What do readers think of this analysis and proposal? – Natylie

By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 4/22/24

President Vladimir Putin started the Ukraine war and he could – and should – end it by negotiating a peace deal that includes Ukraine’s membership of NATO.

Such a scenario is not as implausible as it might seem. While a Russian military victory in Ukraine is all-but assured, Putin needs to win the peace as well. He went to war to safeguard Russia’s security and to protect pro-Russian Ukrainians. The last thing he needs is a permanent confrontation with a militarised West abetted by a defeated but still dangerous Ukraine. He needs a stable European and international order that will facilitate Russia’s recovery from the war, not least the rebuilding and re-population of its newly acquired territories in Ukraine.

For Putin to contemplate such a radical concession, Ukraine and its Western backers would have to give cast-iron commitments to Ukraine’s permanent demilitarisation, albeit within the framework of NATO membership. Establishing Pan-European security structures that contain conflicts rather than incubate them would also be a crucial part of any peace package.

Russia has been railing against Ukraine joining NATO since the country was first slated for membership in 2008. There is no chance it will rub-out this red line in advance of any peace talks but a private signal that Putin might be prepared to allow Ukraine to join NATO under certain conditions is not so improbable.

Putin did not invade Ukraine to prevent it becoming a member of NATO. By the time he launched the so-called Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, Ukraine was de facto a NATO member and rapidly developing into a highly threatening Western military bridgehead on Russia’s border. In Putin’s eyes, Ukraine had become an anti-Russia – an ultra-nationalist state intent on using NATO as a shield to re-gain by force Crimea and rebel Donbass. The SMO was a preventative action to nip that danger in the bud and to force the West to negotiate a security treaty that would preclude further NATO deployments along Russia’s borders.

Putin’s gambit almost succeeded. In spring 2022 there were Russo-Ukrainian peace talks in Istanbul that resulted in a number of draft agreements under which Russia would withdraw its troops in exchange for Ukraine’s neutralisation and disarmament. But many details remained unresolved, above all the nature of an international security guarantee of Ukraine’s future territoriality, sovereignty and independence.

Kiev walked away from these talks and it may well have been the West’s refusal to underwrite the proposed security guarantee that prompted Zelensky to withdraw from the negotiations. Certainly, the West proved more than willing to continue its extensive military support of Ukraine as part of a proxy war to topple the Putin regime.

Two years into the Western proxy war on Russia, Ukraine’s integration into NATO is infinitely greater. Co-operation and co-ordination of Ukrainian and Western militaries could hardly be closer. Ukraine’s war effort is sustained by Western arms, money and intelligence, not to speak of special forces, mercenaries and sabotage groups. Cutting Kiev’s connections with NATO would require Ukraine’s complete capitulation, or its wholesale occupation by Russia.

Ukraine’s rapidly approaching military defeat means that ending the war as soon as possible is Kiev’s and the West’s most rational course of action. The longer the war goes on, the greater will be Ukraine’s defeat. The sooner it ends, the more salvageable will be Ukraine’s sovereignty and the more viable its independent statehood.

The problem is that Western and Ukrainian politicians don’t how to extricate themselves from the conflict without a catastrophic loss of political face.

John Mearsheimer has suggested the United States could cut the Gordian Knot by severing all its security connections with Ukraine. But, as he himself says, this is most unlikely, given Western leaders’ immense economic, ideological, political and psychological investment in defeating Russia in Ukraine

Signalling that Ukraine might be able to join NATO could help open the door to serious peace negotiations. Ukrainian membership of NATO would be spun as success for the West, but PR is far less important than the achievement of Putin’s prime goal – neutering the NATO-Ukraine threat to Russia’s security.

Ukraine’s military collapse in the coming weeks and months seems increasingly likely but that would not necessarily terminate the war. Kiev’s remaining forces may be able to retreat to the Western banks of the Dnieper and hold out in big cities like Kharkov and Odessa. Such respite might be temporary, but it could be enough to prolong the war into 2025 and beyond. In a worst-case scenario, the Kiev government could flee abroad and continue the fight from exile, much like many European governments did during World War II.

Russian hardliners are sanguine about such prospects. They believe neither Ukraine nor NATO can be trusted to honour any commitments they might make to Russia and that the only lasting victory is Russia’s occupation of the whole of Ukraine.

Western hardliners are equally keen to ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’ – seen as a way to weaken Putin’s regime and buy time to prepare for a direct war with Russia in the not too-distant future.

