Six on History: Russia and Ukraine
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Which is also to say that Ukraine is not “a vital US national interest,” as most leaders of both parties, Republican and Democrat alike, and much of the US media now declare. On the other hand, Ukraine is a vital Russian interest by any geopolitical or simply human reckoning.
The short but essential answer is Washington’s decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to expand NATO eastward from Germany and eventually to Ukraine itself. Ever since, both Democrats and Republicans have insisted that Ukraine is a “vital US national interest.” Those of us who opposed that folly warned it would lead to dangerous conflicts with Moscow, conceivably even war. Imagine Washington’s reaction, we pointed out, if Russian military bases began to appear on Canada’s or Mexico’s borders with America. We were not wrong: An estimated 13,000 souls have already died in the Ukrainian-Russian war in the Donbass and some 2 million people have been displaced.
Things are likely to get worse. Democrats are sharply criticizing Trump for withholding large-scale military aid to Kiev (even though President Obama, despite strong pressure, wisely did so). Ukraine’s recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, having been drawn into the Washington scandal, is no longer as free to negotiate peace with Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he hoped and promised during his campaign. And candidates for the 2020 US Democratic presidential nomination, with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, are likely to compete for the role of Kiev’s biggest military booster. Here, as generally in US-Russian relations, Democrats are becoming a war party.
"It’s uncomfortable to feel surrounded. Countries don’t like having hostile forces near their borders. That’s one reason the United States has built rings of bases around China, Russia, and Iran. Even if we don’t attack, constant activity at and around those bases, including saber-rattling maneuvers, unsettles our adversaries every day.
Now, suddenly, our policy is being turned against us. Last month China took three steps that some fear are the beginning of an effort to surround the United States. They are small in themselves, but their confluence has jolted Washington.
China’s first December triumph was the announcement by Nicaragua that it is dropping its recognition of Taiwan and recognizing the Beijing government instead. Three years ago Taiwanese warships called at the Nicaraguan port of Corinto. That didn’t make news in the United States — but imagine the furor that will explode if Beijing sends warships there. Given the antipathy between Nicaragua and the United States, it’s hardly inconceivable.
Chinese power is hardly at our gates. The Chinese base in Equatorial Guinea, if it opens, would be more than 5,000 miles from the United States. Nicaragua’s port is 2,200 miles away. And even if the Chinese consulate on the Persian Gulf morphs into a military base, any missile launched from there would have to fly over two continents and an ocean before reaching the United States. Yet it’s revealing to see how worried American security planners become when foreign power creeps just a bit closer. Even a tiny dose of our own medicine tastes bitter to us.
Through a “visiting forces agreement” with the Philippines, the United States maintains potent air and sea power barely 500 miles from Chinese shores. We have dozens of military installations in Japan, which is even closer. South Korea, where we base more than 20,000 troops and a battery of nuclear-tipped missiles, is just 250 miles across the Yellow Sea from the Chinese mainland. To reinforce this circle of anti-China power, Washington is working assiduously to strengthen military ties with India, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, and Indonesia.
We take the same “tighten-the-noose” approach to Russia: Our NATO air base in Latvia is 500 miles from Moscow, and in Estonia the NATO ground force, which is equipped with more than 100 tanks and combat vehicles, is based 70 miles from the Russian border. To intimidate Iran, we deploy troops and weaponry in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Countries seek what geopoliticians call “strategic depth” — buffers between themselves and potential enemies. This was a main reason that President James K. Polk seized Texas from Mexico in the 1840s: We didn’t want a possibly hostile power so close to New Orleans, then our main port. Besides, pushing your power toward your enemies’ territory erodes their strategic depth. That has motivated us to deploy troops and missiles as close as possible to China, Russia, and Iran. Last month’s developments were a shock because they suggest that China may begin retaliating in kind.
We feel threatened by the steps China is now taking. That’s understandable. We should recognize, however, that other countries feel threatened by us — and that the threats they see are much closer to their borders.
The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has defined moral hypocrisy as “the tendency to judge others more harshly for some moral infraction than we judge ourselves.” That pathology afflicts nations as well as individuals. Americans see our many foreign engagements as eminently peaceful and those of rival powers as disruptive and malign. Others see the opposite. That shouldn’t surprise us."
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
"RUSSIA is reportedly deploying ballistic missiles and teams of snipers to its border with Ukraine amid warnings of “a huge war” in Europe.
Missile launchers have been spotted moving west as the Kremlin said the tense stand-off between Moscow and the West over Ukraine had reached an “extremely dangerous” phase.
Videos appeared to show Iskander-M [maximum range 250-300 miles] launchers being transported by train towards the border while other footage has emerged showing teams of snipers reportedly near the conflict zone.
This comes as the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, Andrij Melnyk, warned Europe faced the risk of “a huge war, the worst since 1945” [when many of his countrymen fought on the Nazi side!] and insisted Ukraine had “a sacred right to self-defence”.
