Who is Dominating Whom? Russia, Ukraine, and the West
by Brian D’Agostino
EDITOR’S NOTE: This issue of Disarmament Times is based primarily on a March 16 webinar entitled “Understanding the Ukraine War.” The first three sections are lightly edited presentations by panelists Brian D'Agostino, Nicholas Davies and Ken Fuchsman. (For a video of the free webinar, you can register retroactively at https://mindmendmedia.com/3-16-24-understanding-the-ukraine-war/ ). The concluding section, “Beyond Ukraine: Demilitarization or a New Cold War?”, is drawn from a peer-reviewed article by the first panelist (D’Agostino, 2024). For short bios of the panelists, scroll to the end. –Brian D’Agostino, bdagostino2687@gmail.com
Let us start by noting some points of agreement and disagreement among the three panelists that you will be hearing today. I think we all agree that we need to consider a broad historical perspective from 1991—the end of the Cold War—to the beginning of the Ukraine war. And we also agree that EU, NATO and US policy are all intertwined.
What we disagree about is the motivations for Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Was it to dominate Ukraine? We're going to hear that viewpoint from Ken Fuchsman. Or was it to counteract domination of Russia by NATO and the United States? That's the view that you'll hear from Nicolas Davies and me.
With this introduction to the panel as a whole, let me now start my own presentation, which you can also follow on my PowerPoint. This story, in my telling, begins in the 1990s with Boris Yeltsin, who outsourced privatization of the Russian economy to Wall Street. This was, of course, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street shared the spoils of Russia’s economy with the Russian oligarchs at the expense of the population. So that was a kind of economic and political domination by the West that occurred at the outset of the Russian Federation.
Then, in 1999, we had the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO. Now, these countries had historical reasons to fear Russian imperialism. But the leaders of NATO could have addressed their concerns by negotiating threat reduction agreements with Russia. To undertake war preparations instead—and that is what the expansion of NATO is: war preparations—required a pretext. So, apologists for NATO expansion claimed that Russia’s interventions in Chechnya threatened its other neighbors. Note, however, that Chechnya had historically been part of Russia. By comparison, to have Hawaii secede from the United States, and have the United States intervene to prevent its secession would not imperil world order or global security. But that was the story we were told to justify the expansion of NATO.
I turn now to other provocations before 2014. Here I am following Ben Abelow’s 2022 book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. In 2001, the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty. In 2008, we had the Bucharest memorandum, where NATO said it intended to admit Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. The US then funded, armed and trained the Georgian military. The August 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia occurred four months after the Bucharest memorandum and was likely a response to US and NATO militarism.
As for Ukraine, between 1991 and 2013, the US spent five billion dollars funding anti-Russian groups in Ukraine. So, when armed Maidan insurgents occupied the Ukrainian parliament building in February 2014, forced out the democratically elected pro-Russian president, and established an unconstitutional anti-Russian government, Putin annexed Crimea. That's the backstory to the annexation of Crimea.
I turn now to Western provocations after Crimea. Between 2014 to 2001, the US spent four billion dollars in mostly military aid to Ukraine, largely to “improve interoperability with NATO.” Beginning in 2016, the US put Aegis missile launchers in Romania and Poland. Now if that's not a menacing gesture, I don't know what is. Then the Trump administration withdrew from the intermediate range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (The specter of nuclear war is hovering in the background of all of this.) The US and NATO provided lethal weapons to Ukraine, trained its armed forces, and conducted joint air and naval exercises with Ukraine.
The US and NATO also reaffirmed their intentions to admit Ukraine into NATO. In the context of the foregoing militarist policies by the West, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
To get a further handle on this big picture, and to answer conclusively the question of who is dominating whom, let us now turn to some comparative data on military spending in the period since the end of the Cold War. These data are presented in the following figure, which is taken from D’Agostino (2024).
