By Chas Freeman, Website, 9/26/23

The Many Lessons of the Ukraine War
Remarks to the East Bay Citizens for Peace

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
The Barrington Library, Barrington, Rhode Island, 26 September 2023

I want to speak to you tonight about Ukraine – what has happened to it and why, how it is likely to emerge from the ordeal to which great power rivalry has subjected it; and what we can learn from this.  I do so with some trepidation and a warning to this audience.  My talk, like the conflict in Ukraine, is a long and complicated one.  It contradicts propaganda that has been very convincing.  My talk will offend anyone committed to the official narrative.  The way the American media have dealt with the Ukraine war brings to mind a comment by Mark Twain: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”

It is said that, in war, truth is the first casualty.  War is typically accompanied by a fog of official lies.  No such fog has ever been as thick as in the Ukraine war.  While many hundreds of thousands of people have fought and died in Ukraine, the propaganda machines in Brussels, Kyiv, London, Moscow, and Washington have worked overtime to ensure that we take passionate sides, believe what we want to believe, and condemn anyone who questions the narrative we have internalized.  No one not on the front lines has any real idea of what has been happening in this war.  What we know is only what our governments and other supporters of the war want us to know.  And they have developed the bad habit of inhaling their own propaganda, which guarantees delusional policies.

Every government that is a party to the Ukraine War – Kyiv, Moscow, Washington, and other NATO capitals – has been guilty of various degrees of self-deception and blundering misfeasance.  The consequences for all have been dire.  For Ukraine, they have been catastrophic.  A radical rethinking of policy by all concerned is long overdue.

Whence and Whither NATO?

First, some necessary background.  NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) came into being to defend the European countries within the post-World War II American sphere of influence against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its satellite nations.  NATO’s area of responsibility was the territory of its members in North America and Western Europe, but nowhere beyond that.  The alliance helped maintain a balance of power and keep the peace in Europe during the four-plus decades of the Cold War.  In 1991, however, the USSR dissolved, and the Cold War ended.  That eliminated any credible threat to NATO members’ territory and raised this issue: if NATO was still the answer to something, what was the question?

The U.S. armed forces had no problem responding to that conundrum.  They had compelling vested interests in the preservation of NATO.

• NATO had created and sustained a post-World War II European role and presence for the U.S. military,
• This justified a much larger U.S. force structure and many more highly desirable billets for flag officers[1] than would otherwise exist,
• NATO enhanced the international stature of the American armed forces while fostering a unique U.S. competence in multinational alliance and coalition management, and
• It offered tours of duty in Europe that made peacetime military service more attractive to U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.

Then, too, the 20^th century had appeared to underscore that U.S. security was inseparable from that of other north Atlantic countries.  The existence of European empires ensured that wars among the great powers of Europe – the Napoleonic wars, World War I and World War II – soon morphed into world wars.  NATO was how the United States dominated and managed the Euro-Atlantic region in the Cold War.  Disbanding NATO or a U.S. withdrawal from it would, arguably, just free Europeans to renew their quarreling and start yet another war that might not be confined to Europe.

So, NATO had to be kept in business.  The obvious way to accomplish that was to find a new, non-European role for the organization.  NATO, it came to be said, had to go “out of area or out of business.”  In other words, the alliance had to be repurposed to project military power beyond the territories of its Western European and North American member states.

In 1998, NATO went to war with Serbia, bombing it in 1999 to detach Kosovo from it.  In 2001, in response to the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, it joined the U.S. in occupying and attempting to pacify Afghanistan.[2]  In 2011, NATO fielded forces to engineer regime change in Libya.

The Coup in Kyiv, Crimea, and the Rebellion of Russian Speaking Ukrainians

In 2014, after a well-prepared[3] US-sponsored anti-Russian coup in Kyiv, Ukrainian ultranationalists banned the official use of Russian and other minority languages in their country and, at the same time, affirmed Ukraine’s intention to become part of NATO.  Among other consequences, Ukrainian membership in NATO would place Russia’s 250-year-old naval base in the Crimean city of Sebastopol under NATO and hence U.S. control.  Crimea was Russian-speaking and had several times voted not to be part of Ukraine.  So, citing the precedent of NATO’S violent intervention to separate Kosovo from Serbia, Russia organized a referendum in Crimea that endorsed its reincorporation in the Russian Federation.  The results were consistent with previous votes on the issue.

Meanwhile, in response to Ukraine’s banning of the use of Russian in government offices and education, predominantly Russian-speaking areas in the country’s Donbas region attempted to secede.  Kyiv sent forces to suppress the rebellion.  Moscow responded by backing Ukrainian Russian speakers’ demands for the minority rights guaranteed to them by both the pre-coup Ukrainian constitution and the principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).  NATO backed Kyiv against Moscow.  An escalating civil war among Ukrainians ensued.  This soon evolved into an intensifying proxy war in Ukraine between the United States, NATO, and Russia.

Negotiations at Minsk, mediated by the OSCE with French and German support, brokered agreement between Kyiv and Moscow on a package of measures, including:

• a ceasefire,
• the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line,
• the release of prisoners of war,
• constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and
• the restoration of Kyiv’s control of the rebel areas’ borders with Russia.

The United Nations Security Council endorsed these terms.  They represented Moscow’s acceptance that Russian-speaking provinces in Ukraine would remain part of a united but federalized Ukraine, provided they enjoyed Québec-style linguistic autonomy.  But, with U.S. support, Ukraine refused to carry out what it had agreed to.  Years later, the French and Germans admitted that their mediation efforts at Minsk had been a ruse directed at gaining time to arm Kyiv against Moscow and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (like his predecessor in office, Petro Poroshenko) confessed that he had never planned to implement the accords.

Moscow and NATO Enlargement

In 1990, in the context of German reunification, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and Russia’s abandonment of its politico-economic sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe, the West had several times somewhat slyly but solemnly promised not to fill the resulting strategic vacuum by expanding NATO into it.  But as the 1990s proceeded, despite a lack of enthusiasm on the part of some other NATO members, the United States insisted on doing just that.  NATO enlargement steadily erased the Eastern European cordon sanitaire of independent neutral states that successive governments in Moscow had considered essential to Russian security.  As former members of the Warsaw Pact entered NATO, U.S. weaponry, troops, and bases appeared on their territory.  In 2008, in a final move to extend the U.S. sphere of influence to Russia’s borders, Washington persuaded NATO to declare its intention to admit both Ukraine and Georgia as members.

The eastward deployment of U.S. forces placed ballistic missile defense launchers in both Romania and Poland.  These were technically capable of rapid reconfiguration to mount short-range strikes on Moscow.  Their deployment fueled Russian fears of a decapitating U.S. surprise attack.  If Ukraine entered NATO and the U.S. made comparable deployments there, Russia would have only about five minutes’ warning of a strike on Moscow.  NATO’s role in detaching Kosovo from Serbia and in U.S. regime-change and pacification operations in Afghanistan and Libya as well as its support of anti-Russian forces in Ukraine, had convinced Moscow that it could no longer dismiss NATO as a purely defensive alliance.

As early as 1994, successive Russian governments began to warn the U.S. and NATO that continued NATO expansion – especially to Ukraine and Georgia – would compel a forceful response.  Washington was aware of Russian determination to do this from multiple sources, including reports from its ambassadors in Moscow.  In February 2007. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, declared: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion … represents a serious provocation …  And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”  On February 1, 2008, Ambassador Bill Burns, now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), warned in a telegram from Moscow that, on this subject Russians were united and serious.  Burns felt so strongly about the consequences of NATO expansion into Ukraine that he gave his cable the subject line, “Nyet Means Nyet” [“No means no.”]

