In late June, a former advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Professor Sergei Karaganov, of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, published an article headlined ‘Here’s why Russia has to consider launching a nuclear strike on Western Europe.’ He argued that the time has now come for Moscow to seriously consider the possibility to pre-emptively invade or use atomic weapons against the most hostile European members of NATO:
“When discussing a hypothetical atomic attack on Western Europe, the question arises: how would the US answer? Virtually all experts agree that under no circumstances would the Americans respond to a nuclear attack on their allies with a nuclear attack on our territory. Incidentally, even [President Joe] Biden has said so openly. Russian military experts, however, believe that a massive conventional retaliatory strike could follow. It could be pointed out that this would be followed by even more massive nuclear strikes. And they would finish off Western Europe as a geopolitical entity.”
However, I believe that if Russia so much as even considers this course it would be a catastrophic mistake without first having offered to each and every Western European country a certain type of bilateral mutual non-aggression treaty which would also require – where applicable – that they withdraw from America’s anti-Russia military alliance, NATO. Even if only one member of the bloc broke away, that could spark the end of the organization.
Putin has thus far responded to the West’s aggressive expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders by targeting missiles against new member states, and not by offering each of them individually a bilateral treaty-proposal and guarantees for peace, including mutual weapons-inspections. Instead, it seems that a NATO nation cannot quit the anti-Russia bloc and manage its own peaceful relations with Moscow, plus increased trade, and other mutual bilateral benefits. However, by abandoning alliances with the world’s most aggressive nation, the US, and agreeing with Russia directly, a future of peace and mutual economic benefit could prevail across Europe. Putin ought to make this offer now. It might prevent World War Three. The historical background explains why:
I agree with Dr. Karaganov that a fundamental change is needed in Russia’s relations with the other countries of Europe, but I propose that the first step in this regard MUST be the following Russian offer to each one of them:
The offer should be made only privately to each US-allied country. If any government concerned privately says no, Russia should then offer the deal publicly. Public opinion might then force that government – whose prior rejection of the deal would not yet be publicly known – to agree to it. Thus, there would be two chances to obtain an agreement, and this would greatly increase the odds of success in each case.
The substance of the agreement would be as follows:
Russia will announce that its nuclear missiles will be targeted ONLY against the US and its allies, including all NATO member-nations, but not neutral or unaligned nations. In other words, any new NATO member-nation will thereby become a target added to Russia’s list for destruction in any World War III scenario that might transpire between the United States and Russia. Any existing NATO nation that accepts the offered treaty would no longer threaten Russia and would consequently no longer be targeted by Russia.
Furthermore, Moscow should simultaneously announce that if any nation wishes to have an assurance that Russia will never, under any circumstance, invade it, then it will welcome from that nation a request for such an assurance from Russia. Moscow will include in that announcement explicit invitations to all nations which have, at some time, expressed an intention or a possible future intention to join NATO. In this regard, it will also state, in advance, that if ever Russia were to provide to a nation such an assurance and subsequently to violate it, then it would be violating its own tradition of rigidly adhering to international treaties that it has signed. Additionally, it would also thereby be forfeiting to the country it had thereby broken its commitment to and violated, any and all of its rights under international law. Consequently, under the arrangement that is being proposed here, there would be no nation in the entire world that has, or ever did have, so strict an international treaty legal obligation as Russia would be beholden to under this proposed arrangement. It would be much clearer than what the international law-breaking US government ever did or can offer in the NATO treaty or any other. Russia’s record of strictly abiding by its agreements speaks for itself. So does America’s record of violating agreements.
Finally, this proposed arrangement would offer, to all existing members of NATO, a promise that if and when any such existing member-nation will quit that anti-Russia military alliance, Moscow will be happy to – at the moment that this is done – automatically provide to that nation the same legal commitment never to invade that nation, as has just been described here. In other words, the proposed arrangement will offer, to the entire world, a stark and clear choice between peace with Russia or being allied with the most aggressive nation in the world’s history. One that places illegal sanctions, organizes coups, and even invades states that fail to cooperate with its goal to replace the United Nations as being the ultimate arbiter of international laws. A country seeking to be the ultimate arbiter of what it calls “the rules-based international order” in which all of those ‘rules’ come ultimately from whomever rules the US government.
On the other hand, Moscow would be helping to reposition the UN into what had been its original goal: to replace the historic use of force by-and-between rival international empires. This vision was to create a peaceful and democratic international world order, in which a “United Nations” would be a worldwide federation of all nations, in which international laws will be produced by the global legislature of duly authorized (under each individual nation’s own internal laws) representatives, and adjudicated by the global Supreme Court, and enforced by the sole global possessor and user of strategic weaponry – the UN. Additionally, penalties that are ruled by this global Court of international relations should be enforced against the government of any nation that has been ruled by this Court to have violated the rights of any other nation’s government.
In this understanding of the UN’s proper scope of power and of authority, the body would have no authority and no power regarding the constitutions or laws of any nation that apply internally to a given nation, but ONLY to international laws, which pertain exclusively to international relations, and never to a nation’s internal matters. It would make another World War – another war between empires – impossible, by eliminating all empires, and replacing all of them by an international democracy of (an international federation of) nations. Russia, in the proposed arrangement, would be striving to achieve, for the entire planet, what had been once planned for the post-War War Two world.
