As for Ukraine itself — yes, it’s complicated. History always is. It’s true that ever since independence, the country’s politics have been horrendously corrupt, as evidenced by Zelenskyy’s recent crackdown on venal ministers and officials. It’s also true, by the way, that its politics have long had an unpleasantly nationalistic, indeed openly neo-Nazi fringe. But I don’t think this is the devastating trump card that professional contrarians and Putin apologists think it is. If we were to withdraw our sympathy from every European country with unpleasant far-Right political elements, then we wouldn’t have any friends left. On that basis, would we still have supported Poland in 1939? Would we intervene to help Italy today, or France, or even the United States? Presumably not.
The really striking thing about the war in Ukraine, it seems to me, is that at a fundamental level it actually isn’t complicated. And for all the cheap and tawdry attractions of contrarianism, the right conclusion is the obvious conclusion. Ukraine didn’t attack Russia; Russia attacked Ukraine. Zelenskyy isn’t perfect and Putin isn’t Hitler; but one really is on the side of the angels, and the other will surely rank alongside the villains of history. One appeals to European solidarity and common humanity; the other to xenophobia and national chauvinism. One defends his own territory; the other seeks to seize somebody else’s. One is right, the other is wrong.
So, Dom……..What you’re saying is
The war didn’t start in 2014,
Up to 20,000 people haven’t been killed in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022,
NATO and the US havn’t been heavily involved in training and arming Ukrainian personne since the comprehensive defeat their army suffered in the notorious kettled encirclement of 2015,
&
The Ukrainian Army wasn’t preparing an offensive in Spring of 2022 ?
“The Ukrainian Army wasn’t preparing an offensive in Spring of 2022?”
So, djm……
– Did Ukraine LAUNCH an offensive in Spring of 2022, or was it pre-empted by a(n undeclared and unprovoked) Russian attack on Ukraine? Aaand…
– If Ukraine was preparing an offensive in Spring of 2022, was it to (a) seize Russian (or somebody else’s) territory, or (b) recover their own territory that Russia stole in 2014?
These things matter; and BTW, as the Donbass was under Russian occupation (“a duck by any other name…”) between 2014 and 2022, who was killing people in the Donbass then?
The strong point of Mearsheimer’s realism approach took into account the intentional and prickly western encroachment issue. That apparently doesn’t count to Sandbrook.
Certainly Putin is wrong. Drastically, monumentally so. But the West doesn’t sit off to the side, blameless.
And Ukraine ends up victim to all.
I urge you to watch Perun’s latest discussion and pause on the part about casualties in Donbass before the Russian invasion last year.
“I urge you to watch Perun’s latest discussion…” – URL please? Was that the discussion (with a lot of nazi-ish pictures) of why the people in the Donbass didn’t welcome Russia with open arms when they crossed the border in Feb 22? The apparatchiks and their ‘favoured sons’ robbing anything they could get, wrecking much more and abducting, torturing and/or killing anybody they felt like? “Might Makes Right” ruling the day and the Ukrainians still in the Donbass readily joining their countrymen to force the Russians and their minions out, because it was obvious there was no living with them? – if so, yeah; and I’ve got some extensive excerpts.
https://www.samizdata.net/2023/02/russias-grand-strategy-and-ukraine/
That is 180 degrees off. Had the west got unambiguously off the side lines in 2014, this war would never have happened. It was the lack of robust reaction in 2014 that gave the impression that western response to a full scale invasion would largely consist of official grimaces.
The main benefit of western involvement was Operation Orbital at al, which helped turn the shambolic Ukrainian army of 2014 into Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s formidable 2022 army. But that was done with training, the actually gear shipped was not significant, if memory serves about $250m per year, which is peanuts. The idea the west was pouring arms into Ukraine & that put the frighteners on Russia is simply not true.
