Link here.

It’s good to see someone explain to an English speaking audience (in this case the readers of The Guardian) how Putin’s views about the west evolved from wanting to be a part of it – and when that wasn’t possible, wanting to simply do business and have its most basic interests respected – and when that wasn’t possible, having to acknowledge that the hardliners were right that the west wasn’t interested in reasonable relations with Russia. Emphasis in the article is mine. – Natylie

By Anatol Lieven, The Guardian, 2/24/23

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and try to capture Kyiv in February 2022, and not years earlier? Moscow has always wanted to dominate Ukraine, and Putin has given the reasons for this in his speeches and writings. Why then did he not try to take all or most of the country after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, rather than only annexing Crimea, and giving limited, semi-covert help to separatists in the Donbas?

On Friday’s one-year anniversary of Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, it is worth thinking about precisely how we got to this point – and where things might be going.

Indeed, Russian hardliners spent years criticising their leader for not invading sooner. In 2014, the Ukrainian army was hopelessly weak; in Viktor Yanukovych, the Russians had a pro-Russian, democratically elected Ukrainian president; and incidents like the killing of pro-Russian demonstrators in Odesa provided a good pretext for action.

The reason for Putin’s past restraint lies in what was a core part of Russian strategy dating back to the 1990s: trying to wedge more distance between Europe and the United States, and ultimately to create a new security order in Europe with Russia as a full partner and respected power. It was always clear that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would destroy any hope of rapprochement with the western Europeans, driving them for the foreseeable future into the arms of the US. Simultaneously, such a move would leave Russia diplomatically isolated and dangerously dependent on China.

This Russian strategy was correctly seen as an attempt to split the west, and cement a Russian sphere of influence in the states of the former Soviet Union. However, having a European security order with Russia at the table would also have removed the risk of a Russian attack on Nato, the EU, and most likely, Ukraine; and allowed Moscow to exert a looser influence over its neighbours – closer perhaps to the present approach of the US to Central America – rather than gripping them tightly. It was an approach that had roots in Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea – welcomed in the west at the time – of a “common European home”.

At one time, Putin subscribed to this idea. He wrote in 2012 that: “Russia is an inseparable, organic part of Greater Europe, of the wider European civilisation. Our citizens feel themselves to be Europeans.” This vision has now been abandoned in favour of the concept of Russia as a separate “Eurasian civilisation”.

Between 1999, when Putin came to power, and 2020, when Biden was elected president of the US, this Russian strategy experienced severe disappointments, but also enough encouraging signs from Paris and Berlin to keep it alive.

The most systematic Russian attempt to negotiate a new European security order came with the interim presidency of Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012. With Putin’s approval, he proposed a European security treaty that would have frozen Nato enlargement, effectively ensured the neutrality of Ukraine and other states, and institutionalised consultation on equal terms between Russia and leading western countries. But western states barely even pretended to take these proposals seriously.

In 2014, it appears to have been Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warnings of “massive damage” to Russia and German-Russian relations that persuaded Putin to call a halt to the advance of the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. In return, Germany refused to arm Ukraine, and with France, brokered the Minsk 2 agreement, whereby the Donbas would return to Ukraine as an autonomous territory.

In 2016, Russian hopes of a split between western Europe and the United States were revived by the election of Donald Trump – not because of any specific policy, rather because of the strong hostility that he provoked in Europe. But Biden’s election brought the US administration and west European establishments back together again. These years also saw Ukraine refuse to guarantee autonomy for the Donbas, and western failure to put any pressure on Kyiv to do so.

This was accompanied by other developments that made Putin decide to bring matters concerning Ukraine to a head. These included the US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021, which held out the prospect of Ukraine becoming a heavily armed US ally in all but name, while continuing to threaten to retake the Donbas by force.

In recent months, the German and French leaders in 2015, Merkel and François Hollande, have declared that the Minsk 2 agreement on Donbas autonomy was only a manoeuvre on their part to allow the Ukrainians the time to build up their armed forces. This is what Russian hardliners always believed, and by 2022, Putin himself seems to have come to the same conclusion.