There is much confusion and scratching of the head surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seeming ‘weakness’, laxity, or permissiveness in hesitating to arrest two-day mutineer and Wagner PMC chief Yevgenii Prigozhin. Recent reports from Russia indicate that Prigozhin has been back in Russia, despite his supposed exile to Belarus along with some 10,000 Wagner fighters. Initially, in the wake of the mutiny’s dissolution Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman stated to Russian journalists that Prigozhin was to go to Belarus as part of the deal hashed out between Putin and his former associate by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka. Reports and photographs of a camp or base being erected for the exiled or redeployed Wagner troops in Belarus were published. But now it emerges that Prigozhin and 35 Wagner commanders and staff met with Putin in the Kremlin on June 29th and discussed what had happened and what the future would be for Wagner and perhaps for Prigozhin himself. In the meeting, Putin stressed both legal issues as well as the mutiny’s violation of an ‘agreement’ between himself and Prigozhin.[1]
Some propose that this boils down to some sort of softness in Putin’s personality, at least towards long-time friends and associates. Others conjecture that this is evidence of Putin’s political weakness, declining power, and failing control over his system, the so-called ‘Sistema’. There are at least three other important factors besides more situational ones such as political, military, and business considerations that help explain why Prigozhin and his co-conspirators have not been arrested. As a preface it must be said that we make a mistake if we expect Russian political actors to behave as, say, American, other Western, or even many non-Western politicians might. Russia is a different country than ours, not really significantly better or worse than ours. That said, the three non-situational factors facilitating impunity that I would like to suggest are: (1) the relatively soft form of the Putin system’s authoritarianism; (2) a tendency towards ‘arbitrary’ rule and limited emphasis on following the letter of the law, and (3) a cultural preference for unity or wholeness rather than disunity, pluralism, and conflict.
Putin’s System of Soft Authoritarianism
First, Western publics have been a caricature of Putin’s style of rule and the Russian political system by media, academics, and experts alike. Putin is either portrayed as an all-powerful dictator or a ruthless mafia don. Although there is occasional leaning in this direction and therefore a small element of truth regarding such aspects of Putin’s rule as is the case in all caricatures, they are gravely mistaken simplifications that distort more than they realistically depict matters as is also the case in caricatures.
As I have been arguing for two decades, Putin is a soft-to-medium range authoritarian leader, not a harsh authoritarian no less a totalitarian dictator. Analogies with Stalin or Hitler are completely misplaced and, indeed, downright absurd. Putin’s soft authoritarian Sistema is consistent with several aspects of Russian culture and political culture—sometimes called ‘national character.’ He has been artfully balancing not just between the republican and authoritarian personalist forms of rule for more than two decades. He has been juggling various factions in a country with a conflictive political culture and weak, non-Western legal culture and an aspiration to unity or ‘solidarist wholeness’ or tselostnost’.
In Putin’s once soft now more mid-range authoritarian system, he functions as the main arbiter, balancing between numerous competing political, ideological, clan-based, financial-industrial, class, and ethno-national groups. While he is surely the most powerful player in the system and has numerous institutional, legal, coercive, economic, and media resources at his disposal that others in the system lack, he also shares the control and application of those resources with select groups or sub-groups of the kind noted above as long as they do not threaten his hegemony over the system. Moreover, Putin is an arch-rational actor who carefully weighs issues, decisions regarding them, and those decisions’ potential consequences, intended and unintended. Personal relations with other actors matter to him. He rarely if ever has retaliated harshly against a former close associate. Putin is not a Joseph Stalin, who can send millions to labor camps, arrest high-ranking officials on a whim, or has his close associates and their family members imprisoned or executed.
In treading carefully in the matter of dealing with Prigozhin’s de jure betrayal, Putin is following his pattern, being sure not to provoke panic within the elite, disturb military function and morale, or leave his options open. By its very nature, soft-to-midrange authoritarianism requires taking into account situational factors. Thus, Putin’s restraint is also explained together and as a result of somewhat limited powers that Putin must gauge the political consequences of cracking down harshly on Prigozhin and the other ‘musicians’ of Wagner who participated in the ‘march for justice. They are regarded by Russians and, according to his own words, Putin himself as patriots who have served admirably in the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. A harsh reaction could cost Putin support among key constituencies of his such as traditionalists and ultra-nationalists.
Putin’s June 29th meeting with Prigozhin and 35 Wagner commanders and management staff was an attempt to look particularly Prigozhin in the eye in order to ascertain whether Putin’s belief that his old associate was not staging a military coup or hoping to incite a revolution from below but rather had let his anger and ambitions get the better of him in response to the Russian high military command’s attempt essentially to corporately raid ‘his’ company. This raises the second explanation: Russian culture’s preference for particularism over strict rule of law.
The Rule of Understandings and the Rule of Law
Russians place high value on personal relations over contractual relationships and legal technicalities. This is part of what is sometimes called the Russian historical pattern of ‘arbitrary rule’ contrasted with the Western pattern of the rule of law and constitutionality—what perhaps Russia’s greatest political philosopher and cultural thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev called the “Western cult of cold justice.” “Pity for the fallen, for the humiliated and offended, compassion are very Russian traits,” he observed.[2] In this way the strict, technical application of the law found in the West is often replaced in Russia by a more social or communal view of justice, where personal relationships with perpetrators and defendants and extenuating circumstances often trump carrying out the letter of the law precisely or even at all. In short, Putin’s Sistema relies less on the rule of law and more on what Russians, including officials, openly refer to ‘understandings’ or ‘ponyatii’. These are informal agreements among and between, leaders, various clans and interests sometimes backed by law, sometimes very much not.
