It’s of course possible that Vladimir Putin was always hell-bent on invading Ukraine, that his decision was taken months if not years ago, and that no diplomatic intervention would have made any difference.
It may seem like a "conspiracy theory" to say this, but it is actually possible that the U.S. wanted Russia to invade Ukraine. There is ample evidence that for the past 15 years or more, the U.S. has been provoking Russia into taking military action there. I wrote a piece on this a few weeks ago, if you want to check it out:
I wrote on Feb. 10: "The conclusion that the US appears to be pursuing a goal of conflict-instigation can also be seen in the trajectory of its 'diplomacy.' To the extent the US has engaged 'diplomatically' in the ongoing situation, the effect has seemingly been to escalate tensions, not 'de-escalate' — despite pretensions to the latter."
The real question is why. I also want to know why our news outlets were not reporting this at the time. Had we known that the real hangup (at least on the surface) was Ukraine in NATO, I know I would have been shouting from the rafters to just give Russia what Putin wants. Rather they were burying Putin's rather understandable request, bearing in mind that we nearly blew the world up in the 1960s to keep from having missiles in Cuba.
It makes as much sense as anything I've seen. Thank you for posting the link. We really want to "save the world," we need to get a handle on our political and bureaucratic class and their elite masters.
As others have pointed out, the likes of Barack Obama aren't exactly wild-eyed white supremacists, but they pointed out that Nato's eastward expansion, and Ukraine's aspirations towards the West are existential to Russia in a way they are not to the United States. It shouldn't be considered an act of high treason to point this out, but it is.
By the same token, it shouldn't be considered belligerence to say that, should Ukraine wish to orient itself with the EU and NATO, and the Ukrainian regime is the legitimate voice of the Ukrainian population, then Russia's right of veto under the sword is illegitimate. That is, Ukraine's path is Ukraine's path, not Russia's path, and just because Russia has a security concern doesn't mean Ukraine's path isn't theirs to pick.
But in the jingoistic frenzy in this country and in Russia, these very simple realities are lost, and we're careening headlong into disaster.
As someone in America and not in Russia, my primary concern is what America does, and here I share Michael's concerns: a very large subset of our elites is now animated by full-on Russophobia. I would separate these people from a lot of the intelligence agencies, whose clear-eyed work leading up to the Russian invasion has, in my view at least, given them a lot of credibility. That is, they articulated the danger of the Russian buildup to a very detailed level, and were proven right by Russia's aggression. We need more of this: recognizing genuine threats. We need less of the Putin-as-Palpatine hysteria. And we need, no matter how terrible the Russian aggression is, a clear-eyed analysis of what *we* can do to resolve the situation, and if it's not too late a return to the Minsk accords might well be the way to go. And only America and Russia can take the lead on that.
If you see any indication that America is willing to "take the lead" on this in the current environment, please pass along. Because I definitely haven't seen it.
I certainly hope there is no desire to take the lead in starting a nuclear exchange, and the crap I am seeing bandied about in the media would lead directly to that.
I hope we're just talking stupid. Nothing is going to stop Putin from taking the Ukraine, and getting involved just assures there will be that exchange. I would cut off the arms shipments now in full knowledge of that. Not liking it doesn't change the fundamental reality.
Obama is the President under whom CIA Chief Brannan gave $1billion to AQ affiliates to be "freedom fighters" for regime change in Syria. Proxy war, like so many others. It is that history that is worth considering, plus the fact that the heads of State Dept and Nat Sec are Hillary Clinton acolytes, she who as Presidential candidate promised immediate No Fly Zones over N Syria which would have just let the Turks invade and the jihadist mercenaries do what they wanted to do
Oh, and if you want a bit of really morbid irony, go look up the Azov battalion and the Odessa Massacre in Ukraine, and then read back about the claims that *Putin* is a white supremacist. Sometimes there really is no good guy in the story, just levels of bad.
I couldn’t agree more, like Stalin vs Hitler. My next article is actually going to be about the Azov Battalion but I’ve still got a lot of research to do.
