By Fred Weir, Facebook, 8/21/22

Fred Weir has been a correspondent for Christian Science Monitor, based in Russia, for decades.

The murder of Daria Dugina, in a car bombing, has the full attention of the Russian media today. The target was almost certainly her father, right-wing “Eurasianist” philosopher Alexander Dugin, who was apparently supposed to be in the car but went in a different one at the last moment.

If we live in a world where people are to be murdered for their intellectual sins, then Dugin is certainly guilty. Eurasianism provides a very coherent rationale for Russian neo-imperialism, and he has been to the right of Putin on Ukraine and the post-Soviet world for a long time. But if the idea of killing him — in what was clearly a very professional assassination — was meant to get at Putin, it was a monstrously botched effort.

It was fashionable at some point among Western Russia experts to claim that Dugin was Putin’s mentor, or geopolitical muse, or something more sinister. The proliferation of articles like this one [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-03-31/putins-brain] calling him “Putin’s Brain” in recent years was a sad embarrassment to the entire Russia-watching profession. I see the same silly old tropes being recycled in Western news coverage of the murder today, calling him a Putin “aide”[the Mail], “ally” [Washington Post], “spiritual guide” [CNN], along with lots of “Putin’s Brain” references, and so forth. Even the NYT calls his relationship with Putin “opaque,” whatever that’s supposed to imply.

I have been acquainted with Dugin for many years, in the line of work, and talked to him frequently. You only had to ask him about his supposed Kremlin influence, and he would cheerfully admit that he had none, knew almost nobody in power and couldn’t even say for sure whether Putin had ever read any of his books. When he was fired from his job at Moscow University a few years ago, absolutely nobody came to his assistance, and he’s lived in relative penury ever since. He’s a critic of Putin, from the hard right, not a cheerleader. Terrible thing about his daughter; nobody deserves that.

‘Putin’s brain’ says he doesn’t have Putin’s ear. Do we know who does?

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2015/0127/Putin-s-brain-says-he-doesn-t-have-Putin-s-ear.-Do-we-know-who-does?

By Jacques Baud, The Postil, 8/1/22

The cultural and historical elements that determine the relations between Russia and Ukraine are important. The two countries have a long, rich, diverse, and eventful history together.

This would be essential if the crisis we are experiencing today were rooted in history. However, it is a product of the present. The war we see today does not come from our great-grandparents, our grandparents or even our parents. It comes from us. We created this crisis. We created every piece and every mechanism. We have only exploited existing dynamics and exploited Ukraine to satisfy an old dream: to try to bring down Russia. Chrystia Freeland’s, Antony Blinken’s, Victoria Nuland’s and Olaf Scholz’s grandfathers had that dream; we realized it.

The way we understand crises determines the way we solve them. Cheating with the facts leads to disaster. This is what is happening in Ukraine. In this case the number of issues is so enormous that we will not be able to discuss them here. Let me just focus on some of them.

Did James Baker make Promises to Limit Eastward Expansion of NATO to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990?

In 2021, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that “there was never a promise that NATO would not expand eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall.” This claim remains widespread among self-proclaimed experts on Russia, who explain that there were no promises because there was no treaty or written agreement. This argument is a bit simplistic and false.

It is true that there are no treaties or decisions of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) that embody such promises. But this does not mean that they have not been formulated, nor that they were formulated out of casualness!

Today we have the feeling that having “lost the Cold War,” the USSR had no say in the European security developments. This is not true. As a winner of the Second World War, the USSR had a de jure a veto right over German reunification. In other words, Western countries had to obtain its agreement, in exchange for which Gorbachev demanded a commitment to the non-expansion of NATO. It should not be forgotten that in 1990 the USSR still existed, and there was no yet question to dismantle it, as the referendum of March 1991 would show. The Soviet Union was therefore not in a weak position and could prevent the reunification.

This was confirmed by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German Foreign Minister, in Tutzing (Bavaria) on 31 January 1990, as reported in a cable from the U.S. embassy in Bonn:

“Genscher warned, however, that any attempt to expand [NATO’s] military reach into the territory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) would block German reunification.”

German reunification had two major consequences for the USSR: the withdrawal of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG), the most powerful and modern contingent outside its territory, and the disappearance of a significant part of its protective “glacis.” In other words, any move would be at the expense of its security. This is why Genscher stated:

“…The changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification should not ‘undermine Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should exclude an ‘expansion of its territory to the East, i.e. to get closer to the Soviet borders.’”

At this stage, the Warsaw Pact was still in force and the NATO doctrine was unchanged. Therefore Mikhail Gorbachev expressed very soon his legitimate concerns for USSR national security. This is what prompted James Baker, the American Secretary of State, to immediately begin discussions with him. On 9 February 1990, in order to appease Gorbachev’s concerns, Baker declared:

“Not only for the Soviet Union but also for other European countries, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States maintains its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not one inch of NATO’s current military jurisdiction will spread eastward.”

Promises were thus made simply because the West had no alternative, to obtain the USSR’s approval; and without promises Germany would not have been reunified. Gorbachev accepted German reunification only because he had received assurances from President George H.W. Bush and James Baker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, her successor John Major and their Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, President François Mitterrand, but also from CIA Director Robert Gates and Manfred Wörner, then Secretary General of NATO.

Thus, on 17 May 1990, in a speech in Brussels, Manfred Wörner, NATO Secretary-Geenral, declared:

“The fact that we are prepared not to deploy a NATO army beyond German territory gives the Soviet Union a solid guarantee of security.”

In February 2022, in the German magazine Der Spiegel, Joshua Shifrinson, an American political analyst, revealed a declassified SECRET document of March 6, 1991, written after a meeting of the political directors of the foreign ministries of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany. It reports the words of the German representative, Jürgen Chrobog:

“We made it clear in the 2+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe. Therefore, we cannot offer NATO membership to Poland and the others.”

The representatives of the other countries also accepted the idea of not offering NATO membership to the other Eastern European countries.

So, written record or not, there was a “deal,” simply because a “deal” was inevitable. Now, in international law, a “promise” is a valid unilateral act that must be respected (“promissio est servanda“). Those who deny this today are simply individuals who do not know the value of a given word.

Did Vladimir Putin disregard the Budapest Memorandum (1994)

In February 2022, at the Munich Security Forum, Volodymyr Zelensky referred to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and threatened to become a nuclear power again. However, it is unlikely that Ukraine will become a nuclear power again, nor will the nuclear powers allow it to do so. Zelensky and Putin know this. In Fact, Zelensky is not using this memorandum to get nuclear weapons, but to get Crimea back, since the Ukrainians see Russia’s annexation of Crimea as a violation of this treaty. Basically, Zelensky is trying to hold Western countries hostage. To understand that we must go back to events and facts that are opportunistically “forgotten” by our historians.

On 20 January 1991, before the independence of Ukraine, the Crimeans were invited to choose by referendum between two options: to remain with Kiev or to return to the pre-1954 situation and be administered by Moscow. The question asked on the ballot was:

“Are you in favor of the restoration of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea as a subject of the Soviet Union and a member of the Union Treaty?”

This was the first referendum on autonomy in the USSR, and 93.6% of Crimeans agreed to be attached to Moscow. The Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea (ASSR Crimea), abolished in 1945, was thus re-established on 12 February 1991 by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. On 17 March, Moscow organized a referendum for the maintenance of the Soviet Union, which would be accepted by Ukraine, thus indirectly validating the decision of the Crimeans. At this stage, Crimea was under the control of Moscow and not Kiev, while Ukraine was not yet independent. As Ukraine organized its own referendum for independence, the participation of the Crimeans remained weak, because they did not feel concerned anymore.

Ukraine became independent six months after Crimea, and after the latter had proclaimed its sovereignty on September 4. On February 26, 1992, the Crimean parliament proclaimed the “Republic of Crimea” with the agreement of the Ukrainian government, which granted it the status of a self-governing republic. On 5 May 1992, Crimea declared its independence and adopted a Constitution. The city of Sevastopol, managed directly by Moscow in the communist system, had a similar situation, having been integrated by Ukraine in 1991, outside of all legality. The following years were marked by a tug of war between Simferopol and Kiev, which wanted to keep Crimea under its control.

