Great and well balanced summary of this tragic situation. The US is willing to fight down to the last Ukranian and any voice for a pragmatic settlement is pro-Putin treachery!
Can you please respond to my comments from the previous comment thread (for the previous piece)? I wrote you some long comments explaining why I find our interactions frustrating. I think that it would be healthy if we could talk about that before jumping into the next conversation. I was expressing my concern with the fact that you seem (I can't be sure, but *seem*) to not read the pieces that you then comment on, which puts me in an awkward situation. Go back and look at the comments if you get a chance; I would appreciate it. :)
Excellent article that provides insight into many of the historical, cultural and geographical factors that led up the current conflict in Ukraine. Learned a lot from reading it and now look at this whole situation with a more informed perspective.
The idea that Euromaidan was a coup is patently absurd. A coup involves the armed forces of a country seizing power. No such thing happened in Ukraine. What happened was that in his brutal attempts to suppress protests, Yanukovych alienated even his own party to the point that his position became untenable. As such, he clearly decided that there wasn't a future for him in Ukraine and thus left the country, after which he was formally removed from office by the Ukrainian Parliament. How exactly that constitutes a "coup" is beyond me. The leader of a country can hardly expect to remain in power when he has fled to another, especially after massacring dozens of people.
I also love how you seem to think that only the Ukrainian election of 2010 was valid - not the elections of 2014 or 2019, in which the regional divisions were far less noticable than in previous ones. Of course, Ukraine was only a democracy from 2010-2014. Everything before and after was fascist despotism.
"A coup involves the armed forces of a country seizing power."
I thought that it was just the overthrow of an elected government. So if you overthrow a dictator, you might just call that a "revolution"; you'd call it a "coup" if it's an elected government in a democracy.
"What happened was that in his brutal attempts to suppress protests, Yanukovych alienated even his own party to the point that his position became untenable. As such, he clearly decided that there wasn't a future for him in Ukraine and thus left the country, after which he was formally removed from office by the Ukrainian Parliament."
Do you know any good source that provides this "there was no coup" account of things? I will definitely look into this and publish about it; I have a few key questions that I hope to answer that should settle the matter of whether it was a coup.
One person told me this: "It's agreed on all sides that he fled right after the US-backed opposition refused his proposal to have an election. Whether it was a coup is not a matter of fact but of interpretation."
"you seem to think that only the Ukrainian election of 2010 was valid"
A couple people have said this. I was just providing maps to go along with Matlock's comment about how that particular election illustrates the divide; I'm not sure why that's bad.
A "coup" is a sudden violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group. January 6th in the US was an attempted coup. Mubarak being removed from power in Egypt during the Arab spring was not a coup. The Arab spring is more similar to the Euromaidan than January 6th.
It does not have to be the military, although usually the military is the only force capable of succeeding in a coup.
Also, when you say "US backed" it makes it sound like something orchestrated and funded by the US, where we played an active role in its success, similar to our actions in South and Central America in the 50's. Again it's more similar to Egypt in the Arab spring, where our "backing" was limited to, "we like you guys"(the people) and "we don't like you guys"(the government).
Only got around to reading this and a couple of core criticisms and suggestions.
The overall gist of this piece suggests that the core reasoning for the invasion of Ukraine is security dominated. It seems to me that many of the claims here overlook significant factors, most significantly Putin and his advisor’s irredentism. Additionally, many of the claims upon which the article is based include factual errors or half-truths which weaken its argument.
I'm not going deconstruct every single argument in detail, rebuttals to each of them have been made. I think that commenting that these commentaries reflect the "the actual record" is ignoring many of the inaccuracies pervasive in some of these accounts. Matlock, for example, claimed in his piece that the whole discourse surrounding the invasion of Ukraine was an American hoax designed to "serve a domestic political end" and to bolster Biden's domestic support. I think taking viewpoints of people who have been so unbelievably wrong as Matlock and Chomsky in their analysis as "the actual record" is a misstep. I will hit on some of the key areas.
Abelow’s commentary is the most recent and extensive on the practical security reasons so most of this response will be related to him.
Firstly, his (and Greene’s) characterisation of the 2014 uprising as a “far-right coup” is laughable at best and disingenuous at worst. Svoboda, the main far-right party at the time of Euromaidan, failed to surpass the electoral threshold in 2014 right after the uprising, losing all representation. This severely damages the claims that the uprising can be characterised as ‘far right’. Whilst there was obviously a far-right movement in Ukraine, attempts to claim that the Maiden was far-right in character fall apart significantly when analysing the political landscape in greater detail. The involvement of some far-right elements is more indicative an alliance of circumstance, not a movement driven by far right proclivities. The strong right-wing ideology central to many of the separatist republics ideologies also undermines the inevitable depictions of the event as far-right neo-nazi fascist vs Russian speakers who merely wanted to live in peace. Neo-Nazis such as Alexei Milchakov rose to prominence and fame in Russia and the Separatist provinces. A detailed and balanced analysis of the Far right in Ukraine over that period can be found here: https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/rnv95_uk_likhachev_far-right_radicals_final.pdf
Abelow’s claim that Ukraine’s armed forces were being armed and trained up to NATO standards is correct. But he fails to acknowledge the fact that all of this occurred AFTER the initial Russian invasion in 2014. Additionally, whilst NATO adopted a position of ‘full support’ for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2014, that does not equate to membership of NATO. The main threat of NATO to Russia is Article 5. The NATO Comprehensive Assistance Packages which included arming and training core units only occurred after the 2014 Russian invasion and provided an emphasis of defensive technology and training. These focused on C4 capabilities, Medical Rehabilitation, and precession development, as well as EOD. It was quite clear that the CAP did not provide Ukraine with offensive capabilities against Russia, merely provide them with the tools necessary to withstand further Russian aggression.
