Cartoonization

Our media covers Vladimir Putin—who's a war criminal—in a simplistic, inaccurate, and propagandistic way.

I’ll use this piece to point out that the way that our media covers Vladimir Putin is simplistic, inaccurate, and propagandistic. Putin is a war criminal—the 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine is an enormous war crime that makes me sick. And Putin is undoubtedly extremely corrupt—his corruption disgusts me. Putin has done all sorts of horrible things. The point isn’t that there’s necessarily anything good about him—the point is instead that Western media turns him into a cartoon in a way that dumbs us down and makes diplomatic success less likely. You can “cartoonize” a figure—make a two-dimensional and unrealistic version of them—even if the figure is vile and terrible. We should criticize the dangerous and destructive process of cartoonization. And one can criticize the cartoonization of a given figure even if one can’t think of a single good, moral, or admirable thing about the figure.

We should always question our assumptions about Russia and other countries. For example, there is—regarding Russia—a common assumption that members of the nomenklatura became the post-Soviet oligarchs. And Ion Marandici provides evidence—in an interesting 2014 paper—that seems to undermine this idea. I can’t speak to how well Marandici’s paper stands up to scrutiny, but the paper very usefully reminds us to question what we assume to be true.

Turning Putin into a Cartoon Villain

A 30 March 2022 FAIR piece says: even “before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with”; such “portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda”; the “implications underlying these media debates and speculations about Putin’s psyche are immense”; if “one believes that Putin is a ‘madman,’ the implication is that meaningful diplomatic negotiations with Russia are impossible, pushing military options to the forefront as the means of resolving the Ukraine situation”; if “Putin is not a rational actor, the implication is that no kind of diplomacy could have prevented the Russian invasion, and therefore no other country besides Russia shares blame for ongoing violence”; yet “another implication is that if Putin’s defects made Russia’s invasion unavoidable, then regime change may be necessary to resolve the conflict”; “Western media have for years been debating whether Putin is insane”; in “the Daily Beast (3/1/22), Amy Knight, a historian of Russia and the USSR, displayed a remarkable ability to read Putin’s mind, discerning the real motivations of someone she describes as possibly ‘detached from reality’”; the Western media has “offered quite specific, though varying, evaluations of Putin’s mental state from a distance”; these “diagnoses from afar have been going on for a long time”; some “writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as ‘Putinology’—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives”; it’s “a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99)”; some “contemporary attempts to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by psychoanalyzing Putin make sweeping judgments about his mental state, even while insisting that a professional diagnosis would be necessary to confirm their speculative perceptions of him”; as “of this writing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hasn’t attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon, likely due to the US sharing military intelligence with the Ukrainian government”; this “silence on both the diplomatic and military fronts risks further escalation instead of a quick negotiated end to the war”; the “Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22)”; and it’s “important not to let US officials subvert peace negotiations between the two parties on the evidence-free grounds that negotiations with Russia are pointless”.