Nonetheless, almost until the eve of invasion, Putin continued unsuccessfully to press the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in particular to support a treaty of neutrality for Ukraine and negotiate directly with the separatist leaders in the Donbas. We cannot, of course, say for sure if this would have led Putin to call off the invasion; but since it would have opened up a deep split between Paris and Washington, such a move by Macron might well have revived in Putin’s mind the old and deeply held Russian strategy of trying to divide the west and forge agreement with France and Germany.

Putin now seems to agree fully with Russian hardline nationalists that no western government can be trusted, and that the west as a whole is implacably hostile to Russia. He remains, however, vulnerable to attack from those same hardliners, both because of the deep incompetence with which the invasion was conducted, and because their charge that he was previously naive about the hopes of rapprochement with Europe appears to have been completely vindicated.

It is from this side, not the Russian liberals, that the greatest threat to his rule now comes; and of course this makes it even more difficult for Putin to seek any peace that does not have some appearance, at least, of Russian victory.

Meanwhile, the Russian invasion and its accompanying atrocities have destroyed whatever genuine sympathy for Russia existed in the French and German establishments. A peaceful and consensual security order in Europe looks very far away. But while Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine are chiefly responsible for this, we should also recognise that western and central Europeans also did far too little to try to keep Gorbachev’s dream of a common European home alive.

Link here.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 2/21/23

It’s been almost a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, and many of the original rationales for the attack put forward by the Kremlin, such as “de-Nazification,” are no longer even mentioned.

Instead, the key appeal Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Tuesday in his first state of the nation address in almost two years was that, since Russians are fighting against the united West and not just Ukraine, they must consolidate behind the war effort for the sake of national survival. “The goal of the West is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, to end us once and for all,” he said. “We will respond accordingly, because we are talking about the existence of our country.”

And, in a demonstrative final break with the post-Cold War arms control regime – which has been tenuous for years – Mr. Putin announced that Russia will suspend its participation in New START, the last of the nuclear arms treaties that limited arsenals and provided channels for verification and crisis management.

It’s hard to gauge the effectiveness of Mr. Putin’s case for uncompromising struggle with the Russian public. As Russia faces receding horizons for victory, the so-called existential threat has become the core of the Kremlin’s case for staying the course, even if it requires a painful new mobilization of manpower and more economic burdens for an indefinite period.

But while Mr. Putin’s framing may be persuading the Russian public that the war is one of defense against NATO rather than of offense against Ukraine, it seems less likely that he is stirring their enthusiasm for the conflict. While support for the war remains high, there appears to be increasing desire among Russians, whether they favor the war or not, that it be resolved with peace talks soon. And while the possibility of defeat is not being entertained, the civic mood seems to be resignation rather than resolution.

“I don’t see consolidation of mass support for the war,” says Boris Kagarlitsky, a Moscow-based veteran left-winger and anti-war activist, who contributes to Russian Dissent, an English-language portal for critical Russian voices, “but there is no groundswell of support for the opposition either.”

“People have returned to a state of detachment”

Russian state-funded pollsters stopped asking explicit questions about war support after some surveys late last year found a softening in public backing, and a sharp rise in a desire for peace talks. The data is thin and, in any case, sociologists warn that wartime polls are inherently unreliable, especially in the current Russian atmosphere where anti-war sentiments or expressions deemed defeatist could result in jail time.

But the sketchy data available indicates that personal support for Mr. Putin remains high, and at least a reduced majority of Russians think the war effort must continue until some kind of victory. Interviews with a few Kremlin-skeptical political experts who remain inside Russia suggest that early hopes of a public anti-war groundswell have been thoroughly dashed and, although most average Russians seem deeply unwilling to talk with a foreign journalist, those who do express ambivalence about the war at best.

“Russian society is multi-layered, and the views we find can be quite contradictory,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who, despite his outspoken anti-war opinions, remains in Moscow. “Some want peace, but support Putin. Some don’t want Putin, but back the war. The middle part of society is composed of conformists, most of whom are passive but some are active.