This is a failure of Western post Cold War geopolitical policy. As the Cold War ended, our leadership didn’t understand how to steer the ship in another direction. Ukraine had always asked to be in NATO. We had always paid the request with slight attention. Until very recently we communicated overtly that we were taking Ukraine’s request serious.
Let’s be clear. Russia has always signaled to the West just how serious they consider the issue of their periphery. They attacked Georgia and they secured Crimea and portions of Eastern Ukraine. The history of Russia’s survival is rooted in strategic depth. The vastness of the Russian and Ukrainian steps killed both Napoleon and Hitlers army’s. Both of which were the most powerful armies of their era. Yet neither couldn’t successfully dominate Russia to the point that their invasions would be their doom.
No Russian leader would ever, or could ever, allow Ukraine to officially become a NATO ally. An attack from Ukraine begins in the heart of Russia. Think about it - we refused Soviet missiles in Cuba to the point we also threaten global nuclear conflict. We also would never allow Russia in Mexico or Canada or Cuba. What the West has done here is essentially corned Russia instead of spending time moving Russia closer to the West. Does this mean that Putin’s various invasions have been legit? Morally no. And now Germany is rearming! Can you imagine a more scary prospect to Russia - there are Russians alive that remember Hitlers invasion and the 26+ million Russian deaths associated with WWII - because they’ve spent all the post WWII years protecting themselves from a repeat of that scenario.
This is an epic disaster that we absolutely had a hand in.
An honest Journalism professor would put this piece before her young students and posit the question: why does no one in corporate media speak like this?
Why is it for Michael Tracy, virtually alone, to ask this question?
You’re wrong. It’s a total coincidence that the Biden family grift purse went to war with the country that definitely absolutely collaborated with Trump not. Commie oligarch Nazi troll. <crying>
Thank you Mr. Tracey for asking these important questions. I hope when this is over, if not before, the US is willing to answer these questions and better understand what has happened. I hope, but doubt it will happen.
I think it's too late to "avert World War II." ;-) I can see you're still a little shell shocked, but thank you for the article. Your explanation for the lack of negotiation is more generous than some I've seen (see, for example, Niccolo Soldo's take: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/fuck-it-russias-final-break-with?utm_source=url). But I am still grateful for the sanity. I am having a lot of trouble with "other media outlets" and their "infantile pablum." So I appreciate you and those like you even more.
Commercial media have been searching for something, anything, to replace Donald Trump as a source of outrage, and neo-con-inspired Ukraine frothing may be just the ticket. Or not. It could be that even the audiences for Rachel Maddow and her ilk on cable news are growing weary with RussiaRussiaRussia. It will be interesting to see how CNN's and MSNBC's viewership numbers develop over the next few days or weeks. They could perk up, unfortunately. Personally, however, I hope they sink so low and fast that they pull even Brian Stelter down the drain.
Please forgive the length of this comment, but you need to shed your blinkers and think very much more deeply about the issues here.
The catastrophe of the Ukraine is a reminder of two things:
1. Bad foreign policy by democratic regimes often costs lives.
2. The internal dynamic of despotic regimes ultimately always spawns a foreign policy that does so.
There is no doubt that one of the two central failures of U.S. foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union was the refusal to grasp that Russia, despite all of its struggles in the post-Soviet period, would nonetheless remain a major European power—which would mean that Russia’s economic and security interests would have to be accommodated in the regional military and economic structures managed by the other major European powers and the United States. (The other major failure was, obviously, how to cope with China.)
This failure was not one born of excusable miscalculation, but of outright incompetence and a naivete amounting to willful blindness. Cogent arguments were repeatedly made from the penumbra of the Washington academic and policy establishment that NATO expansion ought to be managed judiciously, and that NATO’s maximal goal in Ukraine (and in Belarus) ought to be a sort of uneasy neutrality. (If you don’t like reading enough to get through Prof. John Mearsheimer’s 2014 article in Foreign Affairs, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault”, https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf, not to worry, he can be found repeating the thesis all over YouTube.) The alarm bells were rung as far back as 1998 (when the first round of NATO expansion kicked off) by people like the noted Soviet-lover George F. Kennan, who told the New York Times “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
So, there’s a chunk of U.S. responsibility in all this—which even the squishy press has now begun to acknowledge.
