Ukraine: Avoidable War

Ukraine constitutes the most serious foreign policy blunder by any major power since 1945. The former USSR was, contrary to Western stereotypes, relatively restrained in its use of military power limiting itself to lending military support, but no troops, to friends and allies such as Cuba and Vietnam and intervening militarily only in countries which it regarded (and which the West regarded) as part of its immediate sphere of influence, such as Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The great exception was Afghanistan. Initially, the USSR had been reluctant to intervene but eventually it got sucked in a long and unwinnable war which contributed to the end of the USSR.

American intervened in distant countries such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, Libya, and many other places. These interventions were also unsuccessful, but the USA, unlike Russia, could always enjoy wide international support as global power “protected” by its network of alliances.

The Russian intervention has already had massive global repercussions: NATO, riven by recent internal dissent, has been rejuvenated. Japan and Germany revisited their relatively pacifist post-1945 position. Sweden and Finland are joining NATO.

Present-day Russia have almost no allies in Europe. Many of those who were staunchly anti-communists have morphed, in the safety of the West, into frantic Russophobes urging Ukraine to fight on to the last Ukrainian without conceding one inch of Ukrainian soil, even, as is the case with Crimea, it was Russian until 1954 (Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of Germany, in 2014, argued that Russia’s takeover of Crimea was “perfectly understandable” and that western sanction were “nonsense”). “Liberal hawks,” such as Anne Appelbaum and Timothy Garton Ash, rightly condemn Russia, but seldom Israel even during the massacres in Gaza while their liberalism somewhat stops short of condemning the West’s support for Saudi Arabia.

Russia, post-1991, has intervened to defend its only military ally in the Middle East, the Assad regime in Syria (2015) or to defend and protect Russians or pro-Russian minorities such as those of South Ossetia and Abkhazia or in the tiny breakaway republic of Transnistria (1992).

Russian intervention in Ukraine was quite different.

The so-called Maidan revolution of 2014 in Ukraine was initiated and led by local pro-western forces though it also had the support of a small but not insignificant far-right. This was unacceptable to many pro-Russian Ukrainians in Donetsk and Luhansk, once the most industrially advanced areas of Ukraine. They perceived the new Ukrainian government to be hostile. Russia could not avoid being dragged into “protecting” those areas. The invasion of 2022, however, destroyed any pro-Russian feelings existing in the rest of the country.

While Putin’s claims that Ukraine is in the hands of Nazis is excessive, it is equally true that the Azov Battalion fighting as part of Ukrainian forces displayed Nazi symbols and ideology. However, far-right parties won less than 2% of the vote in the elections in 2019.

Pro-Russian parties were much stronger. Shortly after the invasion Zelensky’s government suspended eleven Ukrainian political parties citing their alleged “links with Russia” and one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, came second in the 2019 elections.

If at the beginning of the conflict, in 2014, the question of identity was not pressing – many Ukrainians believed it was possible to be Russian and Ukrainian at the same time – the years of conflict have changed this too. What is now being constructed in Ukraine is a “national” identity (as opposed to a Ukrainian identity). The difference is that the former is about nationhood, the second is about cultural feeling.

Putin has articulated the idea that there is a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” This view is typical of Slav nationalism and was held by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1990 book How We Should Arrange Russia.

Putin’s “historical” speech on the eve of the invasion contained a diatribe against Lenin, Stalin, and all the Bolsheviks who had pandered to the nationalities of the Tsarist Empire, creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “Soviet Ukraine,” he explained, “was the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy.”

Here he is not entirely wrong. Ukrainian history is complex. After November 1917, and the Soviet revolution, a three-year civil war followed. Under the 1921 Treaty of Riga, between the RSFSR (Soviet Russia) and Poland, the western Ukraine was ceded to Poland. Under Tsarism half the population of Ukraine was Catholic, 28% Jews, and 19% were Ukrainian Greek Catholics. Russian, Jewish, and Polish culture prevailed in most urban centres; the identity of Ukrainian peasants was more religious (whether Orthodox or Catholic) than national.

In 1939, the USSR regained the lands earlier seized by Poland and most of these became part of Soviet Ukraine. In 1954, the Crimean Region of the Soviet Russia was ceded to Ukraine. So, Putin is right when he says that modern Ukraine is the product of the Soviet era. It is a creation of the communist state.

In 1991, all of Soviet-defined Ukraine found itself granted its independence, more or less by default, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union.

When the USSR went through its own, internally generated, “regime change” the new Russia should have been welcomed into a refashioned European system, just as post-Napoleonic France was accepted into the Vienna system and post-Nazi Germany became part of the “European family” and obtained substantial American aid through the Marshall Plan.

Instead, a military alliance which had been devised against communist Russia, NATO, remained a military alliance against non-communist Russia. No wonder Russia felt itself surrounded by a hostile West.

Political scientists and former politicians who cannot be suspected of pro-Russian sympathies have long warned that NATO extension would be viewed by Russia as unfriendly.

George Kennan, America’s theorist of containment policy during the Cold War warned in May 1998, that NATO expansion was “a tragic mistake.” Jack Matlock, US Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1987 to 1991) nine days before the invasion, declared that “NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.” Henry Kissinger, in 2014, in the Wall Street Journal wrote that “Ukraine should not join NATO” adding that “to treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation” would damage any prospect to bring Russia into a cooperative international system.

For more than three centuries Russia was seen in the West either as an integral and full-fledged member of the European concert of powers and European civilization, or as “a barbarian at the gate”. In 1881, after Russian troops stormed the Central Asian fortress of Geók Tepé, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote that “in our future destinies Asia is, perhaps, our main outlet! … We must banish the slavish fear that Europe will call us Asiatic barbarians.”

Today, while Ukraine obtains the recognition of being part of Europe, Russia remains a “barbarian at the gate.”