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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