If I may put in my 2 kopecks, a large part of the current argument seems to revolve around the question of whether the Ukraine was and is a separate and independent nation from Russia/Moscovy. Long ago when the world was new, I talked my way into some graduate level history courses at CU Boulder. One of which involved how Russia was founded. I still have the texts.
1) The first state, in what became Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, was founded by the Varangians [Norse traders on the river systems] in 879, also known as the Varangian Rus. They founded the city-state of Kiev, also known as Kievan Rus. There was no Moscow, nor the state that eventually founded Moscow at that time.
2) Moscow was first mentioned in the Chronicles as a very small town on the borders of the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal in 1147. It did not rule anything, including itself. Kiev was the pre-eminent city and civilization.
3) In the early 13th century Genghis Khan’s sons Juchi and Batu, advised by my online avatar, attacked the various city-states of the Rus. By this time, Moscow had become independent after Vladimir-Suzdal was destroyed, but was not running anything but itself.
4) In what was arguably one of the most screwed up decisions of history, Mongol emissaries offered Kiev the chance of being a subject state of the Mongol Empire under their own rulers if they submitted. Their response was to send peasants armed with sticks, rocks, and icons against Mongol horses and bows. It did not turn out well. But neither did it for Moscow or any other Russian state. They all got their fundamental orifii kicked.
5) Unlike the main Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde on the steppes did not want to occupy the cities and give up their nomadic way of life. So roughly every decade or so, they would call a Kuriltai of the leaders of the subject city-states. The city-states would compete based on who promised to do the most to exploit their fellow Russians for the benefit of the Mongols. Tyranny seems to be built into Moscovite culture. Moscow became pre-eminent based on their ability to enslave their own peoples for a foreign power.
6) By 1380, resistance to the Mongols began to prevail. At the battle of Kulikova Pole, the Mongols began to be pushed out, and by the early 1400’s began to splinter.
7) Key to this though, even though defeated both Moscow and Kiev kept their cultural and political identity. Both are ancient and separate. And their history and opposition to each other has gone back over 1000 years. And the conflict continues. Both believe they have a right to survive, and they are trying to. But the Ukrainian nation is in fact legitimate.
Subotai Bahadur
The troubling thing is that President Zelensky’s crackdown on dissent, closing down opposition media, seeking legal action against political opponents, and-so-on, started BEFORE Mr Putin’s invasion. Had it been just a post invasion thing one could understand it (if not support it) – but it started before the invasion.
I believe that President Zelensky really did want to copy the “liberal West” (as he said during the 2019 election campaign) – but what is the “liberal West”?
The liberalism of Gladstone and Grover Cleveland, or the “liberalism” of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden?
For example, is the censorship of non “Progressive” opinions liberal or anti liberal?
There is no reason why Mr Zelensky, now President Zelensky, should know what liberalism is – how would he know? Where would he have been taught such things?
In the end, President Zelensky was dependent on advisers to tell him what “liberal” policies actually were – and those advisers, educated in the modern schools and universities and nurtured by endless international conferences, did not give him good advice – or accurate definitions of words such as “liberal” and “liberalism”.
Unlike Boris Yeltsin, Mr Putin was never interested in creating a liberal constitutional order in Russia – indeed such things as an independent and diverse (diverse in opinions) media, and real trial by jury, were always things that Mr Putin despised.
As for private property rights – Mr Putin associated private property rights with the “Oligarchs” who foolishly helped him to power and who he then brutally betrayed – murdering some of them, and throwing others in to prison camps.
The tragedy, and it is a tragedy, of President Zelensky is that he really does seem to have wanted to created a liberal constitutional order in Ukraine, but got endless bad advice and misinformation from advisers and “experts”.
Still there is nothing wrong in Ukraine that Mr Putin’s invasion is going to make any better – it has only made things worse.
It is a bit like going to Tel Aviv in Israel, or the town of Corby a few miles from me here in Kettering, and complaining about ugly buildings – the buildings are ugly NOT because people wanted the city or town to be ugly, but because that was the fashion in architecture when these places were built after World War II – the horrible “International style” of “Modernism”.