A 21 July 2022 FAIR piece says: “FAIR (3/30/22) has previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless”; tracing “a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage”; “there are few better ways to vilify foreign leaders in the West than by making exaggerated accusations that they are Adolf Hitler reincarnate”; the “glib trope demonstrates how frivolously historical comparisons are thrown around to advance US geopolitical goals”; “British journalist Louis Allday (Ebb Magazine, 3/15/22) compiled a list of instances where Western journalists and officials have compared foreign leaders to Hitler—with Hitler sometimes coming off better in the comparison”; “Hitler-like leaders include Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and even Cuba’s Fidel Castro”; one “inevitable feature of these Hitler comparisons is frequent reference to ‘appeasement’ when reporting on the US’s dealings with foreign leaders”; this “presents any attempt at diplomatic negotiations with foreign leaders opposed by the US as a misguided or unprincipled effort to placate an irrational or evil dictator bent on expansionist conquest”; before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace worried that ‘there was a whiff of Munich in the air’”; this “was a clear reference to what is commonly perceived to be a failed policy of diplomatic efforts to prevent World War II in the West, when European powers agreed to let Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement (BBC, 2/13/22)”; although “establishment Western pundits and officials like to claim that the Russian invasion was ‘unprovoked,’ FAIR (1/28/22, 3/4/22) has pointed out that this self-serving narrative omits a record of conscious provocations against Russia via NATO expansion towards Russian borders, in violation of promises made to Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev”; “New York Times columnist David Leonhardt (5/9/22)” falsely “described the US’s previous foreign policy toward Russia as a ‘strategy of non-confrontation’ rather than encirclement and antagonism”; accusations “of ‘appeasing’ Russia or Putin have been raised towards influential Western officials who have either engaged in diplomacy or advocated de-escalation through negotiations”; an “oft-repeated corollary to the Western media’s frequent Hitler comparisons is that there was little point before the invasion in addressing Russia’s security concerns surrounding NATO expansion and the US’s unilateral abandonment of arms control treaties, since Putin supposedly wanted to recreate the Soviet Union or Russian Empire despite his repeated explicit denials”; “Putin’s alleged belief that the modern state of Ukraine has no right to exist, the argument goes, is proof of his supposed Hitlerian expansionist ambitions”; the “two sources Western media most cite to make this claim are Putin’s speech (2/21/22) recognizing the independence of the separatist Donbas republics, and an essay he wrote last year (7/12/21)”; there have—regarding these two sources—been “blatant misrepresentations”; “when one actually reads both sources, rather than relying on secondhand sources to explain what Putin meant, it quickly becomes apparent that” blatant misrepresentation has occurred; the “hyperbolic comparisons between Russia and Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, as well as constant accusations that anyone who attempts to negotiate with Russia for a peaceful end to the war is engaged in ‘appeasement,’ have cost the world opportunities to de-escalate”; “Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, cohosts of the Citations Needed podcast (10/9/19), point out that the emotionally manipulative and thought-terminating comparisons to Hitler and Munich are designed to suggest” that “‘every so-called dictator is a new Hitler and every negotiation, every potential negotiation even, with those countries is a new Munich, is a new abdication of world responsibility that will inevitably lead’” to “‘a new Holocaust’”; the “extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate”; and the “frequent Nazi comparisons and Munich references made by Western media paint those who would prefer a negotiated settlement to years of bloodshed, the risk of World War III and nuclear war as ‘appeasers’ of a Hitlerian dictator with genocidal ambitions”.

I want to highlight these observations from the above FAIR pieces: some “writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as ‘Putinology’—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives”; it’s “a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99)”; the “Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22)”; and the “extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate”.

The West’s Incorrect Story

Tony Wood writes in his 2018 book Russia Without Putin: “Western media coverage and analysis of Russia are overly fixated on Putin’s personality”; too “much attention has been paid to the man”; not enough attention has been paid “to the system over which he presides”; the “obsession with Putin’s persona effectively reduces a whole range of political, economic and social questions to the swings of one individual’s mood or morality”; at “best, this is highly misleading, distracting us from the broader structural forces that have done so much to shape Russia’s fortunes in the last few decades”; at “worst, the focus on Putin is dangerously counter-productive, leading to profoundly mistaken ideas about the source of Russia’s ills”; at “the height of the Cold War, Western views of the USSR often came packaged in pat formulas about tyranny and freedom, totalitarianism versus democracy”; “at least there was a sizeable body of writers, scholars, activists and thinkers who could supply a more nuanced perspective, based on first-hand experience”; the “West’s levels of expertise and awareness about Russia have, sadly, declined steeply since then, opening the way for all kinds of ill-informed speculation—often churned out by individuals with no knowledge of the place, let alone of the people or the language—to circulate unchallenged”; and as “a result, public opinion and policy decisions are based on a very shallow understanding of the country”.

For “much of the post-Soviet era, the Russian elite—Putin very much included—were committed to an ideal of alliance or even integration with the West”; over “time, however, it became increasingly clear that this was a one-sided fantasy, and Russia’s elite gradually abandoned it, swapping dreams of integration for a more strident defence of Russian interests”; “it was only with the Ukraine crisis and annexation of Crimea in 2013–14 that Russia finally dropped the idea of alliance with the West”; “Russia’s attempts to forge a pragmatic alliance with the West, and to develop closer trade and economic ties, kept failing”; and “Moscow’s aspirations for alliance or integration were repeatedly ignored or rebuffed by the West”.