Additionally, Abelow’s repetition of the Kremlin’s claims that the US/NATO AEGIS Ashore launchers pose an escalatory threat to Russia due to nuclear Tomahawks (TLAM-Ns) is ridiculous. The US disposed of all TLAM-Ns in 2010. Since 2005 the US has only forward deployed B61 gravity bombs, with them held at bases in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and Turkey. There are no forward deployed nuclear weapons on the European continent further east than Düsseldorf in the North, and Milan in Italy. Of note, in February 2022 the US offered Russia an extensive transparency mechanism to inspect the AEGIS Ashore sites in Romania and Poland to ensure there were no conventional TLAMs, only standard 3 SAMs.
This not only counters Abelow’s claim, but also Greene’s claim that having AEGIS Ashore launchers in Poland “give[s] the United State the capacity to launch a nuclear-first strike without retaliation” which, once again is blatantly untrue given the US has not possessed any TLAM-Ns since 2010. Greene merely repeats the Russian claims that there are nuclear weapons stationed in the Baltics, a claim which the most basic level of research would show to be untrue. These claims are fundamental factual errors which both Greene and Abelow make. To claim that US nuclear force posture was escalatory, especially in light of consistent Russian development in tactical nuclear capabilities starting from the 1990s, when the US was disarming tactical devices, is ridiculous.
Regarding Matlock and others’ claims that “Ukraine has been deeply divided along linguistic and cultural lines”, it is worth noting that linguistic usage is not binary, nor is linguistic preference a proxy for political purposes. Ukrainians are bilingual and often use both languages. Indeed, Kyiv remains the largest Russian-speaking city outside of Russia. Moscow learned in 2014 that language is not a proxy for political views when Russian-speaking Ukrainian parties in Kharkiv and Odesa Oblasts. Indeed, the two maps you provide do show language/political correlation, but the sample size of a single election cycle is misleading and earlier and later elections (such as 1994, 2009, 2014 and 2019) dispute the concept of a clear linguistic and political divide within the country.
Evidently, many of the authors which have been cited to provide an account of "the actual record" fall short in providing an accurate depiction of events, and even on the most basic and core factual aspects. Additionally, for writers like Greene to take Putin’s word at face value, despite significant evidence and his own actions being to the contrary, and claiming that Putin would have deescalated had the US not provided weapons to Ukraine, is naive and misinterpret's Putin's intentions. The fact that the US took the unprecedented decision to send the CIA director to show detailed their intelligence to Putin himself, blows any claims that the US was not trying to deescalate out of the water. Revealing valuable military intelligence to a foreign leader preparing for war is not the action of a state with a fundamentally escalatory stance.
Now to the main rebuttal. My main issue with this piece (and much of the ‘realist’/non-interventionist literature) is that it views the war entirely as an outcome of externally applied security pressures rather than endogenous motivations. It removes, almost entirely, Russian agency in the matter portraying them as a force which was backed so far into a hole by the West that the only way they could get out was to invade Ukraine. In particular, the exclusion of the irredentist (and frankly imperialist) views of Putin, Dugan and many in the Russian decision-making sphere regarding Ukraine are a major disservice to this analysis. In my opinion, it is an exclusion fatal to the conclusions of the analysis and on whom the eventual onus falls.
Regarding the security argument as a whole, Putin is not some sort of ‘off-the-hinge’ crazy irrational leader. Often the claim is made that he is a strategic thinker, and as such acts for security purposes. But being a strategic thinker does not preclude territorial or imperial ambitions. Indeed, from a security perspective, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was, in many ways, an entirely counterproductive action. This has been entirely evinced by the fact that Sweden has overturned 200 years of neutrality to apply for NATO, and Finland has now joined, doubling NATO’s land border with Russia. Escalation in Ukraine to halt US “expansion” and “aggression” is entirely counterproductive.
At the core of Putin’s world view is his strongly held belief that, “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,… tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” This statement was made in 2005. The view that Ukraine is not a legitimate state is not just "mendacious Russian propaganda", as Lieven puts it, it is central to Putin and the Russian state’s view of Ukraine, and all of its action must be viewed in light of that.
Putin, in his 2021 ahistorical essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” claims that "Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole... it is what I firmly believe." Putin stated that "there was no historical basis" for "the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians" and that the existence of a Ukrainian nation is a "narrative" which only exists to weaken Russia. Putin laments the Bolsheviks for what he claims was their program of "Ukrainization [which] was often imposed on those who did not see themselves as Ukrainians. This Soviet national policy secured at the state level the provision on three separate Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, instead of the large Russian nation". The crux of his position is clear: "We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed." In the lead up to the invasion, Putin made his vision of the Russian world exceedingly clear, and that world includes Ukraine as an inalienable part of Russia.
This is not new. Nor is it Putin alone who holds these views. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Putin claimed that ““Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In 2014 Putin made it very clear that the Donbas and Crimea were part of “Novorossiya” (New Russia), a historical name for Ukraine during the era of the Russian Empire. Vladislav Surkov, the man credited with much of Putin’s Ukraine policy, stated: “there is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind. An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme. [It is] a muddle instead of a state. […] But there is no nation”. Medvedev stated in 2013 (when Yanukovych was in power) that there “was no [Ukrainian] state even then”.