That said, this appalling imitation of Germany circa 1939 is all on Vladimir Putin. Does Russia have a legitimate beef with NATO and the EU? Admitted. However, the reason Russia’s solution to that understandable grievance is bombs and dead babies is that Putin is a despot and a truly evil man. He is also demonstrably even worse at diplomacy than George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—which is saying something.
“Why Wouldn’t the US Negotiate With Putin?” you ask.
The answer is simple—because it has never been the U.S. that Putin needed to negotiate with, it was Ukraine.
Putin seemed at one point to have grasped this, which is why he tried to do a deal with Yanukovych. However, that deal was cobbled together much too late in the piece, and it was always too obviously just a bribe to a tottering regime. When this too-little-too-late kludge inevitably just inflamed the growing sentiment against Yanukovych and for western integration, Putin did not have the diplomatic nous to understand that Russia simply needed some patience and a more skillful line of attack. The chronic corruption and dysfunction of Ukrainian regimes would hobble progress toward integration with the West for years, giving Russia loads of time to find the right moment to present a more appealing package of incentives and seal a deal with Ukraine for neutrality. Instead, the murderous buffoon and his cronies decided that seizing Crimea would be the successful path to keeping Ukraine in the Russian orbit.
Of course, what the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Eastern Luhansk and Donetsk accomplished was to physically carve out of the polis the main repository of pro-Russian sentiment in the country and accelerate the shift in the rest of Ukraine away from Russia and toward Europe. Once Putin invaded Crimea, Russia lost any hope of negotiating the deal it wanted in Putin’s lifetime. As soon as that reality fully penetrated into Putin’s reptilian intelligence, a violent “solution” became inevitable.
I’m not going to address the profound foolishness of some of your characterizations—such as calling Ukraine a de facto US military outpost since 2104—because none of that matters. What other actors did or didn’t do in or with Ukraine since 2014 was irrelevant.
Had Putin ever deployed any sort of realistic foreign policy in Ukraine, he might have been able to secure an agreement from Ukraine that it would not join NATO, possibly even pass up on full EU membership and associate itself with some kind of Russian-managed trading zone—but once Crimea went, so did that prospect.
“Why Wouldn’t the US Negotiate With Putin?” Because, after 2014, what Russia really wanted out of Ukraine was never in the gift of the U.S., or even of Europe. Russia wanted a neutral Ukraine that leaned East. If that was ever something that the U.S. or Europe (as opposed to Ukraine) could have delivered, after 2014 it was very surely beyond their power—and Putin was fully aware of that.
Putin tacitly acknowledged that the bid to negotiate with the U.S. was a sham by making an opening demand that had nothing in it that could possibly have led to a real agreement with anyone. Putin fully understood that NATO could not agree to give the nation that it was formed to resist a veto over NATO membership. Even if the U.S. had wanted to make that deal (and it very properly didn’t), there was never any prospect it could jawbone the rest of NATO into it. Nor was there really any pressing need for that commitment. As you point out, it was widely understood that NATO membership for Ukraine wasn’t actually on the horizon for anyone.
With this invasion, Putin has taken a bad situation and made it irretrievable. Even if Zelensky would agree to cut some sort of deal now to avoid further carnage, it simply can’t last. Putin has converted a populace that might once have been content to remain in a wobbly state of neutrality to one that will, for generations, simmer in rebellion and look for revenge.
But the resort to the bludgeon is the great weakness of despots. However, popular they may once have been, they soon come to hold on to power only through intimidation and violence. These become the only tools in their toolbox—and these tools seldom work well for long in the international realm.
All the high-mindedness in the world will not change the basic principle that you can't threaten a nuclear power militarily. That gives them carte blanche to do whatever they wish, regardless of social media, to those in their orbit. Also, Putin is at no risk in Russia, none whatsoever. Does he care how he appears to non-Russians? Not all that much.