If you just look at the data, the US and NATO have been spending about 800 billion dollars per year during the last thirty years (the blue line), while Russia is spending something on the order of about 3% of what the US and NATO spend (as seen in the orange line). So, by this metric, the West has completely and utterly dominated Russia militarily since the end of the Cold War.
I would say these data are a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of Russian imperialism, which is really a fantasy and not reality in the post-Cold War period. In 1998, the US and NATO spent $585 billion more on their militaries than Russia. By 2021, this already absurd level of overkill had increased to $873 billion. Russian nationalist dreams of world empire were simply delusional. And this was common knowledge in Washington, Brussels and Moscow. I have to say that US policymakers, in cahoots with the Western press, have been gaslighting the American public about Russian imperialism. They know absolutely well, from the military spending data, that the specter of Russian imperialism is a fantasy. They know this. They're lying and gaslighting the public. That's my view.
Of course, people disagree about this, and we'll hear a different view from Ken Fuchsman. But just to be clear, that's my view of this. There was no conceivable security rationale for the expansions of NATO in 1999 and 2004. They were entirely unprovoked. The US and NATO could have made peace with Russia at any time since the end of the Cold War, and can still make peace today.
So how will the war end? Well, no one has a crystal ball, but it's likely that European and American taxpayers will get tired of paying for the war before Russia abandons its war aim, which is apparently to prevent Ukraine from becoming an outpost of Western power on its very border.
Finally, what should we learn from this war? First, that war is obsolete. If citizens want peace, then demand that our leaders resolve conflicts through negotiations, not war. Second, that war propaganda is seductive. Don’t believe politicians and pundits who whip up indignation about a war in order to give our tax dollars to military bureaucracies and “defense” contractors. And finally, that war institutions are entrenched but depend upon public support. If citizens want peace, then demand that policymakers “move the money” from the war machine to investment in a just and sustainable future.
In the concluding section below, I will have more to say about what an end to this conflict could look like and how international security arrangements can be reformed. First, however, let’s hear from our other two panelists.
Ukraine and Russia: 1991 to 2022
by Ken Fuchsman
How are we to make sense of what has transpired between Russia and Ukraine from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the start of the 2022 war between them? This is a highly controversial subject. Still, there is little harm in trying to develop a historical account of the unfolding of events that includes paying attention to the changing dynamics of European and international power dynamics.
Political scientists distinguish between a multipolar, bipolar, and unipolar international system. Meaning more than two, two, or one major power are prevalent. The multipolar system culminated in the horrors of World War I and World War II. Shortly after that war, it collapsed and was replaced by a bipolar division between the Soviet Union and the United States. Once the USSR disappeared by 1991, for 30 years there was a unipolar power system with the United States as the one dominant world superpower. The assessment that there has been a unipolar system may need some modification. Anyway, U.S. supremacy is now being challenged. But let us first go backwards.
At the end of the second World War, The USSR occupied seven eastern European nations. By the end of the 1940s, they had consolidated power in six of them, and these six were under the thumb of the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s 1948-1949 Berlin blockade, twelve European and North American nations founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to militarily defend themselves from any Soviet threat. In 1955, the USSR established their own military alliance, The Warsaw Pact. The Soviets and the Americans each had consolidated their own spheres of influence.
In 1975, the G7 was established from major industrial powers across the planet. They met annually to discuss current issues facing all of them. The U.S. was one of the seven, the USSR was not. Then in the late 1980s and beyond when the Soviet Union began faltering, former satellite countries became independent. All this changed the power dynamic in Europe. Then in 1992, the treaty forming the European Union was signed, and this over time altered the economics and political dynamics in Europe.
Many former Soviet republics had to decide whether to remain part of Russia or become their own country. In a 1991 plebiscite, 90% of Ukrainians voting favored their country being an independent nation. The popularity of Ukraine independence was a blow to Russia. According to the Council of Foreign Relations Jonathan Masters, next to Russia, Ukraine “was the second most-populous and powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, home to much of the union’s agricultural production, defense industries and military, including the Black Sea Fleet and some of the nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was so vital to the Union that its decision to sever ties in 1991 was the coup de grace for the ailing superpower.”
