It Is What It Is

The war in Ukraine did not have to happen.

Economic Principals has followed developments in Russia at a distance since 1989; more closely since 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved; with active interest since 1996, when Boris Yeltsin was re-elected;  with hopes since 1999, when Vladimir Putin was appointed; with curiosity since 2007, when Putin condemned America’s invasion of Iraq; with shock since 2008, when NATO began to ignore Putin’s clearly expressed “red line;” with alarm since Putin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula; with sorrow when Putin invaded Ukraine; with no surprise when most Russia citizens rallied to support the war;  with  disgust after Putin jailed Evan Gershkovich and murdered Alexei Navalny; and with resignation when Russia gained the upper hand on the battlefield. 

After thirty years, same old Russia. The one thing that can be said with  certainty about this sequence of events is that five times NATO moved closer to Russia’s border of Russia, and reaffirm, three months before the war began, its intention to  enlarge itself a sixth time, to include Georgia and Ukraine.

When Russia began its “special military operation” in February 2022, its leaders expected to achieve a sudden coup, in the manner of Kazakhstan the month before. Instead, its attempted blitzkrieg was foiled by Ukrainian resistance and American intelligence.pt

For anyone not still wedded to the “Washington consensus” of the early Nineties, it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for Vladimir Putin, and Russia. What has been missing ever since Putin blamed the US for withholding intelligence on the 2004 terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in which 186 children were killed, is any sensitivity to the  Russian point of view. So consistent has been the determination of major American newspapers to portray Putin as the second coming of Josef Stalin that it can only be described as propaganda slightly less heavy-handed than the Russian version.

For ten years, EP has depended for its news about Russia from Johnson’s Russia List, an open- source compendium of news and opinion published nearly daily since 1996 by impartial observer David Johnson. JRL includes twenty or thirty reports from American and European newspapers and letter writers, but routinely including Russian media as well. A stereoscopic view is the result.

A good example  cropped up last week in the form of an article in Russia Today by Dmitry Trenin. A former Russian Army colonel who often served abroad, Trenin retired  in 1993 to join the Carnegie Moscow Center, a bi-partisan think-tank been funded by the United States after the break-up of the Soviet Union.  He became its first Russian director in 2008. After Putin’s re-election, he began expressing pro-Putin views. Critics accused Trenin of self-preservation. The Carnegie Foundation for International Peace severed its links with him in 2022, after he supported  the Russian invasion. Today he is a  research professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

In “Russia Is Undergoing a New, Invisible Revolution,” Trenin wrote:

… [T]he drastic, expansive and well-coordinated Western reaction to Moscow’s moves – the torpedoing of the Russo-Ukrainian peace deal and the mounting escalation of the US-led bloc's involvement in the conflict, including its role in deadly attacks inside Russia – have fundamentally changed our country's attitude towards our former partners.

We no longer hear talk about “grievances” and complaints about “failures in understanding.” The last two years have produced nothing less than a revolution in Moscow’s foreign policy, more radical and far-reaching than anything anticipated on the eve of the Ukraine intervention. Over the past 25 months, it has been quickly gaining in strength and profundity. Russia's international role, its position in the world, its goals and methods of reaching them, its basic worldview – all are changing...

Russia may not have been able to start moving so quickly in the direction of sovereignty had it not been for the Western policies of the past two decades: the increasing demonization of the country and its leadership. These choices have succeeded in making perhaps the initially most Westernizing, pro-European leadership that modern Russia has seen – including notably Putin himself and Dmitry Medvedev – into self-avowed anti-Westerners and determined opponents of US/EU policies.

Thus, rather than forcing Russia change to fit a Western pattern, all that pressure has instead helped the country find itself again.

Aside from The Nation, which for many years has fought a lonely battle against dreams of American hegemony, why is there so little questioning in the United States about the background of the war in Ukraine? Surely memories of brutal Communist repression of independence movements in Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia in the Fifties and Sixties has something to do with it.

But the emergence as critics of marginal figures to mainstream views such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and former president Donald Trump likely is more determinative.  Precisely because the dissenters are who they are, more respectable opinion-makers shrink from the prospect of associating themselves with views of the fringe.  

The result is an intricate and stubborn knot. Could war in Ukraine have been avoided? Probably not, given the American State Department’s determination to use NATO to rein in Russia, The US now has no choice but to continue to arm Ukraine. Thus, America has got Ukraine and itself involved in a second Vietnam – with a new Cold War to follow.

It is a crying shame.