In 1994, by signing the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine surrendered the nuclear weapons of the former USSR that remained on its territory, in exchange for “its security, independence and territorial integrity.” At this stage, Crimea considered that it was—de jure—no longer part of Ukraine and therefore not concerned by this treaty. On its side, the government in Kiev felt strengthened by the memorandum. This is why, on 17 March 1995, it forcibly abolished the Crimean Constitution. It sent its special forces to overthrow Yuri Mechkov, President of Crimea, and de facto annexed the Republic of Crimea, thus triggering popular demonstrations for the attachment of Crimea to Russia. An event hardly reported by the Western media.

Crimea was then governed in an authoritarian manner by presidential decrees from Kiev. This situation led the Crimean Parliament to formulate a new constitution in October 1995, which re-established the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. This new constitution was ratified by the Crimean Parliament on 21 October 1998 and confirmed by the Ukrainian Parliament on 23 December 1998. These events and the concerns of the Russian-speaking minority led to a Treaty of Friendship between Ukraine and Russia on 31 May 1997. In the treaty, Ukraine included the principle of the inviolability of borders, in exchange—and this is very important—for a guarantee of “the protection of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious originality of the national minorities on their territory.”

On 23 February 2014, not only did the new authorities in Kiev emerge from a coup d’état that had definitely no constitutional basis and were not elected; but, by abrogating the 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law on official languages, they no longer respected this guarantee of the 1997 treaty. The Crimeans therefore took to the streets to demand the “return” to Russia that they had obtained 30 years earlier.

On March 4, during his press conference on the situation in Ukraine a journalist asked Vladimir Putin, “How do you see the future of Crimea? Do you consider the possibility that it joins Russia?” he replied:

“No, we do not consider it. In general, I believe that only the residents of a given country who are free to decide and safe can and should determine their future. If this right has been granted to the Albanians in Kosovo, if this has been made possible in many parts of the world, then no one is excluding the right of nations to self-determination, which, as far as I know, is laid down in several UN documents. However, we will in no way provoke such a decision and will not feed such feelings.”

On March 6, the Crimean Parliament decided to hold a popular referendum to choose between remaining in Ukraine or requesting the attachment to Moscow. It was after this vote that the Crimean authorities asked Moscow for an attachment to Russia.

With this referendum, Crimea had only recovered the status it had legally acquired just before the independence of Ukraine. This explains why it renewed its request to be attached to Moscow, as in January 1991.

Moreover, the status of force agreement (SOFA) between Ukraine and Russia for the stationing of troops in Crimea and Sevastopol had been renewed in 2010 and to run until 2042. Russia therefore had no specific reason to claim this territory. The population of Crimea, which legitimately felt betrayed by the government of Kiev, seized the opportunity to assert its rights.

On 19 February 2022, Anka Feldhusen, the German ambassador in Kiev, threw a spanner in the works by declaring on the television channel Ukraine 24 that the Budapest Memorandum was not legally binding. Incidentally, this is also the American position, as shown by the statement on the website of the American embassy in Minsk.

The whole Western narrative about the “annexation” of Crimea is based on a rewriting of history and the obscuring of the 1991 referendum, which did exist and was perfectly valid. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum remains extensively quoted since February 2022, but the Western narrative simply ignores the 1997 Friendship Treaty which is the reason for the discontent of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens.

Is the Ukrainian Government Legitimate?

The Russians still see the regime change that occurred in 2014 as illegitimate, as it was not done through constitutional process and without any support from a large part of the Ukrainian population.

The Maidan revolution can be broken down into several sequences, with different actors. Today, those who are driven by hatred of Russia are trying to merge these different sequences into one single “democratic impulse”: A way to validate the crimes committed by Ukraine and its neo-Nazis zealots.

At first, the population of Kiev, disappointed by the government’s decision to postpone the signing of the treaty with the EU, gathered in the streets. Regime change was not in the air. This was a simple expression of discontent.

Contrary to what the West claims, Ukraine was then deeply divided on the issue of rapprochement with Europe. A survey conducted in November 2013 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) shows that it was split almost exactly “50/50” between those who favored an agreement with the European Union and those favoring a customs union with Russia. In the south and east of Ukraine, industry was strongly linked to Russia, and workers feared that an agreement excluding Russia would kill their jobs. That is what would eventually happen. In fact, at this stage, the aim was already to try to isolate Russia.

In the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, noted that the European Union “helped turn a negotiation into a crisis.”

What happened later involved ultranationalist and neo-Nazis groups coming from the Western part of the country. Violence erupted and the government withdrew, after signing an agreement with the rioters for new elections. But this was quickly forgotten.

It was nothing less than a coup d’état, led by the United States with the support of the European Union, and carried out without any legal basis, against a government whose election had been qualified by the OSCE as “transparent and honest” and having “offered an impressive demonstration of democracy.” In December 2014, George Friedman, president of the American geopolitical intelligence platform STRATFOR, said in an interview:

“Russia defines the event that took place at the beginning of this year [in February 2014] as a coup organized by the US. And as a matter of fact, it was the most blatant [coup] in history.”

Unlike European observers, the Atlantic Council, despite being strongly in favor of NATO, was quick to note that the Maidan revolution had been hijacked by certain oligarchs and ultra-nationalists. It noted that the reforms promised by Ukraine had not been carried out and that the Western media stuck to an acritical “black and white” narrative.

A telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Kiev, revealed by the BBC, shows that the Americans themselves selected the members of the future Ukrainian government, in defiance of the Ukrainians and the Europeans. This conversation, which became famous thanks to Nuland’s famous “F*** the EU!”

The coup d’état was not unanimously supported by the Ukrainian people, either in substance or in form. It was the work of a minority of ultra-nationalists from western Ukraine (Galicia), who did not represent the whole Ukrainian people. Their first legislative act, on 23 February 2014, was to abrogate the 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law, which established the Russian language as an official language along with Ukrainian. This is what prompted the Russian-speaking population to start massive protests in the southern part of the country, against authorities they had not elected.

In July 2019, the International Crisis Group (funded by several European countries and the Open Society Foundation), noted:

“The conflict in eastern Ukraine began as a popular movement. […]

“The protests were organized by local citizens claiming to represent the Russian-speaking majority in the region. They were concerned both about the political and economic consequences of the new government in Kiev and about that government’s later abandoned measures to prevent the official use of the Russian language throughout the country [“Rebels without a Cause: Russia’s Proxies in Eastern Ukraine,” International Crisis Group, Europe Report N° 254, 16 juillet 2019, p. 2].”

Western efforts to legitimate this far-right coup in Kiev led to hide the opposition in the southern part of the country. In order to present this revolution as democratic, the real “hand of the West” was cleverly masked by the imaginary “hand of Russia.” This is how the myth of a Russian military intervention was created. Allegations about a Russian military presence were definitely false, an event the chief of the Ukrainian Security service (SBU) confessed in 2015 that there were no Russian units in Donbass.

To make things worse, Ukraine didn’t gain legitimacy through the way it handled the rebellion. In 2014-2015, poorly advised by NATO military, Ukraine waged a war that could only lead to its defeat: it considered the populations of Donbass and Crimea as enemy foreign forces and made no attempt to win the “hearts and minds” of the autonomists. Instead, its strategy has been to punish the people even further. Bank services were stopped, economic relations with the autonomous regions were simply cut, and Crimea didn’t receive drinking water anymore.

This is why there are so many civilian victims in the Donbass, and why the Russian population still stands in majority behind its government today. The 14,000 victims of the conflict tend to be attributed to the “Russian invaders” and the so-called “separatists.” However, according to the United Nations—more than 80% of civilian casualties are the result of Ukrainian shelling. As we can see, the Ukrainian government is massacring its own people with the help, funding and advice of the military of NATO, the countries of the European Union, which defends its values.