The new Ukrainian republic suddenly became the country with the third most nuclear weapons on the planet. About 1/3 of the USSR’s total nuclear arsenal was housed in Ukraine territory. The Ukrainians agreed to return their deadly weapons to Russia in return for an agreement where Russia would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. There were two such arrangements between Russia and Ukraine. The first, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which Russia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” In 1997, there was the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation that recognized the inviolability of present borders, the respect for each nations’ territorial integrity, and pledged not to invade the other. These documents were indications of how the new Russia was willing to cooperate with and insure the sovereignty of a former Soviet socialist republic.
After all, with the collapse of the Soviet communist state, the world had a different power dynamic. Would Russia remain outside the other international groups or be included. The West took actions to welcome their former adversary. In 1994, Russia was invited to be a member of what became the G8. Their being invited was a way of being inclusive rather than exclusionary. In 1997, the European Union and Russia signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, which dealt with coal, steel, mutual administrative assistance, and customs. The European Union website states the following, “The EU-Russia cooperation covered among others, trade and economy, energy, climate change, research and education, culture as well as various international security questions. Fostering people-to-people contacts and providing support to Russian civil society, human rights defenders and independent media has also been always an important element of the EU’s engagement in Russia. Moreover, the EU was a staunch supporter of Russia’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession (completed in 2012).”
With NATO, there was a NATO-Russia Council. The NATO website says that following “the NATO-Russia Summit in Rome on 28 May 2002 by the Declaration on NATO-Russia Relations: a New Quality. The 2002 Rome Declaration built on the goals and principles of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security. The NRC replaced the Permanent Joint Council (PJC), a forum for consultation and cooperation created by the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. The individual Allies and Russia have met as equal partners in the NRC.” Through early 2014, Russia was in cooperation not only with the G8, but with the EU and NATO.
Then in 2013 a nation bordering Russia was on the verge of joining the European Union. After six years of preliminaries on February 22, 2013, 315 of the 349 members of the Ukrainian parliament voted to approve their nation joining the EU. On September 4, 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich called a meeting of his political party. According to Reuters reporter Elizabeth Piper, some of Yanukovich’s party advocated aligning with Russia and not the EU. Some feared going against Russia could bring retaliation from Putin. Piper then writes, that Yanukovich replied, "Forget about it… forever!….We will pursue integration with Europe." Piper writes that he “seemed dead set on looking west.”
Just two months later, on November 9th Yanukovich and Vladimir Putin met secretly with no announcement nor publicity. They agreed that Ukraine would suspend its EU application and instead sign an agreement with Russia. Jovita Neliupšiene, foreign policy aide to the Lithuanian President, said Yanukovych had called her before announcing he was ditching the EU pact, arguing that the pressure from Moscow was irresistible. She said that Putin “threatened” Ukraine "with restricted imports of its goods to Russia, particularly from companies in eastern Ukraine, which accommodates the greater share of its industry and employs hundreds of thousands of people. Calculations suggest this would lead to billions in losses. These causes behind the decision were specified by President Yanukovych in the telephone conversation with the president earlier this week," Neliupšiene told a news agency. She was referring to a conversation between the Presidents of Ukraine and Lithuania. As far as we know, Russia had not made such demands on the five other countries bordering Russia when they joined the European Union. But with Ukraine Putin took a hard line, and got his way with Yanukovych.
