Video clips which appear to show Ukrainian soldiers killing Russian prisoners began to circulate online on November 18. It’s unclear when or where the clips were filmed, and their authenticity is still unconfirmed. Russia has sent the clips to the UN and other human rights organizations. Ukraine has not yet commented on the situation.
During the night of November 18, videos allegedly showing Ukrainian soldiers killing Russian prisoners circulated on Internet channels. The clips first appeared on Ukrainian Telegram channels, and then pro-Russian users started to actively share them.
The authenticity of videos posted by independent sources has not been confirmed by independent sources. It’s not clear when they were made. Ukrainian opposition blogger Anatoly Shariy, who takes Russia’s side in the conflict, claims that he posted one of the videos on his private channel “a few days ago.”
In one of the videos, a group of soldiers, apparently in Russian Armed Forces uniforms, is taken prisoner in the courtyard of a home. An armed man then appears in the clip, there are audible gunshots, and the video cuts off abruptly.
A second clip, probably shot by a drone flying over the same courtyard, shows the bodies of 12 soldiers in the same uniform as in the first clip. It is unclear what happened in the time between when the two clips were filmed.
Russian pro-war Telegram channels claim that the videos were filmed in the town of Makiivka, outside of Svatove in the Luhansk region. They also claim that the Ukrainians in the clip are graduates of the Kharkiv National University of International Affairs and, allegedly, former contestants on the humor TV competition KVN.
Valery Fadeev, head of the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights, called the incident “an emphatically provocative crime” and announced that he would inform the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, human rights organizations, and others – “2,000 addresses” in total.
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a case under the criminal code articles on murder of two or more people in connection with carrying out official duties, and mistreatment of prisoners of war.
Maria Zakharova, official spokesperson for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanded that international organizations “condemn this appalling crime and investigate it thoroughly.”
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that it is already studying the video, says RIA Novosti. Ukrainian representatives have not yet commented on the material.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said the footage “confirms the sadistic nature of the current Kyiv regime” and that such killings are “widespread practice among Ukrainian Armed Forces.” The Ministry also claims that “Ukrainian service members who surrendered this week are being held in accordance with all requirements of the Geneva Convention.”
On November 15, the UN Office of the the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that Ukrainian soldiers in Russian captivity are subject to widespread abuse and torture. The report cited 159 Ukrainians who were taken prisoner and who spoke to the staff of the UN OHCHR. The vast majority of them reported mistreatment. The report also mentions mistreatment of Russian soldiers and isolated cases of torture by Ukrainian soldiers.
Link to video is here. WARNING: video contains graphic and disturbing images.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 4, 2022, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on the topic of Russia.
According to what we hear from the White House and from the television networks, the issues at stake in the Ukraine War are simple. They concern the evil of Vladimir Putin, who woke up one morning and chose, whether out of sadism or insanity, to wreak unspeakable violence on his neighbors. Putin’s actions are described as an “unprovoked invasion” of a noble democracy by a corrupt autocracy. How we ought to respond is assumed to be a no-brainer. The United States has pledged vast quantities of its deadliest weaponry, along with aid that is likely to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and has brought large parts of the world economy—particularly in Europe—to a standstill.
Now, whenever people in power tell you something is a no-brainer, there’s a good chance that it’s a brainer. And the Ukraine War is more complicated than we’ve been led to assume.
There are reasons why the U.S. might want to project power into the Black Sea region. But we must not ignore that the politics of the region are extraordinarily complex, that the Ukraine conflict is full of paradoxes and optical illusions, and that the theater we are entering has been, over the past 150 years, the single most violent corner of the planet. And unless we learn to respect the complexity of the situation, we risk turning it into something more dangerous, both for Europeans and for ourselves.
Historic Roots of the Conflict
Putin invaded Ukraine after the U.S. rejected his demand for a guarantee that Ukraine not join NATO. We don’t have to excuse Putin, but we should note that, until quite recently, having Ukraine in NATO was a prospect that struck even many American foreign policy thinkers as a bad idea. These included George Kennan, who was one of the architects of the NATO alliance when the Cold War began in the late 1940s. Kennan was still alert and active, at about 90 years of age, when NATO won the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s. And in 1997, during the Clinton administration, he warned that American plans to push NATO borders “smack up to those of Russia” was the “greatest mistake of the entire post–Cold War era.”
John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, is a forceful representative of Kennan’s viewpoint. Mearsheimer is skeptical of “idealist” crusades, like the one in Iraq that George W. Bush drew the country into in 2003. He thinks President Bush dramatically overestimated the degree to which the U.S. could spread its values and its institutions. In light of present events, he especially faults Bush’s push to bring the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO in 2008.