This means that a mutiny such as Prigozhin’s is viewed more as a violation of informal understandings than it is seen through the prism of Russian law or the constitution. Putin stated that there is a Wagner “group” but it “does not exist juridically”, since there is no provision in Russian law for private military companies (which Wagner really was not and thus is beside the point), which he seemed to suggest the State Duma ought to begin work on. Nevertheless, he offered the Wagner commanders to gather the fighters “in one place and continue to serve under their direct commander” (not Prigozhin), without any mention of under what legal aegis it should be allowed to function.[3] In other words Wagner’s activities – ongoing for years – were sanctioned in an extralegal, informal form—an intra-elite ‘ponyatiya’ or understanding. Matters may be couched in strictly legal terms publicly, but behind the scenes the pivotal issue is whether Prigozhin violated an informal understanding and perhaps whether he did so first without justification or in response to his partners’ own violation of the perceived understanding.
Although revolts have not been treated with mercy and pardons by Russian rulers throughout all of Russian history, many, particularly quite recent and serious ones have. Prigozhin’s failed revolt would not be the first in recent decades in which insurrectionists might enjoy impunity. In a much stricter Soviet legal environment several political coup attempts against the great Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev went unpunished during his ‘perestroika’ era: an aborted possible autumn 1987 military coup, the March 1988 Nina Andreyeva affair, the June 1991 ‘constitutional coup’, and finally even the August 1991 Party-state apparat coup against Gorbachev and Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin. After the resulting collapse of the communist Party-state regime and ultimately the Soviet state itself, all of the coup plotters were set free without trial. The same occurred after the October 1993 myatezh or revolt against Yeltsin led by his vice president and former military officer Aleksandr Rutskoi, Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, and many of the Soviets’ deputies.
In the pre-Soviet Russian Imperial era, failed palace coups and revolutions such as the constitutionalists’ plot against Empress-select Anna Ioannovna in 1730 and the 1825 Decembrist revolt – saw very different punishments meted out to the conspirators. In the former, the leaders were constantly harassed and eventually arrested, with the leader Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn imprisoned on apparently trumped up charges many years after the event. Six leaders of the Decembrist uprising were hanged, and thousands were exiled to Siberia. But in both cases, the punishments appalled the aristocracy and much of the narod or simple people alike. The somewhat failed 1905 revolution saw no one punished and led to an eventually aborted regime transformation, suggesting the more recent pattern of impunity. One might recall the case of Vera Zasulich, the pre-revolutionary Socialist Revolutionary, who in 1878 attempted to assassinate the governor of St. Petersburg and was acquitted by a jury won over by the moral sincerity of her political motives and social conscience. Russians, in Berdyaev’s words, are less legalistic than Western people: “(F)or them content is more important than form.”[4] Similarly, there is an element of the religious belief that triumphs over cold ‘eye for an eye’ justice in matters of life and death, which belong to God more properly than to man, and hence the Russians’ historical opposition to the death penalty and, to some extent, punishment in general.[5]
In the West, turns of events such as coups – of which we have few recent examples – are not met with pardons towards the preservation of solidarity but, more often than not, Berdyaev’s ‘cold justice.’ Putting aside the American Civil War in which the southern Confederacy’s leaders were given immunity from prosecution, the recent ‘insurrection’ in the US, 1/6, really a riot provoked by the FBI and the Democrat Party-state, is a case in point of cold justice or the rule of law gone awry. Cold legality can be turned against humanistic principles of republican rule of law. Thus, rather than mercy, pardons, and dropped cases, we have seen an aggressive, over-the-top pursuit of anyone even remotely connected or near the events of the ‘insurrection.’ This aggressive posture, of course, may be driven by the fact that the ‘insurrection’ was a fake organized by the Democrat Party-state itself which infiltrated its FBI and other agents into leadership positions of the small, generally non-violent groups that merely sought to enter the Capitol building, not destroy the U.S.’s constitutional republican regime.
In the US it is unclear whether the tendency to punish insurrectionaries and separatists is a function of its political culture’s lack of a value of wholeness or a function of its strict rational-legal form of government. In Russia, some may argue that it is unclear whether Russia’s tendency to forgive putschists evidences arbitrary justice and particularistic understandings – i.e., a weak rational-legal system or culture – or simple political expediency or arbitrariness. This is a question of the weight of background cultural factors and immediate situational ones. I am concerned here with the former, another of which is Russia’s aspiration to wholeness.
Russian Solidarism and Wholeness
In my most recent book Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics I argued that there is a Russian aspiration to wholeness that results from religious and other cultural orientations valuing unity and is a reaction against the highly conflictive, schismatic nature of Russian history and politics. I delineated four types of wholeness or tselostnost’ in Russian culture and thought: monism (unity of the divine and material worlds), universalism (world unity), communalism (subnational, social unity), and solidarism (national political unity).[6] In relation to the impunity of mutineers like Prigozhin or other Russian putschists, rebels and the like, the type of wholeness at issue, I contend, is solidarist tselostnost’ or solidarism. I would argue that the strong preference or cultural norm or value of national political solidarity – having evolved out of the Russian struggle to overcome the dangers of internal disunity – could be at play in decisions to pardon or simply release those involved in political mutinies, revolts and such.
