Fyodor Lukyanov is Chairman of Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, the oldest Russian NGO providing expertise in the foreign policy field, and editor-in-chief of the Russia in Global Affairs journal published in Russian and English with the participation of Foreign Affairs. As head of Russia in Global Affairs since its founding in 2002, he greatly contributed to making this journal Russia’s most authoritative source of expert opinion on global development issues. He is also research director at the International Valdai discussion club, and a member of presidium of Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). Fyodor Lukyanov is research professor at Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
Thomas Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a cofounder of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies program at Yale University and sits on its faculty steering committee. He is also a research fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale. He has been a lecturer in global affairs and political science since 2011, teaching courses on U.S.-Russian relations and Russian foreign policy, as well as cybersecurity and counterterrorism. Graham was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, during which he managed a White House-Kremlin strategic dialogue. He was director for Russian affairs on the staff from 2002 to 2004.
….The statements come from leaders of an industry that exerts tremendous influence in Washington, employing an average of 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years, or more than one lobbyist per member of Congress, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are also funders of the influential think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has been encouraging the United States to take immediate action, including militarily, in the event of a Russian invasion.
“Everyone in D.C. knows that weapons manufacturers are helping skew U.S. policy towards militarism, but they usually try to be less obvious,” Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, an anti-war organization, told In These Times. “They are cashing in on tensions over Ukraine as the U.S. pours weapons into the region.”
Question: You have received the Americans’ response to Russia’s security guarantee proposals. What does it say? What is their reaction? Antony Blinken has said that they are against releasing the document publicly. What has Russia decided on this score?
Sergey Lavrov: I believe that the general public will know the essence of this document soon. As our American colleagues have said, although they would like to keep this document confidential so as to provide space for confidential talks, they have coordinated it with their allies and with Ukraine. Are they sure that it will not be leaked very soon?
As for the essence of the document, the responses offer grounds for serious talks only on matters of secondary importance. There is no positive response to the main issue, which is our clear stand on the continued NATO enlargement towards the east and the deployment of strike weapons that can pose a threat to the territory of the Russian Federation, which we consider unacceptable. This stand did not appear out of the blue. As you may know, the issue of NATO’s non-enlargement or enlargement, however you put it, has a long history. In the early 1990s, or more precisely in 1990, when Germany was reunified and the issue of European security was raised, they solemnly promised that NATO would not expand even an inch eastward beyond the Oder River. These facts are well known and have been included in many memoirs by British, US and German officials. But now that this issue has become a matter of fierce debates, we have been told that the promises were only verbal. When we mentioned the memoirs, our Western partners responded that they were not serious and that their words were misinterpreted. They chose a rather immature way to explain the reckless expansion of the alliance.
But now that we have cited the promises made not in word but in the form of documents signed by the leaders of all OSCE states, including the US President (the 1999 Istanbul Declaration and the 2010 Astana Declaration), our Western partners have to find a way out of a very serious situation. The point is that both declarations set out the participating states’ commitment to the principle of indivisible security and their pledge to honour it without fail. This principle was formulated very clearly. It includes two interconnected approaches. The first is the freedom of states to choose military alliances. The second is the obligation not to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states. In other words, the freedom to choose security arrangements is conditioned by the pledge to respect the security interests of any other OSCE state, including the Russian Federation.
It is indicative that now when we propose coordinating legally binding security guarantees in the Euro-Atlantic region, our Western colleagues respond by urging us to respect the coordinated principles of security guarantees in that region. After saying this, they add that this means that NATO has a right to expand, and nobody can prohibit it from considering any country’s request for joining the alliance. The principle according to which no state may strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states is being deliberately ignored. Our Western partners make no mention of the Istanbul or the Astana declarations during the ongoing discussions on European security. They are keeping away from this matter. We cannot accept this. They explained their failure to honour the non-enlargement promises in the 1990s by the absence of written obligations, but such promises were given in writing later. They have been reaffirmed within the OSCE framework several times, including at the top level. We will now focus on getting clarity regarding this hypocritical position of our Western partners.