Mr Melnyk also pleaded with Germany to supply his country with arms to deter Russia from invading.
Meanwhile, Russian sniper drills involving 100 servicemen [out of 100,000!] were held at Kadamovsky training ground, some 37 miles from the Ukraine border.
Special forces conducted drills using Arbalet-2 and Malva-guided parachute systems in the Tambov region. [417 Miles from Luhansk on the Ukrainian border to Tambov Oblast SE of Moscow!]
This follows live-fire tank training at Mulino in Nizhny Novgorod region. [724.2 Miles from Luhansk on the Ukrainian border to Mulino NE of Moscow!]
More than 300 servicemen were involved in these special tactical exercises.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin was reported to have amassed more than 100,000 troops and heavy military equipment close to the border.
But Russia has repeatedly denied any intention of invading Ukraine and insisted it has the right to move military equipment and troops on its own territory.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “There’s a critical situation here.
“The critical situation is around the concerns, national concerns of Russia.”
He added that "no one is threatening anyone with military actions" which would be "madness".
“But we will be ready to take counteractions.”
It comes as House of Commons Defence Committee chairman Tobias Ellwood MP warned an invasion of Ukraine is feared to be "inevitable and imminent" as Kiev blamed Vladimir Putin for a massive cyber attack.
The eyes of the world are on Ukraine as Putin has massed nearly 100,000 troops along with an arsenal of artillery and tanks in the region.
It is feared Vlad could launch a full-scale invasion in a matter of weeks - or even days - to seize territory given up by Russia in the fall of the Soviet Union."
Hawkish Pundits Downplay Threat of War, Ukraine's Nazi Ties
Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): "A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support" could persuade Russians "to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition"—i.e., regime change.
With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.
Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that “the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance.” He argued that “the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” even while calling for a strategy that “avoids crossing into military adventurism.” He went on to say that “the United States has to be more assertive in the region.”
Yet the US has been plenty “assertive in the region,” where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.
Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21).
Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia’s border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).
"Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding," Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US's violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.
In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take “military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility.” They wrote that “the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities.” The authors claimed that these actions “will help ensure a free and stable Europe,” though it’s easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.
Indeed, US “military measures” have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn’t create a “stable Europe”: Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.
Afghan precedentMax Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia "that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland." Pretty sure they're aware of that, Max.
Max Boot, also writing in the Post (12/15/21), argued:
Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.
The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.
But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that “Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies.” The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.
Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that “outside support” is “usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency”: Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan “were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties.” Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).
That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.
Whitewashing NazisThe Nation (5/6/21): "Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine."
US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine’s. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state’s political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government’s noteworthy tendencies:
Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.
Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of “Jews Out!” rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent with antisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….
Ukraine’s total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.
The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”
Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria’s social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which “has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people”: the Azov movement’s militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard
The fact that that Ukraine's government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.
From December 6, 2021, to January 6, 2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word “Nazi.” Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine’s armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:
On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.
Nothing in the article indicates that while “controlled” may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn’t mean Russia has the right to attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.
In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word “Ukraine.” Of these, six mention the word “Nazi,” none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot’s earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that "all is not lost" in case of a Russian invasion, because "Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers":
They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country's independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.
“All is not lost,” for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn’t bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities “Ukrainian patriots” is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that
the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky’s government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.
Evidently neither the UPA’s precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine’s armed forces and society, give Boot pause. He’d rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren’t a concern of Boot’s.
"As U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia was moving troops close to the Ukrainian border this fall, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Cold War had never ended. President Biden sternly told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a two-hour call that the United States wouldn’t tolerate an invasion, the White House reported. Debate broke out among Washington pundits over how much military equipment the United States could send to Kyiv. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) even suggested that the United States could use nuclear weapons preemptively to keep Russian soldiers from crossing the border.
It all feels depressingly, pointlessly familiar.
Back then, I was fully on board for a one-sided brawl to the bitter end. Like so many of my colleagues at the CIA, I was dedicated to destroying the KGB and, more broadly, the Soviet goliath. That passion derived, in no small part, from the incessant anti-Soviet messages embedded in American Cold War culture. Years later, many of us are still under the influence of those messages, which now insist that modern-day Russia — an ordinary state with a typical, self-interested foreign policy — is in fact unusually aggressive and morally bankrupt.
So while the Soviet Union is gone, the fight between the United States and Russia somehow survives. It is no longer a contest between communism and democracy/freedom/capitalism, but is it a battle between an autocracy-spreading Russia and an America hanging onto democracy for dear life? A repressive oligarchical kleptocracy and a rich but possibly faltering example of extreme capitalism? A struggle between a couple of old adversaries? Yes, Russia has serious flaws. One need only look at its recent wars, its posturing with Ukraine, its harsh treatment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and its support for far-right parties in Europe to see that. Even so, the U.S.-Russia conflict has outlived virtually all of the issues that once animated it, a remarkable testament to our (and no doubt their) need to have a best enemy.