Richard Sakwa writes in his 2020 book The Putin Paradox: a “party state ruled the USSR, although the balance of power between the party and the state varied”; in “post-communist Russia, the functional analogue of the party is the administrative regime, giving rise to a regime-state”; a “power system stands outside of constitutional institutions and processes, governed by its own rules and understandings (ponyatiya, a code of mutual comprehension) which together comprise an ‘informal constitution’”; the “administrative regime exercises a pervasive influence over political processes and society”; parties “are shaped, elections are managed and the normative framework of political life is constantly modified in response to evolving challenges but governed by one constant principle—to ensure the autonomy of the regime, to ensure that it is not swallowed by society on the one side or forced to abide by constitutional rules on the other”; the “system is not foolproof, and each electoral cycle is something of a trial for the managerial capacities of the regime”; as “little as possible is left to chance, but because of the dualism inherent in the system—the tension between constitutionally mandated competitiveness and regime-driven managerialism—there are always opportunities for acts of resistance and unexpected events”; this “is a dynamic model of Russian politics, which recognises that the legitimacy of the administrative regime is dependent on its formal compliance with the norms of the constitutional state”; there “is permanent, although seldom creative, tension between authoritarianism and constitutionalism”; this “system is far more complex and sophisticated than a simple one-man personal dictatorship”; the system “is constrained by powerful ‘horizontal’ forces, various interest groups representing deeply entrenched factional communities”; “Putin is by far the most authoritative and pre-eminent element in the regime-state, but he also has to ensure that the various horizontal pressures remain balanced and that constitutional norms retain vitality”; and if “he infringed the unwritten rules, then the system would be destabilised and his power would be jeopardised”.

The 15 July 1997 cover of Time. (Image source here.)

The “regime-state was not Putin’s invention but was formed in the 1990s”; it “emerged as a distinct type of governance in the Yeltsin period but achieved a peak of functional efficiency under Putin”; the “manipulative techniques of electoral management were forged in the 1990s in conditions of genuine political pluralism, and they were then honed by Putin in a more managerial environment”; “the ‘democratic’ forces, with the help of American advisors, manipulated the 1996 presidential election to get Yeltsin re-elected for a second term, even though his health had collapsed”; the “1996 election is often considered the moment when Russian democracy died”; the “massive abuse of the privileges of incumbency, accompanied by the fear that a” Gennady “Zyuganov victory would halt Russia’s move towards the market and liberal democracy, meant that the self-defined democratic forces intervened to ensure an outcome that would allow the continuation of reforms”; regarding the 1996 election, “the communist leader Zyuganov would probably have won” if “there had been a genuinely free and fair contest”; this “would have provided Russia with the experience of a competitive transfer of power, something the country still lacks”; and “Putin is a product of the system that he inherited, created in part with Western help when in 1996 they ensured Yeltsin’s re-election and with it the Kremlin-oligarch alliance, which in the end delivered Putin”.

And Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne write in their piece “Why Are We In Ukraine?”, which appears in the June 2023 issue of Harper’s: from “Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain”; unlike “the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot”; as “former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia”; thanks “to Washington’s efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia”; “Washington’s rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russia’s forces in the field”; “indirectly and otherwise, Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of Russian casualties in Ukraine”; the “United States has reportedly provided real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv, enabling Ukraine to sink a Russian cruiser, fire on soldiers in their barracks, and kill as many as a dozen of Moscow’s generals”; the “United States may have already committed covert acts of war against Russia, but even if the report that blames the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines on a U.S. naval operation authorized by the Biden Administration is mistaken, Washington is edging close to direct conflict with Moscow”; assuredly, “the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, ever at the ready, are at a heightened state of vigilance”; save “for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of a swift and catastrophic escalation in the nuclear face-off between these superpowers is greater than at any point in history”; to “most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—the reasons for this perilous situation are clear”; “Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy”; to “the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin’s paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War”; “Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational—someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest”; although “the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power”; to “try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to ‘appease’ Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after ‘every good-faith effort’ by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue”; this “conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving”; it “fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse”; and both “the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would”.