On November 21, 2013, President Yanukovych announced he was suspending negotiations with the EU and had signed a deal with Russia. Almost immediately demonstrations in Kyiv against the Russian deal and the abandonment of joining the EU started. Between November 2013 and February 2014, 12% of Ukranians at one point or another participated in protests of the suspending of the application to the European Union. The rebels included Kyiv college students, right wing parties, many priests, both leftists. and less radical elements. The protestors at first demanded restarting the EU application but later opposed the corruption of the Yanukovych regime and were against participating in the Russian backed Eurasian Economic Union. Many protesters chanted “we will protect our children.” The protests were a self-described “Revolution of Dignity.” Here was a populist theme, the people against the corrupt governing elite. Then on the night of February 20,2014, between 50 and 100 protestors were slaughtered. That massacre was the final straw. On February 21, 2014, Yanukovich quietly abdicated and secretly departed Ukraine. The next day, February 22, 2014, 328 of the 450 seat Parliament were present and voted 328 to zero to remove Yanukovych.
The deal with Russia stood, Ukraine did not join the EU, but Ukraine was no longer an ally of Russia. The tide had turned. Five days later Vladimir Putin upped the ante. On February 27, 2014, Russian forces invaded Crimea, and soon after annexed it to Russia. What had led to these 2013-2014 crises was not Ukraine and NATO, but Ukraine and the European Union.
This Crimean annexation had significant consequences for Russia and Europe. On March 24, 2014, what had been the G8 became the G7 again when the remaining countries suspended Russia’s inclusion. Also, in March of 2014, the European Union levelled sanctions against Russia for its illegal annexation of Crimea. On April 1, 2014, NATO unanimously suspended cooperation with Russia. The die was cast. The efforts to include Russia in the major European organizations were disrupted in response to Russia taking over Crimea. From 2014 on Russia was on the outside. The invasion and annexation of Crimea by Putin was a major turning point in the evolution of European political dynamics.
This mention of NATO leads to the next relevant topic. What can account for the expansion of NATO following the collapse of the Soviet Union? Between 1949 and 1990, four other nations became NATO members, one of them Turkey joined in 1952. At the time, they shared a common border with Russia of 335 miles. Stalin did not raise a ruckus when Turkey joined NATO.
The issue of NATO expansion came up again when the USSR was in crisis. Soviet leader Gorbachev in early February 1990 met with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow. At the encounter, Baker posed a hypothetical to Gorbachev, what if you let your part of Germany go, and the U.S. agrees that NATO will “not shift one inch eastward from its present position.” Gorbachev responded that NATO expanding was not acceptable. Baker agreed.
Baker’s boss, U.S. President George H. W. Bush and his National Security Council advisers were not pleased with what Baker told Gorbachev. The President saw no need to make concessions about NATO’s future. Bush communicated these views both to German Chancellor Kohl and James Baker. At the President’s request, his secretary of state stopped using the phrase not one inch. Historian Mary Sarotte points out that when in the 1990 negotiations with Kohl on German unification, Gorbachev “had not secured any major concessions… either orally or in writing, on NATO or any other topic.” When in September 1990, a settlement on Germany’s unification was signed by the two Germany’s and the four powers that occupied Germany after World War II, it only addressed conditions about Germany’s unification, not one word on NATO expansion was included. There was never any other formal agreement that conceded that NATO would not expand. On the other hand, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency no new member was admitted to NATO.
When Bill Clinton became President in 1993, he heard specific requests from leaders of former Soviet satellites. Czech’s Vaclav Havel met with President Clinton on April 20, 1993. Havel said, “we are living in a vacuum” and pressed for full NATO membership. When Lech Walesa met with Clinton at this time, the Polish leader informed Clinton that “we are all afraid of Russia.” Should it happen that Russia “adopts an aggressive foreign policy, that aggression will be directed toward Ukraine and Poland.” Walesa said that “Poland cannot be left defenseless.” This input confirmed Clinton’s belief, historian Sarotte reports, that NATO remains the key to stability in Europe. Still, she says, “the issue of NATO membership remained on the back burner in summer 1993.”