Western publics were never enthusiastic about NATO’s dangerous proxy war with Russia, and this scepticism has been reinforced by an avalanche of media reports detailing Russia’s military advances and Ukraine’s huge losses of men and materiel.

Support for continuing the war is also crumbling within Ukraine as more people embrace the detested but realistic outcome of trading territory for peace.

In Russia, public support for Putin’s war remains strong but a majority want to see the conflict resolved as soon as possible, even if that means a compromise peace.

A peace settlement that included Ukraine’s membership of NATO would be anathema to a substantial minority of Russians, but Putin’s overwhelming victory in the presidential election shows he has the power and popularity to face down such opposition.

In the West, the current chatter about a possible Ukraine peace deal centres on the idea of reviving the Istanbul peace talks – of updating the draft agreements of spring 2022, notably to take account of the formal incorporation of the provinces of Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporozhe into the Russian Federation in October 2022.

Recent comments by Putin have lent credence to the possibility of an Istanbul+ peace agreement. Everyone assumes Ukraine’s non-membership of NATO and its neutrality will remain key Russian demands. But the decisive tilt of the war in Russia’s favour has radically changed the strategic situation.

Russia demanded Ukraine’s neutrality to keep NATO at bay. That goal has now been achieved by other means – Russia’s military expansion into Ukraine. How far Putin intends to go remains unclear. Occupation of the whole of eastern and southern Ukraine is one possibility, but more likely is the establishment of a demilitarised zone as a security buffer between Russia and a rump Ukraine. In any event, Ukraine’s formal neutrality would be of little practical importance.

Crucially, there is the unresolved issue of a security guarantee for unoccupied Ukraine. Without some kind of guarantee there can be no negotiated peace settlement. By far the simplest solution is for NATO to provide this by virtue of Ukraine’s membership of the organisation. Arguably, NATO, with its diverse membership and its collective decision-making, would be a far more stable container of Ukrainian revanchism than any ad hoc security guarantee.

In the 1950s the Soviets feared re-armed West Germany’s entry into NATO would revive German militarism and aggression. Actually, membership of NATO (and the EU) helped pacify Germany.

Conceivably, Putin could agree to such a step, provided Ukraine remains disarmed and NATO’s commitment to its security purely defensive. While there is no guarantee NATO and Ukraine would stick to their commitments, the hard-line alternative of seeking total victory and a dictated peace has its own drawbacks, notably the cost in lost Russian and Ukrainian lives.

A grand gesture by Putin that conceded Ukraine’s membership of NATO as part of an overall peace settlement would be an act of true statesmanship, not least in the eyes of his many friends and allies in the Global South.

By Benjamin Abelow, Antiwar.com, 5/15/24

A friend recently sent me an article that was published in The Atlantic by a Ukrainian journalist. The title and subtitle read as follows:

UKRAINE HAS CHANGED TOO MUCH TO COMPROMISE WITH RUSSIA

My generation has tasted freedom and experienced a competitive, vibrant political life. We can’t be made a part of what Russia has become.

— By Illia Ponomarenko

I don’t particularly recommend this article, but it you want to read it, try this link.

My friend asked me what I thought of the article. From his wording, I inferred that he was impressed and was inclined to accept the article’s conclusions, as well as the unstated policy implications for Americans: Keep supporting this war!

When I wrote back to my friend, I had only glanced at the article, but I’ve since read it, and it does exactly what the title leads you to expect.

I can empathize with the person who wrote the article. He experienced an attack on his country and his community, and no doubt has friends and loved ones who have been wounded or killed in this war. But he believes that the continuation of the war will help his country, his community, his loved ones, and himself. It will not. It will only lead to more destruction.

With the permission of my friend, I’ve removed his name, made a few minor edits, and am copying here what I sent him:

Dear _______,

My patience is very low at this moment, so forgive me if I’m more direct, even blunt, than I might otherwise be.

I’ll take a quick look at the article, but really, based just on the title and subtitle, I want to say: you’re missing the big picture and buying far too readily into a highly propagandized narrative.

The US created this war for no reason other than to expand NATO right up to a 1200 mile border with Russia. The US broke up peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia during the first days of the war — negotiations that likely would have brought Ukraine back to its pre-invasion borders. And as a result of these American actions, the war continued and roughly 500,000 Ukrainians have died or been seriously injured or maimed, and 8 million have fled the country.

The Ukrainian far right, acting in accord with the Kyiv government, has now created what is in important respects a terror state — no free press, no elections, people are being grabbed off the street, beaten, and sent to the front to serve. Ukrainian men who fled to Poland and Lithuania may now be forced back into Ukraine — where they don’t want to be — to serve and quite possibly to die.