Unless someone wants to start a nuclear exchange over the Ukraine, which is insane, there's not a damned thing we can do about this and we should seriously be thinking about what a world without an independent Ukraine looks like, and instead make clear that our Article 5 responsibilities will be lived up to for those who are already NATO members. That will hopefully forestall the next moves toward places like the Baltics. which by the way should never have been given NATO membership. I doubt anyone wants to bomb us into the Stone Age over Latvia, but that may be what it comes down to.
I'm sure the Chinese would be quite happy if we weakened ourselves by trying to interdict Russia in Ukraine and resulting in a catastrophic strategic exchange. They'd wonder why we were such idiots.
Accepting that US hegemony is over is going to be hard for some.
The thing that I don't understand within the current popular framework is that Zelensky's demands seem quite maximalist. This might be normal under some circumstances, from a bargaining standpoint. But in the Minsk process, he has already agreed to certain conditions. So did the Russians, to be fair, and again to be fair, both sides haven't lived up to promises made. But why wouldn't Zelensky begin with at least going back to the drawing board where he left off -- by accepting what he's already agreed to? I can understand bargaining with a high demand first, but not when your country is being smashed to pieces and everybody is fleeing who can. Shouldn't the first priority be cease fire? I can also understand him wanting to up his hand or ante with whatever firepower available, like sanctions or weapons. But again, his country is being smashed right now. To me it gives some credibility to doubts about whose interests are being served.
PS Just skimmed through Blinken's (notably not our President's) news conf on this. In the prepared remarks it seems he is milking it for all it's worth. Didn't notice any concern for negotiations or express willingness to meet for ceasefire. Seems to indicate the focus on Russia and Putin is of value and that's it as far as I could see
It may seem like a "conspiracy theory" to say this, but it is actually possible that the U.S. wanted Russia to invade Ukraine. There is ample evidence that for the past 15 years or more, the U.S. has been provoking Russia into taking military action there. I wrote a piece on this a few weeks ago, if you want to check it out:
https://colinsims.substack.com/p/the-us-really-really-wants-russia?utm_source=url
It's pretty speculative, but you never know... Just food for thought.
I wrote on Feb. 10: "The conclusion that the US appears to be pursuing a goal of conflict-instigation can also be seen in the trajectory of its 'diplomacy.' To the extent the US has engaged 'diplomatically' in the ongoing situation, the effect has seemingly been to escalate tensions, not 'de-escalate' — despite pretensions to the latter."
The real question is why. I also want to know why our news outlets were not reporting this at the time. Had we known that the real hangup (at least on the surface) was Ukraine in NATO, I know I would have been shouting from the rafters to just give Russia what Putin wants. Rather they were burying Putin's rather understandable request, bearing in mind that we nearly blew the world up in the 1960s to keep from having missiles in Cuba.
Especially when you consider the Minsk process already at work for years
It’s not that speculative and you’re not the only one to wonder.
That makes me feel better and worse at the same time... Scary times, indeed.
It makes as much sense as anything I've seen. Thank you for posting the link. We really want to "save the world," we need to get a handle on our political and bureaucratic class and their elite masters.
As others have pointed out, the likes of Barack Obama aren't exactly wild-eyed white supremacists, but they pointed out that Nato's eastward expansion, and Ukraine's aspirations towards the West are existential to Russia in a way they are not to the United States. It shouldn't be considered an act of high treason to point this out, but it is.
By the same token, it shouldn't be considered belligerence to say that, should Ukraine wish to orient itself with the EU and NATO, and the Ukrainian regime is the legitimate voice of the Ukrainian population, then Russia's right of veto under the sword is illegitimate. That is, Ukraine's path is Ukraine's path, not Russia's path, and just because Russia has a security concern doesn't mean Ukraine's path isn't theirs to pick.
But in the jingoistic frenzy in this country and in Russia, these very simple realities are lost, and we're careening headlong into disaster.