A lot of Americans in government at the time felt the same. One was William Burns, then President Bush’s ambassador in Moscow, now President Biden’s Director of Central Intelligence. In a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Burns wrote the following:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. [It would be seen] as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. . . . It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
In thinking about why this would be the “brightest of all red lines,” consider why it was that the Ukraine problem didn’t get resolved at the end of the Cold War.
Russia is a vast country—the largest in the world. It’s not so much a country as an empire. Even today it has dozens of ethnic republics in it. Maybe you’ve heard of Chechnya or Tatarstan. But have you heard of Tuva? Or Mari-El? Or the Republic of Sakha? Sakha is four times the size of Texas, but it disappears inside of Russia. Back in the day, of course, this vast Russian empire was part of another empire, famously referred to by Ronald Reagan as the Evil Empire—that is, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There were 15 Soviet Republics, including Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Armenia, and Turkestan. And that bigger empire was part of an even bigger empire, which included the Eastern European “captive nations” of Poland and Hungary.
When Communism collapsed in the early 1990s, all these countries found their way to independence, most of them peacefully, some of them bloodily. But Ukraine, while nominally independent, remained bound to Russia in a number of informal ways—sometimes willingly, sometimes reluctantly. Russia kept its Black Sea fleet in Crimea, unmolested by Ukraine. Ukraine got cheap gas and desperately needed financial assistance.
Why wasn’t Ukraine able to make a clean break? Not because it forgot to. Not for lack of can-do spirit. It was just a really hard problem. With the possible exception of Latvia, Ukraine was the most Russian of the non-Russian Soviet Republics. Russian has for a long time been the language of its big cities, of its high culture, and of certain important regions.
If you had to give a one-word answer to what this Ukraine War is about, you would probably say Crimea. Crimea is a peninsula jutting out into the middle of the Black Sea. It’s where the great powers of Europe fought the bloodiest war of the century between Napoleon and World War I. It is a defensive superweapon. The country that controls it dominates the Black Sea and can project its military force into Europe, the Middle East, and even the steppes of Eurasia. And since the 1700s, that country has been Russia. Crimea has been the home of Russia’s warm water fleet for 250 years. It is the key to Russia’s southern defenses.
Crimea found itself within the borders of Ukraine because in 1954, the year after Stalin died, his successor Nikita Khrushchev signed it over to Ukraine. Historians now hotly debate why he did that. But while Crimea was administratively Ukrainian, it was culturally Russian. It showed on several occasions that it was as eager to break with Ukrainian rule as Ukraine was to break with Russian rule. In a referendum in January 1991, 93 percent of the citizens of Crimea voted for autonomy from Ukraine. In 1994, 83 percent voted for the establishment of a dual Crimean/Russian citizenship. We’ll leave aside the referendum held after the Russians arrived in 2014, which resulted in a similar percentage but remains controversial.
Enter the United States
With the end of Communism, Ukraine was beset by two big problems. First, it was corrupt. It was run by post-Communist oligarchs in a way that very much resembled Russia. In many ways Ukraine was worse off. In Russia, Putin—whatever else you may think of him—was at least able to rebuff those oligarchs who sought direct political control.
The second problem for Ukraine was that it was divided between a generally Russophile east and a generally Russophobe west. It was so divided, in fact, that Samuel Huntington devoted a long section in his book The Clash of Civilizations to the border between the two sections. But Huntington did not think that the line dividing them was civilizational. He wrote: “If civilization is what counts . . . the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries.”
The U.S. didn’t see things that way. It backed the Russophobe western Ukrainian side against the Russophile eastern Ukrainian side. This orientation took hold in the Bush administration, during the democracy promotion blitz that accompanied the Iraq War. And in 2004, the U.S. intervened in a crooked election, helping to sponsor and coordinate the so-called Orange Revolution. But the pivotal moment—the moment when the region began to tip into violence—came in early 2014 under more dubious circumstances.
The previous year, Ukrainian diplomats had negotiated a free trade deal with the European Union that would have cut out Russia. Russia then outbid the EU with its own deal—which included $15 billion in incentives for Ukraine and continued naval basing rights for Russia—and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich signed it. U.S.-backed protests broke out in Kiev’s main square, the Maidan, and in cities across the country. According to a speech made at the time by a State Department official, the U.S. had by that time spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine’s politics. And, considering that Ukraine then had a lower per capita income than Cuba, Jamaica, or Namibia, $5 billion could buy a lot of influence. An armory was raided, shootings near the Maidan left dozens of protesters dead, Yanukovich fled the country, and the U.S. played the central role in setting up a successor government.