The next step is for US allies, and then perhaps NATO itself, to send in troops to directly engage with Russia — on its border, in a conflict that Russia perceives to be existential yet is not at all significant to the West or, frankly, to you, in any direct, meaningful, skin-in-the-game way.

Whether or not the article is explicitly arguing for direct NATO engagement, that is where it will lead and that is where The Atlantic’s neocon editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, may want it to lead — to a direct NATO-Russia war. Because there is no way that Ukraine can win with just western weapons — which weapons, in fact, the West does not have to give anyway. We’re largely tapped out. (By the way, you can read about Jeffrey Goldberg here. See especially the final section, which pertains to the role he played in promoting the American war in Iraq.)

I assume you know that Russia just announced that it is going to undertake a practice exercise in the use of tactical nuclear weapons. This was announced in response to French statements about possible troop entry into Ukraine, and also in response to recent British statements that Ukraine can use its Storm Shadow missiles to attack targets inside Russia. If you think Russian consideration about the use of tactical nukes in response to NATO involvement is a sheer bluff — as our media like to report without any basis — you need to think again.

There are plenty of people in Ukraine who would want peace now — but most are afraid to speak. And even if that were not the case, which it is, you need to think about your own family. I’m not joking. If NATO goes in, tactical nukes may be used; if nukes are used, it will be impossible to reliably contain escalation; if escalation occurs, you, your wife, and your daughters may be killed.

There is no reason for any of this to continue — no reason for the US, none for Ukraine.

Please forgive the sharp edge, my friend.

Ben

So, what was I telling my friend? I have long emphasized that the interests of the Ukrainian people are aligned with the interests of the American people — that the best thing for everyone is that the war be ended now through a negotiated settlement. I have emphasized that to be compassionate to the Ukrainian people means to end the war, not to support its continuation. Many Ukrainians understand that. If you doubt this, read this article in the Daily Beast. The title is “Frontline Ukrainians Fear New Aid From U.S. Will Be a Disaster.”

But even if every Ukrainian wanted the war to continue, and believed that continuing the war would lead to Ukraine’s salvation, it would not make it true. People closest to a conflict have a detailed knowledge of events that they witness first hand, and they may have certain insights that outsiders lack. But they also may be blinded by passion, or they may see the events in granular (and often traumatic) fashion, and fail to understand the context of how things reached that point. Their grasp of the big picture may be obstructed by the painful quotidian experiences they are enduring. The expression, “Not seeing the forrest, for the trees,” can readily apply. They may be subject to domestic war propaganda. And they may be afraid to speak out and say what they really believe.

So, I have always emphasized that what is good for Ukraine is good for America — and what is good for everyone is the exact opposite of the policies that American, Ukrainian, and European governments are pursuing.

But that is not the only thing I was saying to my friend. I also was strongly emphasizing to my friend that as a father and husband, as an American citizen, and as a self-responsible person who also should value his own life and safety, he has an obligation to protect things closer to home. And this is true regardless what he might think about those in other lands. Yes, there is a balancing act here — one must not be indifferent to the suffering of others — but one also must have a clear grasp about the dangers closer to home and take everything in to consideration when deciding what to do.

At times, viewing one’s own situation clearly can lead to real moral quandaries. It can lead to difficult and painful decisions in which one trades one’s own safety for the safety of others, or the safety of others for the safety of oneself. Fortunately, this is not the case with respect to the American and European role in the conflict in Ukraine. In this situation, thankfully, to end the war helps Americans, Europeans, and, above all, the Ukrainian people.

In my book on the Ukraine war, I emphasized that a desire to do good can lead to great harms — the classic story of the messianic do-gooder who travels to a remote land to save the day but ends up creating a disaster for himself and everyone else. It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions — and that certainly applies to the misguided beneficence of both Americans and Europeans with respect to the Ukraine war. In my book, I said that America’s claimed generosity to Ukraine was destroying the alleged beneficiary:

Even from a blinkered American perspective, the whole Western plan was a dangerous game of bluff, enacted for reasons that are hard to fathom. Ukraine is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a vital security interest of the United States. In fact, Ukraine hardly matters at all. From an American perspective — and I say this with no disrespect for the Ukrainian people — Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukraine is no more important to the citizens of the United States than any one of fifty other countries that most Americans, for perfectly understandable reasons, couldn’t find on a map without a lot of random searching. So yes, Ukraine is irrelevant to America. And if the leaders of the United States and NATO had acknowledged that obvious fact, none of this would be happening.