As someone in America and not in Russia, my primary concern is what America does, and here I share Michael's concerns: a very large subset of our elites is now animated by full-on Russophobia. I would separate these people from a lot of the intelligence agencies, whose clear-eyed work leading up to the Russian invasion has, in my view at least, given them a lot of credibility. That is, they articulated the danger of the Russian buildup to a very detailed level, and were proven right by Russia's aggression. We need more of this: recognizing genuine threats. We need less of the Putin-as-Palpatine hysteria. And we need, no matter how terrible the Russian aggression is, a clear-eyed analysis of what *we* can do to resolve the situation, and if it's not too late a return to the Minsk accords might well be the way to go. And only America and Russia can take the lead on that.
If you see any indication that America is willing to "take the lead" on this in the current environment, please pass along. Because I definitely haven't seen it.
We're leading the way in piety and hysteria... those are kinds of leadership, right? Right?!
I certainly hope there is no desire to take the lead in starting a nuclear exchange, and the crap I am seeing bandied about in the media would lead directly to that.
I hope we're just talking stupid. Nothing is going to stop Putin from taking the Ukraine, and getting involved just assures there will be that exchange. I would cut off the arms shipments now in full knowledge of that. Not liking it doesn't change the fundamental reality.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/real-lesson-taiwan-ukraine-200897
Obama is the President under whom CIA Chief Brannan gave $1billion to AQ affiliates to be "freedom fighters" for regime change in Syria. Proxy war, like so many others. It is that history that is worth considering, plus the fact that the heads of State Dept and Nat Sec are Hillary Clinton acolytes, she who as Presidential candidate promised immediate No Fly Zones over N Syria which would have just let the Turks invade and the jihadist mercenaries do what they wanted to do
Oh, and if you want a bit of really morbid irony, go look up the Azov battalion and the Odessa Massacre in Ukraine, and then read back about the claims that *Putin* is a white supremacist. Sometimes there really is no good guy in the story, just levels of bad.
I couldn’t agree more, like Stalin vs Hitler. My next article is actually going to be about the Azov Battalion but I’ve still got a lot of research to do.
I've subscribed to your Substack so I can watch for it. I look forward to it.
This is a failure of Western post Cold War geopolitical policy. As the Cold War ended, our leadership didn’t understand how to steer the ship in another direction. Ukraine had always asked to be in NATO. We had always paid the request with slight attention. Until very recently we communicated overtly that we were taking Ukraine’s request serious.
Let’s be clear. Russia has always signaled to the West just how serious they consider the issue of their periphery. They attacked Georgia and they secured Crimea and portions of Eastern Ukraine. The history of Russia’s survival is rooted in strategic depth. The vastness of the Russian and Ukrainian steps killed both Napoleon and Hitlers army’s. Both of which were the most powerful armies of their era. Yet neither couldn’t successfully dominate Russia to the point that their invasions would be their doom.
No Russian leader would ever, or could ever, allow Ukraine to officially become a NATO ally. An attack from Ukraine begins in the heart of Russia. Think about it - we refused Soviet missiles in Cuba to the point we also threaten global nuclear conflict. We also would never allow Russia in Mexico or Canada or Cuba. What the West has done here is essentially corned Russia instead of spending time moving Russia closer to the West. Does this mean that Putin’s various invasions have been legit? Morally no. And now Germany is rearming! Can you imagine a more scary prospect to Russia - there are Russians alive that remember Hitlers invasion and the 26+ million Russian deaths associated with WWII - because they’ve spent all the post WWII years protecting themselves from a repeat of that scenario.
This is an epic disaster that we absolutely had a hand in.
An honest Journalism professor would put this piece before her young students and posit the question: why does no one in corporate media speak like this?
Why is it for Michael Tracy, virtually alone, to ask this question?
You’re wrong. It’s a total coincidence that the Biden family grift purse went to war with the country that definitely absolutely collaborated with Trump not. Commie oligarch Nazi troll. <crying>
Thank you Mr. Tracey for asking these important questions. I hope when this is over, if not before, the US is willing to answer these questions and better understand what has happened. I hope, but doubt it will happen.