Again, situational factors, such as political expediency, may meld with this aspiration to preserve unity. For example, Yeltsin may have released the August 1991 and October 1993 putschists for fear of further splitting society and state and thereby prompting another round of political infighting and coups that might lead to the breakup of the Russian Federation as had happened with its state predecessor, the USSR. Similarly, Gorbachev may have foregone criminal or serious political consequences for the early political plots against his general secretaryship in order to preserve the sacred value of Party unity at a time when he was attempting to implement potentially destabilizing reforms. In the case of Prigozhin, we know that Putin has put a premium on preserving state and social political unity, exemplified by such measures as National Unity Day, the annual May 9th mass Victory Day celebrations, and even his repeated calls for political solidarity and even a kind of historical unity.[7] Thus, in his speech to the Russian people and military officers during and after Prigozhin’s revolt, Putin thanked them for preserving Russia’s solidarity and accused of Prigozhin of treason for undermining her solidarist wholeness. Similarly, in deciding to convene a meeting with Prigozhin and Wagner personnel on June 29th we see Putin laboring to stop up small wholes in the image of unity required by the Russian aspiration to and norm of solidarist tselostnost’ and so reinforce a Russian solidarity thrown into doubt by the myatezh.
It is not enough to analyze recent events or even the intricacies of political systems or a particular leader’s political practice. Cultural factors shaped by centuries of history are at least important in helping to understand foreign politics. Russian politics’s differences with our own are deeply rooted in Russia’s own history, culture and political culture and Western analysts are at a loss to understand her and drive us into conflict with her based on the false assumptions they are deluded by as a result of ignorance of almost all of them regarding Russian history and culture. Ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and aspirations matter perhaps even more than personalities and systems, and the former differ from state to state, people to people.
Geoffrey Roberts is an historian, biographer and political commentator. A renowned specialist in Russian and Soviet foreign and military policy and an expert on Stalin and the Second World War, his books have been translated into numerous languages. He is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Natylie Baldwin: How did you become interested in the Soviet Union and Russia?
Geoffrey Roberts: Mainly, it was a political interest in the Soviet socialist system. As a teenager I was enthused by the Prague Spring and [Alexander] Dubcek’s vision of socialism with a human face. Together with others, I studied the Soviet system for lessons — positive and negative — that could inform the achievement and building of socialism in my own country and elsewhere in the world.
I studied international relations as an undergraduate and that led to specialization in Soviet foreign policy but I have always been interested in all aspects of Soviet history. People assume I’m a Russophile, which I’m not (though I do have many Russian friends) — only in recent years have I become more interested in pre-revolutionary Russian history.
Baldwin: A big part of your specialty is Joseph Stalin as well as World War II. What made you focus on Stalin and what is the most interesting thing you learned about him?
Roberts: When I started studying Soviet history I wasn’t much interested in Stalin as an individual. I thought his Marxism was mechanistic, crude and dogmatic. I agreed with Nikita Khrushchev’s critique of his dictatorial rule at the 20th Party Congress.
What interested me was not Stalin but “Stalinism” — the political, ideological and economic functioning of the Soviet system. In that regard, I was unconvinced by Khrushchev’s explanation of Stalinism as a function of the cult of Stalin’s personality. It seemed to me that the mass repressions of the 1930s and 1940s and the ongoing authoritarianism of the Soviet system — softer though it was after Stalin’s death — were the result of the collective failings and defects of the party and its ideology.
Nikita Khrushchev addressing the 20th CPSU Congress in the Kremlin, 1956. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
When I started to research Soviet foreign relations, I focused on policy, and on personalities other than Stalin, such as his foreign commissar, Maxim Litvinov. Only when I began working in the Russian archives in the mid-1990s did my attention switch to Stalin. What those archives revealed to me was how pervasive, detailed and dominant was Stalin’s leadership and decision-making. Given the dictatorial nature of Stalin’s regime, that was not so surprising, but now I could follow its day-to-day operation. Above all, the archives showed that Stalin was a formidable administrator who was able to absorb and process huge amounts of information. His decision-making was often inefficient but invariably effective in achieving his key goals.
The Soviet system was created by Stalin and it endured for many decades after his death. It had many defects but, after a fashion, it worked, not least during the crucible of total war with Nazi Germany.
Baldwin: One of your books is Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War. After making profound errors of judgment in the runup to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which led to horrible losses in the first weeks, you detail how Stalin worked hard to learn from his mistakes and ultimately became — you argue — the most important military strategist of the war in terms of defeating the Germans. Can you discuss this aspect of Stalin as well as how the war affected the Soviet Union in general and why it still has resonance for Russia?
Roberts: Stalin remains a hugely popular historical figure in post-Soviet Russia and in many other parts of the former U.S.S.R., such as his native Georgia. His popularity rests on his perceived role in winning the Second World War. In my book I argued that Stalin was indispensable to the Soviet war effort — it was his system and could only function effectively if he performed well — that without his warlord-ship Hitler and the Nazis might well have won. Somewhat provocatively, I claimed it was Stalin who saved the world for democracy, albeit at the expense of half of Europe being subordinated to his authoritarian rule.