“I have noticed that those active supporters of the war are becoming more aggressive. It’s actually new and unexpected to see so many people who not only feel the war must be continued, but that it must be prosecuted to total victory,” says Mr. Kolesnikov. “I would not have believed that there could be so much dormant instinct for totalitarianism in our society, which Putin is now awakening.”

Mr. Putin’s contention that Russia is defending itself against the concerted forces of the West does appear to get considerable traction among Russians.

“Judging by what I see around me, and sociological data, I see that the idea that ‘it’s us against NATO’ does seem to work,” says Mr. Kolesnikov. “It helps people see this not as a war against little Ukraine, but as a defensive struggle against a really big enemy.”

The only organization still asking Russians flatly whether they support the “special military operation” is the independent Levada Center, and its latest report in January found that 75% of respondents supported the war to some degree, while 21% said they were opposed to some extent. The numbers who believe the war will end in Russian victory declined slightly between April and January from 73% to 71%, while those who think the war will last more than another year more than doubled, from 21% to 43%.

But secret polls allegedly commissioned by the Kremlin last fall, and cited by The Moscow Times and Meduza, found that the number of people who believed that starting the war was the right thing to do was declining precipitously, from over 70% to under 60% by last November, while those who thought the war was not going according to plan had reached a high point of 42%, and just 22% thought it was basically on track.

“By now people who support the operation say that too much has already been invested in it to think of stopping,” says Denis Volkov, head of Levada. “But both supporters and opponents say they wish it would end as soon as possible with peace talks.” After the chaos and shock brought on by the partial mobilization last fall, things have settled down. “Some people left the country, others realized they weren’t subject to mobilization. By early 2023, people have returned to a state of detachment, thinking that none of this depends on them.”

“They will carry on”

Marina Volkova, a working Muscovite, expresses the fairly typical view that “Russia has no way out but to continue this to the bitter end. I think it will win. But I am so surprised that there aren’t more efforts to bring peace, make the sides sit down and find a solution. I have many friends with sons and grandsons on the front line, and I feel for them. I really wish it were over.”

Pensioner Yevgenia Vasilyeva says the war is a horror that has kept her awake every night for a year. “I don’t know whether it will end in victory or defeat, but it should end. I dream of peace and normal relations with Ukraine.”

The prospect of Russian defeat is seldom discussed, even though some like Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser and Putin supporter, insist that most Russians believe the war has become an existential struggle for survival.

“Of course rational people have to consider the possibility of defeat,” he says. “But we know that it would mean that Russia would disappear as a united country. The disaster would be much worse than after the collapse of the USSR. That’s why, if Russia loses during the upcoming spring fighting, there will be mass mobilization and the entire society will be put onto a war footing. …

“Every Russian schoolchild knows that the West has tried to destroy Russia in each century for a long time. Now it’s happening under the leadership of the U.S. But it’s the same thing, they are trying to break up Russia, and people are realizing that it’s an existential battle. Russia is just beginning to gear up for the fight.”

But critics note that the discussion of the possibility of defeat is a deeply unpopular idea, and could court legal consequences.

“Admitting defeat would be a political disaster for the authorities, so they will carry on no matter how much worse things get,” says Mr. Kagarlitsky, the anti-war activist. “Apathy and despair seem to be the order of the day [among the public]. This is a very atomized society. People are mostly concerned about themselves and their families.”

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 3/8/23

On its face, The New York Times article yesterday, “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say,” appears intended to exonerate both the U.S. and Ukrainian governments from any involvement in the destruction last September of the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany.  

The thrust of the Times article is that Ukrainians unaffiliated with the Kiev government were the ones who did it, according to the newspapers often cited, unnamed “U.S. officials.” 

But a closer examination of the piece reveals layers of nuance that do not dismiss that the Ukrainian government may have had something to do with the sabotage after all. 

The story quotes anonymous European officials who say a state had to be involved in the sophisticated underwater operation.  The Times goes out of it way to say more than once that that state was not the United States.  And while the second paragraph of the story says categorically that the state is not Ukraine either, the article then leaves the door open to possible Ukrainian government involvement:

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains. They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services. [Emphasis mine.]

