By David Speedie, ACURA, 4/5/23

The Ukraine tragedy is a twofold thing. First, most obviously, there is the tragedy of the people killed or displaced, the damage to an already fragile economy and the widespread destruction of Ukraine’s physical infrastructure. Second, there is the tragic fact that it could all have been prevented.

This latter is an unfashionable point of view, to say the least. Inevitably, understandably, the daily diet of news in the Western press serves up images and reports of a grim, attritional struggle for ruined towns and territory, with back-and-forth “success”, a prevailing narrative of the heroic David (Ukraine) stoutly resisting the invading Goliath (Russia). The incremental nature of the war’s progress and the weapons with which it is fought suggest nothing less than the trench warfare of World War One.

For those of us who raise the tattered flag of the Minsk Agreements of 2014-15, who try to argue that had the drumbeat of diplomacy been heard instead the drums of war, there is the routine countervailing argument that Russia’s behavior in its former sphere of influence is incorrigible, its appetite insatiable. There is also a collective retreat from Minsk, including by one of its architects, Angela Merkel, who admitted that these substantive proposals to end the conflict were nothing more than a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to gird its loins for battle—with massive NATO support, of course.

This generic indictment of Russia was recently advanced in an opinion piece by Robert Kaplan in the April 3rd edition of The Wall Street Journal. Titled, “Putin’s Shakespearean Demons”, Kaplan argument may be summarized thus, through the following series of quotes from his article:

1. “Ukraine is engulfed by Russia on the north and east, its history and language entwined with its neighbors.”

2. “The geopolitical argument that Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was expanding completely disregards the Russian leader’s Shakespearean demons” [Othello’s jealousy? Macbeth’s overweening ambition? Lear’s folly? Kaplan does not fully explain the Bard’s “Demons” trope.]

3. “Given Putin’s paranoia, isolation and delusions of grandeur, the question arises: would Europe today be at peace with Putin’s Russia had NATO not expanded East after the Cold War and had there been a Western guarantee of recognizing Russian interests in Ukraine? Certainly not”.

4. Instead, Eastern Europe would be “vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s mischief”….. [he] would be “breathing down the neck of every country between Berlin and Moscow”.

5. “NATO and the EU have created many durable bureaucratic states with reliable militaries in Central and Eastern Europe able to do their part to withstand Russian aggression. The West has grown in both economic and political might. Thus the business of World War II and the Cold War has been closed.”

6. “NATO expansion throughout Central Europe was virtually inevitable because of the decisive and one-sided way the Cold War ended.”

Kaplan’s narrative is worthy of John Le Carre, but it is one that simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. First, there is the accusation that Putin’s Russia is an omnivorous beast, with “a belt of democratic states” from the Baltics to Ukraine as its prey. The fact is that Vladimir Putin has been [de jure or de facto] calling the shots in Moscow for more than twenty years, and, until Russia’s negotiated lease on the Sevastopol naval base was threatened by the Ukrainian Rada in 2014, it showed no imperial, neo-Soviet, expansionist ambitions toward Ukraine or anywhere else. Russia’s one foreign intervention–in Georgia’s Russian-majority South Ossetia in 2008–came after an attack on the region by Georgian government forces, documented by an EU report on the conflict. The early 90s-era warnings of Russian adventurism in the Baltics were spurious and continue to be so.

Second, Kaplan is absolutely correct in describing the “entwining” of Russian and Ukrainian history, language and culture. It is precisely because of this fact that the proposal at the 2008 NATO summit to extend invitations for membership to Ukraine and Georgia was so incendiary [although, as already noted, Russia took no preventive action, even though such expert voices as the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and current CIA director, William F. Burns, warned that Ukraine in NATO was a “red line” for Russia.]

Third, and building on the unique bond between Russia and Ukraine [undervalued by us because we have nothing approaching this attachment to any other country on the planet] one asks: We in the United States have what we see as a legitimate sphere of interest [since 1823, no less]; is Russia as a great power to be denied one? The question is all the more salient when one considers both history and geography: The USA has to its north and south friendly neighbors, and to its east and west vast expanses of water. From North Korea in the East to the proximity of the greater Middle East on its Western flank, Russia borders some pretty rough neighborhoods. Throw in the odd invasion or two in modern history from the West, and we might begin to understand what Kaplan describes as Russian/Putin “paranoia”.

Fourth—and I believe most telling in countering Kaplan’s argument—if Putin was so dead set in swallowing Eastern Europe whole, why did he—circa 2010—raise the question of Russia’s application for membership of both NATO and EU? Similar requests came from both his immediate predecessors, President Yeltsin and Secretary Gorbachev; all three were, of course, summarily rebuffed. And if, as Kaplan says, “NATO expansion throughout Central Europe was virtually inevitable because of the decisive and one-sided way the Cold War ended”, why did the George H. W. Bush administration and its German ally reassure Gorbachev otherwise?

Fifth, Kaplan’s view of the current state of affairs is roseate. Quite apart from the ghastly consequences for Ukraine of standing up to Russia rather than following through on Minsk [and there have been proposals for returning to the negotiating table, such as that offered by Turkey’s Erdogan a year ago], Kaplan overstates two points: One, the notion that what were once described as “old” and “new” Europe had been living in perfect, democratic, rule-of-law comity. He does cite the exceptions of Hungary and Bulgaria, but Poland too deserves an asterisk for its recent actions concerning the judiciary. Second is his interpretation of the West’s economic and political ascent (“Thus the business of World War II and the Cold War has been closed” is echoic of the premature “End of History”). Challenges abound to the U.S.-led articulation of a global conflict between a democracy “good” and a dictatorship “evil”—just consider recent developments in the greater Middle East, a China-brokered handshake between Iran and the Saudis; Saudi Arabia possibly joining the BRICS group; and the rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Russia, China and Iran we may see as intractable adversaries to varying degrees; but in the Wall Street Journal of April 4, Walter Russell Mead offers a lengthy list of states that we must engage constructively in countering these opponents, and whose democratic credentials are flimsy, in some cases nonexistent.

Finally, to return to Kaplan’s image of a Ukraine “engulfed” by Russia. Turn the clock back a year, before a tragic and preventable war. Mr. Kaplan, I’ll see your Ukraine surrounded by Russia and raise you Russia surrounded by NATO-armed states from the Baltics to Turkey [and, if we had our way, Ukraine and Georgia.] And now, of course, we can add Finland. To repeat: the war is a humanitarian tragedy, and Russia’s invasion is to be deplored.

It could also have been averted.