President Zelensky got the “best” international advice that was available to him – and it contained the ugly fashionable politics of our age, “crack down on non Progressive media”, “hit the Oligarchs and make sure everything is owned by international Corporations based in the West – and controlled by Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard – with their agenda of SEG and DEI”, “try and join NATO, the E.U. and so on”, “teach Progressive stuff in the schools”, “the traditional family is out of date – try these “new” things we have dug up from the Emperor Hadrian – or, in the case of Hollywood, from Satanism”, and on and on.
Hopefully, if he wins the war against Mr Putin, he will tell the Western advisers and “experts” to go away. We shall have to see.
But winning the war comes first – and, yes, that means making nice with vermin like Joseph Biden and other Progressive “leaders”.
Smile at them, take their money and weapons – and then, when the war against Mr Putin is won, make sure that Samantha Power (wife of Cass “Nudge” Sunstein), Susan Rice (main officer for Agenda 2030 in the United States) and the rest of the “international community” are never allowed in the Ukraine again.
One could understand it? Really? This war started in 2014, not 2022. It’s almost as if Ukraine had a HUGE MASSIVE In-YOUR-FACE problem with not just corruption but also long standing pervasive subversion by the hostile Russian state seeking to control and/or collapse Ukrainian institutions.
So many commentators in the west are beyond clueless.
So many subtle arguments for not responding militarily. There always are. The urge to focus on complexity, rather than to see complexity as camouflage around the fundamental, is strong among the brainy classes of the West. And there’s never any Indian Premier League body-count number in the corner of your 24-7 TV news screen captioned “Deaths Since You Decided This Was Too Complex to Respond”.
1930s pacifists in the UK bought the same. A lot of them famously got their cooking from Paris and their politics from Moscow, so plus ça change…
Abkhazia and South Ossetia was just the amuse-bouche. When Putin gets round to Estonia we’ll have had ample opportunity to construct coherent Reasons Not to Get Involved there either. “You gotta understand the history. It’s their sphere of influence, right?” He might not want to invade Estonia, after all. Let’s hope not, for everybody’s sake. Hoping not being one kind of response.
In what circumstances would we envisage engaging Putin’s Russia militarily? If Russia marched on Hungary? Shouldn’t that nasty Orbán fellow be taught a lesson? Especially if he likes Putin so much? Bulgaria too? Poland? Don’t get me started. If Poland doesn’t know how the EU does things then it should get a dose of traditional values from the East for a while and see how it likes it. (Some say Poland’s had a belly-full of foreign occupation already, but that too is complex, I hear.) If we set a victim’s moral purity up as the standard that alone justifies meeting aggression with counter-aggression, we can turn our swords into ploughshares right now – and feed the sword-making manual to the pigs while we’re at it.
Salami tactics. As old as the hills. If we don’t want to fight because we think we’ll lose, or because we sympathise with the justice of our opponent’s cause, or because we think fighting makes things worse not better, or because we’re scared to, or because meeting aggression with further aggression is morally wrong – let’s at least say so. But let’s not justify inaction as a logical response to complexity itself. Our enemies won’t give us simple choices like our parents did.
– And it must not be forgotten, ever, that Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s borders in perpetuity as part of Ukraine returning all its nukes to Russia. I’m sure Mr. Putin, if asked, would say “Oh yes, but that was signed by Boris Yeltsin, and I disagree with it.”
– No. It was signed by RUSSIA, and your happiness to blithely ignore a RUSSIAN promise-in-perpetuity when it suits you, says a lot more about you, and Russia, than a good chess-playing Russian should be giving away:
i.e., “Do not trust Russia. Russia is asshole.”
In case anyone is in doubt:
“He Did It Again – General Secretary Admits NATO Has Been at War Against Russia in Ukraine Since 2014″
NATO Secretary General – Doorstep statement at Defence Ministers Meeting, 14 FEB 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7fyjDyhHp8&t=367s
This, absolutely 100%.