When the war ended in 1945, Stalin was almost universally hailed as the key architect of the allied victory over Nazi Germany. Not until Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in 1956 was that positive verdict seriously questioned. Central to Khrushchev’s critique of the dictator was the poor quality of Stalin’s military leadership. While some of Khrushchev’s criticisms were valid, others obscured the extent to which the mistakes of the early war years were a collective failure, including on the part of Khrushchev himself.
With access to Russian archives, I was able to re-evaluate Khrushchev’s critique and demonstrate that Stalin was a highly effective war leader — a leader who learnt from and corrected his mistakes.
World War II was the central event in Soviet history. At stake in the conflict was not only the survival of Soviet socialism but the continued existence of the multinational state the Bolsheviks had inherited from the Tsars. Had Hitler won, European Russia would have become a German colony and what was left of the Soviet Union a fragmented, disintegrating state. That historical spectre has particular resonance at the present time when many Russians see their country as once again involved in an existential struggle for survival.
Baldwin: In a recent interview with Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris, you said that Stalin committed the crimes he did largely due to his being such a true believer in his communist ideology and was very convinced of the rightness of his actions to further this ideology. This fits in with an observation I’ve made over the years (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) that the most dangerous people are those who are the most self-righteous, whether it’s on behalf of a religion or political philosophy, because they can justify the use of any means or methods in pursuit of their righteous ends. What do you think? Do you think policymakers in Washington suffer from a similarly dangerous sense of self-righteousness regarding their exceptionalism?
Roberts: The most important thing to understand about Stalin is that he was an intellectual, driven by his Marxist ideas, a true believer in his communist ideology. And he didn’t just believe it, he felt it. Socialism was an emotional thing for Stalin. His often-monstrous actions stemmed from his politics and ideology, not his personality.
Josef Stalin, 1949. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)
But the mass violence and repression of the Stalin era is not the whole of the Soviet story. Soviet society embodied many laudable ideas and aspirations — egalitarianism, multiculturalism, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, above all the valorization of peace and peaceful co-existence between different peoples, systems and values. The U.S.S.R. inspired a great deal of idealism and popular support throughout its existence, notwithstanding the millions of innocent people who fell victim to Stalin’s fanatical determination to defend the Soviet system against its enemies.
I agree with you about the dangerous self-righteousness of Western policymakers. But what really worries me is that they lack Stalin’s sense of realism and pragmatism and his ability to grasp the reality beyond his own ideological preferences. Thankfully, the same is not true of President Vladimir Putin, himself a product of the Soviet system, and an inheritor of its tradition of adapting political ideology to the contingencies and exigencies of the real situation.
Baldwin: Given your work in analyzing and attempting to understand Stalin as a political leader, military strategist and as an intellectual, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get accused of being a Stalin apologist. If so, what is your response?
Roberts: No one who reads my work with any degree of care would give any credence to such an accusation.
As a historian my primary task is to understand and explain Stalin, not to condemn or justify him. I do that by striving to see the world through his eyes, which, admittedly, requires a high degree of empathy, but which is not to be confused with sympathy. As a colleague of mine, Mark Harrison, once said, there is no moral hazard in trying to understand Stalin and having gained greater understanding, you can condemn him even more if you want to. But let’s get the history right before rushing to judgement.
One or two reviewers of my latest book — Stalin’s Library — complained that by presenting him as an avid reader and as a serious intellectual, I whitewashed his dictatorship. All I can say is that they must not have noticed the book’s sub-title — A Dictator and His Books — or its first sentence — “this book explores the intellectual life and biography of one of history’s bloodiest dictators” — or the title of Chapter One — “Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm” — or, indeed, a whole section devoted to “Stalin’s Terror” — a topic on which I published yet another article about just recently.
Baldwin: I want to shift gears to current events. You’ve done a remarkable job documenting exactly how events must have looked to Putin in the leadup to February of 2022, including Putin’s numerous public comments about the growing dangers of NATO expansion, de facto NATO membership for Ukraine, and the possible stationing of offensive missiles in Ukraine.
One of the things I really wanted to hash out with you regards an indirect sort of debate you had recently with Ray McGovern over whether Putin had other options he could have pursued instead of invading Ukraine in February 2022. McGovern tends to agree with John Mearsheimer that Putin did not have any other realistic options to defend Russian security interests. You wrote in response that you think this was a war of choice and not necessity by Putin.
At the time Putin invaded, I believed Putin did have other options such as those outlined by Russia expert Patrick Armstrong in his article of December 2021. Those options included positioning nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and Belarus to show resolve in defending Russia against NATO-aligned mischief, and/or economic measures that would punish NATO-aligned nations, among other things.
In retrospect, I don’t think any of these alternative measures would have worked. We’ve seen how the U.S. and virtually all of Europe has gone along with policies that have hurt their own interests both economically and in terms of security, particularly Europe. We’ve also seen how the West is willing to escalate this conflict. I hate this war as much as anyone, but I also have to be honest at this point — it now seems implausible that Putin stopping gas deliveries to Europe or stationing nukes in Belarus or trying to appeal more to Europe would have deterred Washington/NATO in any meaningful way.
Also, [former Ukraine President Petro] Poroshenko, [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [former French President Francois] Hollande have all since admitted that they had essentially taken Russia for a ride with the Minsk Agreements which they used as a cover to build up Ukraine’s military.
