As the Russia-Ukraine War continues to rage, western leaders must revisit its provenance to better inform their decision-making and maintain their resolve.
Some would have us believe that the West is principally responsible for the conflict. Professor John Mearsheimer, for example, a leading scholar in the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy, argues that NATO’s post-Cold War eastward expansion provoked the Russian bear. His assessment posits the view that as the American-led NATO alliance expanded in 1999 to include the eastern European countries of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and again in 2004 to incorporate, inter alia, the Baltic states, Russian concerns were blithely and ill-advisedly dismissed.
Such provocative insouciance was further exemplified when George W. Bush responded to Putin’s 2007 speech – a speech in which the Russian leader temperately made his concerns vis-à-vis NATO expansion unambiguously clear – by effectively inviting Ukraine into the alliance as well. According to Professor Mearsheimer, these actions – encroaching upon Russia’s historic sphere of influence and rubbing salt into the wounds inflicted by their Cold War defeat – did everything but pull the trigger. Russia invaded Ukraine to defend itself from what it perceives to be an existential threat from NATO’s eastward expansion.
Peter Hitchens gives further weight to this school of thought by invoking the opinion of the great diplomat and architect of America’s Cold War policy of containment, George F. Kennan. He warned against NATO’s eastward expansion during the 1990s, arguing that it was a provocation that could feed Russian resentment.
Mearsheimer and Hitchens go on to urge western leaders – and particularly the USA – to shut down the conflict before it becomes a NATO-Russia nuclear confrontation – though they never quite reveal how this might be done, apart from the implied assumption that the omnipotent West could, if it pleased, stop the war tomorrow. This seems fanciful and, in my view, denies agency to the main antagonists.
Indeed, I think Mearsheimer’s misdiagnosis of the conflict as a de-facto proxy war between the West and Russia, instigated by an avaricious, hegemonic and American-led NATO coalition, has led to a fundamentally flawed prescription. NATO is a defensive alliance. Its expansion was not the result of colonial ambition, but the voluntary accession of former satrapies seeking security from the possibility of Russian revanchism. Russia has a long history of invading its neighbours, after all – a history that, incidentally, predates the existence of NATO.
As the historian Stephen Kotkin argues, a country that cannot voluntarily join an alliance of its choice and fulfil a right protected by international law – a right afforded by agreements like the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which Russia signed – is not a free country. Mearsheimer’s mistake is not only to ignore this fact, but to view the West as omnipotent and, as such, the cause of – and prescription for – the current conflict. He divests responsibility from – and denies agency to – not only Russia and Ukraine, but also the former Soviet satrapies and satellite states that successfully applied to join NATO.
Proponents of the ‘NATO expansionism’ thesis also point to western politicians’ involvement in the 2014 Maidan Revolution and overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. This, they claim, was an example of western interference that led to an inevitable Russian backlash.
It also demonstrates that membership of western multinational organisations – whether it be the EU or NATO – is not voluntary, but coerced. When an elected president determines to reject an EU trade deal – a precursor to EU membership – western leaders instigate an illegal coup to replace said leader with one more oriented towards the West, or so the story goes.
That some western politicians – most notably Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign affair’s representative – fed this false narrative by parading through the Maidan in support of the protesters, does not detract from the fact that such actions were more a demonstration of preening self-aggrandisement than an insidious and serious attempt to control events.
The stark reality was that Yanukovych broke a manifesto commitment to sign a trade deal with the European Union. When the Ukrainian people objected, peacefully protesting in their tens of thousands, he ordered his troops to open fire on them – 108 were killed. This led to further protests, his resignation, and his eventual unconstitutional and voluntary flight from the country. It was not a western-inspired plot. It was a domestic dispute that Putin used as a convenient excuse to illegally occupy and annex the Crimea, and seize parts of eastern Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin is solely to blame for this war. He is the latest incarnation of a Russian leader determined to project power through imperial conquest. This is nothing new.
He views the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century – and, we can assume, wants to reverse Soviet Russia’s territorial losses.
Furthermore, he believes that Ukraine belongs inside a greater Russia. In a now infamous and portentous essay published in July 2021, Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, sharing a common heritage and destiny. He goes on to say that ‘much of modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands,’ before making an ominous and unequivocal statement: ‘Russia was robbed.’ It is indeed a chilling insight into Putin’s state of mind.
He also blames foreign plots as a cause of the Ukrainian crisis, as does Nikolai Patrushev, his right-hand man and head of the Russian Security Council. According to Stephen Kotkin, Patrushev believes that Russia is in an existential struggle against a conspiratorial West that seeks its annihilation.
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Would the author say this war has anything to do with or it is just coincidental that ?
Is the attached graphic of the escalation of ukr missile explosions in Donbas just before the war started accurate and not provocation ?