In May 2014, the violent repression of protests prompted the population of some areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine to hold referendums for Self-Determination in the Donetsk People’s Republic (approved by 89%) and in the Lugansk People’s Republic (approved by 96%). Although Western media keeps calling them referendums of “independence,” they are referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность). Until February 2022, our media consistently talked about “separatists” and “separatist republics.” In reality, as stated in the Minsk Agreement, these self-proclaimed republics didn’t seek “independence,” but an “autonomy” within Ukraine, with the ability to use their own language and their own customs.

Is NATO a Defensive Alliance?

NATO’s rationale is to bring European Allies under the US nuclear umbrella. It was designed as a defensive alliance, although recently declassified US documents show that the Soviets had apparently no intention to attack the West.

For the Russians, the question about whether NATO is offensive or defensive is beside the point. To understand Putin’s point of view, we have to consider two things that are usually overlooked by Western commentators: the enlargement of NATO towards the East, and the incremental abandonment of the international security’s normative framework by the US.

In fact, as long as the US didn’t deploy missiles in the vicinity of its borders, Russia didn’t bother so much about NATO extension. Russia itself considered to apply for membership. But problems stated to appear in 2001, as George W. Bush decided to unilaterally withdraw from the ABM Treaty and to deploy anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) in Eastern Europe. The ABM Treaty was intended to limit the use of defensive missiles, with the rationale of maintaining the deterrent effect of a mutual destruction by allowing the protection of decision-making bodies by a ballistic shield (in order to preserve a negotiating capacity). Thus, it limited the deployment of anti-ballistic missiles to certain specific zones (notably around Washington DC and Moscow) and prohibited it outside national territories.

Since then, the United States has progressively withdrawn from all the arms control agreements established during the Cold War: the ABM Treaty (2002), the Open Skies Treaty (2018) and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (2019).

In 2019, Donald Trump justified his withdrawal from the INF Treaty by alleged violations by the Russian side. But, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) notes, the Americans never provided proof of these violations. In fact, the US was simply trying to get out of the agreement in order to install their AEGIS missile systems in Poland and Romania. According to the US administration, these systems are officially intended to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles. But there are two problems that clearly cast doubt on the good faith of the Americans:

-The first one is that there is no indication that the Iranians are developing such missiles, as Michael Ellemann of Lockheed-Martin stated before a committee of the American Senate.

-The second one is that these systems use Mk41 launchers, which can be used to launch either anti-ballistic missiles or nuclear missiles. The Radzikowo site, in Poland, is 800 km from the Russian border and 1,300 km from Moscow.

The Bush and Trump administrations said that the systems deployed in Europe were purely defensive. However, even if theoretically true, it is technically and strategically false. For the doubt, which allowed them to be installed, is the same doubt that the Russians could legitimately have in the event of a conflict. This presence in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s national territory can indeed lead to a nuclear conflict. For in the event of a conflict, it would not be possible to know precisely the nature of the missiles loaded in the systems—should the Russians therefore wait for explosions before reacting? In fact, we know the answer: having no early-warning time, the Russians would have practically no time to determine the nature of a fired missile and would thus be forced to respond pre-emptively with a nuclear strike.

Not only does Vladimir Putin see this as a risk to Russia’s security, but he also notes that the United States is increasingly disregarding international law in order to pursue a unilateral policy. This is why Vladimir Putin says that European countries could be dragged into a nuclear conflict without wanting to. This was the substance of his speech in Munich in 2007, and he came with the same argument early 2022, as Emmanuel Macron went to Moscow in February.

Finland and Sweden in NATO—A Good Idea?

The future will tell if Sweden’s and Finland’s decision to apply for NATO membership was a wise idea. They probably overstated the value of the nuclear protection offered by NATO. As a matter of fact, it is very unlikely that the US will sacrifice its national soil by striking Russian soil for the sake of Sweden or Finland. It is more likely that if the US engages nuclear weapons, it will be primarily on European soil and only as a last resort on Russian territory, in order to preserve its own territory from nuclear counter-strike.

Further, these two countries, which met the criteria of neutrality that Russia would want for its direct neighbors, deliberately put themselves in Russia’s nuclear crosshairs. For Russia, the main threat comes from the Central European theater of war. In other words, in the event of a hypothetical conflict in Europe, Russian forces would be engaged primarily in Central Europe, and could use their theater nuclear armies to “flank” their operations by striking the Nordic countries, with virtually no risk of a U.S. nuclear response.

Was it Impossible to Leave the Warsaw Pact?

The Warsaw Pact was created just after Germany joined NATO, for exactly the same reasons we have described above. Its largest military engagement was the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (with the participation of all Pact nations, except Albania and Romania). This event resulted in Albania withdrawing from the Pact less than a month later, and Romania ceasing to participate actively in the military command of the Warsaw Pact after 1969. Therefore, asserting that no one was free to leave the treaty is not correct.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 8/21/22

In military terms, the crude, locally assembled drone dropping a country-made bomb or two on unguarded sites in Crimea are at best pin pricks in the big picture of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. But it can be profoundly consequential in certain other ways.

For a start, this escalation has Washington’s approval. A senior Biden administration official told NatSec Daily the US supports strikes on Crimea if Kiev deems them necessary. “We don’t select targets, of course, and everything we’ve provided is for self-defence purposes. Any target they choose to pursue on sovereign Ukrainian soil is by definition self defense,” this person said.

But Washington knows — and Moscow knows — that like any sophistry, this one too is a clever argument but inherently fallacious and deceptive. The New York Times has interpreted the drone attack on Crimea as a challenge to the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. The Times wrote that the Crimea attacks “put domestic political pressure on the Kremlin, with criticism and debate about the war increasingly being unleashed on social media and underscoring that even what the Russian government considers to be Russian territory is not safe.”

Times claimed that “as images of antiaircraft fire streaking through the blue Crimean sky ricocheted through social media, the visceral reality of war was becoming more and more apparent to Russians — many of whom have rallied behind the Kremlin’s line, hammered home in state media, that the “special military operation” to save Ukraine from Nazi domination is going smoothly and according to plan.”

The paper quoted a prominent establishment think tanker in Moscow acknowledging that the Crimean attack is a “serious” development insofar as “People are beginning to feel that the war is coming to them.” The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed in a nationwide address on Saturday, “One can literally feel in the air of Crimea that the occupation there is temporary, and Ukraine is returning.”

Once again, while Russia is steadily winning the ground war in Ukraine, the US is determined not to lose the information war. In Washington’s reckoning, in this Internet Age, the war is to be ultimately won in the Russian people’s minds. Therefore, this studied escalation by Washington puts Moscow in a dilemma, since if it is unanswered, Zelensky may target the 19-km long Crimean Bridge connecting the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar in mainland Russia with the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea. 

In fact, it is a near certainty. The point is, the Kerch bridge is “Putin’s bridge” in the Russian people’s consciousness. While formally opening the bridge to car traffic in May 2018, Putin was quoted as telling the workers, “In different historical epochs, even under the tsar priests, people dreamed of building this bridge. Then they returned to this in the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s. And finally, thanks to your work and your talent, the miracle has happened.”

Therefore, there is no better way to puncture the halo around Putin than by despatching at least a bit of the Kerch bridge to the bottom of the Black Sea. Meanwhile, from the US perspective, Kiev’s drone attacks on Crimea already serve three purposes.

First, this is meant to be a blow to the Russian morale. Indeed, Putin’s towering popularity within Russia has become an eyesore for the Biden Administration. Putin’s masterly navigation of the Russian economy out of crisis mode is an incredible feat that defied all logic of power in the American calculus — inflation is steadily falling (in contrast with the European countries and the US); the GDP decline is narrowing; foreign reserves are swelling; the current account is on the plus side; and lo and behold, the Biden Administration’s so-called “nuclear option” — Russia’s removal from the SWIFT messaging system — failed to cripple foreign trade.

Second, both Washington and Kiev are desperately scrambling for “success” stories to distract attention. The Times playing up the story speaks for itself. In reality, Russia’s Donbass offensive has created a new momentum and is steadily grinding the Ukrainian forces. Within the week, Russian forces will have encircled the lynchpin of the Ukrainian defence line, Bakhmut city, which is a communication hub for troop movements and supply logistics in Donbass. Russian forces have reached the city outskirts from the north, east and south. The fall of Bakhmut will be a crushing defeat for Zelensky.