Russia “repeatedly and unambiguously characterized NATO expansion as a perilous and provocative encirclement”; opposition “to NATO expansion was ‘the one constant in what we have heard from all Russian interlocutors,’ the U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas R. Pickering reported to Washington thirty years ago”; every “leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every Russian foreign policy official since the end of the Cold War has strenuously objected—publicly as well as in private to Western diplomats—to NATO expansion, first into the former Soviet satellite states, and then into former Soviet republics”; the “entire Russian political class—including liberal Westernizers and democratic reformers—has steadily echoed the same”; after “Putin insisted at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATO’s expansion plans were unrelated to ‘ensuring security in Europe,’ but rather represented ‘a serious provocation,’ Gorbachev reminded the West that ‘for us Russians, by the way, Putin wasn’t saying anything new’”; from “the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous”; while “Russians protested Washington’s NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests—or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion”; “Washington’s message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting”; normal “diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete”; “Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States”; while “Russians of every political stripe have judged Washington’s enfolding of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliance’s expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic”; “because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russia’s general apprehension about NATO’s push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance”; that “view certainly reflected Russians’ intense and fraught cultural, religious, economic, historical, and linguistic ties with Ukraine”; “strategic concerns were paramount”, though; “Crimea (the majority of whose people are linguistically and culturally Russian, and have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia) has been the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, since 1783”; since “then, the peninsula has been Russia’s window onto the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the key to its southern defenses”; up “until its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia worried that, were Ukraine to join NATO, Moscow would not only have to surrender its largest naval base, but that base would perforce be incorporated into a hostile military pact, which happens to be the world’s most powerful military entity”; the “Black Sea would have become NATO’s lake”; “Western experts have long acknowledged the unanimity and intensity of Russians’ fear of Ukraine joining NATO”; and “Washington fully grasped the cause and intensity of Moscow’s panic over the prospect of the West’s absorbing Ukraine into its orbit, as well as the diplomatic and security accommodations Russia required”.

In “2014, NATO started training roughly ten thousand Ukrainian troops annually, inaugurating Washington’s program of arming, training, and reforming Kyiv’s military as part of a broader effort to achieve—to quote the State Department’s 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership—Ukraine’s ‘full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions’”; that “aim, according to the charter, was linked to America’s ‘unwavering commitment’ to the defense of Ukraine as well as to its eventual membership in NATO”; the “charter also asserted Kyiv’s claim to Crimea and its territorial waters”; by “2021, Ukraine’s and NATO’s militaries had stepped up their coordination in joint exercises such as ‘Rapid Trident 21,’ which was led by the Ukrainian army with the participation of fifteen militaries and heralded by the Ukrainian general who co-directed it as intending to ‘improve the level of interoperability between units and headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO partners’”; given “the weapons and training the Ukrainian military had absorbed, and given Washington’s and NATO’s newly explicit diplomatic, military, and ideological commitments to Kyiv, and—most important—given NATO’s sophisticated program to integrate Ukraine’s forces with its own, Ukraine could now justifiably be seen as a de facto member of the alliance”; beginning “in early 2021, Russia responded by amassing forces on Ukraine’s border with the intention—plainly and repeatedly stated—of arresting Ukraine’s NATO integration”; far “from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine (an impossible goal for the 190,000 troops that Russia eventually deployed in its initial attack on the country), all of Moscow’s demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that ‘the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward,’ as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a press conference on January 14, 2022”; “given that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to be—defensive alarm over an expansive rival’s military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor”; and to “acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S. officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism”.

Washington “will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat”; echoing “previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily”; “Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace”; for “its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea”; “Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse”; neither “Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full”; barring “either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise”; reaching “such an accord would be extremely difficult”; “Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine”; for “its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas”; more “painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia”; a “peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules)”; most “important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality”; “Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the ‘entire territory’ occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war”; “such an accord would need to make allowances for Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its ‘near-abroad’”; and making these allowances “would require the imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty)”.

Tea Leaf–Reading

Noam Chomsky refers—in a 22 December 2022 Truthout interview—to “the industry of tea leaf–reading that seeks to penetrate Putin’s twisted mind, discerning all sorts of perversities and grand ambitions”. This tea leaf–reading “industry reverses George W. Bush’s discoveries when he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and recognized it to be good”—the industry “is about as well-grounded as Bush’s insights”. The “tea leaf–reading industry has seized on occasional comments by Putin, generally taken out of context, to conjure” up “frightening images of Russia on the march”.