Then Russian leader Boris Yeltsin took an initiative that concerned the Clinton administration. On December 11, 1994, Yeltsin ordered Russian troops to invade Chechnya. To some, historian Sarotte writes, the Chechnya war was “a watershed moment.” For those favoring NATO’s expansion, the Chechnya war, Sarotte writes, “seemed to prove that the states insisting Russia remained a military threat were right.” Secretary of State Warren Christopher said that Chechnya was “an alarm bell for Central Europe.” It “cast a dark shadow over our relationship with Russia,” and was “inconsistent with democracy.” Defense Secretary William Perry said that Clinton and Gore now came to believe “that right was on the side of the Eastern European countries that wanted to enter NATO soon, that deferring expansion until later in the decade was not feasible.”
The idea of the Clinton group was there should be a four-to-five-year time frame for these new admissions to NATO. While certainly the United States has an unenviable record of invading and dominating other nations and committing more than its share of abominations and atrocities, President Clinton and his major advisers became convinced that Russia’s own expansionist history had not ended with the demise of the USSR. They then proceeded to grant the wishes of three former Soviet satellites to join NATO. In 1999, Hungary, Czechia, and Poland became NATO members. Of course, Soviet troops had intervened in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Russia and the Soviets had a long record of oppressing Poland.
Then in 2004, when George W. Bush was President, seven additional nations obtained NATO membership. All had either been satellites or Soviet Socialist Republics. Whether reasonable or not, all feared the Russian bear. U.S. intentions may or may not have been to surround Russia, but the countries who entered NATO in the period 1999 to 2004 wanted to protect their territorial integrity from Russian aggressiveness. To these nations the Cold War was not dead and buried. Between 1949 and 2013 NATO had grown from 12 to 28 member states. The eagerness to join NATO after 1991 can be viewed as a freely chosen realignment of the European power system. It was due to the independent decisions of more than a dozen European nations. They were acting in response to what they thought the USSR did during the Cold War and their perception of contemporary Russian threats.
In assessing the dynamics of European life since the demise of the Soviet Union, something else needs to be added. The European Union (EU) has become a force. There were twelve member states in the EU when it was formed. The European Parliament is one of its government entities. It is elected and roughly proportioned by population. It has legislative, supervisory, and budgetary responsibilities. The Parliament has the duty to supervise each member state to ensure they are in accord with democratic principles. The EU also worked to develop other things. In 2002, the EURO went into effect as the common currency between member nations. According to the World Economic Forum, being in the EU has provided for monetary stability, increased capital inflows, and permanent increases in stock market indices. Between 1993 and 2004 both the EU and NATO brought in additional nations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had ten new members in those years, and the EU added thirteen. These were the years of peak enlargement for both.
By 2022, the EU had 447 million inhabitants and accounted for 1/6 of the world GDP with 16.6 trillion dollars of production. The EURO is the second most traded currency on the planet. Next to the U. S. the EU has the largest economy in the world and is America’s largest trading partner. The economic fortunes of the U. S. and EU are interdependent.
The U S population of 349 million had a GDP that year of $25.46 trillion. In contrast, the Russian GDP in 2022 was around $2.24 trillion with a population of 144 million. Russia has about 1/3 the population of EU countries. The EU GDP is over seven times larger than Russia’s. Russia has the eighth largest GDP on the planet, in terms of GDP per capita income it ranks 52nd.
Four of the seven nations bordering Ukraine in 2022 were EU members. In 2023, the President of the European Commission said Ukraine’s future is in our Union. That may be both Ukraine’s and the EUs assessment. Valdimir Putin from 2013 forward has used many of the means at his disposal to prevent the Ukrainians from making their own sovereign choices.