On the other hand, even after two months after Zelensky promised a “counteroffensive” on Kherson near Crimea, it is nowhere in sight. Even his most ardent votaries in the western media feel let down. To be sure, there is growing disenchantment in Europe.

The Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, undoubtedly the smartest European politician today (with an economy registering over 6% growth when the rest of the continent is mired in recession), told German magazine Tichys Einblick in an interview last week that this war marked the end of “western superiority.” Interestingly, he named Big Oil as “war profiteers” and singled out that Exxon doubled its profits, Chevron quadrupled, and ConocoPhillips’ profits have shot up manifold. (Of course, all three are American companies.) Orban’s message was clear: America has weakened the EU. This thought must be troubling many a European politician today.

Third, Washington has thrown down the gauntlet in a measured way. But there is no way the war can be brought into the drawing rooms of the average Americans the way Times says is happening in Russia. Twenty Americans were killed in Kharkiv two days ago in a high-precision Russian missile strike, but there aren’t going to be any body bags returning to Arlington Cemetery; nor does it make headline in the cooperative American media.

The US plans to go further up on the escalation ladder. Escalation is the Biden Administration’s last chance to stall a Russian victory. The American strategic thinker and academic John Mearsheimer has written that the risk of a disastrous escalation is “substantially greater than the conventional wisdom holds. And given that the consequences of escalation could include a major war in Europe and possibly even nuclear annihilation, there is good reason for extra concern.”

Moscow’s preference is to avoid any escalation, since the special military operation is achieving results. Whereas, it is the US that is in some visible despair, and in immediate terms, Russia’s plans to hold referendums in Kherson and Zaporozhye in September must be stalled. Herein lies the danger.

The US’ current build-up over Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant points toward a hidden agenda to intervene in the war at some point directly. Kiev’s attempt to arrange a nuclear explosion in Zaporozhye can only be seen in this light. Moscow seems to anticipate such an eventuality.

Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu disclosed yesterday that Russia has begun mass production of Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missiles and is already deploying them. The US lacks the capability to counter Tsirkon, which is estimated to be 11 times faster than Tomahawk with far superior target-penetration characteristics. Shoigu may have given a stark warning that Russia will not be cowed down if there’s a NATO intervention in Ukraine.

By Ramzy Mardini, The National Interest, 8/12/22

Ramzy Mardini is an Associate at The Pearson Institute and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Chicago, where he studies the intersection of social networks and civil war dynamics, with a focus on the Islamic State.

As the United States continues to deepen its involvement in Ukraine, policymakers say the dangers and costly sacrifices are still warranted. “As long as it takes,” stressed President Joseph Biden at the NATO summit in Madrid this July, “so Russia cannot in fact defeat Ukraine and move beyond Ukraine.” This escalatory approach is sustained by twin assumptions about the war, which claim Russian president Vladimir Putin resorted to an “unprovoked” military invasion of Ukraine to fulfill “maximum” aims of conquest.

But these purported assertions are erroneous.

And yet, they’re propagated, repeatedly, within the Western discourse over the war. The purpose of the narrative they conjure up is straightforward. The distortion and inflation of the threat serve to compel and enable Western governments to pursue—and maintain—hardline policies to deny Russia a victory in Ukraine.

Early on, with bias run amok in the West, the media’s glaring and lopsided access into the conflict had also undercut its legibility of what was happening on the ground. By default, it over-relied on information furnished by one side of the war’s ledger. This empowered Washington (and also Kyiv) with nearly unfettered access to shape the interpretation of the war and its events to Western audiences without facing much, if any, scrutiny.

In effect, the American public has been bamboozled into supporting a costly and risky proxy war against Russia. Then, it was actively led to believe that Ukraine was winning the fight, despite later reports that the U.S. intelligence community has lacked an accurate portrayal of the war on the ground from its very onset.

As a tool of foreign policy, threat inflation involves concerted and deliberate actions to misrepresent information and manipulate public perception so as to inspire overblown fear and outrage. In turn, this helps to justify costly and risky policies that would otherwise fail to earn sufficient political and public support. Such efforts not only amplify the threat posed by an adversary, but also characterize the source of aggression as an intrinsic quality of its leadership. This is to discredit the belief that its behavior may be a reaction to one’s own policies or actions motivated by circumstance. Thus, the course of action desired is situated within the public discourse as the only reasonable path forward.

Needless to say, Putin started an illegal and unjustified war. Yet, to enable a course correction toward a diplomatic solution, it’s the Western-based narrative about the war that requires a repudiation.

Take, for instance, the purported certainty in the West that Russia’s military sought to conquer a heavily populated and fervently nationalistic country nearly the size of Texas—and initially, intended to do so in a matter of days, no less. This belief is entirely baseless. In fact, even the U.S. military is incapable of pulling off such a feat in that little time. And yet, the falsehood, which formed the West’s perception of Russia’s intentions, remains unabated. So too is Washington’s incessant deflection of holding any responsibility for provoking the invasion, despite its ubiquitous and escalatory involvement in the precipitating crisis.

Today, the narrative of an unprovoked and maximum-aim war persists and dominates the public discourse in the West. There’s no doubt that it has advanced popular and political support for a noble cause. Not only does it help to punish Russia’s aggression in invading a sovereign country, but it also helps Ukraine defend itself. Now surpassing $53 billion in total aid since the war began on February 24, the notable U.S. commitment aims to keep Ukraine in the fight over the long term. By extension, it prolongs the effort to bleed and degrade Russia’s military in hopes of ushering in its retreat from Ukraine.

However, the trade-off in keeping a distorted reality intact undermines better judgments in bringing the war ravaging Ukraine to a responsible end. Indeed, despite the strategic and moral goals the narrative is meant to facilitate, its propagation has also obstructed diplomacy, expanded the consequences of the war beyond Ukraine, and intensified its modes of destruction within it. More troublingly, the blowback continues to compound. Since the West’s approach was founded on misleading assumptions to enact it, ensuring its continuation over time will become more difficult and inextricably bound up with risky military escalation and greater adverse effects on the global economy.

Enabling Denial by Proxy

In late 2021, as pessimism over the crisis ramped up, Biden pledged to put together “the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult” for Putin to “do what people are worried he may do.” This included deterrence of both the punishment and denial variants. Deterrence-by-punishment involved a range of retaliatory sanctions inflicted on Russia’s economy if it invaded its neighbor. Deterrence-by-denial centered on manipulating Putin’s calculus to avoid an invasion by making it unlikely to be successful. Additionally, this also prepared the U.S. to burden, complicate, and spoil Russia’s chances of a speedy and economical victory should it resort to war.

But problems with U.S. strategy persisted. On the one hand, hesitancy in Europe, given the continent’s economic dependence on Russian energy exports, hindered the credibility of deterrence-by-punishment. To sanction Russia risked retaliatory measures in kind. On the other hand, deterrence-by-denial was inoperable through direct military engagement. Ultimately, Russia’s nuclear arsenal eliminated that possibility and neither the U.S. nor NATO intended to send troops to Ukraine, fearing escalation toward nuclear brinksmanship. To issue threats of direct war would be regarded as a bluff by Moscow and fail to deter its aggression.

Thus, to fill the coercive void and strengthen and signal resolve, Washington turned to threat inflation. This sought to buttress ongoing threats of sanctions and facilitate a deterrent strategy of indirect military engagement—or denial-by-proxy. Since the U.S. cannot directly prevent Russia from achieving its aims in Ukraine, it can try to rally Western support to overburden its strategy, resources, and tactics—rendering an invasion more costly to pursue and less likely to succeed if pursued. Without threat inflation to secure political and public buy-in, commitment to help defend Ukraine would fail to launch, be reduced to symbolic gestures, or fizzle out as soon as risks and costs mounted.

The driving logic is to shape the narrative because the narrative enables an indirect form of deterrence-by-denial. The Russian military may, ultimately, achieve some degree or outcome of victory on the battlefield in Ukraine. However, the blow to the West—and the liberal international order it seeks to preserve—is mitigated if that victory comes at great cost to Moscow, so much so that it turns the narrative of the war into Putin’s blunder.