I think it's too late to "avert World War II." ;-) I can see you're still a little shell shocked, but thank you for the article. Your explanation for the lack of negotiation is more generous than some I've seen (see, for example, Niccolo Soldo's take: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/fuck-it-russias-final-break-with?utm_source=url). But I am still grateful for the sanity. I am having a lot of trouble with "other media outlets" and their "infantile pablum." So I appreciate you and those like you even more.
Commercial media have been searching for something, anything, to replace Donald Trump as a source of outrage, and neo-con-inspired Ukraine frothing may be just the ticket. Or not. It could be that even the audiences for Rachel Maddow and her ilk on cable news are growing weary with RussiaRussiaRussia. It will be interesting to see how CNN's and MSNBC's viewership numbers develop over the next few days or weeks. They could perk up, unfortunately. Personally, however, I hope they sink so low and fast that they pull even Brian Stelter down the drain.
Here is an interesting take of a retired Indian diplomat on this very question. www.indianpunchline.com/india-shouldnt-miss-world-war-pointer/
Please forgive the length of this comment, but you need to shed your blinkers and think very much more deeply about the issues here.
The catastrophe of the Ukraine is a reminder of two things:
1. Bad foreign policy by democratic regimes often costs lives.
2. The internal dynamic of despotic regimes ultimately always spawns a foreign policy that does so.
There is no doubt that one of the two central failures of U.S. foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union was the refusal to grasp that Russia, despite all of its struggles in the post-Soviet period, would nonetheless remain a major European power—which would mean that Russia’s economic and security interests would have to be accommodated in the regional military and economic structures managed by the other major European powers and the United States. (The other major failure was, obviously, how to cope with China.)
This failure was not one born of excusable miscalculation, but of outright incompetence and a naivete amounting to willful blindness. Cogent arguments were repeatedly made from the penumbra of the Washington academic and policy establishment that NATO expansion ought to be managed judiciously, and that NATO’s maximal goal in Ukraine (and in Belarus) ought to be a sort of uneasy neutrality. (If you don’t like reading enough to get through Prof. John Mearsheimer’s 2014 article in Foreign Affairs, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault”, https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf, not to worry, he can be found repeating the thesis all over YouTube.) The alarm bells were rung as far back as 1998 (when the first round of NATO expansion kicked off) by people like the noted Soviet-lover George F. Kennan, who told the New York Times “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
So, there’s a chunk of U.S. responsibility in all this—which even the squishy press has now begun to acknowledge.
That said, this appalling imitation of Germany circa 1939 is all on Vladimir Putin. Does Russia have a legitimate beef with NATO and the EU? Admitted. However, the reason Russia’s solution to that understandable grievance is bombs and dead babies is that Putin is a despot and a truly evil man. He is also demonstrably even worse at diplomacy than George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—which is saying something.
“Why Wouldn’t the US Negotiate With Putin?” you ask.
The answer is simple—because it has never been the U.S. that Putin needed to negotiate with, it was Ukraine.
Putin seemed at one point to have grasped this, which is why he tried to do a deal with Yanukovych. However, that deal was cobbled together much too late in the piece, and it was always too obviously just a bribe to a tottering regime. When this too-little-too-late kludge inevitably just inflamed the growing sentiment against Yanukovych and for western integration, Putin did not have the diplomatic nous to understand that Russia simply needed some patience and a more skillful line of attack. The chronic corruption and dysfunction of Ukrainian regimes would hobble progress toward integration with the West for years, giving Russia loads of time to find the right moment to present a more appealing package of incentives and seal a deal with Ukraine for neutrality. Instead, the murderous buffoon and his cronies decided that seizing Crimea would be the successful path to keeping Ukraine in the Russian orbit.
Of course, what the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Eastern Luhansk and Donetsk accomplished was to physically carve out of the polis the main repository of pro-Russian sentiment in the country and accelerate the shift in the rest of Ukraine away from Russia and toward Europe. Once Putin invaded Crimea, Russia lost any hope of negotiating the deal it wanted in Putin’s lifetime. As soon as that reality fully penetrated into Putin’s reptilian intelligence, a violent “solution” became inevitable.