It seems like some in the West wanted this conflict or at the very least they didn’t have a problem once it started given their rejection of several attempts at negotiating an end to it. Can you give some concrete options that Putin had that were realistic at all, given what he was dealing with from the West? And please feel free to respond to any part of what I just laid out.
October 2015 in Paris; seated at table from left: Germany’s Angela Merkel, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko and France’s Francois Holland during Normandy format talks to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Roberts: My agreement with Ray McGovern and John Mearsheimer is far greater than any particular differences of interpretation.
The most important point about the Russia-Ukraine war is that it was the most avoidable war in history. It could have been avoided by Ukraine implementing the Minsk agreements. It could have been avoided by NATO halting its build-up of Ukraine’s armed forces. It could have been avoided by a positive U.S. response to Putin’s common security proposals of December 2021. Putin pulled the trigger but it was Ukraine and the West that loaded the gun.
When the West stonewalled his security proposals, Putin had a choice — continue with what I call his militarised diplomacy, or take military action to force acceptance of his demands. He chose war because diplomacy didn’t seem to be working and because he thought it was better to fight now rather than later — hence my characterisation of the invasion decision as a choice for preventative war.
I disagreed with his decision for three reasons: (1) notwithstanding Ukraine’s progressive military build-up, a dire existential threat to Russia was emergent rather than imminent; (2) the chance of diplomacy succeeding was slim but not non-existent; and (3) going to war was an enormously dangerous and destructive step to take, not just for Russia and Ukraine but for Europe and the rest of the world.
In retrospect, it seems clear that Putin’s decision for war was also based on a series of miscalculations. He over-estimated the power and efficacy of his armed forces, under-estimated Ukraine’s fighting ability, and, crucially, did not anticipate the determination and recklessness of the Western proxy war on Russia.
Had the Istanbul peace negotiations succeeded and war come to an end in spring 2022, those who argue Putin’s decision for war was right at the time he took it, would have a much stronger case to argue. But the prolonged nature of the war, the extent of its death and devastation, the real and continuing threat of nuclear catastrophe, and the prospect of an endless conflict, leave me unconvinced that it was the right thing to do.
It is highly likely Russia will in due course secure a decisive military advantage that will enable Putin to credibly claim victory. But it remains to be seen whether or not what Russia gains will have been worth the cost it will have paid.
Baldwin: Why do you think European leaders refuse to stand up to Washington’s reckless actions in terms of scuttling negotiations to end this war much earlier and continuing to escalate the conflict using a frog-in-boiling-water approach? European leaders must know that if this conflict continues to escalate, they will be potential targets.
Roberts: It’s mind-boggling! Presumably, they feel the Russian threat is so great and their dependence on U.S. protection so deep, that these are risks worth taking. But I hope the scales will fall from their eyes and they will see that the Ukrainians are fighting a losing war of attrition that may end in complete catastrophe for their country.
To be fair, there are realist and pragmatic politicians in all European countries who desire a ceasefire and are prepared to negotiate a compromise peace with Russia. I’m sure their voices will become louder and more persistent in the coming months.
Baldwin: In a similar vein, a recent survey of European opinion revealed that, though they currently view Russia as a rival, once the war ends most European citizens want to reconcile and partner with Russia. It seems that regular Europeans realize that you can’t change geography and that Russia is a European neighbor and a modus vivendi must somehow be reached. When do you think the leaders of Europe might catch up to this realization?
Roberts: The commonsense of the European public is right. There can be no peace and prosperity in Europe without a partnership with Russia. None of the world’s most pressing problems can be resolved without Russian participation.
The sooner this war ends the better it will be for Europe, for Russia and, above all, for Ukraine.
Natylie Baldwin is the author ofThe View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations. Her writing has appeared in various publications including The Grayzone, Antiwar.com, Covert Action Magazine, RT, OpEd News, The Globe Post, The New York Journal of Books and Dissident Voice.
Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
The Nato summit in Lithuania [last] week served only to underscore the utter hypocrisy of western leaders in pursuing their proxy war in Ukraine to “weaken” Russia and oust its president, Vladimir Putin.
Both the US and Germany had made clear before the summit that they would block Ukraine’s admission to Nato while it was in the midst of a war with Russia. That message was formally announced by Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fumed that Nato had reached an “absurd” decision and was demonstrating “weakness”. British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace lost no time in rebuking him for a lack of “gratitude”.
The concern is that, if Kyiv joins the military alliance at this stage, Nato members will be required to leap to Ukraine’s defence and fight Russia directly. Most western states balk at the notion of a face-to-face confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia – rather than the current proxy one, paid for exclusively in Ukrainian blood.
But there is a more duplicitous subtext being obscured: the fact that Nato is responsible for sustaining the war it now cites as grounds for disqualifying Ukraine from joining the military alliance. Nato got Kyiv into its current, bloody mess – but isn’t ready to help it find a way out.
It was Nato, after all, that chose to flirt openly with Ukraine from 2008 onwards, promising it eventual membership – with the undisguised hope that one day, the alliance would be able to flex its military muscles menacingly on Russia’s doorstep.
It was the UK that intervened weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and presumably on Washington’s orders, to scupper negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow – talks that could have ended the war at an early stage, before Russia began seizing territories in eastern Ukraine.
The message Nato has sent Moscow is that Russia made exactly the right decision to invade
A deal then would have been much simpler than one now. Most likely, it would have required Kyiv to commit to neutrality, rather than pursuing covert integration into Nato. Moscow would have demanded, too, an end to the Ukrainian government’s political, legal and military attacks on its Russian-speaking populations in the east.