No doubt, the prospect of another foreign policy calamity weighed heavily on the White House. In 2021, the fiasco ensued by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan—prompting an unforeseen swift takeover by the Taliban—had damaged the post-Trumpian image of Biden’s competence and credibility on the world stage. At home, he never fully recovered. A Russian military victory in Ukraine would deliver an even more consequential and humiliating defeat for the West, especially the United States. Some feared that back-to-back debacles abroad could weaken U.S. deterrence extended to Taiwan, emboldening China’s efforts to control the islands. Accordingly, from an intelligence, political, and strategic standpoint, Washington faced enormous pressure to overcorrect on the crisis in Ukraine.

As such, the Biden administration went to great lengths to deny Russia any semblance of a speedy victory—be it a swift military triumph or a quick political capitulation by Kyiv. Initially, the U.S. worked to bridge the divide among its NATO allies. To allow for a more credible deterrent threat to materialize, it shared intelligence on Russia’s military buildup at a two-day conference in Riga, Latvia, held on November 30 and December 1, 2021. But Putin’s resolve appeared to only harden. By the start of 2022, it was apparent that deterrence-by-punishment was failing to de-escalate the crisis. In turn, the U.S. intensified efforts at deterrence-by-denial.

In January 2022, the Biden administration leaned forward to get ahead of an invasion that hadn’t yet occurred—but one that it had to be ready to confront, nonetheless. Three key pieces of evidence pointed to an intensification in the U.S. approach. First, U.S. officials began to publicly estimate that an invasion was an ever-growing likelihood. “My guess is he (Putin) will move in,” said Biden on January 19, “He has to do something.” This was a change from the previous position, which emphasized that Putin’s intent to invade was unknown or inconclusive. Second, the U.S. incorporated denial-based plans to pre-empt and stifle the likelihood of a speedy Russian victory in case an invasion did happen. Finally, noticeable indications of threat inflation began to appear in the public discourse, whereby Russia’s ostensible aims and projected danger to the West were deliberately exaggerated.

These changes occurred as the U.S. knowingly prepared to officially dismiss Russia’s diplomatic proposal later that month. Centering on grievances and concerns over NATO’s role and its eastward expansion to induct Ukraine, Russia put forth a draft agreement in December 2021 to reset the post-Cold War security arrangement with the West. But in a delivered letter, the diplomatic proposal was declared by the U.S., in clearest terms, to be a non-starter. “There is no change. There will be no change,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 26, in regards to the U.S. commitment to uphold NATO’s open-door policy to prospective members, including Ukraine.

A Blindspot within American Intelligence

Within the media discourse, the American intelligence community was “spot on” in predicting an invasion of Ukraine. But this assumption is misleading, at best, and dangerous, at worst. It has allowed statements and warnings issued by U.S. policymakers, who cite the authority of intelligence, to go unchallenged. Upon closer scrutiny, an examination of the rhetoric of the Biden administration in the lead-up to the war suggests good reason to question the quality of their information. Undoubtedly, the lack of access into the decisions and deliberations inside the Kremlin extends to the lack of insight into Russia’s intentions. Hence, the certainty espoused by U.S. leaders when maximizing Russia’s war aim is unsubstantiated and constitutes an overreach.

A healthy dose of skepticism about the veracity and depth of American intelligence—or, at least, how political elites portrayed it to the public—is needed. First, given the rhetoric and actions by Washington throughout the crisis, there’s no credible indication that access into Moscow’s deliberations over aims, strategy, and intentions was ever obtained by the U.S. intelligence community. Second, the eleventh-hour upswing in alarmism from U.S. officials was also intertwined with an intensified information campaign that sought to preempt and inflate the Russian threat so as to deter it. Importantly, evidence of threat inflation had well preceded the shift to assert a near certainty of an invasion. This makes it difficult to disentangle and discern if the alarmism was derived from new streams of intelligence—or if it stemmed from political decisions to strengthen deterrence-by-denial. Finally, there existed profound political and strategic incentives for U.S. policymakers (and the intelligence community) to hedge their bets. After the debacle in Afghanistan, the uncertainty and inaccessibility to the Kremlin would likely incentivize widening intelligence estimates or political statements to incorporate some level of plausibility over the worst-case scenario. As such, there’s little doubt that avoiding the surmountable damage of being caught flat-footed again was of paramount concern, driving an overcorrection.

Contrary to popular depiction, the U.S. forewarning of an invasion of Ukraine doesn’t necessitate that intelligence access into Russia’s intentions, aims, and strategy drove its decision to issue a prediction. In fact, it was only in the final week of the yearlong military escalation that U.S. officials signaled some modest level of certainty about the prospect of a Russian invasion, yet were still engaged to find a diplomatic solution. Warnings ratcheted up over the likelihood of war as the crisis visibly escalated to a boiling point. In Washington, concern grew over Moscow’s costly signaling after it publicized its ultimatum on December 17, 2021, whereby its rejection would set up a pretext to invade. Some believed Russia’s mere issuance of the demands had indicated that an invasion was a foregone conclusion.

In its public engagement, Washington hedged its threat assessment. It signaled that a Russian invasion was a growing likelihood, inflated the threat to help buttress ongoing deterrent efforts, but still couched those warnings within continued uncertainty regarding Putin’s plans and intentions. This rhetorical balancing act served to preserve the public perception of American credibility regardless of how events unfolded. If Russia invaded, the U.S. credits the accuracy of its intelligence to advance preparations to confront the threat; absent an invasion, it credits its deterrent strategy that kept Russia’s aggression in check.

Up until the closing days, U.S. officials had, repeatedly, stressed that its intelligence had not revealed Putin’s calculus. Throughout the crisis, not to mention the years preceding it, the U.S. intelligence community had been encumbered by a critical blind spot into reading Russia’s intentions. It acknowledged an inability to pinpoint decision-making inside the Kremlin, which required obtaining access to Putin and his deliberations or penetrating his inner circle. The uncertainty forced U.S. intelligence, in large part, to rely on interpreting Russia’s visible military posture and maneuvers along the borders with Ukraine. Indeed, former U.S. intelligence officials doubted if access inside the Kremlin was ever obtained, believing that assessments had to rely on imagery and signals intelligence on Russia’s military deployment, particularly as final orders came down the chain of command.

Indeed, leading up to the invasion, a snapshot into the rhetoric used by U.S. leaders points to the general but imprecise nature of information. In early 2022, the White House estimated an invasion between mid-January and mid-February. On February 11, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the U.S. intelligence community had “sufficient confidence” of a “distinct possibility” that an invasion occurs before the end of the Beijing Olympics, which concluded on February 20. But he also added, “We are not saying that…a final decision has been taken by Putin.” Meanwhile, in an hourlong call, Biden warned Western leaders that an invasion was expected to happen on February 16. Of course, that turned out to be incorrect. “Putin has put in place the capacity to act on very short notice,” said Blinken on that day, “He can pull the trigger. He can pull it today, he can pull it tomorrow, he can pull it next week.” On February 17, Biden said that there was “every indication” Russia prepared to attack Ukraine “in the next several days.” He added, “I guess it will happen.” The next day, on February 18, he stretched that prediction’s timeframe to “in the coming week, in the coming days,” but still emphasized it wasn’t too late for a diplomatic path.

This rolling-basis framing of prediction suggests that Western intelligence assessments suffered from a lopsided composition in source material. Analytically speaking, insight into Russia’s intentions exhibited an overreliance on its capabilities because the U.S. lacked access into the deliberations inside the Kremlin. Indeed, as late as February 17, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg emphasized the ongoing lack of entry into Putin’s inner circle, saying that “we know about their capabilities but of course we don’t know with certainty about their intentions, so it remains to be seen what they will do.” This may have been sufficient to make estimations on general outcomes and provide an early warning system of an invasion’s final ground preparations. But the lack of direct access into Russia’s intentions undermined efforts to determine critical details, such as its strategy, military plans and objectives, and ultimately, political goals.