That the U.S. would meddle with Russia’s vital interests this way created problems almost immediately. Like every Ukrainian government since the end of the Cold War, Yanukovich’s government was corrupt. Unlike many of them, it was legitimately elected, and the U.S. helped to overthrow it.
That was the point when Russia invaded Crimea. “Took over” might be a better description, because there was no loss of life due to the military operation. You can call this a brutal and unprovoked invasion or a reaction to American crowding. We cannot read Putin’s mind. But it would not be evidence of insincerity or insanity if Putin considered the Ukrainian coup—or uprising—a threat. That is what any military historian of the region would have said.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the strategist H.J. Mackinder called the expanse north of the Black Sea the “Geographical Pivot of History.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, used the same “pivot” metaphor to describe Ukraine in his post–Cold War book The Grand Chessboard. “Without Ukraine,” Brzezinski wrote, “Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
The danger to Russia in 2014 was not just the loss of Russia’s largest naval base. It was that that naval base would be acquired by the world’s most sophisticated military power—a power that had shown itself to be Russia’s enemy and that would now sit, with all its weaponry, at Russia’s gateway to the world. When Russians describe Ukrainian membership in NATO as a mortal threat to their country’s survival, they are being sincere.
American and European leaders, although they deplored the Russian occupation of Crimea, seemed to understand that a Russia-controlled Crimea created a more stable equilibrium—and was more to the natives’ liking—than a Ukraine-controlled Crimea. President Obama mostly let sleeping dogs lie. So did President Trump. But they also made large transfers of advanced weaponry and military know-how to Ukraine. As a result, over time, a failed state defended by a ramshackle collection of oligarch-sponsored militias turned into the third-largest army in Europe—right behind Turkey and Russia—with a quarter million men under arms.
Then, on November 10 last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed a “strategic partnership” with Ukraine. It not only committed the U.S. to Ukraine’s full integration into NATO but also stressed Ukraine’s claim to Crimea. This was hubris. Now the Black Sea region’s problems, in all their complexity, risk being thrown into our lap.
Our Problems in Ukraine
When Russia invaded, the U.S. stood by its potential future ally, but without much sense of proportion and seemingly without much attention to the stakes. Let us conclude by discussing the complex military, economic, and political problems we face in dealing with the Ukraine War.
Military Problems
I’m not competent to predict who is going to win this war. But given that Russia is much more powerful than Ukraine—both economically and militarily—the need for U.S. assistance will be immense and indefinite, no matter the war’s outcome. Keeping Ukraine in this war has already come at a high cost in weapons for the U.S. and a high cost in lives for Ukraine.
The U.S. is not just supporting Ukraine. It is fighting a war in Ukraine’s name. From early in the war, we have provided targeting information for drone strikes on Russian generals and missile attacks on Russian ships. Since this summer, the U.S. has been providing Ukraine with M142 HIMARS computer-targeted rocket artillery systems. Ukrainians may still be doing most of the dying, but the U.S. is responsible for most of the damage wrought on Russia’s troops.
This is a war with no natural stopping point. One can easily imagine scenarios in which winning might be more costly than losing. Should the U.S. pursue the war to ultimate victory, taking Crimea and admitting an ambivalent Ukraine into NATO, it will require a Korea-level military buildup to hold the ground taken. It will also change the West. The U.S.—for the first time—will have expanded NATO by conquest, occupying territories (Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine) that don’t want it there.
Economic Problems
American policymakers have launched an unprecedented type of economic warfare against Russia. They expect it to be just as effective as battlefield warfare, but to generate none of the hard feelings. At American urging, Russia has been cut off from the private-but-universal Brussels-based SWIFT system, which is used for international financial transfers. And the U.S. has frozen the hard currency reserves of the Russian central bank—roughly $284 billion.
Long-term, these actions carry risks for the U.S. Our economic power—particularly the dollar’s status as a reserve currency, which permits us to sustain deficits that would bankrupt others—depends on our carrying out our fiduciary responsibilities to international institutions, remembering that the money we are managing is not ours. If you are a banker who pockets his depositors’ money, those depositors will look for another bank. The danger to the United States is that not only Russia, but also China and India, will set up alternative systems through which to move their money.
Political Problems
Finally, we should have learned from the latter stages of George W. Bush’s administration that it is hard to build a forceful foreign policy on top of a wobbly domestic mandate. This is especially true of the Biden administration, which seems unable to distinguish between domestic policy and foreign policy. At the one-month mark after the Russian invasion, for instance, the White House sent a message in which President Biden proclaimed his commitment to those affected by the Russian invasion—“especially vulnerable populations such as women, children, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons, and persons with disabilities.”
President Biden seems to view Russia’s conflict with Ukraine as one of autocracy versus democracy—the same framework he used to describe “MAGA Republicans” in his militaristically choreographed Philadelphia speech in early September.