Since the full-scale invasion in 2022 began, Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great who “gathered in the lands” after his defeat of Sweden. Notably, Putin does not use the rhetoric of restoring the Soviet Union, but the language of Russian Imperialism in the tradition of the Czars. In fact, Putin has railed against Lenin for, in his view, creating a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He has spoken about the restoration of a Slavic Empire, including Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
The reason Putin has an aversion to NATO is not principally because it represents a direct security threat. Russia possesses 1500 strategic nuclear weapons and thousands more tactical weapons. Russia can easily deter any conventional assault. He views it as a threat because it provides a way for Ukraine to exercise its own agency in the face of Russian threats. Putin’s worldview on this matter, which invariably removes any agency from Ukraine, inevitably placed him on a path to “reclaim” Ukraine by one means or another.
The claim that “integrating Ukraine into NATO was—frankly—a fine way to ensure Ukraine’s destruction” is incorrect because it presumes that NATO expansion was the root cause Putin’s objections, rather than the exercise of Ukrainian agency. The “integration” into NATO, which in reality was providing them with the capabilities to defend from themselves (everyone in DC knew Ukraine would not join NATO), is only a way to ensure Ukraine’s destruction if you view the only outcome to a non-invaded Ukraine as subjugation to Russia. Indeed, the initiation of the whole conflict, the EU's Association Agreement - which even in September 2013 Yanukovich was eager to sign, having been stymied due to EU objections over his imprisonment of political rivals - was not a concern around security or nuclear weapons. It was a concern that Ukraine was exercising its own agency, even under Yanukovich (see statement from PM Medvedev above). Indeed, Yanukovich only cancelled the deal after Russia threatened a trade war and to cut off gas supplies.
Additionally, to claim that Poroshenko's post-2014 government was ethno-nationalist and "opposed to local autonomy" is ahistorical. Yanukovich's 2010 changes to the constitution centralised core powers with the Government. Poroshenko brought back the 2004 constitution and further amended it to allow for greater decentralisation, replacing the existing Oblasts and granting regional status to Crimea, Kyiv, Sevastopol as well as creating a new subdivision of "hromadas" (communities). This included over the issue of language with Poroshenko stating that "the lion's share of problems, starting from what language, including Russian, to use on the territory of a community, will be within the powers of local authorities."
Failure to recognise or analyse this consistent and pervasive narrative from Putin and his senior advisors regarding their view of Ukraine over decades, and a failure to recognise this position as one which fundamentally underpins Putin’s motivations and views toward Ukraine, is a fatal error. At the core of Putin’s worldview, Ukraine is Russia. Ukraine will always be Russia. Ukrainian agency or self-determination is a myth. This is a war to reaffirm Russian imperial and territorial control over Ukraine, and to reintegrate it into “Novorossiya”, the Russian empire. Putin does not view NATO expansion as a threat, he views any shift of Ukraine away from Russia as a threat because he believes it is a core part of Russia. Yet this worldview removes any agency from Ukraine. Putin views Ukraine as illegitimate and part of Russia, and therefore any indication of Ukrainian independence or agency constitutes a security threat. Putin has made it clear, time and again, that what lies at the centre of his world view is the oneness and subordination of Ukraine to Russia.
Thanks for commenting! I just want to ask if you read my previous piece on this. I believe that it's linked at the very start of this one. I apologize if I wasn't more clear that this piece is the second piece and that the first one is important to read beforehand.
This piece that you're commenting on begins with these words:
I’ll use this piece to talk about whether it was necessary to integrate Ukraine into NATO. Someone might read my 12 February 2023 piece—which talks about the history that preceded the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine—and say “Maybe integrating Ukraine into NATO was indeed ‘highly provocative’, but how else could we have protected Ukraine from Russian aggression?”. This piece will address that question—I’ll quote from various commentaries and then give my own thoughts.
May 6, 2023·edited May 6, 2023Liked by Andrew Van Wagner
I did read the previous piece. This is a response to this particular piece of work, taking into account the initial one. You have, indeed, quoted from numerous commentaries. However, a great many of these commentaries possess significant errors, as I outlined in the first aspects of the response. These commentaries form the base of your analysis as to whether NATO "integration" was necessary or "provocative". Given your claim that these commentaries provide a key insight into "the actual record" as to the escalation of the conflict, they needed to be addressed. Your previous article was a repetition of Chomsky's claims. I decided to reply here as the poor historiography in both articles (I wouldn't rely on Chomsky as a reliable source).
Fundamentally you claim that NATO expansion was the core reasoning for the initiation of the war. You also claim that Ukraine was becoming a "NATO member in all but name". As I pointed out in my comment, this lacks an understanding as to where the real value of NATO is (principally Article 5), and the activities of the CAPs. Burns and the whole US NatSec area recognise that Ukraine in NATO is a red line for Russia.
You take NATO "integration" as a key cause, at face value, when it is anything but that. You seem to assume that training Ukrainian forces is tantamount to alliance membership. It isn't. The failure to integrate an acknowledgement of Putin's worldview causes your core analysis regarding the role of "NATO integration" and its outcomes to be faulty.
