problem with Nazis is not a justification for invasion. The United States and many European countries have similar problems and are seeing a resurgence of neoNazi and fascist ideologies, according to research by the BBC and The Guardian. The Guardian recently characterized America as being in the “legal phase” of fascism. And one can find similar images of U.S. military personnel wearing Nazi and fascist insignia.
The difference between Ukraine and America, however, is the U.S. Department of Defense released a report detailing how fascism in our ranks constitutes an insider threat to the Constitution, whereas Ukrainians tend to dismiss their Nazi problem as Kremlin propaganda.
In the face of the overwhelming evidence Ukraine has a problem with neoNazism and that western governments financed and trained neoNazis to fight the Russians, apologists for fascism either retort that Zelenskyy is Jewish or resort to a strawman. No one except perhaps Putin is claiming Ukraine or Zelenskyy’s government is full of neoNazis. The fact Zelenskyy is Jewish is completely irrelevant to finding a diplomatic solution, except insofar as Judaism could form a common ground on which to reach a negotiated settlement, since Putin is also Jewish by blood through his mother, Мария Ивановна Шеломова (viz., Maria Ivanovna Shelomova), according to an unauthenticated leak of what purports to be Putin’s application for a new passport.
What is relevant is Putin witnessed NATO resort to anti-democratic tactics and arming neoNazis to keep Russian influence out of Ukraine. It is naive to think such extreme measures do not influence Putin towards distrusting the U.S. and NATO and, therefore, invading Ukraine.
The bottom line is the U.S. sponsored neoNazis who were instrumental in overthrowing a Ukrainian government, simply for moving away from the west towards Russia. This is vital context for understanding the current war in Ukraine. The use of anti-democratic methods spearheaded by armed neoNazis would set off alarm bells in the mind of a reasonably prudent person.
Cornering The Bear
The reason Putin is invading Ukraine now is three-fold.
First, he has seen NATO break their promises to Russia while promising every state in Russia’s former sphere of influence a U.S.-backed nuclear umbrella. That umbrella is a package including not only a mutual-defense guarantee but also missile defense systems, which undermine Russia’s nuclear deterrent and elevate the probability of a successful first-strike on Moscow.
Second, Putin has also watched the U.S. engage in covert and overt influence amounting to the coup of a democratically-elected Ukrainian government, which undermined Russia’s diplomatic and economic efforts to persuade Kiev to align with Moscow.
Third, the U.S. refused to walk-back Bush’s promise to make Ukraine part of NATO. If Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, then the U.S. can stage hypersonic, nuclear weapons in Ukraine creating an intolerable risk to Moscow and therefore the Russian state. Biden refused to negotiate with Putin under pressure from domestic pundits who compared conceding Ukrainian neutrality to appeasing Hitler. As Wright points out, comparisons to Chamberlain’s concessions over the Sudetenland are a false equivalence.
At Munich, with Hitler threatening to invade and seize a chunk of territory, Chamberlain agreed to let him have the chunk of territory he was threatening to seize. Britain and France strongarmed Czechoslovakia into giving Hitler the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of the country. In contrast, the idea behind the NATO-Ukraine concession would have been to keep Putin from seizing the territory he was threatening to seize.
[. . .]
In short: Chamberlain replaced one kind of violation of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty—losing territory via invasion—with what was, in effect, another kind: losing territory without the invasion. No one was asking Biden to do that with Ukraine. We’ve been asking him to prevent a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty (losing territory via invasion) by doing something that violates no one’s sovereignty.
In truth, Russia exhausted economic and diplomatic alternatives and has no sphere of influence left (other than Belarus) to protect its western border. There is no room to retreat and no more time to wait for the U.S. to recognize Russia’s security concerns. The U.S. is currently testing hypersonic missiles with a view to approving their production by September 20. Therefore, this is the last winter Russia is guaranteed to be able to invade Ukraine before Zelenskyy leads Ukraine into NATO. (The Russians are invading in winter because Germany cannot afford to stop purchasing Russian energy.) Russia will not be able to use force in Ukraine without triggering a military response from the U.S. when Ukraine becomes part of NATO. It is now or never.
Putin's Endgame
As evidence of Putin’s malicious intent towards Ukraine, commentators regularly point to Putin’s essay titled “On The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The essay focuses on the history of Ancient Rus and its impact on the nation states and peoples of Ukraine and Russia. Many western commentators seized upon the essay as proof Putin intends to erase Ukraine and make it part of Russia. (See the Atlantic Council’s “Putin’s new Ukraine essay reveals imperial ambitions”; 15 July, 2021.) This interpretation is a self-serving fabrication that is not justified by the content of the essay and, as Mearsheimer points out, misstates Putin’s position. Putin publicly stated, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.”
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not driven by emotion or psychological disorders. He is a cold-blooded KGB officer who makes decisions based on strategy and tactics. Mearsheimer spells out what Putin is aiming to get from the war.
It’s hard to say whether he’s going to go after the rest of Ukraine because—I don’t mean to nitpick here but—that implies that he wants to conquer all of Ukraine, and then he will turn to the Baltic states, and his aim is to create a greater Russia or the reincarnation of the Soviet Union. I don’t see evidence at this point that that is true. It’s difficult to tell, looking at the maps of the ongoing conflict, exactly what he’s up to. It seems quite clear to me that he is going to take the Donbass and that the Donbass is going to be either two independent states or one big independent state, but beyond that it’s not clear what he’s going to do. I mean, it does seem apparent that he’s not touching western Ukraine.