As such, U.S. predictions were made in the context of Russia having positioned its final military pieces. In February, Putin had claimed a partial withdrawal of Russian forces from the border. But evidence contradicted any signs of a pullback. “So far we have not seen any de-escalation on the ground from the Russian side,” said Stoltenberg on February 15, “Over the last weeks and days we have seen the opposite.” This suggested an invasion was on the horizon, and likely prompted U.S. officials to get ahead of it and elevate their warning status. The chances of an invasion are “very high,” Biden said on February 17, “because they have not moved any of their troops out,” but instead “have moved more troops in.”

Another sign of the unbalanced and limited nature of U.S. intelligence was the wide-ranging projections into the mechanics of a military invasion. Devoid of knowing Russia’s war-aim and military strategy, U.S. estimations of how an invasion would look relied on deducting plausible scenarios. Essentially, it focused on information gleaned from Russia’s mobilized military capabilities, force posture, and unit compositions.

Speaking from a White House podium, Sullivan suggested on February 11 that an invasion “could take a range of different forms,” with “a possible line of attack” being “a rapid assault on the city of Kyiv,” whereby the Russians “could also choose to move in other parts of Ukraine as well.” On February 17, in a speech to the United Nations Security Council, Blinken described a wider range of scenarios, even as he admitted: “We don’t know exactly the form it will take.”

Surely, at the individual level, U.S. policymakers were also incentivized to overcorrect and safeguard their reputations. Back in summer 2021, Blinken’s dismissal of a hyperbolic scenario he conceived—that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan wasn’t going to happen over the span of a weekend—had ironically turned out to be the reality foreshadowed. Now, the incentives at using hyperbole were reversed. Akin to throwing spaghetti on the walls at the UN, he warned of a false flag operation in the form of “a fabricated so-called ‘terrorist’ bombing inside Russia, the invented discovery of a mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake—even a real—attack using chemical weapons,” whereby Russian leaders “may theatrically convene emergency meetings” that greenlight an invasion. In the attack stage, “missiles and bombs will drop across Ukraine,” whereby “communications will be jammed,” and “cyberattacks will shut down key Ukrainian institutions,” all occurring prior to soldiers marching in “on key targets that have already been identified and mapped out in detailed plans.”

Needless to say, the forewarnings turned out to be wildly incorrect. Despite laying out an array of possibilities, the U.S. still missed Russia’s decision, days prior to the invasion, to recognize the independence of the two Russian-speaking breakaway provinces in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. This represented even more evidence of Washington’s lack of access to the decision-making calculus in Moscow. Moreover, the expectations over how Russia might conduct its war strategy were so overly generalized that military observers noted they “mirror-image” how the U.S. would conduct an invasion of its own….

A War to Bargain, Not Conquer

For Russia, a maximum aim was not only out of reach, but it never even attempted the preparations to grasp it. Upon closer scrutiny, its invasion reflects a limited-aims war waged as an extension of Russian statecraft. In essence, Russia seeks not to conquer Ukraine, but to coerce it. Its use of military force is a mechanism to gain bargaining power so as to strong-arm Kyiv’s compliance and coxswain Ukraine’s orientation, whereby it doesn’t threaten Russia’s security or its geopolitical interests.

In the opening salvo of the invasion, Russia’s northern front, operating from Belarus, deployed a small but rapid military force that quickly arrived at Kyiv’s doorstep. In real-time, U.S. officials publicly proclaimed the maneuver was intended to “seize” the capital city of 3 million people and “decapitate” the Ukrainian government in 48 hours. In the West, the mad dash straight toward Kyiv had all but confirmed the purported theory that Russia’s intent was to enact regime change. And henceforward, the Western media fallaciously adopted it as an empirical fact.

The assertion, however, was an artifact of American distortion. Such a military endeavor was impossible with the size and type of forces deployed. Kyiv is a vast city of “broad, sweeping avenues, bisected by narrower streets often paved with lumpy cobblestones,” with “extensive basements and cellars” inhabiting many of its structures. By itself, this renders any task to establish control over the city to be a bloody slog, lasting many weeks, if not months. “None of our leaders, neither the president nor anyone else, has ever said that we would like to capture Kyiv,” said Russia’s ambassador to the U.K., “I do not believe that it is possible to capture or occupy Kyiv. It is a big city.”

In reality, Russia’s military maneuver toward Ukraine’s capital was about coercive signaling, not conquering it. The military invasion, in fact, paralleled a diplomatic track, which explicitly sought to coerce Kyiv to promptly enter into negotiations. The goal of Russia’s Plan A was to elicit a conditional-based surrender favoring its terms, while keeping the bulk of its mobilized forces on the horizon. In exchange to comply early, Ukrainian leaders could avoid a destructive and devastating war that plays out on their soil.

Furious and disappointed with NATO’s initial hesitancy to offer support, Zelenskyy, in fact, publicly signaled (and threatened) on February 25 that he might accept Putin’s delivered request earlier that day “to talk about Ukraine’s neutral status.” Days later, he called on a national resistance to fight the invader and rejected Russia’s proposed talks in Belarus, where a delegation from Moscow waited. Yet, he was forced to send a delegation the next day since his public rejection gave Putin a propaganda victory. Nevertheless, no agreement emerged, but further rounds of negotiations were expected, and each sought to improve their bargaining position on the battlefield.

In the West, Zelenskyy’s bravado was heroized. But this rash defiance wasn’t driven by an abrupt change in personal conviction. Instead, it was motivated by a Western commitment, along with unprecedented actions by Europe, to assist in Ukraine’s defense. Quite possibly, it represented an overpromise given the Ukrainian leader’s subsequent and public frustrations with the actual level of support delivered.

To be clear, Moscow’s plan for a so-called “quick-and-decisive victory” wasn’t about capturing the flag; it was about expediting, under duress, a negotiated settlement over neutrality. In effect, Plan A wasn’t spoiled by a military defeat, but rather because it failed to coercively extract political compliance. Immediately thereafter, Moscow initiated its Plan B, which sought to enhance its bargaining power.

But with the faulty assumptions of an unprovoked and maximum-aimed invasion still intact, Western observers initially perceived Russia’s follow-on military behavior as an effort to “double-down” on still conquering Ukraine. Later on, it was said to have “downgraded” its earlier ambition and now seeks control over partial territory as opposed to the entire country. Both of these misinterpretations are driven by confirmation bias, given the misplaced certainty in the prevailing narrative.

Thus far, there’s no indication that Moscow has relegated its original war aim. Plan B, in fact, seeks the same principal goal in shaping Ukraine’s orientation as Plan A. Essentially, the change hasn’t so much occurred in the substance of Russia’s primary aim, but rather in the type of military strategy to secure it. Having preferred to obtain an agreement and avoid a costly war, Russia has been in the process of inflicting those costs to force the desired submission.

As already demonstrated, Russia’s contingency plan embarked on the arduous endeavor to establish hard facts on the ground to first position its bargaining power. This parallels a separate coercive campaign to build pressure and squeeze the acquiesce of Kyiv (and the West) to begrudgingly comply with Moscow’s terms for peace. Having targeted global food and energy supplies, the compellence phase is likely to expand and exploit other vulnerabilities. This can include attacks on infrastructure in parts of the country largely left untouched, which could extend to targeting civilians.

Nevertheless, the plethora of contradictions on the battlefield hasn’t forced a reevaluation of the axioms that underpin the distorted interpretation of the war. Despite the persistent confusion over the Russian military’s behavior, the tendency in the West has been to uphold the maximum aim of conquest and then erroneously attribute any shortfalls and irregularities as symptoms of Russian ineptitude, irrationality, or weakness.

For example, the miles-long Russian military convoy, which entered Ukraine in late February from Belarus, was expected to encircle and enforce a siege of the capital and topple the government. Despite arriving promptly outside Kyiv, Western observers were then baffled by the convoy’s perpetual stagnation. Appearing to be “sitting ducks,” the convoy was alleged in the media to have been impeded by “logistical problems” and “fierce resistance.”

In reality, the purpose of the Russian convoy wasn’t to seize Kyiv. Instead, it served as a decoy operation to facilitate the efficacy of the contingency plan, initiated after Zelenskyy rejected talks.