Thanks; I just wasn't sure if you'd read the previous piece. A lot of people don't seem (somehow?...I guess that they don't read things and instead launch into their responses without reading for some reason) to recognize that the point about Russia's security concerns and crossing the "red lines" of Ukraine and Georgia and everything is from the US establishment. That's a big thing to start with; it's not left-wing radicals who have been saying this for 30 years, but rather the people I quote like WIlliam Burns and a striking range of others. That doesn't mean that they're correct but these experts (both hawks and doves) are about the furthest thing from radical that you can imagine. So it does prompt the question of how every top Russia expert got things so wrong; it's not like these people are left-wing. Chomsky did an interview recently where someone attributed the "red line" stuff to him and he had to go through where the notion actually comes from and how it comes from this long "Who's Who" list of US Russia experts. The people who devised US Cold-War policy; not left-wingers.
NATO red lines are a thing. But as I've mentioned before, that's to do principally with membership. Yet the extent to which NATO red lines have played are not what you have claimed.
The notion that the current war was initiated due to a violation of those red lines is inaccurate. The US made it clear from 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would not be granted MEPs. That remained the status quo even past 2014, when CEPs were provided to enhance Ukrainian defensive capabilities, but Membership was never realistically on the table, despite Ukrainian attempts.
The invasion was not prompted by "security concerns" in the traditional sense, but by increasing Ukrainian independence. Fundamentally, Putin is not driven by "security concerns" as you frame it in terms of simple capabilities. Putin's "Security concerns" are best viewed in the context of his irredentist views regarding the subjugation of Ukraine as part of a greater Russian state. In that sense, any form of Ukrainian agency to the contrary of what Putin envisions for Ukraine is a "security concern". The threat, therefore, isn't NATO military expansion per se, but the ability for Ukraine to be independent of Russia. This results in an inaccurate conclusion regarding the proclivities of Russia for aggression. Russia will remain aggressive in any situation where Ukraine exercises its own agency in a manner where it does not align with Russia. This was evident even with Yanukovych in 2013. The fact that many of the Russian claims regarding NATO expansion (such as the false AEGIS systems claims repeated by Abelow & Greene) as well as the fact that was clear to everybody on earth that Ukraine did not the capabilities to launch an offensive against Russia (the CAPs primarily armed Ukraine in a defensive orientation) clearly indicate that NATO expansion itself was not the security concern, but an independent Ukraine was.
This is why Director Burns, and the CIA in general, recognises Putin's drive as coming from an irredentist and imperialist viewpoint. The Director has noted that in his own interactions with Putin prior to the beginning of the war, that Putin believed that Ukraine and the West was weak, that Ukraine was not a real country and was part of Russia, and wished to further those aims. Fiona Hill, who wrote THE Book on Putin has also pointed this out.
I would be interested to know, by the way, about the technical reasons why the missile systems aren't offensive. I myself have often frowned at the notion that the missiles would be used to attack Russia...it seems far-fetched. But on the technical side of things, I totally understand the problem. Suppose you walk into a store with a handgun and say "It's just a defensive handgun"...that's not going to go well because nothing about the actual gun makes it "defensive". And I'm sure that other countries, not just Russia, would take the same approach and not be comforted by the notion that the weapons are merely "defensive". So if you know any technical reason that there's no threat then I'd be interested.
On the other side of things, like I mentioned, I'm not sure what the exact threat truly is. Like, what scenario does Russia envision leading to a missile strike against them? Maybe there are such scenarios. But the very presence of the missiles alone doesn't seem like something that's a real threat. Although, how would other countries react? Presumably the exact same way; it's intolerable.
I'd like to see actual Russian security analyses; that would presumably explain precisely why the missiles were seen as a danger.
Thanks for the interesting comment! It's super interesting because you and I have mirror-image views of the war; completely polar-opposite perspectives. My view is that this is about security concerns (as far as we can tell; nobody actually knows what the Kremlin decision-making was). And my view is that these security concerns are a broader Russia thing; it's not all about Putin. In fact Boris Yeltsin freaked out about NATO too; he was a US darling as you know. So it's interesting because I'm talking about security concerns that go way back before Putin and that extend beyond Putin. Remember what the head of the CIA said about not being able to find ANYONE in Russia who was remotely OK with Ukraine joining NATO. So it's not about Putin. Here's the quote I'm talking about:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines 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. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze.…It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Hi Andrew, apologies this is off topic, I've been looking for a recording of the Chomsky-Gzowski interview and followed a trail of breadcrumbs through your youtube page to here, which seems like your most active page. Did you ever manage to get that interview processed and uploaded anywhere? I've always wanted to see it and I'd be happy to contribute in some way to that or getting any other historical chomsky content uploaded.
If you prefer you can email me at my firstname dot lastname at gmail, or dm me on twitter @garethdmm!
I have a ton of Chomsky material. I feel guilty about it because I was supposed to get it digitized but it just proved to be a huge project. I actually did get together with some guys and we assembled a team; we were going to get it done. But then the team just fell apart; people had other things to do. So that was very demoralizing.
I'd be happy to hand off the material to someone else but I would have to know that they were ultra-responsible of course. And I should note that there's a copy of all of the material at UBC in British Columbia, so I guess that much (or even all? not sure) of the material is safely archived there as well.
Great and well balanced summary of this tragic situation. The US is willing to fight down to the last Ukranian and any voice for a pragmatic settlement is pro-Putin treachery!