We should not overestimate how much Americans know or care about Russia and Ukraine. In August, the Pew Center published a study listing the top 15 issues motivating voters in the 2022 elections. Here are those issues in order: the economy, guns, crime, health care, voting rules, education, the Supreme Court, abortion, energy policy, immigration, foreign policy, big government, climate change, race and ethnicity, and the coronavirus. Ukraine doesn’t appear on the list, and generic foreign policy didn’t make the top ten. That doesn’t look like a level of voter buy-in sufficient for running such big economic and military risks.
A dispassionate and honest discussion of Vladimir Putin’s conduct through the years would find much to criticize. Unfortunately, Putin’s name has been dragged into American politics primarily for the purpose of discrediting the presidency of Donald Trump. And the main thing Americans were told about Putin—that he and Trump colluded to steal the 2016 U.S. election—turned out to have no basis in fact. Since then, Congress has become as much an investigative body as a legislative chamber. Should Republicans end up with a majority in one or both houses of Congress next January, it would not be surprising if they investigated the allegation that President Biden’s family enriched itself by trading on his name with corrupt foreign elites—most prominently those in Ukraine.
The largest problem America faces is distrust, both at home and abroad. Thus far the war’s most important world-historical surprise has been the failure of the U.S. to rally a critical mass of what it used to call “the world community” to punish Russia’s contestation of the American-led world order. In the past few decades the U.S. has developed a method of intervention against those it considers ideological adversaries. The U.S. first expresses moral misgivings about a country and then tries to rally other countries to pressure it economically and to isolate it until it relents. This time, India and China did not join us in isolating Russia. It seems they fear that this same machinery can easily be cranked up against them if they’re not careful. And in fact it is being cranked up against China.
Another factor is surely that, after the Iraq War, other countries have less trust in the judgment of the U.S. as to which territories are likely to be suitable candidates for “spreading democracy.”
Finally, the big transformation that has been predicted for a generation now—that power would shift from the U.S. and Europe to Asia and other places—is now measurably underway. In the 1990s, between the Gulf War and the Iraq War, the U.S. and its Western European allies controlled 70 percent of world GDP; that number is now 43 percent. The West still does relatively well, but not so well that it can count on the rest of the world to rally behind it automatically. Whether in victory or defeat, Americans may be about to discover that you cannot run a twentieth century foreign policy with a twenty-first century society.
Bill Clinton’s wholesale rejection of his predecessor’s Russia policy laid the groundwork for the current crisis between Russia and the West.
Understanding the history behind US policy toward Russia since the end of the Cold War has taken on renewed urgency in light of current events. As of this writing, the war in Ukraine, begun on February 24, 2022 has taken the lives of tens of thousands of people and has displaced million others in the largest wave of refugees on the European continent since the end of the Second World War. An understanding of how we arrived at this perilous moment takes on an even greater urgency in light of the real, if distant, possibility of nuclear war. International relations experts, including the realist scholar John J. Mearsheimer and the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (1987-1991) agree that today’s crisis surpasses the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in its potential to bring the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
A review of American policy towards Russia in the immediate post-Soviet decade of the 1990s suggests that things didn’t have to be this way: Specific American policy choices (made with the acquiescence of America’s NATO allies in Europe) pursed over the course of that decade have led us to where we are today.
What we will find is that American policy wasn’t always marked by the hubris that later became its hallmark. In the years following the end of the Cold War (which Matlock has convincingly argued Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ended in his address on December 7, 1988 before the UN General Assembly) the US had an opportunity to pursue a policy towards Russia that was both magnanimous and prudential.
As was noted at the time by Princeton University scholar Stephen F. Cohen, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Union Treaty at a covert meeting in the forests of Belarus between the presidents of the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in December 1991, did not end the problems within the Soviet space, nor did it end the manifold issues between Russia and the United States.
For one thing, the wrapping up of Moscow’s politico-military domination of Eastern Europe and the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union was bound to be a messy business. The sudden end of the Union Treaty left millions of Russian citizens within the borders of what were now foreign, often unfriendly countries. As Cohen observed in November 1992, there was “the combustible combination of 25 million Russians living in former Soviet republics outside Russia and a Russian Army still encamped throughout those territories.”
“In one way or another,” wrote Cohen, “that army has already been involved in at least four civil wars outside Russia-in Moldova, Georgia, Tajikistan and the Armenian enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh in Azerbaijan.” Cohen went on to observe that, “Elsewhere, elements of the Russian military in Estonia and Latvia, where large Russian minorities have been disenfranchised, are itching for a fight. Meanwhile, none of the potentially explosive conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, the second largest former republic, have yet been resolved or even defused.”