Stationary-like, maintaining the convoy in striking distance from the capital city kept the Ukrainian military divided. Unable to prioritize and concentrate its maximum strength to defend against the other invading fronts, the decoy allowed Russian forces to make territorial advances in the south and east. Later on, the convoy’s withdrawal was misinterpreted by the West to be a sign of Moscow relinquishing its aim to “seize” Kyiv. But this optimism, which followed the closure of Russia’s northern front, was also misplaced. The convoy’s role was fulfilled and the purpose of its northern front phased out when it aided the completion of a land bridge that connected Russia’s southern and eastern fronts. With the Crimean Peninsula now reinforced from Russia’s own border, Moscow has hardened and entrenched its staying power, bolstering its bargaining position.

A Course Correction Toward Diplomacy

Today, the situation grows direr for Ukraine’s military. But there’s little appetite in the West to correct the narrative in making a pivot to diplomacy. The West continues to leverage a favorable, but fleeting, discourse to justify its policy of denial. Even as the narrative loses momentum, political elites will continue to propel it forward. “You can already see in the media that interest is going down, and that is also affecting the public, and the public is affecting the politicians,” said Ann Linde, the Foreign Minister of Sweden in July. “So, it is our responsibility to keep Ukraine and what Russia is doing high up on our agenda.”

The interest to preserve the narrative’s tenets prolong efforts to punish and degrade Russia. But it also shapes how victory is defined. Certainly, the war looks abysmal for Putin if his original aim is perceived as maximum. However, if interpreted through the lens of a limited aim, the war’s trajectory is reversed in favor of Moscow, not Kyiv—and advocates of pursuing “victory” ought to take notice.

Either way, the West isn’t winning the war. A decisive victory in Ukraine is neither realistic nor worth the dangers or costs to try to achieve it. Even if more Western support arrives, it won’t stop Russia from escalating in kind. It also won’t do much to roll back the tremendous coercive leverage it has already gained. In reality, Russia’s terms for peace will be difficult to defy in any eventual settlement.

Moreover, prolonging the fight furthers the carnage and could likely worsen Ukraine’s negotiating power rather than boost it. Indeed, Moscow’s aims are, in fact, expanding over secondary interests beyond its primary interest of neutrality. This expansion is not only driven to justify the costs expended in the war but also because of emerging security concerns produced as a result of the war.

For instance, since Ukraine’s possession of newfound military systems, Russia is likely inclined to create a buffer zone that reduces the coercive value of those weapons. “Now, [our] geography is different,” said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister in July, “It is not only the DNR and LNR,” referring to the provinces in the Donbas region, “it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporizhzhia region and a number of other territories.” This would not only harden Moscow’s bargaining power, but also sustain its coercive superiority vis-à-vis Kyiv by reducing the efficacy of the latter’s retaliatory capability. “If Western countries supply long-range weapons to Ukraine,” Lavrov warned, territorial interests “will move even further.”

Inevitably, the misguided U.S.-led approach will be exposed by the merits of a hard and inconvenient truth: Russia’s resolve will likely prevail over the thin veneer of Western unity. As Europe steadily finds itself having to absorb the blowback of a U.S.-driven policy, escalation may accelerate its defection to seek accommodation with Russia. Moreover, NATO’s deepening involvement will only intensify a threat that Russia has deemed existential. This fuels its resolve rather than abates it. As demonstrated by the rattling of its nuclear saber, the vital interests at stake for Russia gives its leadership far more political will than the West in accepting the burdens and perils of escalation.

To end the fighting, recent calls have suggested Ukraine make territorial concessions to Russia. But neither a bilateral deal nor redrawing borders alone will bring about a lasting peace. This is because Ukraine is entangled in a proxy war. Its casus belli cannot be simplified as a territorial tiff between neighbors. Although such disputes played a role in the crisis, the taproot of the instability remains NATO’s living commitment—issued in 2008 and reiterated in 2021—to bring Ukraine into the Western alliance.

As such, the West must be a party to negotiations and a signatory to any lasting settlement. Without a multilateral agreement over Ukraine’s strategic orientation, the war could settle into a ‘frozen’ or recurring conflict. Putin may be content with either scenario. If diplomacy with the West remains an intractable path to pacify its security concerns, Russia will continue to hold Ukraine hostage in the broader dispute with NATO, as it has with Georgia. Doing so preserves a backdoor mechanism to obstruct Ukraine’s admission into the alliance, indefinitely.

A negotiated settlement is in the best interest for all parties. However, diplomacy has long stalled behind the scenes and given the multiple layers of actors on the Western side of the ledger, the prerequisite conditions will be slow and stubborn. Indeed, despite their perilous position, Zelenskyy’s domestic and foreign backers are adamant to prolong the fighting until a final victory is achieved. But for diplomacy to gain traction sooner rather than later, the U.S. and Europe must pivot in unison to pressure and empower him to seek the compromise that is necessary with Putin, which also requires the West to formally relinquish its position to bring Ukraine into NATO.

Before all else, Washington must come to terms with its role in provoking and now prolonging the war. Unfortunately, the conventional narrative dampens that realization and delays the course correction.

This reckless obduracy from afar will only add to Ukraine’s wrecking.

by Lindsey Snell and Cory Popp, The Grayzone, 8/18/22

Lindsey Snell is a journalist covering conflict and crises in the Middle East and North Africa, especially Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Tunisia. Cory Popp is a director, DP and camera operator whose work has appeared at HBO, Discovery, Travel Channel, National Geographic, TLC, MTV, Animal Planet, Fox Sports and PBS

“The weapons are stolen, the humanitarian aid is stolen, and we have no idea where the billions sent to this country have gone,” a Ukrainian complained to The Grayzone.

In a video sent via Facebook messenger in July, Ivan* can be seen standing next to his car, an early 2010s model Mitsubishi SUV. Smoke is pouring out of the rear window. Ivan laughs and pans his phone’s camera across the length of the vehicle, pointing out bullet holes. “The turbocharger died in my car,” he said, panning his phone toward the front of the vehicle. “My commander says I should pay to repair it myself. So to use my own car in the war, I need to buy a new turbocharger with my own money.”

Ivan flipped the camera toward his face. “Well, you fucking motherfucker members of parliament, I hope you fuck each other. Devils. I wish you were in our place,” he said.

Last month, Ukraine’s parliamentarians voted to give themselves a 70% salary increase. Filings indicate the raise was enabled and encouraged by the billions of dollars and euros of aid that have poured in from the US and Europe.

“We, the Ukrainian soldiers, have nothing,” said Ivan. “The things the soldiers have been given to use in the war came directly from volunteers. The aid that goes to our government will never reach us.”

Ivan has been a soldier since 2014. Currently, he’s stationed in the Donbas region, where he is tasked with using small, consumer-grade drones to spot Russian positions for artillery targeting. “There are so many problems on the frontline now,” he said. “We don’t have an internet connection, which makes our work basically impossible. We have to drive to get a connection on mobile devices. Can you imagine?”

Another soldier in Ivan’s unit sent us a video of himself from a trench near the frontlines in Donbas. “According to documents, the government has built us a bunker here,” he says. “But as you see, there are only a few centimeters of a wood covering over our heads, and this is supposed to protect us from tank and artillery shelling. The Russians shell us for hours at a time. We dug these trenches ourselves. We have two AK-74s between 5 soldiers here, and they jam constantly because of all the dust.

“I went to my commander and explained the situation. I told him it’s too hard to hold this position. I told him I understand this is a strategically important point, but our squad is broken, and no relief is coming for us. In 10 days, 15 soldiers died here, all from shelling and shrapnel. I asked the commander if we could bring some heavy equipment to build a better bunker and he refused, because he said the Russian shelling could damage the equipment. Does he not care that 15 of our soldiers died here?”

“If you tried to explain the situation Ukrainian soldiers are facing to an American soldier, they would think you were insane,” said Ivan. “Imagine telling an American soldier that we are using our personal cars in the war, and we’re also responsible for paying for repairs and fuel. We’re buying our own body armor and helmets. We don’t have observation tools or cameras, so soldiers have to pop their heads out to see what’s coming, which means at any moment, a rocket or tank can tear their heads off.”