Thanks! I appreciate the kind words.
Can you please respond to my comments from the previous comment thread (for the previous piece)? I wrote you some long comments explaining why I find our interactions frustrating. I think that it would be healthy if we could talk about that before jumping into the next conversation. I was expressing my concern with the fact that you seem (I can't be sure, but *seem*) to not read the pieces that you then comment on, which puts me in an awkward situation. Go back and look at the comments if you get a chance; I would appreciate it. :)
Excellent article that provides insight into many of the historical, cultural and geographical factors that led up the current conflict in Ukraine. Learned a lot from reading it and now look at this whole situation with a more informed perspective.
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you found it useful!
The idea that Euromaidan was a coup is patently absurd. A coup involves the armed forces of a country seizing power. No such thing happened in Ukraine. What happened was that in his brutal attempts to suppress protests, Yanukovych alienated even his own party to the point that his position became untenable. As such, he clearly decided that there wasn't a future for him in Ukraine and thus left the country, after which he was formally removed from office by the Ukrainian Parliament. How exactly that constitutes a "coup" is beyond me. The leader of a country can hardly expect to remain in power when he has fled to another, especially after massacring dozens of people.
I also love how you seem to think that only the Ukrainian election of 2010 was valid - not the elections of 2014 or 2019, in which the regional divisions were far less noticable than in previous ones. Of course, Ukraine was only a democracy from 2010-2014. Everything before and after was fascist despotism.
Thanks for commenting; I appreciate it.
"A coup involves the armed forces of a country seizing power."
I thought that it was just the overthrow of an elected government. So if you overthrow a dictator, you might just call that a "revolution"; you'd call it a "coup" if it's an elected government in a democracy.
"What happened was that in his brutal attempts to suppress protests, Yanukovych alienated even his own party to the point that his position became untenable. As such, he clearly decided that there wasn't a future for him in Ukraine and thus left the country, after which he was formally removed from office by the Ukrainian Parliament."
Do you know any good source that provides this "there was no coup" account of things? I will definitely look into this and publish about it; I have a few key questions that I hope to answer that should settle the matter of whether it was a coup.
One person told me this: "It's agreed on all sides that he fled right after the US-backed opposition refused his proposal to have an election. Whether it was a coup is not a matter of fact but of interpretation."
"you seem to think that only the Ukrainian election of 2010 was valid"
A couple people have said this. I was just providing maps to go along with Matlock's comment about how that particular election illustrates the divide; I'm not sure why that's bad.
Clarification: If the *people* overthrow a dictator, you might just call that a "revolution".
A "coup" is a sudden violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group. January 6th in the US was an attempted coup. Mubarak being removed from power in Egypt during the Arab spring was not a coup. The Arab spring is more similar to the Euromaidan than January 6th.
It does not have to be the military, although usually the military is the only force capable of succeeding in a coup.
Also, when you say "US backed" it makes it sound like something orchestrated and funded by the US, where we played an active role in its success, similar to our actions in South and Central America in the 50's. Again it's more similar to Egypt in the Arab spring, where our "backing" was limited to, "we like you guys"(the people) and "we don't like you guys"(the government).
Only got around to reading this and a couple of core criticisms and suggestions.
The overall gist of this piece suggests that the core reasoning for the invasion of Ukraine is security dominated. It seems to me that many of the claims here overlook significant factors, most significantly Putin and his advisor’s irredentism. Additionally, many of the claims upon which the article is based include factual errors or half-truths which weaken its argument.
I'm not going deconstruct every single argument in detail, rebuttals to each of them have been made. I think that commenting that these commentaries reflect the "the actual record" is ignoring many of the inaccuracies pervasive in some of these accounts. Matlock, for example, claimed in his piece that the whole discourse surrounding the invasion of Ukraine was an American hoax designed to "serve a domestic political end" and to bolster Biden's domestic support. I think taking viewpoints of people who have been so unbelievably wrong as Matlock and Chomsky in their analysis as "the actual record" is a misstep. I will hit on some of the key areas.
Abelow’s commentary is the most recent and extensive on the practical security reasons so most of this response will be related to him.
Firstly, his (and Greene’s) characterisation of the 2014 uprising as a “far-right coup” is laughable at best and disingenuous at worst. Svoboda, the main far-right party at the time of Euromaidan, failed to surpass the electoral threshold in 2014 right after the uprising, losing all representation. This severely damages the claims that the uprising can be characterised as ‘far right’. Whilst there was obviously a far-right movement in Ukraine, attempts to claim that the Maiden was far-right in character fall apart significantly when analysing the political landscape in greater detail. The involvement of some far-right elements is more indicative an alliance of circumstance, not a movement driven by far right proclivities. The strong right-wing ideology central to many of the separatist republics ideologies also undermines the inevitable depictions of the event as far-right neo-nazi fascist vs Russian speakers who merely wanted to live in peace. Neo-Nazis such as Alexei Milchakov rose to prominence and fame in Russia and the Separatist provinces. A detailed and balanced analysis of the Far right in Ukraine over that period can be found here: https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/rnv95_uk_likhachev_far-right_radicals_final.pdf
Abelow’s claim that Ukraine’s armed forces were being armed and trained up to NATO standards is correct. But he fails to acknowledge the fact that all of this occurred AFTER the initial Russian invasion in 2014. Additionally, whilst NATO adopted a position of ‘full support’ for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2014, that does not equate to membership of NATO. The main threat of NATO to Russia is Article 5. The NATO Comprehensive Assistance Packages which included arming and training core units only occurred after the 2014 Russian invasion and provided an emphasis of defensive technology and training. These focused on C4 capabilities, Medical Rehabilitation, and precession development, as well as EOD. It was quite clear that the CAP did not provide Ukraine with offensive capabilities against Russia, merely provide them with the tools necessary to withstand further Russian aggression.