I’m not going to address the profound foolishness of some of your characterizations—such as calling Ukraine a de facto US military outpost since 2104—because none of that matters. What other actors did or didn’t do in or with Ukraine since 2014 was irrelevant.
Had Putin ever deployed any sort of realistic foreign policy in Ukraine, he might have been able to secure an agreement from Ukraine that it would not join NATO, possibly even pass up on full EU membership and associate itself with some kind of Russian-managed trading zone—but once Crimea went, so did that prospect.
“Why Wouldn’t the US Negotiate With Putin?” Because, after 2014, what Russia really wanted out of Ukraine was never in the gift of the U.S., or even of Europe. Russia wanted a neutral Ukraine that leaned East. If that was ever something that the U.S. or Europe (as opposed to Ukraine) could have delivered, after 2014 it was very surely beyond their power—and Putin was fully aware of that.
Putin tacitly acknowledged that the bid to negotiate with the U.S. was a sham by making an opening demand that had nothing in it that could possibly have led to a real agreement with anyone. Putin fully understood that NATO could not agree to give the nation that it was formed to resist a veto over NATO membership. Even if the U.S. had wanted to make that deal (and it very properly didn’t), there was never any prospect it could jawbone the rest of NATO into it. Nor was there really any pressing need for that commitment. As you point out, it was widely understood that NATO membership for Ukraine wasn’t actually on the horizon for anyone.
With this invasion, Putin has taken a bad situation and made it irretrievable. Even if Zelensky would agree to cut some sort of deal now to avoid further carnage, it simply can’t last. Putin has converted a populace that might once have been content to remain in a wobbly state of neutrality to one that will, for generations, simmer in rebellion and look for revenge.
But the resort to the bludgeon is the great weakness of despots. However, popular they may once have been, they soon come to hold on to power only through intimidation and violence. These become the only tools in their toolbox—and these tools seldom work well for long in the international realm.
All the high-mindedness in the world will not change the basic principle that you can't threaten a nuclear power militarily. That gives them carte blanche to do whatever they wish, regardless of social media, to those in their orbit. Also, Putin is at no risk in Russia, none whatsoever. Does he care how he appears to non-Russians? Not all that much.
Unless someone wants to start a nuclear exchange over the Ukraine, which is insane, there's not a damned thing we can do about this and we should seriously be thinking about what a world without an independent Ukraine looks like, and instead make clear that our Article 5 responsibilities will be lived up to for those who are already NATO members. That will hopefully forestall the next moves toward places like the Baltics. which by the way should never have been given NATO membership. I doubt anyone wants to bomb us into the Stone Age over Latvia, but that may be what it comes down to.
I'm sure the Chinese would be quite happy if we weakened ourselves by trying to interdict Russia in Ukraine and resulting in a catastrophic strategic exchange. They'd wonder why we were such idiots.
Accepting that US hegemony is over is going to be hard for some.
Beautiful last paragraph. Worth the price of subscription.
The thing that I don't understand within the current popular framework is that Zelensky's demands seem quite maximalist. This might be normal under some circumstances, from a bargaining standpoint. But in the Minsk process, he has already agreed to certain conditions. So did the Russians, to be fair, and again to be fair, both sides haven't lived up to promises made. But why wouldn't Zelensky begin with at least going back to the drawing board where he left off -- by accepting what he's already agreed to? I can understand bargaining with a high demand first, but not when your country is being smashed to pieces and everybody is fleeing who can. Shouldn't the first priority be cease fire? I can also understand him wanting to up his hand or ante with whatever firepower available, like sanctions or weapons. But again, his country is being smashed right now. To me it gives some credibility to doubts about whose interests are being served.
PS Just skimmed through Blinken's (notably not our President's) news conf on this. In the prepared remarks it seems he is milking it for all it's worth. Didn't notice any concern for negotiations or express willingness to meet for ceasefire. Seems to indicate the focus on Russia and Putin is of value and that's it as far as I could see
Michael, I think this article from Michael Tooze at Chartbook will be of great interest.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-90-heavy-fires
Air quote much?