In coming to terms with the European political dynamics since the demise of the USSR, it becomes clear that there has been a major realignment of power dynamics, which includes the axis between the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There are twenty-two members of NATO who are also part of the twenty-seven member European Union. These countries have all chosen NATO and the EU rather than the Russia sponsored alternatives. Any full consideration of post-Cold War Europe power system should consider the EU and NATO in tandem, as the intersection between the two is indispensable for making sense of today’s European politics. This new combined military and economic force covers so much of the European continent. The EU/NATO group overshadows, even dwarfs, any European rival. As a new European political/economic/military order has emerged through both the EU and NATO, it is a mistake to consider Europe just through with what the EU has achieved without incorporating the NATO contribution. It is equally an error to single out NATO as a cause without fully including the EU at the same time. Then there is the U.S., which is central in NATO and the EU is its leading trading partner. In short, the U.S. while not a EU member, the EU/NATO ascendancy cannot be separated from U.S. involvement.
The EU/NATO intersection combined with its U.S. connections places Russia in a challenging spot. Russia itself had opportunities for closer ties with the EU and NATO, but these went away when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Since 2014, Russia could well have made it a top priority to reconnect to the G7, the EU, and NATO. Putin has not gone in that direction.
It was the desire by Russia not to let Ukraine pursue its own course in economics and politics in 2013-2014 that triggered a major change in European power dynamics. Many Ukrainians wanted to be free from Russian influence. This concern with remaining independent from Russia clearly was also shared by the many former satellites and Soviet Republics who pursued being part of NATO and the EU rather than getting closer to Mother Russia
Like many another country that had been part of or a satellite of the USSR, over time Ukraine turned toward the West for protection against Russia and increased economic opportunities. In June 2017, the Ukraine parliament passed legislation declaring joining NATO was a goal. Ukraine President Zelensky in September 2020 approved a strategy having being part of NATO as a goal. At the June 2021 NATO summit, they decided that having Ukraine join NATO was an aim. If opposition to NATO expansion was Russia’s main objection, would not the 2020 and 2021 actions be cause for Russia to immediately invade Ukraine to prevent that? Russia did not immediately invade Ukraine with the NATO actions as a justification.
What Putin did instead was to make proposals that would reverse the course of history. On December 17, 2021, Russia proposed a treaty with NATO. Russia wanted a binding guarantee that neither Ukraine nor Georgia would become part of NATO. That meant that Russia was opposed to allowing these two nations to make their own choices. Russia also wanted recognition of its own sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas. Putin demanded that NATO should withdraw its capabilities in former Soviet Union territories. In other words, if former Soviet countries wished to have a military force from NATO in their territory, Putin would deny them that option. Putin was basically admitting that if countries are given a free choice, they were not going to select Russia but their competitors. Not surprisingly, Putin on December 21, 2021, said if the West does not meet his demands, he could well take military action.
Is Putin the only super-power leader who wants to stack the deck in their favor and deny choice to others, of course not. But in this instance, his December 2021 proposals were an admission that he had been outmaneuvered. Putin had to know that his proposals would be rejected. In response to Putin’s proposals, U.S. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, "We will not compromise the key principles on which European security is built, including that all countries have the right to decide their own future and foreign policy, free from outside interference." Putin had backed himself into a corner.
Not surprisingly, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. There was an additional precipitating cause for his action that Putin left out of his December demands. While neither Ukraine nor Georgia were on the verge of being inducted into NATO, what was imminent was that Ukraine was about to apply for EU membership. Ukraine submitted the EU paperwork on February 28, 2022, four days after the war began. There is a resemblance between what Russia initiated in 2013 and 2022. The common element is that Ukraine was taking steps to join the European Union. It was deja vu all over again. Putin was willing to risk much to ensure Ukraine did not escape Russian oversight.
Is it an aberration in the international power system that a powerful nation that cannot get its way through free choice and peaceful competition resorts to military force? Let me count the ways. Still, for Russia there have been negative consequences of their aggression. As Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea led to the disentangling of Russia from the G8, the EU and NATO, their 2022 war against Ukraine led two long unaligned European nations, Finland and Sweden, to apply to NATO. For many European nations between 1991 and 2024, there have been more worries about the dangers of Russian aggression than NATO expansion.
By 2024, five nations belonging to both the EU and NATO border 11% of Russia. Mother Russia has never taken military action against any of these five when they were applying to the EU and/or NATO. Given this, is it or is it not peculiar that Russia has made an exception and twice invaded Ukraine around the time of an impending EU application?