In April 2008, NATO nonetheless invited both Ukraine and Georgia to join it.  Moscow protested that their “membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.”  By August 2008, as if to underscore this point, when an emboldened Georgia sought to extend its rule to rebellious minority regions on the Russian border, Moscow went to war to consolidate their independence.

Civil and Proxy War in Ukraine

Less than a day after of the US-engineered coup that installed an anti-Russian regime in Kyiv in 2014, Washington formally recognized the new regime.  When Russia then annexed Crimea and civil war broke out with Ukraine’s Russian speakers, the United States sided with and armed the Ukrainian ultranationalists whose policies had alienated Crimea and provoked the Russian-speaking secessionists.  The United States and NATO began a multi-billion-dollar effort to reorganize, retrain, and re-equip Kyiv’s armed forces.  The avowed purpose was to enable Kyiv to reconquer the Donbas and eventually Crimea.  Ukraine’s regular army was then decrepit.  Kyiv’s initial attacks on Russian speakers in the Ukrainian eastern and southern regions were largely conducted by ultranationalist militias.[4]  By 2015, Russian soldiers were fighting alongside the Donbas rebels.  An undeclared US/NATO proxy war with Russia had begun.

Over the course of the next eight years – during which the Ukrainian civil war continued – Kyiv built a NATO-trained army of 700,000 – not counting one million reserves – and hardened it in battle with Russian-supported separatists.  Ukrainian regulars numbered only slightly less than Russia’s then 830,000 active-duty military personnel.  In eight years, Ukraine had acquired a larger force than any NATO member other than the United States or Türkiye, outnumbering the armed forces of Britain, France, and Germany combined. Not surprisingly, Russia saw this as a threat.

Meanwhile, as tensions with Russia escalated, in early 2019 the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty, which had barred ground-launched missiles with ranges of up to 3,420 miles from deployment in Europe.  Russia condemned this as a “destructive” act that would stoke security risks.  Despite ongoing misgivings on the part of some other NATO members, at American insistence, NATO continued periodically to reiterate its offer to incorporate Ukraine as a member, doing so once more on September 1, 2021.  By that time, after billions of dollars of U.S. training and arms transfers, Kyiv judged it was finally ready to crush its Russian speakers’ rebellion and their Russian allies.  As 2021 ended, Ukraine stepped up pressure on the Donbas separatists and deployed forces to mount a major offensive against them timed for early 2022.

Moscow Demands Negotiations

At about the same time, in mid-December 2021, twenty-eight years after Moscow’s first warning to Washington, Vladimir Putin issued a formal demand for written security guarantees to reduce the apparent threats to Russia from NATO enlargement by restoring Ukrainian neutrality, banning the stationing of U.S. forces on Russia’s borders, and reinstating limits on the deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in Europe.  The Russian foreign ministry then presented a draft treaty to Washington incorporating these terms – which echoed similar demands put forward by former Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1997.  At the same time, apparently both to underscore Moscow’s seriousness and to counter Kyiv’s planned offensive against the Donbas secessionists, Russia massed troops along its borders with Ukraine.

On January 26, 2022, the U.S. formally responded that neither it nor NATO would agree to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality or other such issues with Russia.  A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid out his understanding of the American and NATO positions at a meeting of Russia’s Security Council as follows:

“[Our] Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily those on NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy and the freedom of each state to choose its own way of ensuring security. Neither the United States, nor [NATO] … proposed an alternative to this key provision.”

Moscow wanted negotiations but, in their absence, was prepared to go to war to remove the threats to which it objected.  Washington knew this when it rejected talks with Moscow.  The American refusal to talk was an unambiguous decision to accept the risk of war rather than explore any compromise or accommodation with Russia.  U.S. and allied intelligence services immediately began releasing information purporting to describe impending Russian military operations[5] in what they described as an attempt to deter them.

Russia Invades Ukraine

In mid-February, fighting between Ukrainian army and secessionist forces in Donbas intensified, with OSCE observers reporting a rapid rise in ceasefire violations by both sides but with most allegedly initiated by Kyiv.  Perhaps disingenuously, the Donbas secessionists appealed to Moscow to protect them and ordered a general evacuation of civilians to safe havens in Russia.  On February 21, Russian President Putin recognized the independence of the two Donbas “people’s republics” and ordered Russian forces to secure them against Ukrainian attacks.

On February 24, 2022, in an address to the Russian nation, Putin declared that “Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist with a constant threat emanating from the territory of modern Ukraine” and announced that he had ordered what he called a “special military operation” “to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide . . . for the last eight years” and to “strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”  He added that:

“It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.”

The official narrative put forward in U.S. and NATO information warfare against Russia contradicts every element of this statement by President Putin, but the record affirms it.

The Run-up to the U.S.-Russian Proxy War in Ukraine

In the post-Soviet era:

• NATO – the U.S. sphere of influence and military presence in Europe – constantly expanded toward Russia’s borders despite escalating Russian warnings and protests.
• By contrast, Moscow was in constant retreat. It had abandoned its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.  It made no effort to reestablish it.
• Moscow repeatedly warned that NATO enlargement and U.S. forward deployment of forces that might threaten it, especially from Ukraine, were a grave threat to it to which it would feel compelled to react.
• Given NATO’s transformation from a purely defensive, Europe-focused alliance into an instrument for power projection in support of U.S. regime-change and other military operations beyond its members’ borders, Moscow had a reasonable basis for concern that Ukrainian membership in NATO would pose an active threat to its security. This threat was underscored by U.S. withdrawal from the treaty that had prevented it from stationing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, including in Ukraine.
• Moscow consistently demanded neutrality for Ukraine. Neutrality would make Ukraine both a buffer and bridge between itself and the rest of Europe, rather than part of Russia or a platform for Russian power projection against the rest of Europe.
• By contrast, the United States sought to make Ukraine a member of NATO – part of its sphere of influence – and a platform for the deployment of U.S. military power against Russia.
• Moscow agreed at Minsk to respect continued Ukrainian sovereignty in the Donbas region, provided the rights of Russian speakers there were guaranteed. But, with support from the U.S. and NATO, Ukraine declined to implement the Minsk agreement and redoubled its effort to subjugate the Donbas.
• When Washington refused to hear the Russian case for mutual accommodation in Europe and instead insisted on Ukrainian membership in NATO, the U.S. government knew that this would produce a Russian military response. In fact, Washington publicly predicted this.
• Early in the resulting war, when third-party mediation achieved a draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, the West – represented by the British – insisted that Ukraine repudiate it.

This sad incident brings me to the war aims of the participants in the war.

War Aims in Ukraine

Kyiv has not wavered from its objectives of:

• Forging a purely Ukrainian national identity from which Russian and other languages, cultures, and religious authorities are excluded.
• Subjugating the Russian speakers who rebelled in response to this attempt at their forced assimilation.
• Obtaining U.S. and NATO protection and integrating with the EU.
• Reconquering the Russian-speaking territories Moscow has illegally annexed from Ukraine, including both the Donbas oblasts and Crimea.

Moscow clearly stated its maximum and minimum objectives in the draft treaty that it presented to Washington on December 17, 2021.  Core Russian interests have been and remain:

• (1) to deny Ukraine to the American sphere of influence that has engulfed the rest of Eastern Europe by compelling Ukraine to affirm neutrality between the United States / NATO and Russia, and
• (2) to protect and ensure the basic rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine.

Washington’s objectives – which NATO has dutifully adopted as its own – have been much more open-ended and unspecific.  As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it in June 2022,

“We have . . .  refrained from laying out what we see as an endgame. . .. We have been focused on what we can do today, tomorrow, next week to strengthen the Ukrainians’ hand to the maximum extent possible, first on the battlefield and then ultimately at the negotiating table.”

Inasmuch as the first principle of warfare is to establish realistic objectives, a strategy to achieve them, and a plan for war termination, this is a perfect description of how to brew up a “forever war.”  As Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen attest, this has become the established American way of war.  No clear objectives, no plan to achieve them, and no concept of how to end the war, on what terms, and with whom.