For me, this war will only end when Russia is forced to accept the consequences of its actions SINCE 2014 and that means Russia pushed back to it’s 2014 border and that border firmly secured behind the retreating (and preferably disarmed) Russian troops.
Same applies to all those little enclaves that Russia has tried to carve out to undermine the sovereignty of its neighbours, they’ve all got to go.
Only through the utter humiliation of defeat and the restoration of Ukrainian territory to Ukraine can we be assured that the Russians will turn on Putin, because any other result leaving Ukrainian territory in Russian hands gives Putin a way to spin this all as a win.
That’s why they’re so keen to have an peace treaty, to cement their gains SINCE 2014 as permanently part of Russia. It’s a shit sandwich that they’d love to serve up to Zelensky and the Ukrainians and it’s absolutely what must not happen.
On the contrary, the invasion & the many-strings-attached western backing that resulted has dialled up the already non-trivial anti-corruption campaign to 11.
This was enabled in no small part because there is an equally non-trivial correlation between institutional corruption & Russian influence (not a Pearson correlation of 1, but pretty close). A previously untouchable district court in Kyiv notorious for cutting lose slam-dunk corruption cases was lustrated under martial law provisions not that long ago, a development that Paul presumably thinks very illiberal on the basis it would be like doing the same to a court in Bognor Regis.
I wish that had been true but sadly it really isn’t by any meaningful definition of “at war with Russia”.
@Perry
I wish that had been true but sadly it really isn’t by any meaningful definition of “at war with Russia”.
OK, I’ll leave it up to you to tell NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (of all people) that he doesn’t understand what NATO is doing. 😉
It’s good to note for posterity the heroic role of Boris Johnson in keeping this pot boiling.
As reported by BBC on 4th April 2022:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60987350
So on 4th April, there was still a path out of this mess. But five days later, Boris Johnson made his unannounced visit to Kiev.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/09/boris-johnson-meets-volodymyr-zelenskiy-in-unannounced-visit-to-kyiv
What happened and what changed? The Ukrainian Pravda made it clear in May 2022:
Possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/5/7344206/
Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine “had turned into a dead end”.
This was confirmed by Naftali Bennett (former prime minister of Israel, involved in the negotiation process)
If NATO has been at war with Russia since 2014, where are the NATO troops? Where is the NATO airpower? Where are the NATO navies? Why is Ukraine still using mostly Soviet era weapons? Please, explain to me by what definition NATO has been at war with Russia? Not in an indirect confrontation, but actually at war?
Explain.
Yes of course there was, and there still is. Ukraine could surrender and accept Russian war aim. And without western military and financial aid, that was indeed their only option. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but without that support, they were in an untenable situation.
And if Boris Johnson was truly the one who convinced Zelenskyy that aid would indeed be forthcoming at scale provided Ukraine held on, then Boris Johnson’s place in history has been secured, Britain’s anti-Chamberlain.
I’m not really too sure what people expect Zelensky to do, when he finds collaborators and traitors within his nation while fighting for its survival during a war with a much larger neighbor that’s hell-bent on destroying Ukraine as a culture.
I mean, did anyone miss the post-war plans for appropriating Ukrainian factories and properties after the war? The one that came out a few weeks ago, with everything going to Putin cronies?
I will gladly cut Zelensky all the slack he needs to win this war. I’ll start criticizing him the minute he’s won, and continues with this crap past the point its necessary. Wars are not pleasant things; you don’t win them with moral rectitude and fine feelings. Look at what Lincoln did during the Civil War; what Churchill did during WWII. You’ve got no bloody choice in the matter, literally; if you lose the war because you’re too morally refined to take the steps you need to, what does that say about the value of the lives you’ve already expended?
To my way of thinking, everything remains negotiable until blood is shed. After that? Well, that’s the moral boundary; you kill me or mine, or make me kill yours? That’s war to knife.