If you haven’t read my book yet, you can read it here on Medium, free of charge, in essay format. Or if you want to buy it, here’s the Amazon link. You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or other large chains. Or you can read about it on the book’s website. The book is now out in seven translations — German, French, Italian, Polish, Danish, Dutch, and Slovenian — and has sold a total of 50,000 copies.

Since I wrote to my friend, two important things have happened.

First, Russia called in both the French and British ambassadors to Moscow for immediate consultation. The exact things said were not disclosed, but it is known that the Russians issued a warning to the British, and told them that if British Storm Shadow missiles were used as Britain had suggested — to attack targets inside Russia — Russia would consider British military forces anywhere in the world, including in Britain itself, legitimate targets for missile attacks by Russia.

Second, as I understand it, the British, French, and also the Americans — notwithstanding their public bluster — have taken these Russian threats seriously and have backed away from their more bellicose postures. For an update on all this, the first half of this episode of the excellent geopolitics podcast, The Duran, is worth hearing:

The sequence of events that just occurred is of great importance to all of us. It involved the risk of a major escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons — but, to my knowledge, no mainstream western media reported it adequately.

Yet again our media are failing us.

This is one more indication that — instead of remaining independent and fulfilling their societal responsibilities — our media have become, in effect, a propaganda wing of the state, continuing to serve as cheerleaders for a war that should have ended long ago.

Ben

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 4/4/24

Within just 24 hours of the horrific mass shooting in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22nd, which left at least 137 innocent people dead and 60 more critically wounded, US officials blamed the slaughter on ISIS-K, Daesh’s South-Central Asian branch. For many, the attribution’s celerity raised suspicions Washington was seeking to decisively shift Western public and Russian government focus away from the actual culprits – be that Ukraine, and/or Britain, Kiev’s foremost proxy sponsor.

Full details of how the four shooters were recruited, directed, armed, and financed, and who by, are yet to emerge. The Kremlin claims to have unearthed evidence that Kiev’s SBU were the ultimate architects, which the agency denies, charging that Russian authorities knew about the attack and permitted it to happen, in order to ramp up its assault on Ukraine. It has been reported that the killers received funds from a cryptocurrency wallet belonging to ISIS’ Tajikistan wing.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that the four individuals responsible had no clue who or what truly sponsored their monstrous actions. Contrary to the group’s mainstream portrayal, as inspired by fanatic, extreme religious fundamentalism, ISIS are primarily guns for hire. At any given time, they act at the behest of an array of international donors, bound by common interests. Funding, weapons, and orders reach its fighters circuitously, and opaquely. There is almost invariably layer upon layer of cutouts between the perpetrators of an attack claimed by the group, and its ultimate orchestrators and financiers.

Given ISIS-K is currently arrayed against China, Iran, and Russia – in other words, the US Empire’s primary adversaries – it is incumbent to revisit their “parent” group’s origins. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere just over a decade ago, before dominating mainstream media headlines and Western public consciousness for several years before vanishing again, at one stage the group occupied vast swaths of Iraqi and Syrian territory, declaring an “Islamic State”, which issued its own currency, passports, and vehicle registration plates.

Devastating military interventions independently launched by the US and Russia wiped out that demonic construct in 2017. The CIA and MI6 were no doubt immensely relieved. After all, extremely awkward questions about how precisely ISIS came to be were comprehensively extinguished. As we shall see, the terror group and its caliphate did not emerge in the manner of lightning on a dark night, but due to dedicated, determined policy hatched in London and Washington, implemented by their spying agencies.

‘Continuingly Hostile’

RAND is a highly influential, Washington DC-headquartered “think tank”. Bankrolled to the tune of almost $100 million annually by the Pentagon and other US government entities, it regularly disseminates recommendations on national security, foreign affairs, military strategy, and covert and overt actions overseas. These pronouncements are more often than not subsequently adopted as policy. 

For example, a July 2016 RAND paper on the prospect of “war with China” forecast a need to fill Eastern Europe with US soldiers in advance of a “hot” conflict with Beijing, as Russia would undoubtedly side with its neighbour and ally in such a dispute. It was therefore considered necessary to tie down Moscow’s forces at its borders. Six months later, scores of NATO troops duly arrived in the region, ostensibly to counter “Russian aggression”. 