The most cogent statement of U.S. objectives in this war was offered by President Biden as it began.  He said his goal with Russia was to “sap its economic strength and weaken its military for years to come” – whatever it takes.  At no point has the United States government or NATO declared that the protection of Ukraine or Ukrainians, as opposed to exploiting their bravery to take down Russia, is the central American objective.  In April 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterated that U.S. aid to Ukraine was intended to weaken and isolate Russia and thereby deprive it of any credible capacity to make war in future.  Quite a few American politicians and pundits have extolled the benefits to having Ukrainians rather than Americans sacrifice their lives for this purpose.  Some have gone farther and advocated the breakup of the Russian Federation as a war aim.  If you are Russian, you don’t have to be paranoid to see such threats as existential.  Russian President Putin assesses U.S. war aims as directed at humbling the Russian Federation strategically and, if possible, overthrowing its government, and dismembering it.[6]  The United States has not disputed this assessment.

Peace Set Aside

In mid-March 2022, the government of Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett mediated between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, who tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement.  The agreement provided that Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.  A meeting between Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Zelensky was in the process of being arranged to finalize this agreement, which the negotiators had initialed ad referendum – meaning subject to the approval of their superiors.

On March 28, 2022. President Zelensky publicly affirmed that Ukraine was ready for neutrality combined with security guarantees as part of a peace agreement with Russia.  But on April 9 British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Kyiv.  During this visit, he reportedly urged Zelensky not to meet Putin because (1) Putin was a war criminal and weaker than he seemed.  He should and could be crushed rather than accommodated; and (2) even if Ukraine was ready to end the war, NATO was not.

Zelensky’s proposed meeting with Putin was then called off.  Putin declared that talks with Ukraine had come to a dead end.  Zelensky explained that “Moscow would like to have one treaty that would resolve all the issues. However, not everyone sees themselves at the table with Russia. For them, security guarantees for Ukraine is one issue, and the agreement with the Russian Federation is another issue.”  This marked the end of bilateral Russian-Ukrainian negotiations and thus of any prospect of a resolution of the conflict anywhere but on the battlefield.

What Happened and Who’s Winning What

This war was born in and has been continued due to miscalculations by all sides.  NATO expansion was legal but predictably provocative.  Russia’s response was entirely predictable, if illegal, and has proven very costly to it.  Ukraine’s de facto military integration into NATO has resulted in its devastation.

The United States calculated that Russian threats to go to war over Ukrainian neutrality were bluffs that might be deterred by outlining and denigrating Russian plans and intentions as Washington understood them.  Russia assumed that the United States would prefer negotiations to war and would wish to avoid the redivision of Europe into hostile blocs.  Ukrainians counted on the West protecting their country.  When Russian performance in the first months of the war proved lackluster, the West concluded that Ukraine could defeat it.  None of these calculations have proved correct.

Nevertheless, official propaganda, amplified by subservient mainstream and social media, has convinced most in the West that rejecting negotiations on NATO expansion and encouraging Ukraine to fight Russia is somehow “pro-Ukrainian.”  Sympathy for the Ukrainian war effort is entirely understandable, but, as the Vietnam War should have taught us, democracies lose when cheerleading replaces objectivity in reporting and governments prefer their own propaganda to the truth of what is happening on the battleground.

The only way you can judge the success or failure of policies is by reference to the objectives they were designed to achieve.  So, how are the participants in the Ukraine War doing in terms of achieving their objectives?

Let’s start with Ukraine.

From 2014 to 2022, the civil war in Donbas took nearly 15,000 lives.  How many have been killed in action since the US/NATO-Russian proxy war began in February 2022 is unknown but is certainly in the several hundreds of thousands.  Casualty numbers have been concealed by unprecedentedly intense information warfare.  The only information in the West about the dead and wounded has been propaganda from Kyiv claiming vast numbers of Russian dead while revealing nothing at all about Ukrainian casualties.  It is known, however, that ten percent of Ukrainians are now involved with the armed forces and 78 percent have relatives or friends who have been killed or wounded.  An estimated 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees.  (By comparison, only 41,000 Britons had to have amputations in World War I, when the procedure was often the only one available to prevent death.  Fewer than 2,000 U.S. veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions had amputations.)  Most observers believe that Ukrainian forces have taken much heavier losses than their Russian enemies and that hundreds of thousands of them have given their lives in their country’s defense and efforts to retake territory occupied by the Russians.

When the war began, Ukraine had a population of about thirty-one million.  The country has since lost at least one-third of its people.  Over six million have taken refuge in the West.  Two million more have left for Russia. Another eight million Ukrainians have been driven from their homes but remain in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s infrastructure, industries, and cities have been devastated and its economy destroyed.  As is usual in wars, corruption – long a prominent feature of Ukrainian politics – has been rampant.  Ukraine’s nascent democracy is no more, with all opposition parties, uncontrolled media outlets, and dissent outlawed.

On the other hand, Russian aggression has united Ukrainians, including many who are Russian speaking, to an extent never seen before.  Moscow has thereby inadvertently reinforced the separate Ukrainian identity that both Russian mythology and President Putin have sought to deny.  What Ukraine has lost in territory it has gained in patriotic cohesion based on passionate opposition to Moscow.

The flip side of this is that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking separatists have also had their Russian identity reinforced.  Ukrainian refugees in Russia are the hardest of hardliners demanding retribution from Kyiv.  There is now little to no possibility of Russian speakers accepting a status in a united Ukraine, as would have been the case under the Minsk Accords.  And, with the failure of Ukraine’s “counteroffensive,” it is very unlikely that Donbas or Crimea will ever return to Ukrainian sovereignty.   As the war continues, Ukraine may well lose still more territory, including its access to the Black Sea.  What has been lost on the battlefield and in the hearts of the people cannot be regained at the negotiating table.  Ukraine will emerge from this war maimed, crippled, and much reduced in both territory and population.

Finally, there is now no realistic prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO.  As NSC Advisor Sullivan has said, “everyone needs to look squarely at the fact” that allowing Ukraine to join NATO at this point “means war with Russia.”  NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has stated that the prerequisite for Ukrainian membership in NATO is a peace treaty between it and Russia.  No such treaty is anywhere in sight.  In continuing to insist that Ukraine will become a NATO member once the war is concluded, the West has perversely incentivized Russia not to agree to end the war.  But, in the end, Ukraine will have to make its peace with Russia, almost certainly largely on Russian terms.

Whatever else the war may be achieving, it has not been good for Ukraine.  Ukraine’s bargaining position vis-à-vis Russia has been greatly weakened.  But then, Kyiv’s fate has always been an afterthought in U.S. policy circles.  Washington has instead sought to exploit Ukrainian courage to thrash Russia, reinvigorate NATO, and reinforce U.S. primacy in Europe.  And it has not spent any time at all thinking about how to restore peace to Europe.

How about Russia?

Has it succeeded in expelling American influence from Ukraine, forced Kyiv to declare neutrality, or reinstating the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine?  Clearly not.

For now, at least, Ukraine has become a complete dependency of the United States and its NATO allies.  Kyiv is an embittered, long-term antagonist of Moscow.  Kyiv clings to its ambition to join NATO.  Russians in Ukraine are the targets of the local version of cancel culture.  Whatever the outcome of the war, mutual animosity has erased the Russian myth of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood based on a common origin in Kievan Rus.  Russia has had to abandon three centuries of efforts to identify with Europe and instead pivot to China, India, the Islamic world, and Africa.  Reconciliation with a seriously alienated European Union will not come easily, if at all.  Russia may not have lost on the battlefield or been weakened or strategically isolated, but it has incurred huge opportunity costs.