Illya*, a 23 year-old soldier from Kiev, says his unit is facing the same conditions in another part of the Donbas region. He joined the Ukrainian Army shortly after the war started. He has a background in IT and knew such expertise was in high demand. “If I had known how much deception there was in this Army, and how everything would be for us, I never would have joined,” he said. “I want to go home, but if I flee, I face prison.”

Illya and the other soldiers in his unit lack weapons and protective gear. “In Ukraine, people cheat each other even in war,” he said. “I’ve watched the medical supplies donated to us being taken away. The cars that drove us to our position were stolen. And we have not been replaced with new soldiers in three months, though we should have been relieved three times by now.”

“Everyone is lying”: US doctor describes shocking corruption

Samantha Morris*, a doctor from Maine, went to Ukraine in May to try to help provide medical training for soldiers. “The first time I crossed the border from Poland, I had to hide my medical supplies under mattresses and diapers to prevent them from being stolen,” she said. “The border guards on the Ukrainian side will just take things, and tell you, ‘we need this for our war,’ but then, they just steal the items and resell them. Honestly, if you don’t hand-deliver donations to the intended recipients, the items will never reach them.”

Morris and a few other American medical professionals began to hold training courses in Sumy, a mid-sized city in northeastern Ukraine. “We drew up a contract with the governor in Sumy, though all they provided to us were meals and lodging, and the lodging was just us sleeping in the same public university we held our training courses in,” she said. “The Sumy governor had a friend, a local businessman, and he demanded that this businessman be added to the contract as a ‘liaison’ between us and the city of Sumy. And as a liaison, he would get a percentage fee of the contract. Our lawyers tried to negotiate the businessman out of the contract, but the governor of Sumy wouldn’t budge. We ultimately just signed the contract so we could hold our trainings.”

In the two months she spent in Ukraine, Morris says she encountered theft and corruption more times than she could count. “The lead doctor at the military base in Sumy has ordered medical supplies from and for the military at different points in time, and he has had 15 trucks of supplies completely disappear,” she said. The military first aid kits she had intended to give to soldiers once they graduated her training program were stolen. She saw the same kits for sale at a local market days later.

“I got a call from a nurse at a military hospital in [the Ukrainian city of] Dnipro,” Morris recalled. “She said the president of the hospital had stolen all the pain medications to resell them, and that the wounded soldiers being treated there had no pain relief. She begged us to hand-deliver pain medications to her. She said she would hide them from the hospital president so that they’d reach the soldiers. But who can you trust? Was the hospital president really stealing the medications, or was she trying to con us into giving her pain medications for her to sell or use? Who knows. Everyone is lying.”

Donated protective military equipment and combat medical supplies have flooded Ukraine’s online marketplaces. Sellers are careful to hide their identities, often creating new vendor accounts for each sale and willing to fulfill orders exclusively by mail. “We have found armored helmets given as aid from the Americans for sale on websites,” Ivan said. “You know, inside the helmet, the class of protection and brand are written. We saw this brand before and realized the helmets were the ones given to us as aid. Some of us tried to contact the sellers to set up a meeting, so we could prove they were selling stolen aid, but they were suspicious and stopped responding to us.”

Ivan says he has heard about the theft of weapons donated from Western countries, but pointed out that several soldiers in his unit are sharing a single AK-74. “I wouldn’t know about how they’re stealing the weapons, because the weapons never reach the Ukrainian soldiers in the first place,” he said. “And if they were giving more than small missiles and rifles, if they were giving us what we actually need to fight Russia, they would be weapons too big to steal.”

“I don’t think they want us to win”: Ukrainians scoff at Western aid

Ivan is not optimistic about Ukraine’s chances to win the war. “There won’t be a Donbas left,” he said. “The Russians will destroy it, or they’ll control all of it, and then they’ll move on to the south. And now, as it is, I’d say 80% of the civilians who have stayed in Donbas support Russia and leak all of our location information to them.”

When asked if he thought the US and European countries truly want Ukraine to win the war, Ivan laughed. “No, I don’t think they want us to win,” he said. “The West could give us weapons to make us stronger than the Russians, but they don’t do this. We know Poland and the Baltic countries want us to win, 100%, but their support isn’t enough.”

“It is obvious that the US doesn’t want Ukraine to win the war,” said Andrey*, a Ukrainian journalist based in Mykolayiv. “They only want to make Russia weak. No one will win this war, but the countries the US is using like a playground will lose. And the corruption related to the war aid is shocking. The weapons are stolen, the humanitarian aid is stolen, and we have no idea where the billions sent to this country have gone.”

Andrey is especially appalled by the lack of services provided to internally displaced Ukrainians. “It really isn’t a mystery why everyone wants to go to Europe,” he said. “There’s a refugee center near Dnipro, for example, and displaced people are only allowed to stay there for three days. And it’s 45 or 50 people in one big, open room with one bathroom and a tiny kitchen. Horrible conditions. So after the three days, if they have no money, no clothes, nothing, they are kicked out and have no choice but to go back to their homes in dangerous areas. We must ask our government where all the aid money has gone, when our soldiers don’t have what they need, and our civilians don’t have safe places to stay.”

Foreign journalists cover up grim reality with triumphalist delusions

Before the war started, Andrey spent several years reporting on corruption and crooked politicians in Ukraine. After an investigation into a government official in Odessa resulted in death threats against his wife and young daughter, Andrey sent them to live with relatives in France. “Ukraine is a democracy, right? So the government won’t press on you in an official way. First, you get phone calls warning you to stop. Then, they offer you money to stop. And then, if you refuse to be bought, you should be prepared for an attack.

“Real journalism is dangerous here,” he continued. “You see, since the war started, we have these new star reporters, and every day, they write that ‘Putin is bad, the Russian soldiers behave very badly…today, the Ukrainian army killed 1,000 Russians and destroyed 500 Russian tanks.’ They get a million followers on Twitter because they lie, and this isn’t real reporting. But if you write about the corruption in the Armed Forces, and have real examples…you won’t be famous, and you’ll be in trouble.”

Andrey has been picking up extra work as a fixer, arranging interviews and translating for foreign journalists in Ukraine to cover the war. “I have worked with about a dozen journalists from different countries in Europe,” he said. “All of them have been shocked. They left Ukraine shocked. They said they could not believe the situation here. But this shock did not make it into any of their articles about the war. Their articles said that Ukraine is on the road to victory, which is not true.”

Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers confirm Ukraine’s Armed Forces endanger civilians

In July, we spent the night at a hotel in Kramatorsk and were concerned to see that neo-Nazi Azov battalion soldiers were among the hotel’s guests. On August 4th, Amnesty International published a study revealing that since the start of the war in February, Ukrainian forces have endangered civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals and operating weapons systems in civilian areas, which is a violation of international law.

Amnesty International now plans to “re-assess” its report, in response to a massive public outcry after its publication, but Ukrainian soldiers and foreign volunteers have confirmed that Ukrainian armed forces maintain a heavy presence in civilian areas. “Our bases were mostly built in Soviet times,” said Ivan. “So now, Russia knows our bases inside and out. It’s necessary to spread the soldiers and weapons out to other places.”

A former US serviceman who goes by the moniker “Benjamin Velcro” was a volunteer fighter for the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ official unit for foreign volunteers. He spent five months in various parts of Ukraine, and says that soldiers being stationed in civilian areas was a common occurrence.

“Whenever I hear that Russia bombed a school, I just kinda shrug,” the American foreign fighter said. “Because I garrisoned inside a school. That’s a fact. The school didn’t have kids in it, so it’s not like they were endangering children. So all it takes is for Ukraine to say, ‘Ah! They hit a school!’ And that cumulates into an easy media narrative on their part.”

Like Ivan, Velcro is also pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances to win the war. “Man, I want everything in the world for Ukraine to win this. I want Ukraine to get its pre-2014 borders back. But do I think that’s tenable? No. You can’t sustain a war by crowdfunding forever.”

*Several interview subjects requested to be quoted under assumed names to protect themselves from potential danger.