I’m not the author of this piece, but which senior U.S. Democrats have corrupt links to Ukraine, except Joe Biden, whose son was on the board of Burisma? The owner of that company has fled the country and is being pursued by the Ukrainian authorities, so if anything that should make Joe Biden and Ukraine enemies.
The claims about FTX and money laundering are not serious, as you can see with a teensy bit of research.
I addressed the issue of shelling in the Donbas just prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion here.
These are all old talking points, and you should get new ones to show why Ukraine and the West are really to blame. Sergei Lavrov recently explained, to much amusement, that the war “was launched against [Russia]”. Why not start there?
“…whose son was on the board of Burisma”……LOL!!
When Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, 7 million dollars in bribes were paid to the Attorney General of Ukraine to keep his nose out of Burisma’s affairs. Later, this same prosecutor, who had become too greedy, was ousted by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) under pressure from the United States, the European Union, the IMF and the World Bank, which wanted to save the owner of Burisma and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC%20-%20Finance%20Joint%20Report%202020.09.23.pdf
Hunter also appointed his friend, Devon Archer, to the board of Burisma..(Archer was imprisoned last year for his role in a scheme to defraud a Native American tribe of some $60 million in bonds.)Devon Archer is the good friend and was the university room mate of Christopher Heinz, the step son of John Kerry.
Heinz, Biden and Archer were all involved in the set up of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners…who had involvement with Metabiota and ‘biological laboratories’ in Ukraine….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Biden-helped-secure-millions-funding-military-biotech-research-program-Ukraine.html
As for FTX … that story is also still ongoing…and I suspect there’s more to come…an investigation by Greyzone suggested that….”The Ukrainian government mysteriously disappeared online records of its fundraising arrangement with the FTX crypto scam just days before the scandal erupted. The initiative claims to have raised $60 million for Ukraine, but where did the money go?….”
An excellent reply ebygum, you saved me a lot of time there. Yet another example of ignorance and bias which we don’t expect to see in the Daily Sceptic. What we do want to see is in-depth knowledge and broad historical and geo-political understanding – something which people like Mearsheimer and McGregor (amongst many others) do possess.
Not worth a rebuttal beyond Cui bono?! and https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/03/jacob-hornberger/rato-and-nato/
I’ll add this one, as the author subscribes to the missionary Manichean world view.
Soon, Europe will be left alone standing in the cold. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/03/no_author/manichaeism-and-an-ideology-of-liberal-empire-bidens-forever-cosmic-war-against-russian-evil/
And this one, as it addresses much if his spin and the major miscalulations.
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29425
An interesting little story, except that much of it isn’t a story.
Whether or not Vladimir Putin is solely to blame for this war it is nothing to do with us.
They are building houses in Shropshire for Ukrainian refugees. Where this evil end?
We are lead by a Parliament that hates this country.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
It’s rather naive to imagine “free” countries can join whatever military alliance they wish without consequences. The real world doesn’t work like that – as seen by n Cuba in the sixties and as would be seen very swiftly if, say, Mexico suddenly fancied allowing Russian bases on its soil.
We don’t live in a fantasy world where any country can do as it pleases, we live in the real world where military superpowers do what they please and the rest suck it up, and where it was blindingly obvious that poking one of those powers would have consequences.
Yep.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/03/jacob-hornberger/rato-and-nato/
We live in a world where the US has sanctions operating against forty other nations. We are the only ones in step.
This article is laughable.
The United States launched at least 251 military interventions between 1991 and 2022.
This is according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, a US government institution that compiles information on behalf of Congress.
It is important to stress that all of these numbers are conservative estimates, because they do not include US special operations, covert actions, or domestic deployments.
The Military Intervention Project added: “With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite – the US has increased its military involvements abroad.”
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/13/us-251-military-interventions-1991/
This shows that the US and it’s Nato vassals are a warmongers of the highest order.
In comparison Russia under Putin has been involved in 2.
“Since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, apart from the most recent crisis in Ukraine, Russia has been involved in just two major conflicts: The Chechen War between 1999 and 2009 and the so-called Five Day War with Georgia in 2008. In both of these events, it can be argued with some certainty that Russia did not instigate the conflict and was in fact acting defensively. The Chechnya conflict began after the Invasion of Dagestan, when the Chechnya-based Islamic International Brigade (IIB), an Islamist militia [covertly supported by the CIA], led by warlords Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab, invaded the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan on August 2, 1999, in support of the Shura of Dagestan separatist rebels. Russia was left with little choice but to enter Chechnya on 1st October. The campaign ended the de facto independence of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and restored Russian federal control over the territory. It is even debatable to even consider this as a “foreign” conflict, as it is quite plausible to argue that this crisis was an internal one.