Additionally, Abelow’s repetition of the Kremlin’s claims that the US/NATO AEGIS Ashore launchers pose an escalatory threat to Russia due to nuclear Tomahawks (TLAM-Ns) is ridiculous. The US disposed of all TLAM-Ns in 2010. Since 2005 the US has only forward deployed B61 gravity bombs, with them held at bases in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and Turkey. There are no forward deployed nuclear weapons on the European continent further east than Düsseldorf in the North, and Milan in Italy. Of note, in February 2022 the US offered Russia an extensive transparency mechanism to inspect the AEGIS Ashore sites in Romania and Poland to ensure there were no conventional TLAMs, only standard 3 SAMs.
This not only counters Abelow’s claim, but also Greene’s claim that having AEGIS Ashore launchers in Poland “give[s] the United State the capacity to launch a nuclear-first strike without retaliation” which, once again is blatantly untrue given the US has not possessed any TLAM-Ns since 2010. Greene merely repeats the Russian claims that there are nuclear weapons stationed in the Baltics, a claim which the most basic level of research would show to be untrue. These claims are fundamental factual errors which both Greene and Abelow make. To claim that US nuclear force posture was escalatory, especially in light of consistent Russian development in tactical nuclear capabilities starting from the 1990s, when the US was disarming tactical devices, is ridiculous.
Regarding Matlock and others’ claims that “Ukraine has been deeply divided along linguistic and cultural lines”, it is worth noting that linguistic usage is not binary, nor is linguistic preference a proxy for political purposes. Ukrainians are bilingual and often use both languages. Indeed, Kyiv remains the largest Russian-speaking city outside of Russia. Moscow learned in 2014 that language is not a proxy for political views when Russian-speaking Ukrainian parties in Kharkiv and Odesa Oblasts. Indeed, the two maps you provide do show language/political correlation, but the sample size of a single election cycle is misleading and earlier and later elections (such as 1994, 2009, 2014 and 2019) dispute the concept of a clear linguistic and political divide within the country.
Evidently, many of the authors which have been cited to provide an account of "the actual record" fall short in providing an accurate depiction of events, and even on the most basic and core factual aspects. Additionally, for writers like Greene to take Putin’s word at face value, despite significant evidence and his own actions being to the contrary, and claiming that Putin would have deescalated had the US not provided weapons to Ukraine, is naive and misinterpret's Putin's intentions. The fact that the US took the unprecedented decision to send the CIA director to show detailed their intelligence to Putin himself, blows any claims that the US was not trying to deescalate out of the water. Revealing valuable military intelligence to a foreign leader preparing for war is not the action of a state with a fundamentally escalatory stance.
Now to the main rebuttal. My main issue with this piece (and much of the ‘realist’/non-interventionist literature) is that it views the war entirely as an outcome of externally applied security pressures rather than endogenous motivations. It removes, almost entirely, Russian agency in the matter portraying them as a force which was backed so far into a hole by the West that the only way they could get out was to invade Ukraine. In particular, the exclusion of the irredentist (and frankly imperialist) views of Putin, Dugan and many in the Russian decision-making sphere regarding Ukraine are a major disservice to this analysis. In my opinion, it is an exclusion fatal to the conclusions of the analysis and on whom the eventual onus falls.
Regarding the security argument as a whole, Putin is not some sort of ‘off-the-hinge’ crazy irrational leader. Often the claim is made that he is a strategic thinker, and as such acts for security purposes. But being a strategic thinker does not preclude territorial or imperial ambitions. Indeed, from a security perspective, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was, in many ways, an entirely counterproductive action. This has been entirely evinced by the fact that Sweden has overturned 200 years of neutrality to apply for NATO, and Finland has now joined, doubling NATO’s land border with Russia. Escalation in Ukraine to halt US “expansion” and “aggression” is entirely counterproductive.
At the core of Putin’s world view is his strongly held belief that, “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,… tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” This statement was made in 2005. The view that Ukraine is not a legitimate state is not just "mendacious Russian propaganda", as Lieven puts it, it is central to Putin and the Russian state’s view of Ukraine, and all of its action must be viewed in light of that.
Putin, in his 2021 ahistorical essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” claims that "Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole... it is what I firmly believe." Putin stated that "there was no historical basis" for "the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians" and that the existence of a Ukrainian nation is a "narrative" which only exists to weaken Russia. Putin laments the Bolsheviks for what he claims was their program of "Ukrainization [which] was often imposed on those who did not see themselves as Ukrainians. This Soviet national policy secured at the state level the provision on three separate Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, instead of the large Russian nation". The crux of his position is clear: "We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed." In the lead up to the invasion, Putin made his vision of the Russian world exceedingly clear, and that world includes Ukraine as an inalienable part of Russia.