Now the chief sticking point to an agreement will be persuading the Kremlin to trust the West and reverse its annexation of eastern Ukraine, assuming Nato ever allows Kyiv to re-engage in talks with Russia.
And finally, it is Nato members, especially the US, that have been shipping out vast quantities of military hardware to prolong the fighting in Ukraine – keeping the death toll mounting on both sides.
Damp squib
In short, Nato is now using the very war it has done everything to fuel as a pretext to stop Ukraine from joining the alliance.
Seen another way, the message Nato has sent Moscow is that Russia made exactly the right decision to invade – if the goal, as Putin has always maintained, is to ensure Kyiv remains neutral.
It is the war that has prevented Ukraine from being completely enfolded in the western military alliance. It is the war that has stopped Ukraine’s transformation into a Nato forward base, one where the West could station nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.
Had Russia not invaded, Kyiv would have been free to accelerate what it was already doing secretly: integrating into Nato. So what is Zelensky supposed to conclude from his exclusion from Nato, after he committed his country to an ongoing war rather than negotiations and neutrality?
So far, Ukraine’s much-vaunted “spring counter-offensive” has turned into a damp squib, despite western media spin about “slow progress”. Moscow is holding on to the Ukrainian territories it annexed.
So long as Kyiv can’t “win the war” – and it seems it can’t, unless Nato is willing to fight Russia directly and risk a nuclear confrontation – it will be precluded from the military alliance. Catch-22.
Do not expect this conundrum to be highlighted by a western establishment media that seems incapable of doing anything other than regurgitating Nato press releases and cheering on bigger profits for the West’s war industries.
War crimes
Another such conundrum is the Biden administration’s decision last week to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions – small bomblets that, when they fail to explode, lie concealed like mini-landmines, killing and maiming civilians for decades. In some cases, as many as a third are “duds”, detonating weeks, months or years later.
Washington’s move follows Britain recently supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium shells, which contaminate surrounding areas with a radioactive dust during and after fighting. Evidence from areas such as Iraq, where the US and Britain fired large numbers of these shells, suggests the fallout can include a decades-long spike in cancer and birth defects.
The White House was all too ready to denounce the use of cluster bombs as a war crime last year – when it was Russia that stood accused of using them. Now it is Washington enabling Kyiv to commit those very same war crimes.
More than 110 states – not including the US, of course – have ratified a 2008 international convention outlawing cluster munitions. Many are in Nato.
Given the high “dud” rate of US cluster bombs, President Joe Biden appears to be breaking US law in shipping stocks to Ukraine. The White House can invoke an exemption only if exporting such weapons satisfies a “vital US national security interest”. Apparently, Biden believes “weakening” Russia – and turning parts of Ukraine into a death zone for civilians for decades to come – qualifies as just such a vital interest.
Desperate stop gap
While the official story is that this latest escalatory move by the US will help Kyiv “win the war”, the truth is rather different. Biden has not shied away from admitting that Ukraine – and Nato – are running out of conventional arms to fight Russia. This is a desperate stop-gap measure.
While most Nato members might be signatories to the convention on banning cluster munitions, they appear more than willing to turn a blind eye to Washington’s decision. Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who signed the convention in his earlier role as foreign minister, said this week that Berlin should not block the US shipment because to do so “would be the end of Ukraine”.
Every day such talks are delayed, Ukraine loses more of its fighting men, and potentially more of its territory
In other words, the resort to cluster munitions is an admission that it is Kyiv and its Nato partners – not Moscow – that have been weakened militarily by the war.
Once again, a supposedly “humanitarian war” by the West – remember Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – is becoming the opposite. Like every previous weapon delivered to Ukraine, the cluster bombs are being supplied to postpone the inevitable: the need for Kyiv to engage in talks with Moscow to end the fighting.
And every day such talks are delayed, Ukraine loses more of its fighting men, and potentially more of its territory.
Horrors of cluster bombs
It is not as though Washington or the rest of Nato are unaware of the effects of using cluster bombs. The US is estimated to have dropped 270 million of them on Laos during its “secret war” on that country more than half a century ago. Up to 80 million of them did not detonate.
Since the bombing ended in 1973, at least 25,000 people – 40 percent of them children – are reported to have been killed or injured by these small landmines littered across Laos’s territory.
More recently, the US used cluster munitions in its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hun Sen, the prime minister of Cambodia, which was bombed alongside Laos by the US during the Vietnam War, reminded the world this week of the horrors in store. He noted that, half a century on, Cambodia had still not found a way to destroy all the explosives: “The real victims will be Ukrainians,” he said.
But that warning is likely to fall on deaf ears in Ukraine. Zelensky, a leader who has been all but beatified by the western media, is no stranger to the use of cluster bombs. Though journalists prefer to mention their use by Russia only, human rights groups have documented Kyiv’s firing of cluster munitions on its own population in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
The need to protect Russian-speaking communities in eastern Ukraine from their own government – and from Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in the Ukrainian military – was one of the main reasons given by Moscow for launching its invasion. The New York Times reported Kyiv using cluster bombs last year on a small Ukrainian village in the country’s east.
According to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, Ukrainian forces also fired cluster munitions on the Ukrainian town of Izium last year, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 15 others.