During my talks with Antony Blinken in Geneva, I asked him to explain why they regard the obligations made within the OSCE as a menu from which they are free to choose the dishes that taste good to them, and why they are disregarding or talking round their pledge to honour the interests of other countries. Mr Blinken did not reply to my question. He only shrugged his shoulders, and that’s it. I told him, just as I have told our other colleagues, that we would shortly send them an official request for an explanation why they choose only one of their commitments and disregard the other commitments on which its implementation depends. It will be an official request sent to all countries whose leaders signed the Istanbul and Astana declarations. I hope that it will not take them long to explain the Western position.
Other than that, we are analysing the Americans’ response. As Antony Blinken has said, they have coordinated it with Ukraine and with the other Western countries, with US allies. We have also received NATO’s response from Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. We are analysing these two documents as a package, because they have been provided in response to the draft treaty and draft agreement we proposed in December 2021. After an inter-agency coordination of our conclusions, we will submit them to President Vladimir Putin, who will make a decision on our further actions.
Western media and Western governments are all telling us one thing. But, suddenly, the actual players are all telling us another. Is it possible that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed an opportune situation too far and is now afraid of what he has unleashed?
On September 1, 2021, Zelensky met with Biden at the White House. In setting the agenda, he said that he “would like to discuss with President Biden here his vision, his government’s vision of Ukraine’s chances to join NATO and the timeframe for this accession.” He also walked away with a pledge for millions more in US money for security assistance.
Zelensky has been demanding, and receiving, money and arms from everyone. Only Germany has not joined the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and even the Baltic States in sending Zelensky the gift of weaponry.
But as the arms pour in, as the US focuses more on long talks than real solutions, and as Ukraine finds itself in the middle of something potentially scary, suddenly Zelensky is calming things down instead of heating things up.
After asking everyone to send money, arms and troops, on January 25, Zelensky suddenly turned down the volume. Everything is “under control,” he calmly reassured. There is “no reason to panic.” In fact, nothing is happening at all. Ukraine’s foreign ministry joined the new Zelensky choir, saying that, “In fact, there have been no radical changes in the security situation recently: the threat of new waves of Russian aggression has remained constant since 2014.” Zelensky actually “does not think there’s any remotely imminent threat to Kyiv.”
Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov added the not trivial contribution that the Russian troops near his border have not formed battle groups, “which would have indicated that tomorrow they would launch an offensive.” And just to make sure everyone was singing their part in the new Zelensky choir, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, added that the activity of Russian troops near the Ukraine border “is not news.” Not news? Then why are Biden and Blinken threatening war with Russia?
The US, UK, Germany and Australia have recently recalled their embassy staff from Ukraine because of the imminent danger of Russian invasion and war. On January 25, Canada joined them. But the EU did not. Why? Because, Josep Borrell, the chief EU diplomat said, “we don’t know any specific reasons.” He went so far as to call closing embassies dramatizing the situation. Ukraine agrees. The Ukrainian foreign ministry called it “premature.” Zelensky broke with the US and actually thanked the EU, saying, he was “grateful” to countries “whose diplomats remain in our country and support us in our work.”
Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials now seem to be closer to what Russia has been saying. Putin has consistently denied that Russian troops are near the Ukrainian border for offensive rather than defensive reasons. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, again told a US media audience that Russian troops are positioned as they are in response to NATO threats. He added, in case no one has been listening to Putin, “[W]e’re not speaking about military action. This is – you have to understand, no one is threatening anyone with military action. This will be just a madness to do that.”
And it is not only Russia, Ukraine and the EU who are speaking in a way that is not consistent with the way the situation is being constantly hyped by the US government and media. It is also the US. CIA Director Burns maintains that “We don’t know that Putin has made up his mind to use force.” So, “U.S. intelligence agencies haven’t concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin will invade Ukraine.” And, as the Ukrainian Minister of Defense has said that the Russian groups have, at least not yet, formed into battle groups that would indicate an invasion, so US intelligence says Russian troops have not done what they would expect if they intended an invasion. US intelligence had expected that, if Putin was planning to invade Ukraine, there would be a surge in the number of Russian troops near the Ukraine border, and the hostile presence would swell to 175,000. No such surge has occurred.