The conflict with Georgia follows a similar line of events as with Chechnya. During the night of 7th to 8th August 2008, Georgia launched a large-scale military offensive against South Ossetia, in an attempt to reclaim the territory. This move was completely unprovoked. The Georgian attack caused casualties among Russian peacekeepers, who resisted the assault along with Ossetian militia. Russia rightfully reacted by deploying units of the Russian 58th Army and Russian Airborne Troops into South Ossetia one day later and launched airstrikes against Georgian forces in South Ossetia and military and logistical targets in Georgia proper. It is now well established that the majority of experts, monitors and ambassadors agreed that the war was started by Georgia.”
Alexander Clackson is the founder of Global Political Insight, a political media and research organisation. He has a Master’s degree in International Relations.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-or-america-who-is-the-real-aggressor/5372882
I have previously listed all the reasons why Russia were “justified” in their actions against Ukraine which was as “legal” as US involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc. etc. etc. (I won’t list them here again as it would be too long).
The difference being that the world did NOT impose sanctions on those Nato countries but when Russia do something very similar they are sanctioned.
This is no doubt a US proxy war against Russia so that the US can cling on to it’s Unipolar hegemony and will target Russia, China and anyone else who dares to challenge them.
…yes, I’m looking forward to the next essay on how China hasn’t been provoked by the USA either…..surrounding it with military bases, selling weapons to Taiwan, fomenting trouble there continuously….flying military aeroplanes through the Taiwan Straits this week….implementing sanctions….etc..
Nicholas Burns, the U.S Ambassador to China saying China have to understand and accept that America is the leader in Asia…??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wCXDboZ9AA
…and now this…because let’s not forget the USA only does anything for peace and democracy….and because it cares…LOL!
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/taiwan-should-adopt-a-broken-nest-policy-and-destroy-tsmc-in-wake-of-any-chinese-invasion-suggests-us-military-paper/
Taiwan should adopt a ‘scorched earth policy’ and wipe out its own semiconductor foundries in the wake of any Chinese invasion as a deterrent, US military academics have suggested…Instead, the paper, Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan, suggests a “broken nest” approach wherein Taiwan destroys its own semiconductor industry – including global chip powerhouse TSMC – upon the news of any invasion from China to make it a less attractive target and scupper China’s own technology ambitions.
Whoever is to blame, shouldn’t the question be what should the UK’s aims and role be regarding the situation?
It’s hard to see how either side can be defeated so the best we can do is probably bring pressure to bear for a settlement that minimises further suffering and establishes a basis for lasting stability
Agreed, however, I am afraid that devious International geopolitical groups have an agenda that insists on a continuation of this terrible, gruelling and grinding war.
This debate is like a tedious game of ping pong.
It was Nato expansion, it was Russian imperialism, Nato expansion, Russian imperialism, expansion, imperialism, expansion, imperialism.
As if the two things didn’t feed on each other.
This is a pissing match between governing elites and plutocrats. Ordinary people get screwed. As with almost all wars.
Why ordinary people would want to get drawn into this other than to fulfill some desire to feel relevant in some way is quite beyond me.
Yes. Anyone who still has a semblance of reality would see this for what it is. A US proxy war. Like they’ve never done anything like this before.
The USA are in this up to their eyeballs, as usual..
They are ultimately responsible for the untold tragedies ie the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Russia will “win” this but the West will spin it as per usual and life will go on, especially for the usual bastards who will become even more powerful and rich as a result.
‘Twas forever thus.
Yet another piece by someone who can apparently read Putin’s mind.
It gets incredibly tedious listening to all those, who somewhat belatedly, somehow know exactly what his ambitions are and appear never to listen to what the man says.
It started to go downhill when it was said that Russia has a history of attacking its neighbours, totally ignoring the millions of Russians who have died at the hands of neighbours who had territorial ambitions over in Russia.
Blaming one man for this is to ignore the track record of the USA for creating political instability in numerous foreign countries and walking away when things fail to go the way they planned, leaving those countries much poorer and hating the USA.
Ukraine will be hung out to dry eventually, Europe will be poorer and USA will become a pariah for having wreaked this havoc on a large part of the world.
My only regret is that I probably won’t be around to witness it.
I see your ‘infamous and portentous essay’…and raise you the 2019 Rand Corporation Report…
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
Overextending and Unbalancing Russia
NATO is as much a defensive alliance as Ukraine is a bastion of democracy.
Anyone looking at the roughly 800 American bases, many surrounding Russia and China, can only come to the conclusion that it’s done because America care so very much about everyone…LOL!
You don’t mention Victoria Nuland, also wandering around the Maidan, then having the telephone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, where they discuss who they want to put in power? You should have a listen it’s just as if they caused the coup just to do that?? LOL!