This is not new. Nor is it Putin alone who holds these views. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Putin claimed that ““Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In 2014 Putin made it very clear that the Donbas and Crimea were part of “Novorossiya” (New Russia), a historical name for Ukraine during the era of the Russian Empire. Vladislav Surkov, the man credited with much of Putin’s Ukraine policy, stated: “there is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind. An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme. [It is] a muddle instead of a state. […] But there is no nation”. Medvedev stated in 2013 (when Yanukovych was in power) that there “was no [Ukrainian] state even then”.
Since the full-scale invasion in 2022 began, Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great who “gathered in the lands” after his defeat of Sweden. Notably, Putin does not use the rhetoric of restoring the Soviet Union, but the language of Russian Imperialism in the tradition of the Czars. In fact, Putin has railed against Lenin for, in his view, creating a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He has spoken about the restoration of a Slavic Empire, including Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
The reason Putin has an aversion to NATO is not principally because it represents a direct security threat. Russia possesses 1500 strategic nuclear weapons and thousands more tactical weapons. Russia can easily deter any conventional assault. He views it as a threat because it provides a way for Ukraine to exercise its own agency in the face of Russian threats. Putin’s worldview on this matter, which invariably removes any agency from Ukraine, inevitably placed him on a path to “reclaim” Ukraine by one means or another.
The claim that “integrating Ukraine into NATO was—frankly—a fine way to ensure Ukraine’s destruction” is incorrect because it presumes that NATO expansion was the root cause Putin’s objections, rather than the exercise of Ukrainian agency. The “integration” into NATO, which in reality was providing them with the capabilities to defend from themselves (everyone in DC knew Ukraine would not join NATO), is only a way to ensure Ukraine’s destruction if you view the only outcome to a non-invaded Ukraine as subjugation to Russia. Indeed, the initiation of the whole conflict, the EU's Association Agreement - which even in September 2013 Yanukovich was eager to sign, having been stymied due to EU objections over his imprisonment of political rivals - was not a concern around security or nuclear weapons. It was a concern that Ukraine was exercising its own agency, even under Yanukovich (see statement from PM Medvedev above). Indeed, Yanukovich only cancelled the deal after Russia threatened a trade war and to cut off gas supplies.
Additionally, to claim that Poroshenko's post-2014 government was ethno-nationalist and "opposed to local autonomy" is ahistorical. Yanukovich's 2010 changes to the constitution centralised core powers with the Government. Poroshenko brought back the 2004 constitution and further amended it to allow for greater decentralisation, replacing the existing Oblasts and granting regional status to Crimea, Kyiv, Sevastopol as well as creating a new subdivision of "hromadas" (communities). This included over the issue of language with Poroshenko stating that "the lion's share of problems, starting from what language, including Russian, to use on the territory of a community, will be within the powers of local authorities."
Failure to recognise or analyse this consistent and pervasive narrative from Putin and his senior advisors regarding their view of Ukraine over decades, and a failure to recognise this position as one which fundamentally underpins Putin’s motivations and views toward Ukraine, is a fatal error. At the core of Putin’s worldview, Ukraine is Russia. Ukraine will always be Russia. Ukrainian agency or self-determination is a myth. This is a war to reaffirm Russian imperial and territorial control over Ukraine, and to reintegrate it into “Novorossiya”, the Russian empire. Putin does not view NATO expansion as a threat, he views any shift of Ukraine away from Russia as a threat because he believes it is a core part of Russia. Yet this worldview removes any agency from Ukraine. Putin views Ukraine as illegitimate and part of Russia, and therefore any indication of Ukrainian independence or agency constitutes a security threat. Putin has made it clear, time and again, that what lies at the centre of his world view is the oneness and subordination of Ukraine to Russia.
Thanks for commenting! I just want to ask if you read my previous piece on this. I believe that it's linked at the very start of this one. I apologize if I wasn't more clear that this piece is the second piece and that the first one is important to read beforehand.
This piece that you're commenting on begins with these words:
I’ll use this piece to talk about whether it was necessary to integrate Ukraine into NATO. Someone might read my 12 February 2023 piece—which talks about the history that preceded the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine—and say “Maybe integrating Ukraine into NATO was indeed ‘highly provocative’, but how else could we have protected Ukraine from Russian aggression?”. This piece will address that question—I’ll quote from various commentaries and then give my own thoughts.
I did read the previous piece. This is a response to this particular piece of work, taking into account the initial one. You have, indeed, quoted from numerous commentaries. However, a great many of these commentaries possess significant errors, as I outlined in the first aspects of the response. These commentaries form the base of your analysis as to whether NATO "integration" was necessary or "provocative". Given your claim that these commentaries provide a key insight into "the actual record" as to the escalation of the conflict, they needed to be addressed. Your previous article was a repetition of Chomsky's claims. I decided to reply here as the poor historiography in both articles (I wouldn't rely on Chomsky as a reliable source).
Fundamentally you claim that NATO expansion was the core reasoning for the initiation of the war. You also claim that Ukraine was becoming a "NATO member in all but name". As I pointed out in my comment, this lacks an understanding as to where the real value of NATO is (principally Article 5), and the activities of the CAPs. Burns and the whole US NatSec area recognise that Ukraine in NATO is a red line for Russia.
You take NATO "integration" as a key cause, at face value, when it is anything but that. You seem to assume that training Ukrainian forces is tantamount to alliance membership. It isn't. The failure to integrate an acknowledgement of Putin's worldview causes your core analysis regarding the role of "NATO integration" and its outcomes to be faulty.