In 2008, the US, having been stymied by Germany and France in its attempt to accelerate Ukraine’s ascension into NATO, stated that, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO.” In 2014, the US set up and supported a coup in Ukraine that was intended to pull Ukraine closer into the NATO and European security sphere. Ukraine’s President Zelenski has been pressing the gas pedal on NATO membership, and the US and NATO have intensified the pressure on Russia, pushing NATO and weapons right up to its borders.
Russia finally drew the line. Prior to 2014, Russia had accepted its subordinate role to the West and compromised on all disagreements with the US. At Ukraine, Putin drew the line. He refused to accept the US’s hegemonic rules and stood up to the unipolar world. He defended Russia’s interests and asserted itself as a balancing pole in a multipolar world. That is why the US is so threatened by Russia’s demands for security assurances. It is not about Ukraine: it is about the line over which the battle to maintain the US led unipolar world will be fought.
Zelenski may have exploited this situation to advance his NATO ambitions. But having called for weapons and troops, he now finds his nation in the middle of a potential war in which his country will become the battle ground. Perhaps that is why he is may now be attempting to disarm the situation.
In early November 2021, several media outlets and the U.S. government began to warn of an imminent full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia on a scale not seen since the Iraq War of 2003. The attack was predicted to come around Christmas or in mid-January. Both dates have come and gone, and no invasion has materialized, yet some policymakers and most pundits continue to warn that it will happen, and soon. Moscow announced a series of demands on European security—unrealistic ones, but ones that seem set as a starting point for a dialogue among peers. This is a shift in the dynamic that Russia has been pushing for years: increasing its indirect confrontations with the United States to get America to treat it as a peer, not a spent force that can be ignored or dictated to.
The evidence so far points to Russia looking toward talks, not invasion. The initial reaction was set off by Russia’s movement of military assets within the Southern and Western military districts. The movements did not even represent a serious addition of forces to these command areas but a repositioning of different assets.
But there is a plausible argument that these are not a serious threat to Ukraine. In an article published in the Dutch-language magazine Knack and also on social media, Sim Tack, an independent military analyst (and previous co-author of mine) has noted that there has been more of a concentration of equipment than of personnel. He suggested last month that “Russia appears to experiment with forward positioning of equipment over longer durations of time than we usually see. They have done this first at Opuk between April and October, and now at Yelnya, Novoozerne, and Bakhchysarai. An emulation of NATO procedures in Eastern Europe.”
As Tack notes, the Russian air force has been largely absent from these movements. Air superiority would be a critical component of any ground offensive, so the lack of movement other than some helicopter formations is a major point against an imminent offensive.
Though on maps like the one published by the New York Times earlier this month Russian formations seem to be almost inside Ukraine, some are hundreds of miles away, lined up in depots at long-standing bases. There has been no effort to conceal the troops in forward positions or prepare them for an imminent offensive. Exercises in the Southern and then Western military districts have been interpreted as directed at Ukraine, yet these exercises were well within the scale of what is typical for Russia’s training schedule—and if units were being relocated to new areas as part of a reconfiguration, training and logistical exercises make perfect sense.
The Russian military is in many ways still reforming and evolving into a post-Soviet formation. Massed combined arms formations manned by conscripts are being replaced by contract professional formations. A major part of this involves a tempo of regular training and exercises.
There has also been an over-concentration on the motives of Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. Understanding Putin has its place in legitimate scholarship, but it is made more useful if scholars look at Putin within the context of the Russian political system. Putin is the president of Russia and the main arbiter of its various elite circles. He governs through the Russian political consensus that emerged after the disastrous 1990s. He is not a supreme master of strategy or a maniacal Bond villain set on revenge for the fall of the Soviet Union. Rather than attempting to read Putin’s mind, observers should ask not just what he wants, but how he could achieve it and what the cost-benefit is for the regime and for Russia.