They are actually saying a lot of the quiet bits out loud now..you know..we will fight to the last Ukrainian…
Retired General Keith Kellogg’s recent remarks that “…it’s the “acme of professionalism” to use Ukraine to fight Russia because that “takes a strategic adversary off the table” without “using any US troops.” And then “we can focus” on “our primary adversary, which is China.”
Obviously they have Ukrainian lives at the forefront of their minds….
Oh, and as for the Helsinki Accords..are you even serious?….They’ve been broken by the USA on numerous occasions…..
From the beginning I’ve pointed out that it just doesn’t matter to us – and by us I mean the British people – which bits are ruled from Kiev and which from Moscow, so beyond saying it believes the two states should enter negotiations, which costs us nothing, our government should have been neutral.
Trouble is, the last 25 years have proved that the last thing UK governments care about are the interests and wishes of the British people.
The USA is absolutely to blame for this Conflict they have plotted against Russia for decades. In fact they are responsible for the destruction of countries in the ME and the deaths of millions of people. You can add Covid to their list of Crimes against Humanity too. America is due a Day of Reckoning!
Here here, putin and xi ping must be on their bellies and beating the floor with their fists laughing, seeing how pathetic the west has become! We seam to be preoccupied with what’s between our legs sooner than important stuff!
It’s utterly depressing to see the Daily Sceptic putting out this kind of article. Putin solely to blame for this war? – unbelievable! Thank God DS is on top of at least the climate business and the effects of the Covid jabs – thanks to Chris Morrison and Will Jones.
“Is the West Really to Blame For the Russia-Ukraine War?”
Yes!, disband NATO!, it’s no longer nessasary, Russia isn’t the enemy any more yet we treat it like one, why? Its not the 1950s. If aggression is imminent you’ll pick a side, you don’t need to be a member of a club to do that! Nato didn’t exist during both world wars! Why do we need it now? Putin and Russia would feel a lot more relaxed if it wasn’t threatened by an outdated panic club!
And let’s not forget, when it comes to ukraine, they were the last bastion of neo naziism in the west! Were there’s smoke!!
Is the West really to blame?
Finland and Sweden now wish to join NATO.
Poland has ordered 1250 tanks, which will give it the most powerful land forces in Europe after……oh yes, Russia….
Estonia is raising its defence expenditure from 2% to 3% of GDP and calls for the rest of Europe to match that 3% figure, an effective doubling of current European defence budgets.
And all of these actions are because it is the West that these countries, all close to or bordering Russia, blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?
Or maybe it’s because of something else:
The Union State Plan
‘A leaked internal strategy document from Vladimir Putin’s executive office lays out a detailed plan on how Russia plans to take full control over neighbouring Belarus in the next decade under the pretext of a merger between the two countries……..authorship of the strategy document, according to one Western official with direct knowledge of its construction, belongs to the Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, a subdivision of Putin’s Presidential Administration, which was established five years ago.
The rather innocuously named directorate’s actual task is to exert control over neighboring countries that Russia sees as in its sphere of influence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.
This directorate is headed by Alexey Filatov, who reports directly to Dmitri Kozak, the deputy chief of the Presidential Administration. Filatov’s team was tasked to come up with new strategies that would detail Russia’s strategic goals in all six countries, relying on the resources and input of most of the vital Russian state institutions.
According to a Western intelligence officer with direct knowledge of the strategy document, Russia’s domestic, foreign and military intelligence services — the FSB, SVR, GRU, respectively — in addition to the General Staff of the Armed Forces, all actively contributed to the Union State plan. The resulting document was presented to Kozak in the fall of 2021…..’
All sounds a bit like some kind of a plan, doesn’t it….you know….the sort of thing our own leaders are plainly incapable of….making policy up, as they do, as we can see with stark clarity from their WhatsApps, as they go along……..?
Leaked by whom to whom? To the Americans? Can they be trusted or believed?
So many gross simplifications and biases in this article that it is hard to know where to start. Will there ever be any even-handed, detailed assessments in The Daily Sceptic or is this to be held ‘below the line’? A bit depressing, to be honest – and the most depressing thing of all is the LACK OF KNOWLEDGE that screams at the reader.
Ivan Katchanovski School of Political Studies Ottawa Uni, a West Ukrainian with no known Russian sympathies, has written of the extensive CCTV footage and eye-witness testimony that the Maidan Massacre in Kiev which sparked the 2014 revolution/ coup was perpetrated by anti-gov forces; mainly far-Right militia snipers firing down on the crowds, seeking to implicate the Kremlin-friendly regime. It worked and set in motion the war. CIA involved? He doesn’t comment. But it does point to other things apart from Putin’s neo-Czarist, imperialistic megalomania at work.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1321588
Yes.
I thought this was about keeping NATO alive having had nothing to do after the fall of the Berlin Wall when of course it should have been disbanded.
Let’s just stop this stupid unnecessary war.
Hilarious.