[. . .]
I don’t think he has designs on Kyiv. I think he’s interested in taking at least the Donbass, and maybe some more territory and eastern Ukraine, and, number two, he wants to install in Kyiv a pro-Russian government, a government that is attuned to Moscow’s interests.
[. . .]
This is great-power politics, and what the Russians want is a regime in Kyiv that is attuned to Russian interests. It may be ultimately that the Russians would be willing to live with a neutral Ukraine, and that it won’t be necessary for Moscow to have any meaningful control over the government in Kyiv. It may be that they just want a regime that is neutral and not pro-American.
[. . .]
It would be a blunder of colossal proportions to try to do [conquer all of Ukraine.]
[. . .]
My argument is that he’s not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine. The argument that the foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and in the West more generally, has invented revolves around the claim that he is interested in creating a greater Russia or a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. There are people who believe that when he is finished conquering Ukraine, he will turn to the Baltic states. He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. . . . They are part of NATO. They have an Article 5 guarantee—that’s all that matters. Furthermore, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering the Baltic states. Indeed, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering Ukraine.
[. . .]
Military might is built on economic might. You need an economic foundation to build a really powerful military. To go out and conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation that contemporary Russia does not come close to having. There is no reason to fear that Russia is going to be a regional hegemony in Europe. Russia is not a serious threat to the United States. We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today.
We should be pivoting out of Europe to deal with China in a laser-like fashion, number one. And, number two, we should be working overtime to create friendly relations with the Russians. The Russians are part of our balancing coalition against China. If you live in a world where there are three great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—and one of those great powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger. Instead, what we have done with our foolish policies in Eastern Europe is drive the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. This is a violation of Balance of Power Politics 101.
The war will be over shortly if Meirsheimer’s analysis is correct. The diplomatic solution will center on Ukraine giving up NATO (or NATO closing the door on Ukraine) and Russia annexing the Donbas. Putin may also seek to negotiate the removal of western sanctions and the end of Zelenskyy’s presidency. The only alternative to these terms is Putin laying siege to Kiev and starving Zelenskyy out or bombing the city into the ground before installing a puppet of his choice to rule over the rubble.
Conclusion
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
– Noam Chomsky on the Overton window in The Common Good (1998).
Free and critical thinking has no limits. It requires a sensibility mainstream society oftentimes finds offensive or dangerous. It frequently demands unpopular speech that makes others uncomfortable.
My purpose in writing this article is in large part to challenge mainstream misconceptions, kick down intellectual barriers to the dialectical process, and strip readers of their ingroup biases and blinders. Here are the conclusions that will help us reach a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine and peace for the Ukrainian people:
Russia has legitimate security concerns and their fear of Ukraine becoming part of NATO must be respected.
The U.S. and NATO must reverse their open door policy, renege on their promise to make Ukraine part of NATO, and guarantee Ukraine's neutrality in a treaty with Russia. (Zelenskyy conceded this point just before publication.)
Zelenskyy should step down as President of Ukraine not least because of his blatant strategic errors that encouraged Putin to invade, as well as his decision to continue fighting even if it meant the complete destruction of Ukrainian cities and their peoples, but also because he is pro-E.U./NATO and cannot get along with Moscow.
Americans should recognize the U.S. government coerced Russia to invade, by backing Moscow into a corner, knowing full well Putin would respond with military force in Ukraine.
Americans should realize the war in Ukraine is to the benefit of U.S. special interests from Exxon (selling oil to Europe) to Lockheed Martin (selling F-35s to Germany) to the Biden administration (framing Biden as standing against authoritarianism and erasing the memory of his and his family's participation in systemic corruption in Ukraine) and the anti-Russia Democrat Party (polling better than Republicans in an election year).
Westerners should realize governments seizing $300 billion in Russian foreign currency reserves, stealing a $3.5 billion dollar football club, and snatching yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars sets a dangerous precedent of government theft of private property for political purposes and increases the incentives for politicians to let war happen to create a pretext for seizing assets.
The U.S. should reverse its strategy of isolating Russia in finance, economics, and culture with a view to working with the Kremlin to contain the Chinese Communist Party.
Lastly, I want to reaffirm the principle of free speech as one of the most important antidotes to fascism. Congresswoman Gabbard in particular deserves praise for the way she has turned her experience on the ground in Iraq fighting a war-for-profit against the establishment’s war machine in Washington.
Senator Romney’s completely unevidenced characterization of Congresswoman Gabbard’s statements as “false . . . lies” is an echo of Goering. He is also completely incorrect, as Glen Greenwald has noticed. Under Secretary of State Nuland testified under oath the U.S. does in fact have “biological research facilities” in Ukraine and the U.S. is “quite concerned Russian troops—Russian forces—may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukranians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.” Presumably the U.S. is concerned about the Russians obtaining those materials because they constitute dual-use research of concern.
If no one is calling you a traitor or treasonous swine, chances are you are not speaking truth to power. In an epoch of deceit and propaganda, speaking the truth as one knows it is a revolutionary act.
This is Law and Politics. Until next time . . . .