Of course, it may be that I put too high a value on human life.
Perry:
Not to mention Biden influence.
From Subotai’s comment:
Apologies for being pedantic, but i just checked the history of the Mongol Empire that i am reading, and Batu was the son of Juchi (which is usually spelled Jochi).
Incidentally, it is somewhat dubious that Jochi was the son of Temujin, since the latter’s 1st wife had been kidnapped about 9 months before Jochi was born. Genghis Khan himself, though, always treated Jochi as a son: he was his first son de jure, if not de facto.
He admits nothing of the sort in the video that Rudolph links to.
I also note that Rudolph does not provide a link for the un-attributed quote, which suggests that he is ashamed of its source.
Ukraine, after 6 years of foreign troops on its soil and major foreign support of a pair of secession movements, dropped an ultimatum to the world, that the current state of affairs was intolerable and must be resolved or that “Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.”
https://kyivindependent.com/national/zelenskys-full-speech-at-munich-security-conference
The package decisions being getting rid of its nuclear weapons and signing on to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state. The next week, Russia invaded. Ukraine’s withdrawal from the NPT has not been discussed much since but I think that it is vital to any proper understanding of Western actions since then.
We really do not want an independent, nuclear weapons-armed Ukraine, but we really don’t have much of an argument against it other than by giving Ukraine what it wants through conventional force of arms.
So I am not sentimental about Ukraine as some white hat country fighting black-hatted Russia. I view the situation as entirely different. But it is also a situation where the varied national interests of the West all agree that Ukraine must be supported and Russia must be opposed.
Perhaps this discussion paper from the Estonian Ministry of Defense would be more relevant to the factual post with the Perun video than here; but since this is the latest Ukraine post, i am linking here.
It is somewhat more pessimistic than Perun.
“Perhaps this discussion paper…”
^That. Executive summary on the Estonian paper – Putin’s goal is to do-away with the West’s rule of law and return the world to “spheres of influence”, in which the good, cultural Russians may do what they want and nobody tells them otherwise. It also points-out that liberating conquered territories is horrifically bloody and expensive, so as long as Russia is growing (in Ukraine for now – Poland is next), Putin is achieving his goals and will not stop.
The scary bit the Estonian paper brings-out is that even in December 2022, after 10 months of failure and horrific casualties, 70% of Russians fervently support Putin and his “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine; and I postulate that so long as “the empire is growing”, they will continue to do so whatever the cost.
The only way to deter Putin and Russians in general, is to make clear to them – from here on, until they become a functioning democracy in their own right (of which, the paper lays stress there’s no danger of it happening any time soon) – that they WILL NOT WIN, and they will not make any gains, and the cost of their continued tries to do so will be very expensive and totally fruitless. And this requires a general rearmament and continuous preparation, and a stern and numerous presence on the Russian border with modern, well-equipped superior forces. And it is this that has me despairing – the West has demonstrated for decades our unwillingness to pay in peacetime for the sinews of war.
Lenin said, “Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop – if you meet mush, keep on pushing.” Russia appears not to have changed much since Lenin’s time…
Related thoughts on the long history of Russian autocracy: https://lawliberty.org/autocracy-in-russia/
“And Ukraine ends up victim to all.”
Sure!
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
Meaning what? But yes, I get it that you still think mass murderous Russian rule is the better option for Ukraine than fighting to drive them out. It makes about as much sense as Israel agreeing to Egyptian & Syrian war aims in 1973.
Perry, it no contradiction to deplore that Ukrainians are being ground up in between two massive self-serving forces and still want them to prevail. “Interests, not friends” has seldom been so clear. If it were not so, we (the US) might be trying to help Ukraine win instead of us not merely losing. Shades of Vietnam.