It may be that Putin’s best chance of achieving his purposes with Ukraine is related to American domestic politics. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Donald Trump declared it the work of “genius.” Donald Trump’s 2023-2024 hostility to having the Congress pass aid to Ukraine had been influential in delaying additional Congressional funding. Trump’s 2024 announcement that he favored Putin militarily invading NATO nations also showed his choosing a U.S. adversary over its formal allies.
If one favors increased Russian power in the world order, backing Trump can foster that aim. If one sees Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine as disruptive of peace, then opposing Putin means opposing Trump. If one sees America as more of a danger than Russia, then again Trump is your man. If one views European political stability and national sovereignty as priorities, then you would be against the team of Putin and Trump. No matter where one sides among these or other alternatives, it is hard not to conclude that from 2013 to 2024 Putin’s policy in relation to Ukraine is to keep that nation in Russia’s orbit and to prevent Ukraine from making its own choices if that includes being part of the EU and/or NATO.
In conclusion: with the Russia-Ukraine war, humanity is once again in a tragic, horrendous situation. While there were 19 genocides between the 1960s and the early 2000s, this present conflict is the first European interstate extended war since 1945. This war may lead to greater catastrophe or remain confined to the current area. Allegations of abominations, atrocities, and other extensive war crimes have accompanied this standoff as it has with many others interstate conflicts. We can play the blame game all we want. We can try to articulate what led to this dreadful occurrence to our heart’s content. But when dust comes to dust, humanity is immersed in the all too familiar reality of being brutally lethal to members of our own species. The capabilities of Homo sapiens to develop technologically advanced weapons of mass destruction and use them on each other distinguishes us from any other species on the planet. Our extraordinary innovations in weaponry along with the increased percent of non-combatants murdered in war indicates that as civilization progresses so too often does our bestiality. The Russia-Ukraine War is no exception to this embrace of sophisticated barbarity.
Understanding the Ukraine War
by Nicolas J. S. Davies
[I was born in a British naval family in Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, and spent my childhood growing up on British naval bases around the world, only one of which, Plymouth, in England, is still a British naval base. So I hope I can offer hope to anti-imperialists in the United States that empires do not last forever, and some of them end quite quickly and unexpectedly.]
In our book, War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, Medea Benjamin and I quoted retired US ambassador and diplomat Chas Freeman, who wrote, “This war in Ukraine is the most intense information war humanity has ever seen. There are so many lies flying about that it's totally impossible to perceive the truth.” Well, Medea, and I took that as our challenge. We set out to write a concise primer that would cut through the propaganda gushing out from all sides, Russia, Ukraine, and of course, the US and NATO, and give people the missing background and context that they're not getting from our political leaders and the corporate media.
Brian did a great job of explaining why Russia had rational security concerns over NATO expansion. US diplomats and elder statesmen like George Kennan warned successive administrations that this would lead to a new Cold War, as it has.
When NATO officially agreed that Ukraine would eventually join NATO in 2008, the US Ambassador to Moscow, William Burns, who is now the CIA director, warned that promising NATO membership to Ukraine could lead to a civil war, which also proved correct. In a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which he titled “Nyet Means Nyet,” Burns wrote that Russia, “would then have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
On our book tour and in discussions like this, we have found that Americans are split along a clear line in their views of this conflict. And what primarily divides them is what they believe about Russia and its war goals. But what is that based on? Why does one person see Russia driven to war by the dangers of a hostile military alliance gathering at its borders, and another person see it as an imperialist power, threatening to invade Europe? You are all part of the International Psychohistorical Association. So maybe some of you can take a serious look at why people are so clearly divided into these two camps, and what are the psychological factors involved in this?