I think that Geoffrey Roberts’s 2022 essay “‘Now or Never’” demonstrates—regarding Putin—an approach that’s the opposite of tea leaf–reading:

The Immediate Origins Of Putin's Preventative War On Ukraine (2022)

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Roberts writes: this “essay is devoted to the when and why of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022”; as “far as possible, it refrains from speculation and relies almost entirely on the record of Putin’s public pronouncements during the immediate prewar crisis”; that “public record is currently the best available evidence of his motivations and calculations”; what “this evidence shows is that Putin went to war to prevent Ukraine from becoming an ever-stronger and threatening NATO bridgehead on Russia’s borders”; at “the heart of Putin’s preventative war thinking was an imagined future in which Russia would confront an existential threat”; the “longer war was delayed, he argued in February 2022, the greater would be the danger and the more costly a future conflict between Russia, Ukraine, and the West”; better “to go to war now, before NATO’s Ukrainian bridgehead on Russia’s borders became an imminent rather than a potential existential threat—a statement that he repeated during the course of the war”; pre-emptive “action to preclude an even bloodier conflict in the future is a standard justification for aggressive war, one that is often accompanied by illusions of quick and easy victory”; to “say that Putin believed he had been backed into a corner by Ukraine and the West is not to endorse his perceptions and assessments of the situation”; “greater understanding of Putin’s calculations may help clarify how this calamity came about, how it could have been prevented, and how an even greater future catastrophe might be averted”; it’s quite possible that war could “have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty”; no “war is inevitable until the moment of decision”; that “was as true in February 2022 as it was in July 1914”; a “constant theme of Putin’s public discourse throughout the pre-invasion crisis was his extreme distrust of the” West, “especially the United States”; and the West could’ve made significant concessions—“in relation to Russia’s security concerns”—that “might have assuaged his darkest forebodings and persuaded him that the risks of peace were lower than those of war”.

Benjamin Abelow writes in his 2022 book How the West Brought War to Ukraine: in “the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the explanation offered for America’s involvement has changed”; what “had been pitched as a limited, humanitarian effort to help Ukraine defend itself has morphed to include an additional aim”, namely “to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight another war in the future”; “this strategic objective may have been in place from the start”; whether “or not eviscerating Russia’s military has been the American plan from the outset, the policy is not surprising because it follows logically, even predictably, from an overarching Western narrative about Russia that has already been widely accepted”; according “to this narrative, Mr. Putin is an insatiable expansionist who lacks any plausible national security motivations for his decisions”; this “narrative portrays Mr. Putin as a new Hitler, and the Russian move into Ukraine as akin to the Nazi aggression of World War II”; “the narrative portrays any Western desire to compromise and negotiate a quick end to the conflict as wishful thinking and appeasement”; “America’s new military objective thus emerges directly from Western perceptions about Moscow’s motivations and the causes of the war”; “the Western narrative is incorrect”; in “crucial respects, it is the opposite of truth”; the “underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war”; these “provocations placed Russia in an untenable situation, for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution”; in “criticizing the West, it is not my aim to justify Moscow’s invasion or exonerate Russia’s leaders”; “I have no brief for Mr. Putin”; “I believe he had alternatives to war”; “I do want to understand him—in the sense of seeking to rationally assess the causal sequence that led him to launch the war”; the “story of an evil, irrational, intrinsically expansionist Russia with a paranoid leader at its helm, opposed by a virtuous United States and Europe, is a confused and strange confabulation, inconsistent with a whole series of directionally aligned events during the past 30 years—events whose significance and meaning should have been readily apparent”; in “fact, the predominant Western narrative might itself be viewed as a kind of paranoia”; incrementally, “in steps small and large, the West has disregarded Russia’s reasonable security concerns, considering them irrelevant, stoking Russian concerns about encirclement and invasion”; at “the same time, the United States and its European allies have implied that a rational actor would be assuaged by the West’s statements of benign intention”; in “many instances, Western leaders, especially from the United States, have actively disrespected Mr. Putin, sometimes insulting him to his face”; in “doing all this, the West has suggested that Mr. Putin is imagining strategic threats where none in fact exist”; this “Western framing—which posits a lack of legitimate Russian security concerns coupled with implied and explicit accusations of irrationality—underlies much of the currently dominant narrative”; and it “also underlies the ideological position of the Russia hawks who play such a prominent role in Washington”.

