Portside

Trump shocked the world when he let loose an angry tirade accusing Ukraine of starting the war with Russia. He argued that Ukraine’s attempt to join NATO was the trigger that provoked a Russian invasion. This idea has been circulating since the beginning of the war. It’s central to Putin’s narrative. He portrayes Russia as a victim of an attempt by the West to encircle it and bring nuclear weapons to its borders. This is what he tells the Russian people—who don’t know that Russia is at war with Ukraine, but think it is fighting the USA/NATO. There are many on the left who accept this story—(see Medea Benjamin: War in Ukraine: 2022).

To be plausible, a false narrative must contain a grain of truth—and this one does. The grain of truth is that the USA, after the collapse of the USSR, did pursue a policy of inviting a number of old Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO. This was a serious and stupid mistake. It broke a promise that Bush1 had made to Gorbachev.  It created insecurity on the part of a Russia that was struggling to make a difficult transition from communism and that was feeling weak. The NATO expansion was experienced as the humiliation of what had been a great power. Putin was a protégé of Yeltsin during this period, and like Yeltsin, he was opposed to NATO’s expansion. However, Russia was helpless to do anything about it. Putin concluded that Russia needed to become  “great again” or it would be sidelined as a second-rate power—unable to influence world events. The USA’s policies toward Russia and NATO did not start this war. But they helped to push Putin in an aggressive, nationalistic direction.

The immediate events that led to the current war took place in 2013-2014. They began with a rebellion against a newly elected Ukrainian president who had gone back on his promises to move Ukraine towards joining the European Union. Instead, he signed an energy and trade pact that tied Ukraine more closely with Russia. This produced a mass uprising resulting in his expulsion. Russia’s reaction to his removal and its fear that Ukraine would move closer to the West, led it to seize the Crimean Peninsula—the home-port of its navy. Shortly thereafter, a separatist movement was launched  in Luhansk and Donets (Donbas). The rebels were backed by Russia  (the Wagner Group) and a protracted civil war began. Zelensky was elected in 2019, running on a program of reconciliation with the separatist faction, negotiating with Russia to bring the Crimea back into the fold, and moving towards joining the EU. This is when he made an attempt to join NATO. 

 In an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Zelensky said that after his election, he went to NATO Headquarters in Brussels and asked about becoming a member. The NATO General Secretary told him that NATO could not accept Ukraine because of the ongoing civil war in the Donbas. NATO, Zelensky was told, is a defensive alliance. It acts when a member is invaded by a foreign power. It does not take sides in a civil war.  At that point, Zelensky realized that NATO was not an option for Ukraine. He told Fareed that when he met with Putin in December 2019 to talk about to ending the war in the Donbas and the settling the issue of the Crimea, he told Putin that Ukraine would agree to never join NATO and that it would be politically neutral—and put off negotiations on the Crimea for ten years. However, he also told Putin that Ukraine would not cede the Donbas (the main center of its heavy industry). Putin, according to Zelensky, paid no attention to the NATO issue. He was focused entirely on Russia’s territorial claims-- on which he refused to budge. That convinced Zelensky the war was all about territorial expansion. 

How to make sense of all of this? The NATO issue, I believe it is clear, did not trigger the war.. However, I do believe the thoughtless expansion of NATO contributed to a climate of mistrust that was a factor in Russia’s moving in an aggressive, nationalist direction. But there are two more parts to the story.

One comes from Michael McFaul. McFaul was Obama’s ambassador to Russia (2008-2016). McFaul, in his book: “From Cold War to Hot Peace” 2018, explains Obama’s policies toward Russia. These were built on the idea of a “reset:” an attempt to establish a positive relationship with Russia. McFaul comes across as an honest player who believed in what the Obama administration was trying to do. He criticizes the missteps made by previous US administrations, but argues that Obama was trying to improve relations with Russia, not, as is wrongly stated by some on the left, trying to instigate a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, Obama did not feel Ukraine could win a war with Russia, and thus refused to provide it with military equipment in order to avoid encouraging it to resist militarily.

McFaul also describes Putin’s descent into authoritarianism and the closing down of all democratic openings in Russia. Putin  returned to the presidency in 2011 after a constitutionally mandated step-down. At that point, there were mass demonstrations in all the major cities calling for democratic reforms. That is when Putin began a nationalistic campaign against the West—developing a whole historical narrative of Western hostility and humiliation going back to Peter the Great. The campaign was capped with the seizure of the Crimea—which produced an outpouring of nationalist support in Russia. This surge of nationalism pushed Putin’s powers to new heights, leading to the suppression of all protests and political resistance—the takeover of the media, jailing’s, beatings, and assassinations. Indeed, to say that the war in Ukraine is a “war” and not a “special military operation” can presently result in a 9-year jail sentence.

There is another piece of the puzzle. In a very thorough and valuable book (“Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union:” 2021: Zubok) the author relates an experience I think is very relevant to this discussion. As the situation in post-communist Russia was spinning out of control, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to Yeltsin telling him that the goal of the reforms should be to create a great Russian nation built on the Eastern Slav ethnicity—the ethnicity that, according to Solzhenitsyn, was the “true foundation” of the historic Russian state and culture. He told Yeltsin to dispense with the “mongrels’ (peoples of Central Asia and Far East) and unite the three eastern Slavic-speaking peoples—Russians, Belarusians,  and Ukrainians. Yeltsin, who was Putin’s mentor and who appointed him President, was very impressed with the Solzhenitsyn letter. I believe this played an important role in Putin’s thinking. If Russia was to become a truly great power again, it would need to incorporate the Ukraine. Putin is not , as is widely believed, trying to reconstitute the USSR: he is trying to resurrect Tsarist Russia.

On February 22, 2022, Russia began a massive invasion of Ukraine. While there is room for criticism of the US role, the Ukrainians had done nothing to warrant this military assault. Russia has tried to portray this war as defensive--between itself and a hostile, Russia-hating, hegemonic  USA. This narrative is supported by those on the American left that see the USA as all-powerful and behind every international misdeed. What Putin and these folks leave out of their narratives is the role of the Ukrainian people—whose efforts to construct a workable Ukrainian state and whose courage and resistance to Russia’s imperial designs, has been at the center of this drama from the very beginning.

[Matthew B. Hallinan received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. In Beyond Biology, he brings together his years of study and independent research to answer a question that has long fascinated him: How could humans have gone through the same kind of evolutionary process as every other animal and yet have come out so different? This question has been central to Hallinan’s intellectual life. His passion for the subject is not driven simply by curiosity, but rather by a sense that time is growing short for us to come to terms with our place in the natural world. More ]