Then, too, NATO has expanded to include Finland and Sweden.  This does not change the military balance in Europe.  Western portrayal of Russia as inherently predatory notwithstanding, Moscow has had neither the desire nor the capability to attack either of these two formerly very Western-aligned and formidably armed but nominally “neutral” states.  Nor does either Finland or Sweden have any intention of joining an unprovoked attack on Russia.  But their decision to join NATO is politically wounding for Moscow.

Since the West shows no willingness to accommodate Russian security concerns, if Moscow is to achieve its goals, it now has no apparent alternative to battling on.  As it does so, it is stimulating European determination to meet previously ignored NATO targets for defense spending and to acquire self-reliant military capabilities directed at countering Russia independently of those of the United States.  Poland is reemerging as a powerful hostile force on Russia’s borders.  These trends are changing the European military balance to Moscow’s long-term disadvantage.

What about the United States?

In 2022 alone the United States approved $113 billion in aid to Ukraine.  The Russian defense budget then was then less than half of that — $54 billion.  It has since roughly doubled.  Russian defense industries have been revitalized.  Some now produce more weaponry in a month than they previously did in a year.  Russia’s autarkic economy has weathered 18 months of all-out war against it from both the U.S. and the EU.  It just overtook Germany to become the fifth wealthiest economy in the world and the largest in Europe in terms of purchasing power parity.  Despite repeated Western claims that Russia was running out of ammunition and losing the war of attrition in Ukraine, it has not, while the West has.  Ukrainian bravery, which has been hugely impressive, has been no match for Russian firepower.

Meanwhile, the alleged Russian threat to the West, once a powerful argument for NATO unity, has lost credibility.  Russia’s armed forces have proven unable to conquer Ukraine, still less the rest of Europe.  But the war has taught Russia how to counter and overcome much of the most advanced weaponry of the United States and other Western countries.

Before the United States and NATO rejected negotiations, Russia was prepared to accept a neutral and federalized Ukraine.  In the opening phase of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia reaffirmed this willingness in a draft peace treaty with Ukraine which the United States and NATO blocked Kyiv from signing.  Western diplomatic intransigence has failed to persuade Moscow to accommodate Ukrainian nationalism or accept Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and the American sphere of influence in Europe.  The proxy war seems instead to have convinced Moscow that it must gut Ukraine, keep the Ukrainian territories it has illegally annexed, and likely add more, thus ensuring that Ukraine is a dysfunctional state unable either to join NATO or to fulfill the ultranationalist, anti-Russian vision of its World War II neo-Nazi hero, Stepan Bandera.

The war has led to the superficial unity of NATO but there are obvious fissures among members.  The sanctions imposed on Russia have done heavy damage to European economies.  Without Russian energy supplies, some European industries are no longer internationally competitive.  As NATO’s recent summit at Vilnius showed, member countries differ on the desirability of admitting Ukraine.  NATO unity seems unlikely to outlast the war.  These realities help explain why most of America’s European partners want to end the war as soon as possible.

The Ukraine War has clearly put paid to the post-Soviet era in Europe, but it has not made Europe in any respect more secure.  It has not enhanced America’s international reputation or consolidated U.S. primacy.  The war has instead accelerated the emergence of a post-American multi-polar world order.  One feature of this is an anti-American axis between Russia and China.

To weaken Russia, the United States has resorted to unprecedentedly intrusive unilateral sanctions, including secondary sanctions targeting normal arms-length commercial activity that does not involve a U.S. nexus and is legal in the jurisdictions of the transacting parties.  Washington has been actively blocking trade between countries that have nothing to do with Ukraine or the war there because they won’t jump on the U.S. bandwagon.  As a result, much of the world is now engaged in pursuit of financial and supply-chain linkages that are independent of U.S. control.  This includes intensified international efforts to end dollar hegemony, which is the basis for U.S. global primacy.  Should these efforts succeed, the United States will no longer be able to run the trade and balance of payments deficits that sustain its current standard of living and status as the most powerful society on the planet.

Washington’s use of political and economic pressure to compel other countries to conform to its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese policies has clearly backfired.  It has encouraged even former U.S. client states to search for ways to avoid entanglement in future American conflicts and proxy wars they do not support, like that in Ukraine.  To this end, they are abandoning exclusive reliance on the United States and forging ties to multiple economic and politico-military partners.  Far from isolating Russia or China, America’s coercive diplomacy has helped both Moscow and Beijing to enhance relationships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that reduce U.S. influence in favor of their own.

To summarize:

In short, U.S. policy has resulted in great suffering in Ukraine and escalating defense budgets here and in Europe but has failed to weaken or isolate Russia.  More of the same will not accomplish either of these oft-stated American objectives.  Russia has been educated in how to combat American weapons systems and has developed effective counters to them.  It has been militarily strengthened, not weakened.  It has been reoriented and freed from Western influence, not isolated.

If the purpose of war is to establish a better peace, this war is not doing that.  Ukraine is being eviscerated on the altar of Russophobia.  At this point, no one can confidently predict how much of Ukraine or how many Ukrainians will be left when the fighting stops or when and how to stop it.  Kyiv just failed to meet more than a fraction  of its recruitment goals.  Combating Russia to the last Ukrainian was always an odious strategy.  But when NATO is about to run out of Ukrainians, it is not just cynical; it is no longer a viable option.

Lessons to be Learned from the Ukraine War

What can we learn from this debacle?  It has provided many unwelcome reminders of the basic principles of statecraft.

• Wars do not decide who is right. They determine who is left.
• The best way to avoid war is to reduce or eliminate the apprehensions and grievances that cause it.
• When you refuse to hear, let alone address an aggrieved party’s case for adjustments in your policies toward it, you risk a violent reaction from it.
• No one should enter a war without realistic objectives, a strategy to achieve them, and a plan for war termination.
• Self-righteousness and bravery are no substitutes for military mass, firepower, and stamina.
• In the end, wars are won and lost on the battlefield, not with propaganda inspired by and directed at reinforcing wishful thinking.
• What has been lost on the battlefield can seldom, if ever, be recovered at the negotiating table.
• When wars cannot be won, it is usually better to seek terms by which to end them than to reinforce strategic failure.

It is time to prioritize saving as much as possible of Ukraine.  This war has become existential for it.  Ukraine needs diplomatic backing to craft a peace with Russia if its military sacrifices are not to have been in vain.  It is being destroyed.  It must be rebuilt. The key to preserving Ukraine is to empower and back Kyiv to end the war on the best terms it can obtain, to facilitate the return of its refugees, and to use the EU accession process to advance liberal reforms and institute clean government in a neutral Ukraine.

Unfortunately, as things stand, both Moscow and Washington seem determined to persist in Ukraine’s ongoing destruction.  But whatever the outcome of the war, Kyiv and Moscow will eventually have to find a basis for coexistence.  Washington needs to support Kyiv in challenging Russia to recognize both the wisdom and the necessity of respect for Ukrainian neutrality and territorial integrity.

Finally, this war should provoke some sober rethinking here, in Moscow, and by NATO of the consequences of diplomacy-free, militarized foreign policy.  Had the United States agreed to talk with Moscow, even if it had continued to reject much of what Moscow demanded, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine as it did.  Had the West not intervened to prevent Ukraine from ratifying the treaty others helped it agree with Russia at the outset of the war, Ukraine would now be intact and at peace.

This war did not need to take place.  Every party to it has lost far more than it has gained.  There’s a lot to be learned from what has happened in and to Ukraine.  We should study and learn these lessons and take them to heart.

[1] Generals and admirals.

[2] Ukraine contributed troops to this NATO operation despite not being a member of the alliance.

[3] Reportedly, by 2014, various agencies of the U.S. government had committed a cumulative total of $5 billion or more to political subsidies and education in support of regime change in Ukraine.

[4] Prior to the U.S. and NATO decision to aid Ukraine against its Russian-backed separatists, these militias were commonly identified as neo-Nazi in the Western media.  They professed to be followers of Stepan Bandera – who has now been adopted as a revered national figure by Kyiv.  Bandera was famous for his extreme Ukrainian nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and violence.  He and his followers were allegedly responsible for massacring 50,000 – 100,000 Poles and for collaborating with the Nazis in the murder of an even larger number of Jews.  After the US/NATO proxy war broke out, despite their continuing display of Nazi regalia and symbols on their uniforms and their ties to neo-Nazi groups in other countries, Western media ceased to characterize these militias as neo-Nazis.

[5] The “special military operation’ mounted by Russia bore little resemblance to the specific predictions put forward in this information warfare, which appears have been designed as much to rally support for Ukraine and boost its morale as to deter Russia.

[6] See, e.g., https://jamestown.org/event/watch-the-video-preparing-for-the-dissolution-of-the-russian-federation/

By Nahal Toosi, Politico, 10/2/23

Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit, a confidential U.S. strategy document obtained by POLITICO suggests.

The “sensitive but unclassified” version of the long-term U.S. plan lays out numerous steps Washington is taking to help Kyiv root out malfeasance and otherwise reform an array of Ukrainian sectors. It stresses that corruption could cause Western allies to abandon Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, and that Kyiv cannot put off the anti-graft effort.

“Perceptions of high-level corruption” the confidential version of the document warns, could “undermine the Ukrainian public’s and foreign leaders’ confidence in the war-time government.”

That’s starker than the analysis available in the little-noticed public version of the 22-page document, which the State Department appears to have posted on its website with no fanfare about a month ago.

The confidential version of the “Integrated Country Strategy” is about three times as long and contains many more details about U.S. objectives in Ukraine, from privatizing its banks to helping more schools teach English to encouraging its military to adopt NATO protocols. Many goals are designed to reduce the corruption that bedevils the country.

The quiet release of the strategy, and the fact that the toughest language was left in the confidential version, underscores the messaging challenge facing the Biden team.

The administration wants to press Ukraine to cut graft, not least because U.S. dollars are at stake. But being too loud about the issue could embolden opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine, many of them Republican lawmakers who are trying to block such assistance. Any perception of weakened American support for Kyiv also could cause more European countries to think twice about their role.

When it comes to the Ukrainians, “there are some honest conversations happening behind the scenes,” a U.S. official familiar with Ukraine policy said. Like others, the person was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Ukrainian graft has long been a concern of U.S. officials all the way up to President Joe Biden. But the topic was deemphasized in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion, which Biden has called a real-life battle of democracy against autocracy.

For months, Biden aides stuck to brief mentions of corruption. They wanted to show solidarity with Kyiv and avoid giving fuel to a small number of Republican lawmakers critical of U.S. military and economic aid for Ukraine.

More than a year into the full-scale war, U.S. officials are pressing the matter more in public and private. National security adviser Jake Sullivan, for instance, met in early September with a delegation from Ukrainian anti-corruption institutions.

A second U.S. official familiar with the discussions confirmed to POLITICO reports that the Biden administration is talking to Ukrainian leaders about potentially conditioning future economic aid on “reforms to tackle corruption and make Ukraine a more attractive place for private investment.”

Such conditions are not being considered for military aid, the official said.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired several top defense officials in a recent crackdown on alleged graft — a message to the United States and Europe that he’s listening.

The Integrated Country Strategy is a State Department product that draws on contributions from other parts of the U.S. government, including the Defense Department. It includes lists of goals, timelines for achieving them and milestones that U.S. officials would like to see hit. (The State Department produces such strategies for many countries once every few years.)

A State Department official, speaking on behalf of the department, would not say if Washington had shared the longer version of the strategy with the Ukrainian government or whether a classified version exists.

William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said many ordinary Ukrainians will likely welcome the strategy because they, too, are tired of the endemic corruption in their country.

It’s all fine “as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the assistance we provide them to win the war,” he said.

The document says that fulfilling American objectives for Ukraine includes making good on U.S. promises of equipment and training to help Ukraine’s armed forces fend off the Kremlin’s attacks.

The confidential version also describes U.S. goals such as helping reform elements of Ukraine’s national security apparatus to allow for “decentralized, risk-tolerant approach to execution of tasks” and reduce “opportunities for corruption.”

Although the NATO military alliance is not close to allowing Ukraine to join, the American strategy often cites a desire to make Ukraine’s military adopt NATO standards.

One hoped-for milestone listed in the confidential version is that Ukraine’s Defense Ministry “establishes a professionalized junior officer and non-commissioned officer corps with NATO standard doctrine and principles.”

Even the format and content of Ukrainian defense documents should “reflect NATO terminology,” a confidential section of the strategy says.

One target includes creating a “national level resistance plan.” That could allude to ordinary Ukrainians fighting back if Russia gains more territory. (The State Department official would not clarify that point.)

The U.S. also wants to see Ukraine produce its own military equipment by establishing a “domestic defense industry capable of supporting core needs” as well as an environment that boosts defense information technology start-ups, according to one of the confidential sections.

U.S. officials appear especially concerned about the role of an elite few in Ukraine’s economy.

“Deoligarchization, particularly of the energy and mining sectors, is a core tenet to building back a better Ukraine,” the public part of the strategy declares. One indicator of success, the confidential version states, is that the Ukrainian government “embraces meaningful reforms decentralizing control of the energy sector.”

The United States appears eager to help Ukrainian institutions build their oversight capacities. The goals listed include everything from helping local governments assess corruption risks to reforms in human resources offices.

As one example, the strategy says the U.S. is helping the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine enhance its auditing and related work in part so it can track direct budget support from the United States.

The strategy describes ways in which the United States is helping Ukraine’s health sector, cyber defenses and organizations that battle disinformation. It calls for supporting Ukrainian anti-monopoly efforts and initiatives to spur increased tax revenue for the country’s coffers.

The confidential portion calls for Ukraine’s financial systems to “increase lending to encourage business expansion” and a reduction in the state’s role in the banking sector.

One envisioned milestone for that section is that “Alfa Bank is transparently returned to private ownership.” That appears to be a reference to an institution now known as Sense Bank, which was previously Russian-owned but nationalized by Ukraine.

The U.S. strategy appears intent on ensuring that Ukraine not only retains its orientation toward the West but that it develops special ties with America.

One way Washington believes that will happen is through the English language. The strategy indicates the United States is offering technical and other aid to Ukraine’s education ministry to improve the teaching of English and that it believes offering English lessons can help reintegrate Ukrainians freed from Russian occupation.

U.S. officials also are helping Ukraine build its capacity to prosecute war crimes in its own judicial system. The desired milestones include the selection of more than 2,000 new judges and clearing up a backlog of over 9,000 judicial misconduct complaints.

The strategy also calls for rebuilding the U.S. diplomatic presence in Ukraine, expanding beyond Kyiv to cities such as Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipro.

Due to earlier staff drawdowns spurred by the full-scale Russian invasion, “the embassy remains in crisis mode,” one of the public sections states. (The State Department official would not discuss the current Embassy staffing numbers.)

As they have in past communications reported on by POLITICO, U.S. officials note inventive ways in which the United States is providing oversight of American aid to Ukraine despite facing limitations due to the war. Those efforts have included using an app called SEALR to help track the aid.

By Natylie Baldwin, Consortium News, 10/20/23

Canadian-Ukrainian professor Ivan Katchanovski’s investigation of the Maidan massacre in Kiev in February 2014  found an organized mass killing of both protesters and the police, with the goal of delegitimizing the Yanukovych government and its forces and seizing power in Ukraine, as he wrote for Consortium News in an in-depth article in 2019. (On Wednesday three policemenwere sentenced for the massacre, one was acquitted and one was released for time served. The official investigation ignored Katchanovski’s academic research.)

Natylie Baldwin: Tell us about your Ukrainian background and how you came to be an academic focused on the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the subsequent war?

Ivan Katchanovski: I was born in Western Ukraine. I became interested in politics and conflicts since I was about 10 years old, and I wanted to become professor since then.

The dangerous Cold War and my family experience were motivating factors. My family and I did not participate in any political parties, wars, or other armed conflicts. But politics and conflicts shaped our lives.

My mother lived in four countries and my grandmother lived in five countries without ever moving on their own. I grew up listening to recollections of my mother about her and her family survival during World War Two in Poland when she was a teenager and recollections of my grandmother about her experience as a small child of being a refugee during World War One. They always wished that there would not be another war. 

Although I was interested in studying politics and read hundreds of books about politics of different countries, I could not pursue this formally since there was no such academic discipline in the Soviet Union.

The only department of international relations in Ukraine was in Kyiv University, and it required a recommendation from the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I could not get such a recommendation, since I was not a party member. When the head of the local party committee asked me in 1985 why I am not joining the Communist Party, which was the only party in existence in the Soviet Union, I told her that I had not decided yet which party to join. But Petro Poroshenko [Ukraine’s post-coup president from 2014 to 2019] and Mikhai Saakashvili [former president of Georgia] were students in this department at Kyiv university at that very time, which means that they got such recommendations from the regional Communist Party committee.   

Poroshenko, on right, with U.S. Vice President Biden in Kiev on Dec. 7, 2015. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

While I was a student in another Kyiv university in 1988, I attended a small rally organized by the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. This smally rally with a few dozen participants was the first opposition demonstration in Kyiv in some 70 years. I also attended all rallies by Rukh and other Ukrainian organizations in Kyiv in 1988-1990. But I was in a very small minority. I supported the then and now multiparty system, freedom of the media, speech, assembly and rights of ethnic minorities and language rights.

I was threatened with expulsion from my university in Kyiv when I proposed to write my undergraduate thesis based on theories of Max Weber and Western economists. I also proposed to write it in Ukrainian, and the administration told me that I can write it even in Chinese. I wrote it anyway and concluded that the Soviet system was bound to collapse.

While I was not expelled from the university because [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s glasnost started making headway in Ukraine, I was given a “C” grade and could not pursue graduate education then because this required recommendation from the university from which I graduated.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, I was able to pursue my graduate education in the West. I wrote my PhD dissertation under the direction of Seymour Martin Lipset at George Mason University on regional political divisions and separatist conflicts in Ukraine and Moldova. This study, which I published as a book, predicted a real possibility of a violent break-up and civil war in regionally divided Ukraine, especially with pro-Russian separatism in Crimea and Donbas, similar to what happened in neighboring Moldova after de facto secession of pro-Russian Transdniestria Region with Russian military support following a civil war.

I specialized in the study of comparative politics, conflicts, and political violence in Ukraine since. I researched all major conflicts and cases of political violence in Ukraine since the end of the 1930s, including Stalin’s Great Terror; World War Two; the Nazi collaboration and mass murder of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians by the OUN and the UPA; and the “Orange Revolution.” 

Orange-flag waving demonstrators in Independence Square in Kiev on Nov. 22, 2004. (Serhiy, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Therefore, as soon as the Maidan started in 2013 and almost immediately turned violent, I started to research it. I published op-eds warning that the violence during the Maidan, specifically by the far-right, could lead to a violent break-up of Ukraine and a civil war. 

But such a possibility was dismissed then by almost all scholars researching Ukraine. I was watching the start of the Maidan massacre live over several Internet streams, but on the next day I noticed that all recordings of these streams disappeared. 

Helmeted protesters face off against police on Dynamivska Street during the Maidan uprising in Kiev, Jan 20, 2014. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

I researched the civil war and Russian military interventions in Donbas as soon as the separatist conflict in Donbas started following the violent overthrow of the Yanukovych government by means of the Maidan massacre and assassination attempts against Yanukovych. 

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, I warned in my publications, media interviews and social media posts about a real possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine. I am researching this ongoing war now. My books on the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins, on the Maidan massacre, and on modern Ukraine are forthcoming from three major Western academic presses.

Baldwin:  How did your investigation of the events surrounding the 2014 coup in Ukraine evolve and what are your conclusions?

Katchanovski: I researched the Maidan massacre for almost 10 years. I published a book chapter and two peer-reviewed journal articles on this massacre. Another of my articles on this crucial massacre is in press following very positive peer reviews by two experts. All these articles are open-access thanks to crowdfunding, and can be freely viewed, downloaded, shared, translated and republished.

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My studies found that the Maidan massacre was a false-flag mass killing of the protestors and the police in order to seize power in Ukraine. It was conducted with the involvement of oligarchic and far-right elements of the Maidan opposition using concealed groups of Maidan snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings. The evidence shows this beyond any reasonable doubt. 

[Related:  The Buried Maidan Massacre and Its Misrepresentation by the West]

Baldwin: It sounds like your work on these events has been censored.  Please explain what challenges you’ve had in presenting and publishing your work and why you think this has been happening.

Katchanovski:  My comprehensive article concerning the Maidan massacre was accepted for publication with minor revisions by a major peer-reviewed journal but then the decision was reversed in a clear case of political censorship. My appeal, with a supporting letter by Jeffrey Sachs, was rejected. Now the same article has been published as two separate articles in two other major peer-reviewed journals.  

In retaliation for my academic studies of the Maidan massacre, my own house, land, and all property in Western Ukraine were seized by court decisions, which were issued on the orders from the top, despite all the documents and dozens of witness testimonies and in reversals of the decisions by the same judges and courts which confirmed my ownership. My house and all my property there have been damaged. 

I faced ad hominem attacks, denunciations and defamation from a few researchers, most of whom are linked to the Ukrainian far right and obviously have vested interest in whitewashing the far right and denying their involvement in the false flag mass killing of the Maidan protesters. 

Ukrainian opposition leaders Oleh Tyahnybok, seated on van, with Vitali Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, addressing Euromaidan demonstrators, Nov. 27, 2013. (Ivan Bandura, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0) 

A far-right activist linked to Svoboda, which my studies show was implicated in the Maidan massacre, was involved in the creation of several dozens of identical blogs and social media sites calling me “falsifier of the Maidan massacre.” It is telling that he used what he called “scientific anti-Semitism” to justify the OUN-led pogrom of Jews in Nazi-occupied Lviv. 

A small group of Wikipedia editors resorted to similar defamation and fraud in order to whitewash the far right and the far-right involvement in the mass murder of the Maidan protesters and the police. They systematically whitewash the contemporary far right in Ukraine and their historical predecessors from the OUN and the UPA, and their Nazi collaboration and involvement in mass murder of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, and smear and defame many scholars of Ukraine.

They include editors who were identified by “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust” article by the University of Ottawa professor. Most of them are identified by various publications and online sources as academics, who are not experts in Ukraine but whitewash the far right and Maidan mass murders and smear scholars either because of political agenda or even possibly for pay.

Silhouette of a victim painted on a sidewalk in Hrushevskoho Street, Kiev, July 2015, over a year after the clashes in Maidan square. (Skoropadsky, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

But my Maidan massacre studies were reported or cited, overwhelmingly positively by over 100 Western scholars and experts. Such leading scholars and experts as Richard Sakwa, (University of Kent), Professor David Lane (Cambridge University), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University), Jack Matlock (Duke University and the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union), Stephen F. Cohen (New York University), Anatol Lieven (Quincy Institute), and many others in their peer-reviewed articles, books, and media publications either accepted my research findings concerning the Maidan massacre or [have] written favorably about my studies of this massacre.

Similarly, more than a hundred Western media outlets and over 50 Ukrainian media outlets positively reported or cited findings of my Maidan massacre studies: They include major American, Austrian, Canadian, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, New Zealand, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swiss media outlets such as The Nation, Huffington Post, Courthouse News, Jacobin, Consortium News, Counterpunch, The Grayzone, Truthout, and Ukraina Moloda.

Their number is dozens of times higher than the few Western and Ukrainian media which attacked or denounced my Maidan massacre studies by resorting to outright fraud or the deliberate omission of overwhelming evidence revealed by my studies and the Maidan massacre trial.  

But the absolute majority of the Western media deliberately does not report concerning findings of my studies of this massacre and various overwhelming evidence that this was a false-flag operation with the far-right involvement. 

Feb. 18, 2014: Protesters throwing pieces of brick pavement at Ukrainian troops obscured by the smoke of burning tires in Kiev. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In contrast, my interviews, comments and publications concerning my other research areas, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, the war in Donbas and World War Two, appeared in more than 3,000 media reports in some 75 countries. They include the following media: Associated Press, BBC Ukrainian, Canadian Press, CBC News, CTV News, Daily Express, France 24, Global TV, Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Hill TV, Le Figaro, National Post, Reuters, Times Higher Education, Toronto Star, Vice, Voice of America, The Washington Post, Euronews, Sky News Australia and CNN Brazil.

My research-based tweets and interviews concerning the standing ovation to the SS Galicia Division veteran by the Canadian parliament, the Canadian prime-minister and [Ukraine’s President Volodymyr] Zelensky were reported by several hundred media in dozens of countries and helped to make it the top story in Canada and one of major stories in the U.S., Poland and other countries.

[Related: Apologies in Canada for Honoring Ukrainian Nazi] 

There is also outright media censorship concerning my Maidan massacre research. A popular Polish media outlet Onet removed my interview following a request from the office of president of Poland. British OpenDemocracy accepted for publication in 2014 a popular version of my original study but did not publish it. A dozen of my interviews concerning the Maidan massacre were either not reported or canceled by major TV networks, radio stations and newspapers in the U.S., Canada and the EU. 

My applications for research funding or research positions in Canada and the U.S. were denied since I first presented my study of the Maidan massacre in 2014, including during the current war, even though I am one of the most cited political scientists specializing primarily in the conflicts and politics in Ukraine and earlier held such research positions at Harvard, the University of Toronto, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

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I published four books, 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and 12 book chapters, and have three forthcoming books on Ukraine. And I am one of a few Ukrainian political scientists in the Western academy specializing in conflicts in Ukraine.

I was denied presentations in Ukrainian studies conferences in Canada and the U.S. One of the persons, who denied me a Canadian government-funded research grant, denounced me on Twitter for my Maidan massacre studies and suggested that she contacted my university demanding my removal. She is a professor specializing in Canada and not Ukraine but claims to know simply because she is from the Ukrainian diaspora.

I intended to use this large research grant to pay for open access publication of my articles and book. I used my own money to fund my Maidan massacre research, and I am thankful for ongoing crowdfunding support for open access publication of my articles and a book from over 100 donations.   

It is simply astonishing and revealing that I am the one punished for my academic studies of the Maidan massacre, while mass murders of the Maidan protesters and the police are supported, whitewashed, and even glorified by the Westen governments, politicians, the media, and even by many academics.

Baldwin: You’ve talked periodically about investigations and court proceedings in Ukraine regarding the events surrounding the Maidan and the change of government that resulted from it. Can you tell us more about those court proceedings and investigations – how are they set up and what are they investigating?  What are the most interesting revelations that have come out of them and do you think there will be any meaningful accountability for illegal and/or violent actions?

Ukrainian Internal Troops form a phalanx against protesters with Berkut special police grouped behind them. (Amakuha, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Katchanovski: The Maidan massacre trial, which started in 2015, examined charges against five members of Berkut [a special police unit] who are charged with the massacre of the Maidan protesters on Feb. 20, 2014.  

My recent peer-reviewed journal article and video appendixes show that the absolute majority of wounded protesters testified at the trial and the investigation that they were in fact shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings or areas or that they witnessed snipers there. 

Some 100 prosecution and defense witnesses and relatives of killed protesters also testified about snipers in the Maidan-controlled buildings and areas. This is consistent with testimonies by several hundred other witnesses and confessions by 14 self-admitted members of Maidan sniper groups.

Statements by the far-right Svoboda Party, videos and numerous witnesses show that the Hotel Ukraina and other buildings, which were locations of snipers who massacred the protesters and the police, were controlled then by the Maidan forces. My analysis of synchronized videos revealed Maidan snipers in these buildings during the massacre.

Forensic medical examinations by government experts showed that nearly all protesters were shot from the top, the back, and from the side directions, which match these Maidan-controlled buildings. 

Government forensic ballistic experts determined that many protesters were killed or wounded from the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. A forensic ballistic examination by government experts with use of an automatic computer-based system found that bullets extracted from killed protesters did not match bullets from the Kalashnikov assault rifles of Berkut police. My analysis of synchronized videos showed that the specific time and direction of shooting by Berkut policemen did not coincide with the killing of specific protesters. 

But the government investigation in Ukraine in a most blatant cover-up simply denies that there were any snipers in these Maidan controlled buildings in spite of the undeniable evidence. As part of such a cover-up, no one was convicted or under arrest for the massacre of the protesters and the police for almost 10 years after this massacre, which was one of the most documented cases of mass killing in history. 

Crucial evidence, such as security cameras recordings, bullets, shields and helmets, “disappeared” or were destroyed. There is also tampering with evidence, such as bullets and forensic ballistic examinations, whose results were reversed without any explanation and contrary to videos, witnesses and forensic medical examinations. There is no trial for the killing of the police even though Maidan snipers, in particular, members of a far-right-linked group, publicly confessed in Ukrainian and Western media interviews of killing or shooting the police during the massacre.    

Baldwin: Given that Ukraine is your family homeland, what is currently happening there must inform your work in a way that is different from other experts who may not have a personal connection. How has this war, both from 2014 and from 2022, personally affected you and your family?

Katchanovski: My relatives live in Western Ukraine which was not much affected by the war. One distant relative was wounded during the war in Donbas. My best friend, who lived then in Mariupol with his family, disappeared after the Russian invasion in 2022. We studied together at Central European University in Prague and communicated over Skype often when he was in Mariupol or taught in American universities in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

War-damaged Mariupol on March 12, 2022. (Mvs.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Baldwin:  You made reference on Twitter to a recent poll of Ukrainians living both in and outside Ukraine that found 43 percent of those in Ukraine and 36 percent of those in Europe disagree that Neo-Nazi ideology is not a significant problem in Ukraine.  It also revealed that 29 percent of those in Ukraine and 35 percent of those in Europe disagree that the 2014 Maidan events were not a coup. Can you discuss these results and their significance given the western media narrative about what’s been going on in Ukraine since 2014?

Katchanovski: Since the poll question does not specify “no spread” as an answer, this poll means that 46 percent of respondents in Ukraine agree that Nazi/neo-Nazi ideology has a small spread in Ukraine, while 43 percent disagree, i.e. regard Nazi/neo-Nazi ideology spread as either significant or non-existent.

This poll, like other polls in Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine war, underestimate responses that go against the narrative propagated by the Ukrainian government, in particular concerning the Maidan. Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine, including pro-Russian Crimea and Donbas, are excluded. There are also social/political desirability bias and fear to express views contrary to the official narrative of the Zelensky government. 

Protesters in Kiev with neo-Nazi symbols – SS-Volunteer Division “Galicia” and Patriot of Ukraine flags, 2014. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The poll results show that contrary to the narrative propagated by Western and Ukrainian governments and the media, Ukrainians have different views concerning the Maidan and the far-right in Ukraine. But this poll also contradicts the narrative propagated by the Russian government and the media about Nazi or neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine since a “fascist coup” in 2014.  