In “2015, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer began stating publicly that if the West did not stop trying to integrate Ukraine militarily, politically, and economically, the Russians, out of concern for their security, might feel compelled to take military action, including attempting to ‘wreck’ Ukraine as a way to remove it from the equation”; perhaps “surprisingly, the basic thrust of the historical argument made by Mearsheimer and other critics of NATO expansion seems to be accepted even by some aggressively Russophobic analysts”; a “recent interview with Fiona Hill, a Washington insider and outspoken Russia hawk, illustrates this point”; “she asserts several important points that hawkish analysts are typically loath to acknowledge”; first, “she asserts that in 2007—seven years before Russia’s annexation of Crimea—the U.S. intelligence establishment recognized there was a ‘real, genuine risk’ that in response to NATO expansion Russia might annex Crimea”; second, “she asserts that in 2007, the intelligence community recognized that NATO expansion might precipitate a broader Russian military action, not just one confined to Crimea, but a ‘much larger action’ taken against both Ukraine and Georgia”; third, “Hill asserts that Russia’s participation in the Russo-Georgian war was a response to NATO expansion”; fourth, “Hill states quite directly that, unlike what it did in Georgia, Russia took no action in Ukraine in 2008 because ‘the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership’”; in “these points, especially the final one, Hill directly acknowledges the crucial role that NATO expansion and Western military encroachments have played in motivating Russian actions in Ukraine”; “it appears that, while arguing for a hawkish position, Hill helps make the case for a perspective much like the one presented by Mearsheimer”; “for reasons hard to fathom, she and like-minded policy gurus give this perspective little or no weight” when it comes to their decision-making; regarding their decision-making, “the perspective seems to fade into the background”; instead “of openly acknowledging the untoward consequences of NATO expansion, they attribute Mr. Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine to an unhinged and unprovoked Hitler-like drive for territorial expansion”; both “Mearsheimer and Hill appear to believe NATO expansion formed the underlying basis for the transformation of Russian behavior that culminated in the Ukraine war”; “both analysts anticipated that, in response to NATO expansion, Russia might seek to ‘wreck’ Ukraine—or, as Hill put it, to turn Ukraine into a ‘fractured, shattered’ nation”; “I find little fundamental disagreement between Hill and Mearsheimer”; “what I do find confusing is that Hill seems not to account in her overall analysis for this important area of agreement between herself and Mearsheimer”; “late in the interview, Hill describes those who point to Western responsibility for the Ukraine crisis as dupes of Russian disinformation”; and in doing “this, Hill seems to disregard her own conclusions about the untoward consequences of NATO expansion”.

There’s “no doubt that Russian perceptions of external threats have been deeply influenced by Russia’s past”; in “addition to the German invasions of World War II and World War I, Russia had, a hundred years earlier, been invaded by Napoleon, whose army reached as far as Moscow”; Richard Sakwa says that Moscow “‘doesn’t have two major oceans to defend itself’” and has no mountains or rivers to defend itself; he says that Moscow is “‘set on a vast north Eurasian plain, with no defensible borders, and a constant sense of threat from the West’”; policy “hawks such as Hill are, of course, aware of this history and geography”; “instead of viewing them as potential psychological reinforcements for legitimate Russian security concerns, these analysts communicate the view that Mr. Putin is engaged in a Hitlerian land grab, a modern version of a pitiless hunt for lebensraum, and that Putin himself is essentially Hitler incarnate—paranoid, living in the imperial past, and driven by an innate Russian militarism”; and this “sort of analysis can be maintained only by disregarding conclusions about NATO expansion that Hill herself has reached and publicly asserted”.

And Chomsky comments in a 9 October 2022 interview: it’s “worthwhile to digress for a moment on US doctrinal isolation”; to “take one of myriad examples, the current issue of the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs—moderate and independent by US standards—has an article on Ukraine and the world by two representatives of the more liberal wing of policy planning and discussion, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent”; they “find incomprehensible the unwillingness of the Global South—most of the world—to join the US in its obviously noble efforts”; the “South even sinks so low as to ‘argue that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is no different from what the United States did in Iraq or Vietnam’—which would indeed be a serious error, but for reasons the authors could not comprehend”; the “South doesn’t even share our distress ‘that Russia has violated the UN Charter and international law by unleashing an unprovoked attack on a neighbor’s territory,’ an unimaginable crime”; the “only explanation the authors can think of for this remarkable lack of understanding” on the world’s part “is Putin’s propaganda machinations”; and it “will be interesting to see if there is a word of critical comment”.