So, as Cohen pointed out, within a year of the dissolution of the Union Treaty, the situation in Ukraine was already showing potential for conflict, after all, millions of ethnic Russians in Crimea and the Donbas now found themselves citizens of an entirely different country – and it was one which harbored rather different historical and cultural views from that of the Soviet Union.
The situation in Ukraine grated on the nerves of Russian nationalists who blamed Russian president Boris Yeltsin for his inept handling of the Soviet breakup. Russian nationalists in Crimea began to assert themselves as early as 1992, when the regional Crimean parliament declared independence from the new Ukrainian state. Russian Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn believed Yeltsin was duped by Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk’s promise during the negotiations in the Belavezha Forest that after the dissolution of the Union Treaty, a new kind of Union with “invisible borders, a single army and currency” would replace the old USSR.
Solzhenitsyn denounced the leaders of the new Ukrainian state for deceiving Yeltsin noting that the Ukraine nationalists now in charge “who in the past so staunchly opposed Communism, and…cursed Lenin” now, in an about-face, eagerly accepted “the false Leninist borders of Ukraine” including what he called “the Crimean dowry of the petty tyrant Khrushchev.”
Indeed, the disagreement over borders and the treatment of the ethnic Russian minority population within the new Ukrainian borders remains at the heart of the current controversy between the two nations.
I. George H.W. Bush’s ‘Go Slow’ Policy
Given the unstable and indeed volatile situation on the ground in the countries of the former Soviet Union, the administration of US president George H.W. Bush crafted a Soviet-, and later, Russia- policy based on two pillars consisting of 1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and 2) an effort to avoid exacerbating the latent ethnic tensions within the former Soviet republics.
As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”
Concretely, Bush’s “go slow” policy meant that the US would not push one way or another with regard to the direction post-Soviet politics took. Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding a crisis rather than shaping the new reality.
Bush and his team recognized the world US and Soviet leaders had operated in since the end of the Second World War had changed irrevocably after Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev abandoned the Marxist class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were free to choose their own paths, declaring “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” as “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”
Gorbachev continued:
“…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”
Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed the historic import of Gorbachev’s speech, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”
The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev was likewise extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe. There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. The diplomatic historian James Graham Wilson noted that Bush realized that a triumphalist approach on the part of the Americans might backfire. “Ok, so long as the programs do not smack of fomenting revolution,” Scowcroft wrote on a paper proposing ‘democratic dialogue’ in Eastern Europe.
Eventually, Bush accepted that Gorbachev was serious about reform and came to see him, as Reagan, Shultz and Matlock did: As a partner in ending the 40 year division of Europe.
A little known episode that took place at Camp David in November 1989, a month before the first summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev may have played a role in convincing Bush to overcome the skepticism of his advisers.
A young national security council aide named Condoleezza Rice invited two Russian specialists to Camp David to meet the Bush: Harvard University’s Richard Pipes, a leading neoconservative hardliner, and Princeton University’s Stephen F. Cohen, a leader of the “revisionist” school of Soviet history and author of a biography of Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin that Gorbachev had admired. Pipes and Cohen had a long, public history of opposing views and were frequent sparring partners on television and radio. At Camp David, Pipes and Cohen debated how the president might best approach Gorbachev at the upcoming summit in Malta. Pipes was, like Bush, a Republican and had served as an advisor on Soviet affairs to President Reagan. Cohen was a left-of-center critic of US policy and a longtime advocate for detente. Many years later, Cohen told me that after the debate, Bush asked that he sit next to him at lunch, and, seemingly rejecting Pipe’s hardline advice, told the room “Steve is my kind of Russianist.”
Subsequent events at Malta show that Bush took Cohen’s advice to heart. As Graham-Wilson notes, at Malta, “Bush wanted to avoid the impression that he was issuing orders to a defeated rival.” And according to the historian Joshua Shifrinson “Rather than trumpeting the collapse of the Soviet system for political points, the American transcript [of the meeting] suggests that Bush was willing to downplay changes in Soviet ideology if doing so would help maintain U.S.-Soviet relations writ large.”
***
Once the USSR fell, Bush and his team recognized the combustible reality on the ground. The most well-known expression of Bush’s policy towards the emerging post-Soviet states was made on August 1, 1991, during a speech to the Ukrainian Rada where he pledged that the US would take a hands off approach. Bush told the audience that the US “cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.”
Bush also warned he would “not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”
Bush was bitterly criticized by Cold Warriors within his own party. William Safire, a neoconservative columnist for the New York Times, famously dubbed the speech “Chicken Kiev.” Yet, and tragically, nationalist impulses drove Kiev, in both 2004 and 2014, to ignore the votes cast by the Russian speaking citizens in the south and eastern parts of Ukraine. And more dangerously, political elites in Kiev also embarked on a mission to join the NATO alliance.
Matlock has said that he was “quite convinced that if Bush had been reelected he would not have [expanded NATO].”
But we will never know, because on Tuesday, November 3, 1992, Bush lost the presidency to Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
I want to make one final point regarding Bush’s foreign policy. The wariness he evinced over stirring up the cauldron of parochial nationalism in the former USSR also manifested itself in his policy toward an emerging, analogous situation in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia, like the USSR, was a communist, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state that was, after 70 years, descending – thanks to nationalist tensions in Croatian, Bosnia, Slovenia and Serbia – into chaos. In Baker’s judgment, the war in the Balkans did not merit American intervention: “We don’t,” Baker once family quipped, “have a dog in this fight.” Baker also no doubt also understood the close historic, cultural and religious ties between Serbia and Russia and rightly felt that American attempts at shaping the post-Yugoslav reality on the ground would inevitably mean choosing sides and violating Bush’s cardinal rule against rubbing Russia’s diminished position in its face.
As we will see, the Bush approach toward both Russia and Yugoslavia was entirely rejected by the incoming Clinton administration – with disastrous results.
II. Clinton’s Wrong Turn
In the years following the 1992 US presidential election, Bush’s policy of respectful non-interference in post-Soviet affairs was replaced by a policy of micromanagement from Washington. The problem started early on. Clinton’s choice of foreign policy advisors proved the truth of the old dictum that “personnel is policy.” An old Clinton friend from his days at Oxford, Strobe Talbott, became the president’s principal advisor on Russia. And in short order, Talbott, and a team of officials from the State Department, CIA, Treasury and the National Security Council embarked on a series of trips throughout the former Soviet Union.
Dubbed “hello-goodbye” tours, Talbott and a team which included the young foreign service officer Victoria Nuland, a member of the most influential neoconservative family in Washington, currently serving in the Biden administration as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. The Talbott team traveled to 14 of the former Soviet republics. Talbott has written that his job was “to deliver to leaders of all the new independent states messages of American support for their sovereignty and willingness to help them resolve their disputes with each other and with Moscow.”
Their first trip to Kiev was in May 1993.
What was behind all this?
The answer is as sad and it is unsurprising: Votes. Clinton’s policy to expand NATO was calibrated to appeal to voters of Polish and Ukrainian descent in the American Rust Belt. It was politics that drove the policy – not US national security interests.
In a recent interview, Ambassador Matlock revealed that…
“The real reason that Clinton went for it [NATO expansion] was domestic politics. I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great mistake, and that if it continued, that certainly it would have to stop before it reached countries like Ukraine and Georgia, that this would be unacceptable to any Russian government, and that furthermore, that the expansion of NATO would undermine any chance for the development of democracy in Russia.”
Matlock continued:
“But why, when I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said, ‘Jack, why are you fighting against this?’ And I said, ‘Because I think it’s a bad idea.’ They said, ‘Look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois; they all have a very strong East European…’ Many of these had become Reagan Democrats on East- West issues. They’re insisting that the Ukraine [NATO] expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine. So, Clinton needs those to get reelected.”
Clearly then, NATO expansion was driven by Clinton’s political agenda. US national security interests didn’t enter into the equation. Clinton’s rejection of Bush’s “go slow” policy was a fateful error, and one that has helped to bring about the current proxy war between Russia and the West in Ukraine.
But if Clinton’s major mistake was pushing NATO expansion, a close runner up would be his policy toward the former Yugoslavia. Here again Clinton failed to take heed of Bush’s warning regarding “suicidal nationalism.” And indeed it might be fair to say that Clinton’s policy towards Serbia set the stage for what we are seeing in Ukraine.
Writing at the end of the 1990s, the late foreign affairs columnist William Pfaff observed that “The end of Soviet power encouraged Americans to think that history itself had validated American virtues and given the country a new mandate to improve the world, not by providing it with an edifying example, as once believed, but through action.”
And the hawkish ‘New Democrats’ who staffed and advised the Clinton administration found many an opportunity to flex American muscle in the new ‘unipolar world.’ Clinton and his national security team came quickly – after NATO’s intervention in Bosnia in 1995 – to take the efficacy and rightness of humanitarian intervention as an article of faith. The success of the Dayton Accords seemed to cement the idea that America was, after all, the indispensable nation.
As the historian David P. Calleo observed, the Clinton administration “had always sported a low-grade Wilsonian rhetoric that implied hegemonic ambitions,” it was only after Dayton that “the policy began to imitate the rhetoric.”
Clinton’s second intervention in the Balkans in 1999 set the template for what George W. Bush attempted in Iraq, and, later, what Barack Obama attempted in Libya and Syria. In the absence of U.N. sanction, Clinton launched a 78-day bombardment of Serbia, ostensibly undertaken to prevent what was said to be the looming slaughter of Albanian Kosovars by Serbian forces.
Kosovo, and later American interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, combined with the American-sponsored “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe in the 2000s, all fed Vladimir Putin’s paranoia about American intentions – and his fears of American-sponsored regime change in Moscow. As the novelist Joseph Heller once wrote: “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Russia’s reaction to Clinton’s policy, particularly with regard to its illegal bombing campaign over Serbia helped to feed the crisis from the other end: It is useful to recall that the precedent for Russia’s unilateral recognition of the breakaway republics of Dontesk and Luhansk made this past February was set by the US in February 2008 when the it unilaterally recognized the independence of Kosovo.
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The “suicidal nationalism,” of which George HW Bush warned us, has long haunted Ukrainian politics, and in recent years has become its most dominant force thanks in no small part to the rhetorical financial and military assistance provided by presidents Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump.
Ukrainian nationalism bared its teeth during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, and then again during the violent coup d’etat of February 22, 2014. This last led directly to an 8 year war (April 6, 2014 – February 24, 2022) against the Russian speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk which killed over 13,000 people and displaced 1.3 million. The primary victims of that war, Russian speaking non-combatants, received little in the way of sympathy in the West.
In post-Maidan Ukraine, discriminatory language laws were instituted and an “anti-terror operation” aimed at the Donbas commenced under the direction the Washington’s hand picked prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
These moves by Kiev directly challenged Putin’s policy of protecting Russian minority populations abroad. The later refusal by Ukrainian presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky to implement the Minsk Protocols of 2015 was yet another sign that “suicidal nationalism” had taken hold in Kiev.
It then seems clear, in the light of history, that Bush’s prudential and cautious policy toward Russia was the correct one. Unfortunately, Clinton and his advisers, many of whom, worryingly, continue to hold sway over the policymaking process in Washington all these years later, rejected Bush’s approach.
On November 15, two Russian-made cruise missiles crossed into Poland, landing in the village of Przewodow, a village in the southeastern corner of the country, near the border with Ukraine, killing at least two people.
Preliminary investigations, as reported by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, indicate that the incident was caused by Ukraine’s missile defense systems, which sought to intercept an incoming Russian missile. But the event immediately created a storm of speculation, coming as it did on a day when the Russian military fired some 90 cruise missiles at energy installations and other sites throughout Ukraine, continuing a weeks-long attempt to devastate the Ukrainian economy as winter approaches.
The episode, though accidental, marks the first time the fighting in Ukraine has crossed into NATO territory. That, in turn, produced a tsunami of instant analysis about whether Poland would invoke Article 5 of the 1949 Washington Treaty that created NATO. Article 5 is important because it states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all.
Everyone should have taken a deep breath. In times like these, when emotions run high and scary scenarios abound, prudence is particularly important. Invoking Article 5 is an alliance decision—and even if it were invoked, each country has the right to determine how it will respond.
Article 5 is frequently labeled the North Atlantic Treaty’s most important clause—and with some justification. The collective defense commitment serves as the foundation of NATO’s deterrent power. It is designed to dissuade an adversary from even thinking about launching an attack against a member state for fear of having to fight an alliance that now includes 30 countries (compared to the Cold War highpoint of 16). To the alliance’s credit, the collective defense provision has worked as intended since 1949. The only time NATO has invoked the clause was after the 9/11 attacks, and that was largely as a demonstration of solidarity against a much weaker foe—a terrorist group, not a state.
Furthermore, putting NATO on a war footing isn’t as simple as flipping a switch—and that’s a good thing. The invocation of Article 5 doesn’t actually require all NATO countries to go into autopilot mode and rush into battle. Each member of the alliance has self-agency. The decision to act, and what exactly to do, lies entirely with individual states and may differ depending on any number of circumstances—and for good reason.
NATO’s commitment to collective defense was framed in a manner that would prevent events outside of its control from forcing the alliance into military action it may not wish to take. To preclude haste, the alliance’s charter gives each member state the leeway to act “as it deems necessary…to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” The term “action” is left open to interpretation: it could include the use of military force but also any number of responses short of war, including severing diplomatic relations with the offending state and imposing economic sanctions. The resort to force is not ruled out, but neither is it automatic.
Moreover, no treaty, however sacrosanct in Washington policy circles, supplants the U.S. Constitution. Even had Poland requested the invocation of Article 5 and NATO determined that military force was called for, President Biden could not have short-circuited American constitutional procedures. He would still need to approach the U.S. Congress, the branch with the sole authority to declare war or authorize the use of force, and make the case that war serves the U.S. interest. Bypassing these critical procedures, even to protect an ally, would be unconstitutional.
What happened in Poland should remind us that war is inherently unpredictable and far more difficult to control than those who initiate and wage it assume. It can escalate, spread to places that were not in the fight when the guns began to fire, and produce unimaginable economic repercussions. The longer a war drags on, the more likely the law of unintended consequences will kick in.
The war in Ukraine illustrates this perfectly. It has lasted longer than anyone — certainly Vladimir Putin — anticipated and increased food and energy prices for countries, especially poor ones, thousands of miles away from Ukraine. There’s no reason to believe a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine is on the horizon; but there are several reasons to believe that more surprises await us—some that may harm people with no immediate connection to the conflict. This is reason enough to have provisions and procedures, such as Article 5, in place to put a brake on impulsive reactions. To their credit, President Biden and America’s NATO partners displayed this prudence by not jumping to a premature conclusion and, instead, urging patience until the facts became clear.
The larger lesson to be learned from what happened in Poland is that dialogue is an essential requirement during moments of tension. Washington and Moscow need to keep communications channels open even, or especially, during the worst of times. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has taken US-Russian relations to their lowest point in the post-Cold War era. As tempting as it may be to ostracize Russia, self-interest, even self-preservation, dictates clear and frequent communication in order to minimize misunderstandings and prevent isolated incidents from blooming into full-blown crises. It’s the kind of common sense which, fortunately, infuses Article 5.
MOSCOW, November 7. /TASS/. Over 60% of Russian entrepreneurs pointed to the decline in domestic demand as the main problem they are up against now. This is according to a survey conducted by the office of the institute of Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs’ Rights among businessmen in October 2022.
The survey involved 5,760 entrepreneurs from all regions of the country. In particular, 74% of respondents belong to the micro business sector, 21% to small businesses, 3.4% to mid-sized businesses and 1.6% to large businesses. Twenty-three percent of respondents are engaged in in the non-food products sector, another 11% in food, 8% in catering, and 7.5% each in manufacturing, construction and building materials, 7.3% in the consumer services sector, 5.2% in agriculture and forestry, 3.9% in education, and 3.5% in the hotel and tourism business. Each of the other industries does not exceed a share of 3% of the total number of respondents.
“Sixty-four percent of entrepreneurs picked this particular factor as the thing that most negatively affect their business. The next ones in terms of severity are shortage of personnel (34.2%), shortage of working capital and cash gaps (28.9%), supply chain gaps (26.5 %), and the complexity of import delivery (19.1%),” the survey results reveal.
According to the report, the partial mobilization introduced in Russia did not affect the teams of the majority of respondents (66%), while 34% reported that part of their employees were called up.
“More than half (58.6%) of those whose employees were mobilized did not need to replace these employees, or a replacement was found very quickly, and only 19% could not find a replacement for drop-out employees so far,” the report says.
As the authors of the survey noted, 26.7% of respondents reported that they were unable to find analogues of critically important foreign products or services that are no longer supplied to Russia due to sanctions. However, the majority still managed to find new suppliers of the same (23.6%) or similar products, both in Russia (22.3%) and abroad (13.5%).
As for the impact of sanctions, entrepreneurs gave different assessments. More than half (55.4%) have fully adapted or continue to adapt to the West’s anti-Russia sanctions.
“That is, most of the community withstood the aftermath of the sanctions,” the institute’s office stated. Anyway, 10.5% of the polled participants said that they could not cope with the consequences of the sanctions, and 16.3% did not notice them at all. Regarding the assessment of the state of their own business, only 6% of respondents said that they had to close their businesses or will have to do so soon.
Support measures and government work
Among the state support measures already taken, the entrepreneurs most highly appreciated the moratorium on inspections (52.2%), reduction of rates of the simplified system of taxation and property tax rates in the regions (37.4%), soft loans for SMEs for backbone companies (23.9%), and the suspension of new requirements for labeling goods (22.7%). The survey’s authors noted that the respondents were allowed to give a multiple choice answer to this question.
The measures the entrepreneurs would like the government to take in the future include writing off part of taxes, cutting insurance premiums to 15% of the total salary, cheaper and more accessible revolving loans, as well as the freezing of tariffs for natural monopolies.
According to the poll, 40.9% of respondents believe that the government’s work in terms of import substitution and the development of domestic production in Russia is the right move. However, the respondents also note that the volume of measures taken is still insufficient, and 8% believe that the actions of the authorities have already significantly improved the situation.