Thanks; I just wasn't sure if you'd read the previous piece. A lot of people don't seem (somehow?...I guess that they don't read things and instead launch into their responses without reading for some reason) to recognize that the point about Russia's security concerns and crossing the "red lines" of Ukraine and Georgia and everything is from the US establishment. That's a big thing to start with; it's not left-wing radicals who have been saying this for 30 years, but rather the people I quote like WIlliam Burns and a striking range of others. That doesn't mean that they're correct but these experts (both hawks and doves) are about the furthest thing from radical that you can imagine. So it does prompt the question of how every top Russia expert got things so wrong; it's not like these people are left-wing. Chomsky did an interview recently where someone attributed the "red line" stuff to him and he had to go through where the notion actually comes from and how it comes from this long "Who's Who" list of US Russia experts. The people who devised US Cold-War policy; not left-wingers.
NATO red lines are a thing. But as I've mentioned before, that's to do principally with membership. Yet the extent to which NATO red lines have played are not what you have claimed.
The notion that the current war was initiated due to a violation of those red lines is inaccurate. The US made it clear from 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would not be granted MEPs. That remained the status quo even past 2014, when CEPs were provided to enhance Ukrainian defensive capabilities, but Membership was never realistically on the table, despite Ukrainian attempts.
The invasion was not prompted by "security concerns" in the traditional sense, but by increasing Ukrainian independence. Fundamentally, Putin is not driven by "security concerns" as you frame it in terms of simple capabilities. Putin's "Security concerns" are best viewed in the context of his irredentist views regarding the subjugation of Ukraine as part of a greater Russian state. In that sense, any form of Ukrainian agency to the contrary of what Putin envisions for Ukraine is a "security concern". The threat, therefore, isn't NATO military expansion per se, but the ability for Ukraine to be independent of Russia. This results in an inaccurate conclusion regarding the proclivities of Russia for aggression. Russia will remain aggressive in any situation where Ukraine exercises its own agency in a manner where it does not align with Russia. This was evident even with Yanukovych in 2013. The fact that many of the Russian claims regarding NATO expansion (such as the false AEGIS systems claims repeated by Abelow & Greene) as well as the fact that was clear to everybody on earth that Ukraine did not the capabilities to launch an offensive against Russia (the CAPs primarily armed Ukraine in a defensive orientation) clearly indicate that NATO expansion itself was not the security concern, but an independent Ukraine was.
This is why Director Burns, and the CIA in general, recognises Putin's drive as coming from an irredentist and imperialist viewpoint. The Director has noted that in his own interactions with Putin prior to the beginning of the war, that Putin believed that Ukraine and the West was weak, that Ukraine was not a real country and was part of Russia, and wished to further those aims. Fiona Hill, who wrote THE Book on Putin has also pointed this out.
I would be interested to know, by the way, about the technical reasons why the missile systems aren't offensive. I myself have often frowned at the notion that the missiles would be used to attack Russia...it seems far-fetched. But on the technical side of things, I totally understand the problem. Suppose you walk into a store with a handgun and say "It's just a defensive handgun"...that's not going to go well because nothing about the actual gun makes it "defensive". And I'm sure that other countries, not just Russia, would take the same approach and not be comforted by the notion that the weapons are merely "defensive". So if you know any technical reason that there's no threat then I'd be interested.
On the other side of things, like I mentioned, I'm not sure what the exact threat truly is. Like, what scenario does Russia envision leading to a missile strike against them? Maybe there are such scenarios. But the very presence of the missiles alone doesn't seem like something that's a real threat. Although, how would other countries react? Presumably the exact same way; it's intolerable.
I'd like to see actual Russian security analyses; that would presumably explain precisely why the missiles were seen as a danger.
Thanks for the interesting comment! It's super interesting because you and I have mirror-image views of the war; completely polar-opposite perspectives. My view is that this is about security concerns (as far as we can tell; nobody actually knows what the Kremlin decision-making was). And my view is that these security concerns are a broader Russia thing; it's not all about Putin. In fact Boris Yeltsin freaked out about NATO too; he was a US darling as you know. So it's interesting because I'm talking about security concerns that go way back before Putin and that extend beyond Putin. Remember what the head of the CIA said about not being able to find ANYONE in Russia who was remotely OK with Ukraine joining NATO. So it's not about Putin. Here's the quote I'm talking about:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines 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. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze.…It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Hi Andrew, apologies this is off topic, I've been looking for a recording of the Chomsky-Gzowski interview and followed a trail of breadcrumbs through your youtube page to here, which seems like your most active page. Did you ever manage to get that interview processed and uploaded anywhere? I've always wanted to see it and I'd be happy to contribute in some way to that or getting any other historical chomsky content uploaded.
If you prefer you can email me at my firstname dot lastname at gmail, or dm me on twitter @garethdmm!
The unfortunate part is that you never really know what you're going to get. Some of it is gold, I'm sure. Some of it is uninteresting.
There's also quite a nightmare involved when it comes to editing the video files and preparing it for Youtube upload. A lot of work, for sure.
I have a ton of Chomsky material. I feel guilty about it because I was supposed to get it digitized but it just proved to be a huge project. I actually did get together with some guys and we assembled a team; we were going to get it done. But then the team just fell apart; people had other things to do. So that was very demoralizing.
I'd be happy to hand off the material to someone else but I would have to know that they were ultra-responsible of course. And I should note that there's a copy of all of the material at UBC in British Columbia, so I guess that much (or even all? not sure) of the material is safely archived there as well.