Given this history, Washington would be foolish to take at face value reassurances from the Zelensky government that US supplies of cluster bombs will be fired only on Russian troops. All the evidence indicates that they will likely be used on civilian areas in eastern Ukraine too.
Double standard
Publicly, European leaders are trying to salve their consciences by implying that there are exceptional justifications for providing cluster munitions to Kyiv. The bomblets are supposedly essential if Ukraine is to defend its territory against Russian aggression and occupation.
But if that is really Nato’s yardstick, then there is another exceptional, oppressed state in no less need of such munitions: Palestine.
Like Ukraine, the Palestinians have had their territory seized by an implacable foe. And like Ukraine, the Palestinians face continuous military attacks by an occupying army.
Occupation forces always end up committing war crimes, as Russia’s have. The United Nations accuses the Russian army of rapes, killings and torture, and attacks on civilian infrastructure.
The commission of war crimes is inherent in the task of invading another people’s sovereign territory and subduing the local population, as the US and UK proved in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Undoubtedly, both Israel and Russia’s actions are causing untold suffering. But where there are differences, they reflect worse on Israel than Russia.
Is anyone in Nato considering supplying cluster munitions to the Palestinians to defend themselves?
Israel’s occupation has lasted many decades longer than Russia’s, and it has throughout those years continued to commit war crimes, including creating hundreds of illegal, armed settlements exclusively for Jews on Palestinian land.
Further, there was an existing civil war in Ukraine that had killed more than 14,000 Ukrainians before Russia invaded. At least a proportion of Ukrainians – largely its ethnic Russian population in the east – welcomed Moscow’s intervention, at least initially. It would be hard to find a Palestinian who wants Israel or its settlers occupying their land.
Is anyone in Nato considering supplying cluster munitions to the Palestinians to defend themselves? Would Nato endorse Palestinians firing cluster bombs at Israeli military bases or at militarised settlements in the occupied West Bank?
And would Nato accept Palestinian reassurances that such munitions would not be fired into Israel, just as it has accepted Ukrainian assurances that they won’t be fired into Russia?
These questions answer themselves. In the case of the Palestinians, western states don’t just apply a double standard. They even echo Israel in condemning Palestinian conventional attacks on Israeli forces.
Dangerous delusions
But the hypocrisies do not end there. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s hawkish foreign minister, wrote in the Guardian last week that her country had made a mistake in pursuing a policy of what she called “chequebook diplomacy”.
Berlin, she added, had naively believed that political and economic interaction with the West would “sway the Russian regime toward democracy”. Instead, she concluded that “Putin’s Russia will remain a threat to peace and security on our continent and that we have to organise our security against Putin’s Russia, not with it.”
Europe’s path forward, Baerbock suggests, is limited to either a forever war against Russia or imposing regime change on the Kremlin. All of this is dangerous nonsense. The fact that self-serving, delusional analysis of this kind is echoed so uncritically by western media should be a stain on its reputation.
Baerbock implies that it was Moscow that rebuffed “our efforts to construct a European security architecture with Russia”. But Russia was never offered a meaningful place within Europe’s security umbrella after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That contrasts strongly with West Germany’s treatment after the Second World War. With the Nazi regime barely gone, Germany received massive US aid via the Marshall Plan to rebuild its economy and infrastructure, and it was soon embraced by Nato as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was handled very differently. It was not viewed as an opportunity to bring Russia into the fold.
Instead, the US and its western allies denied Russia both a proper aid plan and the cancellation of Soviet-era debts. The West preferred to prop up a weak president, Boris Yeltsin, insisting he commit to “shock therapy” privatisation that left the Russian economy open to asset-stripping by a new class of oligarchs.
Nefarious ambitions
While Russia was being hollowed out economically, Washington hurried to isolate its historic rival militarily and bring former Soviet states into the US “sphere of influence” via Nato. Successive US administrations developed and zealously pursued a hubristic foreign policy known as “full-spectrum global dominance” against its main great-power rivals, Russia and China.
Putin’s popularity among Russians grew the more he posed – often only rhetorically – as the strongman who would stop Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders.
Contrary to Baerbock’s suggestions, Moscow wasn’t wooed by a Nato “chequebook”. It was gradually and systematically cornered. It was turned, bit by bit, into a pariah.
This isn’t the assessment simply of “Putin apologists”. Nato’s strategy was understood and warned against in real time by some of the biggest figures in US foreign policy-making – from George Kennan, the father of US Cold War policy, to William Burns, the current CIA director.
In 2007, as US ambassador to Moscow, Burns wrote a diplomatic cable – later revealed by Wikileaks – arguing that “Nato enlargement and U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe play to the classic Russian fear of encirclement”. Months later, Burns warned that offering Ukraine Nato membership would place Moscow in an “unthinkable” predicament.
Washington simply ignored these endless warnings from its own officials, because maintaining peace and stability in Europe was not its goal. Permanently isolating and “weakening” Russia was.
The Biden administration understands it is playing with fire. Last year, in a remark most likely unscripted, the president himself invoked the danger of Russia, faced with a defeat in Ukraine it viewed in existential terms, unleashing a nuclear “Armageddon”.
Tragically, Nato’s malevolence, deceit and betrayal means that the only alternative to Armageddon may be Ukraine’s downfall – and with it, the crushing of Washington’s nefarious ambitions to advance full-spectrum global dominance.