The Times then makes clear what the consequences would be for the pro-Ukraine “coalition” that Washington has built in the combined West if there was Ukrainian government involvement.

“Officials said there were still enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired. But officials said it might constitute the first significant lead to emerge from several closely guarded investigations, the conclusions of which could have profound implications for the coalition supporting Ukraine.

Any suggestion of Ukrainian involvement, whether direct or indirect, could upset the delicate relationship between Ukraine and Germany, souring support among a German public that has swallowed high energy prices in the name of solidarity.”

The Times further develops the theme that involvement by the Ukrainian government could destroy the international support for Kiev the United States has built, as well as the immense public backing for Ukraine that the U.S.-led information war has developed.

The Washington Post, which yesterday ran a similar story, reported that the Ukrainian government denied any involvement in the attack. “Ukraine absolutely did not participate in the attack on Nord Stream 2,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, the top adviser to Zelensky, questioning why his country would conduct an operation that “destabilizes the region and will divert attention from the war, which is categorically not beneficial to us.”

Distancing Begins

The newspaper here is allowing U.S. officials to begin distancing the U.S. from Ukraine, claiming Washington has limited influence on Kiev, despite years of evidence to the contrary. The piece appears to be preparing the Western public for an abrupt about face in Ukraine because of a litany of Ukrainian operations the U.S. says it opposed.  It is worth quoting the Times at length here:

“Any findings that put blame on Kyiv or Ukrainian proxies could prompt a backlash in Europe and make it harder for the West to maintain a united front in support of Ukraine.

U.S. officials and intelligence agencies acknowledge that they have limited visibility into Ukrainian decision-making.

Despite Ukraine’s deep dependence on the United States for military, intelligence and diplomatic support, Ukrainian officials are not always transparent with their American counterparts about their military operations, especially those against Russian targets behind enemy lines. Those operations have frustrated U.S. officials, who believe that they have not measurably improved Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, but have risked alienating European allies and widening the war.

The operations that have unnerved the United States included a strike in early August on Russia’s Saki Air Base on the western coast of Crimea, a truck bombing in October that destroyed part of the Kerch Strait Bridge, which links Russia to Crimea, and drone strikes in December aimed at Russian military bases in Ryazan and Engels, about 300 miles beyond the Ukrainian border.

But there have been other acts of sabotage and violence of more ambiguous provenance that U.S. intelligence agencies have had a harder time attributing to Ukrainian security services.

One of those was a car bomb near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist.

Kyiv denied any involvement but U.S. intelligence agencies eventually came to believe that the killing was authorized by what officials called “elements” of the Ukrainian government. In response to the finding, the Biden administration privately rebuked the Ukrainians and warned them against taking similar actions.

The explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines took place five weeks after Ms. Dugina’s killing. After the Nord Stream operation, there was hushed speculation — and worry — in Washington that parts of the Ukrainian government might have been involved in that operation as well.“

Of course all this is not to say that the United States did not conduct the Nord Stream sabotage just as Seymour Hersh has reported and yet still cynically blames Ukraine. (Hersh ridiculed the Times story in an email to Consortium News, which sought his comment.)

In directing attention towards the Ukrainian government’s possible culpability, U.S. intelligence gets a twofer: it deflects blame from the U.S. and prepares the public for the United States to justify abandoning Ukraine after all the U.S. has invested in its adventure to weaken Russia and topple its government through an economic, information, and proxy war, all of which have failed. 

A consensus is forming among Western leaders that the war against Russia in Ukraine is lost. Thus Washington would have to save face to pull off such a reversal of policy. Insinuating that Ukraine blew up the pipelines of its ally Germany could help the U.S. climb down from its strident position in support of Ukraine.

German Media Also Blames Ukraine on Same Day

On the same day of The New York Times story yesterday, a joint investigation by a major German newspaper, Die Zeit, and the ARD broadcast network, also reported that the pipeline attack was linked to Ukraine.  Die Zeit reports, according to a machine translation:

“The German investigative authorities have apparently made a breakthrough in solving the attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. After joint research by the ARD capital studio, the ARD political magazine Kontraste, SWR and ZEIT, it was possible to largely reconstruct how and when the explosive attack was prepared in the course of the investigation. Accordingly, traces lead in the direction of Ukraine.” 