I agree. However, I suspect the gradualist approach to US support is because of the Pentagon’s anti-escalation faction & Biden’s typically half-arsed nature, rather than a literal desire to see Ukraine & Russia attrited to pieces. Personally I think smashing the Russian army faster rather than slower makes more geopolitical sense, but clearly opinions vary. Enabling deeper Ukrainian fires will enable more Russian logistic degradation and more Ukrainian manoeuvre, and that is the way to achieve Russian mass casualties far more dependibly than a long WW1 style grind.
Of course, not being privy to Pentagon & White House rap sessions, I could be wrong about the reasons things have gone the way they have (i.e. all the right stuff just far too gradual).
Agree. Exactly how we trashed Vietnam and destroyed Cambodia. We’re doing the same thing now, because we can’t muster one national will out of two mutually exclusive factions. I don’t know the way out of this. I hope Ukraine can figure one out. Take our money, but not our counsel. Never forget that we are not your friend.
I tend to agree, but it is also a matter of degree.
I read a while ago an opinion that, had a few Warthogs been available, Ukraine could have quickly destroyed that entire Russian convoy that got bogged down last year. Sure they could have, but what would Putin have done next?
It is a matter of fine tuning the attrition.
But still, i think that the Ukrainians are in a better position to judge the risks of going too fast.
bobby b said:
Let’s not leave Iraq or Afghanistan off the list of horrors, along with Libya and Syria.
The US military has often done a lot of good, but the State Department and the rest of the sorry edifice?
I have my doubts. I personally think that once a single drop of blood has been shed on either side, then the moral imperative is that you keep going right up until the end, no questions asked, no restraints.
Either that, or stay the hell out. You don’t ask young men to kill in your name and then decide the whole thing was a damn “mistake”. If it was a “mistake” of that magnitude, then the moral thing to do is copy the Japanese code and resign, followed by ceremonial suicide in expiation.
Of course, the mentality that all of this sort of thing is OK permeates society. It’s just as OK to send young men off to a war you weren’t sure about winning as it is for a woman to decide that what was consensual sex last Saturday night is now rape. Only difference is the sex of the perpetrator, really.
That was the Powell Doctrine (the overwhelming force bit), which of course didn’t outlast Powell.
Not really an option once Russia finally figured out how to use its own air defence network (such as the whole turning the radars on thing for example). A-10 only works if you have some degree of air superiority.
@Perry
NATO troops are already openly embedded in Ukraine as “instructors” and “weapons support”, but most are in action via the eyes in the sky.
I refer my honourable colleagues to the details of how NATO’s integrated C4ISR is at work in Ukraine using Delta.
along with
Ukraine is now a de facto integrated part of NATO. Using NATO targetting with NATO weapons.
For more, see https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/usnato-isr-addendum-deep-dive-into
For the “NATO navies” see our reports in UK Defence Journal.
e.g. HMS vessels now operating under the Ukraine flag (a new twist on the old “flag of convenience” ploy)
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/two-ukrainian-warships-train-together-off-scottish-coast/
Absolutely none of that means NATO is “at war with Russia” any more than the Soviet Union was at war with USA during Vietnam War.
So, why did NATO attack Serbia? Why are we splitting off Kosovo, which has belonged to Serbia since 1912? Why are the aspirations of Kosovars so important and the aspirations of Crimeans, which has only belonged to Ukraine since 1954, so unimportant? If the occupation of Russian-inhabited eastern Ukraine is so heinous that any action may be taken in response, why hasn’t the West responded in the same way to the occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey?
Because the same Serbia that attacked Bosnia & Croatia when they sought independence attacked Kosova.
“We” just stopped Kosova from suffering the fate of the rest of former Yugoslavia.
No, Crimea has not only belonged to Ukraine since 1954, but that is actually an irrelevance. Scotland has been part of the UK since 1707. The aspirations of Scots who wish to be independent was put to the vote & had they won, the 1707 Act of Union would have ended. That is how the grownups do things. Why should Crimeans & Kosovars not be accorded the same? An independence vote was taken in Ukraine in 1991 too.