It was great to have an enemy. I could focus my intellectual and moral energy on how evil that enemy was: The Soviets didn’t allow freedom of speech! The Soviets didn’t have fair elections! The KGB force-fed dissidents psychotropic medications! If this was how my enemy behaved, there was no question that my country, and therefore I myself, was a pure embodiment of virtue. We were the good guys, and I was one of the good guys. I was not alone in seeing the world through this one-dimensional lens.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, it was impossible to avoid depictions of nefarious Soviets in movies, TV shows and spy novels (John le Carré, James Bond, “Red Dawn,” Rocky, countless anonymous villains). In school, we hid under desks to prepare for a Soviet nuclear attack and read textbooks that omitted the fact that our Cold War enemy had done the lion’s share of the work — and suffered a wildly disproportionate share of the casualties — in defeating the Nazis. And perhaps most powerfully, there was the baked-in moral certainty of most newspapers, magazines and television journalism: An invisible assumption that the Soviet Union was evil and, therefore, the United States was good. All of that was abetted by a bipartisan political consensus that we were in a fight for our very survival against the communists.
A few brave souls did challenge the consensus, pointing to the social advancement of millions of Soviet peasants in the decades after the revolution, Soviet successes in education and health care, and the broad popular support that the system long enjoyed. But these outliers were relegated to the margins of journalism and academia, where I didn’t hear their ideas — or at least encountered them so rarely it was easy to look away.
In America, we seem to be collectively stuck in the past. Just as we did during the Cold War, we see ourselves as the good-guy victims of an immoral opponent. This time, the Russian state, personified by Vladimir Putin, is the one-dimensional enemy. The common narrative begins with basic truths: Putin wants to reclaim past Soviet glory, is a politically repressive dictator and is determined to spread Russia’s autocratic system abroad. This is all accurate. But instead of adding complexity to the picture by trying to understand Putin’s point of view, we reduce him to a wholly malevolent force that is attacking our nation out of spite, using propaganda and lies to turn our citizens against one another.
Absent from this narrative, as it was in Soviet times, is our own role in the conflict. Having reappraised the two decades I spent as a stalwart cold warrior, I do not believe that Putin and his pals in the Kremlin are villainous anti-American autocrats who pose a grave danger to our stable, decent and humane democracy. Instead, I see the U.S.-Russia relationship under Putin as a back and forth, a collaboration in making enemies.
Within a few years, though, the United States was trying to fully integrate some former Soviet republics into the West, bringing Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia into NATO, an organization specifically devoted to combating Moscow. (Some former Warsaw Pact members such as Poland and Hungary had been admitted earlier, and more were admitted later.) We began building a missile defense shield to protect Europe, placing it in countries formerly allied with the Soviet Union (the shield was ostensibly meant to protect against missiles fired from Iran, but given the sites we chose, Russia didn’t see it that way). Putin became increasingly hostile. We eventually leveled an endless series of sanctions against a broad array of Russians and Russian interests, seeing it as our role to punish Russian misbehavior, whether it related to internal corruption and political repression or military adventures abroad.
Whether you think these moves were justified or not, they were all aggressive acts that a reasonable person — or state — might consider threatening. Russia’s ongoing interference in our political system and electoral process, seen through a lens that includes not just their attacks on us but our attacks on them, starts to look more like a tit for tat. American financial support for election and human rights monitoring groups in Russia, after all, certainly constitutes a kind of interference in Russia’s internal affairs.
What would it look like if we tried, by ourselves, to ratchet down this dangerous back and forth? We might, for example, rescind sanctions against Russia. Our government might stop making pronouncements on the Russians’ internal affairs and let them figure out their own problems without our unwelcome criticism (criticism better meted out to all countries by private individuals and organizations, not foreign governments). We could extend an olive branch by releasing Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, traitors who were directly responsible for the deaths of numerous Soviets spying for the United States and who have each spent more than two decades in American prisons. Typically, two nations in conflict try to negotiate mutual concessions along these lines, but we aren’t doing that successfully with Russia, and mutual concessions aren’t necessarily effective at addressing the roots of a conflict anyway. We’d be better off focusing on our own attitudes and policies and offering Russia some basic goodwill gestures.
I don’t know if this kind of unilateral action would prompt Russia to reciprocate. I don’t know if it would reduce tensions enough to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine — where it’s not at all clear Putin really wants to invade. Even if Russia does escalate its war in Ukraine, though, that would present the United States with an opportunity to respond differently: not with more threats and sanctions, but by honestly assessing how we have contributed over the years to Russian anxieties about encirclement and lost influence. We have played, at the very least, our own significant role in fueling the animosity between our two countries. Ultimately, we cannot control what Russia does in this long-running conflict. But we can at least try to pull back from the fight."