Just like the Times report, Die Zeit also hedges its reporting, saying that “investigators have not yet found any evidence as to who ordered the destruction.” It might not be credible to immediately blame Ukraine. The sources for these articles may be employing a tactic to gradually prepare the public for more definitive blame later.  Die Zeit does provide a level of detail missing from the Times report, however.  The investigation

“managed to identify the boat that was allegedly used for the secret operation. It is said to be a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians. According to the investigation, the secret operation at sea was carried out by a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman. Accordingly, the group consisted of a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor, who are said to have transported the explosives to the crime scenes and placed them there. The nationality of the perpetrators is apparently unclear. The culprits used professionally forged passports, which are said to have been used, among other things, to rent the boat.”

That both articles appeared on the same day in major U.S. and German publications (including The Washington Post) might indicate a degree of coordination between U.S. and German intelligence. On Friday, just four days before the articles appeared, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made an unusual trip from Berlin to Washington, where he immediately went to the White House for a meeting with President Joe Biden. 

No aides were present in the Oval Office with the two men. The meeting lasted just over an hour.  There was no press conference afterward and Scholz did not allow press on his plane. He returned to the airport after the meeting to fly back to Berlin. Clearly the two men did not want to discuss a sensitive matter over the phone or in a video-link. 

Western Leaders Already Say Ukraine Can’t Win 

The Times was fed this piece from U.S. intelligence as stories continue to be leaked showing Western leaders do not believe Ukraine can win the war, despite their public pronouncements, and that Kiev must cut its losses and seek a settlement with Russia. The Wall Street Journal reported 11 days ago: 

“The public rhetoric masks deepening private doubts among politicians in the U.K., France and Germany that Ukraine will be able to expel the Russians from eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014, and a belief that the West can only help sustain the war effort for so long, especially if the conflict settles into a stalemate, officials from the three countries say.

‘We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable,’ a senior French official said. ‘And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.’

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Zelensky at an Élysée Palace dinner last month that he must consider peace talks with Moscow, the Journal reported.

According to its source, the newspaper quoted Macron as telling Zelensky that “even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.”

Macron told Zelensky “he had been a great war leader, but that he would eventually have to shift into political statesmanship and make difficult decisions,” the newspaper reported.

Bakhmut: a Turning Point

A major turning point in the war that would force a huge decision for Washington may come if Russia can complete its military takeover of Bakhmut. 

The battle for the city in Donbass has been raging since last summer and has intensified in the past weeks.  Russia has nearly encircled the entire city trapping an estimated 10,000 Ukrainian troops inside. Ukraine had repeatedly played down the importance of Bakhmut, but nevertheless has continually sent in droves of soldiers to their death. Bakhmut is an important hub in Ukraine’s defense of Donbass. 

In an interview with CNN yesterday, Zelensky at last admitted Bakhmut’s vital importance to Ukraine. “We understand that after Bakhmut they could go further. They could go to Kramatorsk, they could go to Sloviansk, it would be open road for the Russians after Bakhmut to other towns in Ukraine, in the Donetsk direction,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “That’s why our guys are standing there.” 

The fall of Bakhmut to Russia would be a major humiliation for Zelensky and Ukraine, as well as for the United States and Europe.  The U.S. would have a major choice to make:  continue to escalate the war with the danger that it could lead to a NATO-Russia confrontation that could go nuclear, or press Ukraine to absorb its losses and seek a settlement. 

Russia however would then be in a position to dictate terms:  possibly recognition of four eastern Ukrainian oblasts as part of Russia after referendums there voted to join the Russian Federation; Ukraine agreeing to be a neutral nation that will not join NATO; demilitarization of Ukraine and disbanding of neo-nazi units. 

Portraying Ukraine as an unworthy partner that blew up German pipelines might help minimize the humiliation to the West if this were to happen.  Then again neoconservatives in Washington and in European capitals might win out in the battle with realists and continue pressing the war, though the realists at this stage seem to have the upper hand.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe