By Christopher Layne & Benjamin Schwarz, The American Conservative, 10/16/23

Washington’s explanation for the Russo–Ukrainian war is simple. As President Biden told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023, “Russia alone, Russia alone bears responsibility for this war.” As we demonstrate, this simply is not true. To understand why the Russo–Ukrainian war began, and the obstacles to ending it, it is necessary to examine the war’s American origins. These are: the George H.W. Bush administration’s failure to give more economic assistance to support Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reforms; the failure, at the Cold War’s end, to dissolve the two hostile alliance systems it spawned and replace them with a new post–Cold War European security architecture; the decisions of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to undertake NATO expansion; Washington’s specific promise, first made at NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit and repeatedly reaffirmed, that Ukraine would become a NATO member; and the strategic and ideational underpinnings that have guided U.S. grand strategy toward the Soviet Union/Russia since the 1940s.  

The Biden administration and the broader foreign policy establishment dismiss the notion that the causes of this war are complex. Rather than multiple causes, they believe the Russo–Ukrainian war’s cause is simple: Vladimir Putin. Discussions of the war are framed solely around Putin as an individual. An example is the frontpage headline in the December 18, 2022, New York Times promoting an eponymous special section of the paper: “Putin’s war.” The U.S. foreign policy establishment apparently has forgotten that Russia is a state, the policies of which are shaped by its history, geography, and political culture. Indeed, it would not be a surprise to learn that the denizens of the foreign policy Blob have removed the word “Russia” from their maps and rechristened that geographic space “Putinania.” As Washington sees it, the Ukraine war stems solely from the actions of an aggressive autocrat. This view neatly fits the Biden administration’s narrative—deeply rooted in America’s foreign policy tradition—that international politics are reducible to a struggle of  “good” states (democracies) versus “bad” states (non-democracies).

The focus on Putin as the sole driver of events misses a lot of the story. To be sure, as Russia’s leader, his decision to greenlight the all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (and the 2014 seizure of Crimea and support for the Russian separatist uprisings in Donbas) is indeed the conflict’s proximate cause. He makes a convenient villain, though nothing like the overwrought comparison some make with Adolf Hitler. However, as important as Putin is, his views are not anomalous among Russians. By pinning the blame for the war on Putin alone, in effect personalizing the conflict, American and European policymakers have shorn the war of its geopolitical and historical context. The exclusive focus on Putin as a causal agent also distorts how the American foreign policy establishment thinks about both the war’s conclusion and Russia’s future. This was evident during the June 2023 Prigozhin mutiny, which raised short-lived hopes that Putin would fall from power and the door would be open to the emergence of a liberal democratic Russia.

Even if Putin were removed from power in the Kremlin—which seems to be one of the Biden administration’s unstated war aims—Russia’s foreign policy would not change much. As Georgetown University professor Angela Stent, who was national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia in the George W. Bush administration, wrote in her book Putin’s World (2019), singling out Putin as the necessary and sufficient cause of Moscow’s foreign policy “oversimplifies how Russia is ruled. Behind the new tsar stands a thousand year-old state with traditions and self-understanding that precedes Putin and surely will outlast him.” For these reasons, Stent writes, “it is an illusion to believe that Russia will markedly change in the course of the twenty-first century.” 

That Russia and Ukraine came to blows will not have surprised anyone with knowledge of the tumultuous period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the Soviet Union’s breakup in December 1991. The potential for war was foreseeable, and foreseen, in Moscow, Kyiv, and Washington. The details of the Soviet Union’s demise have been brilliantly chronicled by Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, in his deeply researched new book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021).  

Gorbachev’s domestic reforms were catalyzed by the Soviet Union’s failing economy. Instead of reviving the Soviet economy, his policies accelerated its collapse. The economic crisis had important geopolitical consequences: it hastened the weakening of the Kremlin’s central authority, which fueled rising nationalism and separatism in the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, especially Ukraine and the Baltic states. This created openings for ambitious and opportunistic politicians like Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk, who became the first presidents of the Russian Federation and of an independent Ukraine. Here, Russia was the victim of what turned out to be a Faustian bargain struck by Yeltsin. To remove Gorbachev from power, thereby clearing the path for him to take command of the Kremlin, Yeltsin supported the Soviet breakup and Ukrainian independence. As Stent notes, he did not think through “the security implications of ushering in an independent Ukrainian state.” In short order, Yeltsin had the geopolitical equivalent of buyer’s remorse.    

The failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev fast-forwarded events. Kravchuk, a longtime Soviet functionary, recast himself as a champion of Ukrainian nationalism, as did other senior Ukrainian apparatchiks. They used the coup as an opportunity to declare Ukrainian independence, which was proclaimed by the Rada (Ukrainian parliament/Supreme Soviet) and confirmed in December 1991 by a referendum and by Kravchuk’s election as president. 

Throughout this process, Yeltsin and top Russian leaders around him voiced concerns about the fate of Crimea and the Donbas, and even Odessa, which they viewed as historically Russian territories. Dark allusions to the Yugoslav breakup were made. In November 1991, when told by a top adviser that the upcoming Ukrainian referendum would result in a strong pro-independence vote, Yeltsin was disbelieving. “It cannot be true!” he exclaimed. “This is our fraternal Slavic republic… Crimea is Russian! All the people who reside eastward of the Dnieper gravitate to Russia!”

Watching these events from his perch as the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Ronald Braithwaite observed that “perfectly sensible Russians froth at the mouth” at the notion of Ukrainian independence. Relations between Russian and Ukraine, he said, were “as combustible as those in Northern Ireland: but the consequences of an explosion would be far more serious.” In a memo, Gorbachev aide Georgy Shakhanazarov urged the Soviet leader, still clinging to power in the Kremlin, to declare that Crimea, Donbas, and southern Ukraine “constitute historical parts of Russia, and Russia does not intend to give them up, in case Ukraine leaves the [Soviet] Union.” 

The George H.W. Bush administration has been praised for skillfully navigating the geopolitical turbulence caused by the Soviet Union’s disintegration. A closer look reveals that in key respects its Soviet policy was deeply flawed. To his credit, in his August 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech, Bush recognized the risks of “suicidal nationalism” and attempted to dissuade Ukraine from breaking away from Moscow. Similarly, Secretary of State James A. Baker III was concerned that Ukrainian independence could lead to conflict over Crimea and Donbas. NSC staffer Nicholas Burns (now U.S. ambassador to China) warned that the independence of the Soviet Union’s republics would create a “crazy quilt” of geopolitical hot spots, including Crimea. However, having diagnosed perceptively the dangers of a Soviet breakup, the administration failed to take steps that might have forestalled these dangers. 

The Soviet Union’s economic crisis was inextricably linked to its unraveling, because the “sense of economic doom became the main driver of separation,” Zubok writes. Washington knew that the Soviet Union faced a grave economic crisis. At the December 1989 Malta summit, Gorbachev told Bush that the Soviet Union needed loans from the West to avert economic collapse. Zukok argues that Gorbachev had a “window of opportunity” to implement economic reforms successfully. That window quickly shut, and one of the key reasons was the “lack of tangible Western support.”   

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