Baldwin:  I’ve seen you mention on social media that there is a Neo-Nazi element in the Wagner forces.  Can you tell us more about that?  Does it have to do with a lot of them being convicts?

Katchanovski: It was Dmitry Utkin, the Wagner military commander, who used Nazi SS symbols as his signature and the name of the Hitler’s favorite composer as his nom de guerre, which became the name of the Wagner mercenary company. The Wagner company also included small “Rusich” unit, which was organized and led by Russian neo-Nazis. 

Natylie Baldwin is the author of The 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. She blogs at natyliesbaldwin.com.  Twitter: @natyliesb.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Substack, 10/3/23

A few weeks ago the U.S. Army War College released a paper which was an urgent call for the U.S. armed forces to adapt to the modern style of warfare being innovated in the Ukrainian conflict. [https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3240&context=parameters]

The paper made the rounds due to some startling admissions, which we’ll get to. But what’s most important to understand is that it represents a general shift in thinking that’s propagating throughout the entire sphere of the Atlanticist West, and was released in concert with several other key thinktank pieces and policy shift announcements from the EU, NATO, etc., which holistically represent an internal panic deep within their structures, resulting in an urgent need for a strategy change.

And this point is one of the central themes of the War College paper itself. Its opening preamble can be summarized in a single sentence: the current time period marked by the Ukrainian conflict represents the largest “inflection point” in 50 years of military history. The authors believe that the Yom Kippur War of 1973 was the previous most impactful inflection point. They recount how the U.S. army was demoralized by its experience in Vietnam, and inability to meet its objectives, followed by Israel almost losing to a Soviet-equipped Egypt in the Yom Kippur War.

As a very brief and over-generalized backdrop, though Israel is listed as officially having “won” the Yom Kippur War, Egypt in fact achieved most of its political objectives, which was to seize some land east of the Suez in order to eventually take back the Sinai peninsula, which they did. And although Egypt made huge blunders that caused part of their army to be routed, ultimately the war proved to Israel, the U.S., and allies that the future would be dangerous as the Arabs were getting much stronger, particularly under Soviet backing. In fact, for anyone interested, just purely coincidentally there’s a new article from a week ago in the Jerusalem Post about the irony that years later, Israel views the Yom Kippur War as a somber experience whereas in Egypt it’s celebrated as a grand victory.

Either way, the War College explains that as a result of this inflection period, the U.S. founded TRADOC (United States Army Training and Doctrine Command) school. Which is actually a network of schools tasked with creating new operational doctrines to prepare the U.S. military for future conflicts. In short, they were spooked by the developments of the previous years, and needed a way to “jump ahead” of the competition. This resulted in a series of new doctrines like the AirLand Battle I wrote about at length in this previous dissection of a U.S. internal thinkpiece:…

But this seems to highlight the odd dichotomy: on one hand the entire report, entitled Escalation in the War in Ukraine, appears to go into overdrive in attempting to convince readers and policymakers that Russia is surrounded by a plethora of escalation options, insinuating that it will have no choice but to use one of them as it gets increasingly ‘desperate’ in the war effort. But on the other hand, they admit Russia actually doesn’t see any reason to escalate. [https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2807-1.html]

This leaves us to conclude that the real current course in Western military command centers and thinktank-land revolves around finding further pressure points and ways to make Russia want to escalate in a way that could turn global perception against it, and could justify further NATO intervention of some kind to save Ukraine. In a sense, as I implied before, this report appears more like a handbook or guidebook on how to make Russia give us the casus belli to increase our own provocations and escalations to save a floundering AFU.

What it ultimately highlights is the fact that the West appears greatly irked and peeved by Russia’s stoic, mannered approach to this war. They are beside themselves, and can’t believe that Russia can fight such a devastatingly protracted conflict in so calm and measured a manner, without major political, societal, and economic upheaval to throw them off-kilter and create the ripe groundswell of turmoil which would necessitate an off-balancing “escalation” that would prove a major blunder, and hand the salivating NATO thinktankers an enormous gift.

Thus, in light of this, the West plans to use all possible means to coax Russia into shooting itself in the foot by disproportionately responding to one of the planned provocations they have in store, in order to give raison d’etre for some intervention to save Ukraine. This doesn’t have to be something of maximal proportions yet, like full-on NATO invasion or something like that. No, even the justification of further increased support, or the activation of more lethal strategic weaponry supplied to Ukraine would suffice.

Remember, a major portion—perhaps the biggest one—of the West’s support is convincing their own publics and lawmakers in justifying increasingly more provocative weapons pledges. Even provoking a relatively minor Russian rash response could be used to convince wearying Western populaces in warming to the hand over of things like ATACMS or other items.

Of course, I find all this to be a relatively pointless exercise and strategic dead-end because I don’t think they have much left to hand over that could do anything in changing the now-crystallized trajectory of this conflict. The only other potential pivot I could glean from the Rand document which could conceivably form the axis of a strategy is in the final item on their escalations options list: Option G.

It reads: Ukraine expands its strikes inside Russia. Motivation: Increase domestic political costs for Russian leadership.

That encapsulates just about the only realistic option they have left, and given recent trends it appears to be one of the main thrusts they’re going with. I’m referring to the other big recent provocation, German Bundestag member Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann’s statement that Ukraine has the right to strike Russian territory with German Taurus missiles. Putting the two together, we can only come to the conclusion that the progressive push for Ukraine to strike deeper and deeper into Russian territory has nothing whatever to do with any strategic or military considerations, but rather revolves entirely around Rand’s assessment of “putting political pressure on Russian leadership.”

To wit, they believe that by striking deep into Russia they can cause enough fear, panic, and public distress as to force Russian citizens to begin pressuring the government to end the war, or simply create enough unpopularity as to give Western intel services opportunities to oust key leadership, whether that might be election, overthrow, etc. Unfortunately, this has virtually no chance of having any effect as the Russian public either doesn’t care nor notice any strikes, including the ones to the heart of Moscow, or is simply unified into greater solidarity by them.

Dmitry Medvedev’s “populist” pandering-style response to both the aforementioned provocative announcements likely leaves Western thinktankers with an inkling of hope:

“The number of leadership idiots in NATO countries is growing.

“One newfangled cretin – the British defense minister – has decided to move British training courses for Ukrainian soldiers to the territory of Ukraine itself. That is, to turn their instructors into a legal target for our Armed Forces. Realizing perfectly well that they will be ruthlessly destroyed. And not as mercenaries, but as British NATO specialists.

“Another fool – the head of the Defense Committee of the Federal Republic of Germany with a hard-to-pronounce surname – demands to immediately supply the Khokhobanderites with Taurus missiles, so that the Kiev regime can strike at the territory of Russia to weaken the supply of our army. They say this is in accordance with international law. Well, in that case, strikes on German factories where these missiles are made would also be in full compliance with international law.

“After all, these morons are actively pushing us towards World War III….”

– Medvedev

But alas, ever the stoic practitioner of the ‘long game’, I doubt Putin will give them the uncharacteristic slipup they’re counting on to salvage their disastrous Ukrainian campaign. Painful as it might be for us to take some of the obviously deliberate provocations ‘on the cheek,’ good chance remains that sometime in the future, after Ukraine’s rapid disintegration and subsequent capitulation—perhaps even only a year or two from now—we may recognize, in hindsight, the wisdom of the strategy which staved off nuclear war by way of a methodical, unwavering, and strategically disciplined approach.

Putin says Israel needs to publish satellite evidence that it didn’t bomb Gaza hospital. Link here, embed below.

Israel v. Hezbollah? Link here, embed below.