At the heart of this question is a yawning gulf between what Western political leaders have claimed about Russia and its supposed ambitions to invade other countries in Europe, which some of the public have also come to embrace, and what Russia in fact agreed to at peace talks in Turkey in March 2022, a month after the beginning of the war, when it agreed to withdraw to its pre-war positions in return for a simple Ukrainian commitment to neutrality, giving up its its ambition to join NATO.
Our leaders did not tell us about that peace and neutrality agreement in 2022, or try to explain why they deliberately chose a long war, to weaken Russia as they said, over the chance to make this one of the shortest wars in history. So it has been left to the other parties to these negotiations to come out one by one and tell the world about them, and about the American and British roles in undermining them.
Ukrainian negotiator, Oleksiy Arestovych, has described how he and his colleagues returned to Kyiv to the popping of champagne corks, celebrating the favorable terms they negotiated, and which Russia agreed to. The Turkish foreign minister and Turkish diplomats expressed dismay at how the US and Britain undermined their mediation and chose to prolong and escalate the war.
Another mediator, then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, told an interviewer that Britain opposed the negotiations all along, and that the US eventually “blocked” or “stopped” them, depending how you translate the Hebrew. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who flew to Moscow to intercede with President Putin at Ukraine's request, told Berliner Zeitung, “In the end, nothing could happen. Because everything was decided in Washington. That was fatal.”
Two years later, there have been at least half a million casualties on both sides, and the real casualties may very well be much higher, because both sides have exaggerated their enemy's casualties and shrouded their own in secrecy.
After the US shipped tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine, its failed offensive in 2023 left it in a far weaker position than it was before, or than it was at the talks in 2022. The war has degenerated into a bloody war of attrition that many compare to the First World War, but one in which Russia is firing five times as many artillery shells as Ukraine, and producing five times as many shells as the US, NATO and Ukraine combined.
This is because, unlike western countries, Russia did not privatize its weapons industry after the end of the Cold War, and still had surplus industrial capacity, or wasted capacity according to neoliberal economic theory, that it has now reactivated. The West does not, despite spending trillions more than Russia on the most expensive war machine in history.
Even former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who many regard as the architect of these policies, has compared the resulting war of attrition to the First World War, and she admitted in February that the US has no plan B. Secretary Blinken announced, on March 5th, that Under Secretary Nuland was taking early retirement at the age of 62, after the dangerous policy she championed has led to the disintegration and devastation of Ukraine in this terrible war.
After Ukraine's failed 2023 offensive, and with critical manpower and recruitment problems, one could say that Ukraine is losing and Russia is winning. But that depends on what Russia's real war aims are. Which brings us back to the bifurcated view of Russia in our own society. Does Russia plan to invade Europe? Or would it still be ready to settle for an agreement in which Ukraine would simply commit to a future as a neutral country, as in the agreement they were negotiating two years ago?
How can we answer that question? Let's start by looking at what Russia is doing since the fall of Avdiivka. Russia is not racing toward Kyiv or even toward Kharkiv, Odessa, or the natural boundary of the Dnipro River, as many commentators expected. Reuters Moscow Bureau has reported that Russia spent months trying to open new negotiations with the United States in late 2023, but that, in January, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slammed that door shut with a flat refusal to negotiate over Ukraine.
But the only way to actually find out what Russia really wants, and what it will settle for, is to return to the negotiating table. All sides have demonized each other and staked out maximalist positions. But that is what nations at war do, in order to justify the sacrifices they demand of their people and their rejection of diplomatic alternatives. Serious diplomatic negotiations are now essential to get down to the nitty gritty of what it will take to bring peace to Ukraine.
I am sure there are wiser heads within the US and other NATO governments who are saying this too behind closed doors. And that may be precisely why Nuland is out, and why France’s president Macron is talking so openly about where the current policy is leading, which is toward direct conflict between NATO and Russia - in other words, the World War Three that Biden has promised to avoid. I fervently hope that wiser heads will prevail, and that a new plan B will lead back to the negotiating table, and then forward to peace in Ukraine.