Similarly, in April 2019 RAND published Extending Russia. It set out “a range of possible means” to “bait Russia into overextending itself,” so as to “undermine the regime’s stability.” These methods included; providing “lethal aid” to Ukraine; increasing US support for the Syrian rebels; promoting “regime change in Belarus”; exploiting “tensions” in the Caucasus; neutralising “Russian influence in Central Asia” and Moldova. Most of that came to pass thereafter.

In this context, RAND’s November 2008 Unfolding The Long War makes for disquieting reading. It explored ways the US Global War on Terror could be prosecuted once coalition forces formally left Iraq, under the terms of a withdrawal agreement inked by Baghdad and Washington that same month. This development by definition threatened Anglo dominion over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, which would remain “a strategic priority” when the occupation was officially over.

“This priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war,” RAND declared. The think tank went on to propose a “divide and rule” strategy to maintain US hegemony in Iraq, despite the power vacuum created by withdrawal. Under its auspices, Washington would exploit “fault lines between [Iraq’s] various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts”, while “supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran”:

“This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces…The US and its local allies could use nationalist jihadists to launch proxy campaigns to discredit transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace…This would be an inexpensive way of buying time…until the US can return its full attention to the [region]. US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict…by taking the side of conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”

‘Great Danger’

So it was that the CIA and MI6 began supporting Sunni “nationalist jihadists” throughout West Asia. The next year, Bashar Assad rejected a Qatari proposal to route Doha’s vast gas reserves directly to Europe, via a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometre-long pipeline spanning Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. As extensively documented by WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables, US, Israeli and Saudi intelligence immediately decided to overthrow Assad by fomenting a local Sunni rebellion, and started financing opposition groups for the purpose.

This effort became turbocharged in October 2011, with MI6 redirecting weapons and extremist fighters from Libya to Syria, in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s televised murder. The CIA oversaw that operation, using the British as an arm’s length cutout to avoid notifying Congress of its machinations. Only in June 2013, with then-President Barack Obama’s official authorisation, did the Agency’s cloak-and-dagger connivances in Damascus become formalised – and later admitted – under the title “Timber Sycamore”.

At this time, Western officials universally referred to their Syrian proxies as “moderate rebels”. Yet, Washington was well-aware its surrogates were dangerous extremists, seeking to carve a fundamentalist caliphate out of the territory they occupied. An August 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report released under Freedom of Information laws observes that events in Baghdad were “taking a clear sectarian direction,” with radical Salafist groups “the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

These factions included Al Qaeda’s Iraqi wing (AQI), and its umbrella offshoot, Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The pair went on to form ISIS, a prospect the DIA report not only predicted, but seemingly endorsed:

“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria…This is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime…ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create great danger.”

Despite such grave concerns, the CIA continued to dispatch unaccountably vast shipments of weapons and money to Syria’s “moderate rebels”, well-knowing this “aid” would almost inevitably end up in ISIS hands. Moreover, Britain concurrently ran secret programs costing millions to train opposition paramilitaries in the art of killing, while providing medical assistance to wounded jihadis. London also donated multiple ambulances, purchased from Qatar, to armed groups in the country.

Leaked documents indicate the risk of equipment and personnel from these efforts being lost to Al-Nusra, ISIS, and other extremist groups in West Asia was judged unavoidably “high” by British intelligence. Yet, there was no concomitant strategy for countering this hazard at all, and the operations continued apace. Almost as if training and arming ISIS was precisely the desired outcome.

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by Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 5/10/24

We have been through an intense, if muffled crisis in the ongoing political-military confrontation between Russia and the West by way of Ukraine. The essence of this crisis is simple: Kiev and its Western supporters have lost the initiative in the Ukraine proxy war and may be on the verge of defeat, as high Western officials increasingly admit.

In response to this self-inflicted quandary, several important Western players have threatened further escalation. Most prominently, Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron publicly encouraged Kiev to use British Storm Shadow missiles to strike inside Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron continued to threaten a direct – not covert, as at present – intervention by French, that is, NATO, troops (In addition, an intriguing and much-discussed article reported that a deployment of 1,500 troops from France’s Foreign Legion had already begun. While its sources were hard to assess, its claims appeared too plausible for easy dismissal.)

Moscow, in return, issued a set of stark warnings, laying down – or highlighting – red lines. It announced drills with tactical nuclear weapons. Belarus did the same; in Minsk’s case, the weapons in question are, of course, also Russian. In addition, the British and French ambassadors received extremely straight talk about the risks their respective governments were running.

Addressing London, Moscow made clear that Kiev striking inside Russia with British missiles would expose Britain to “catastrophic consequences,” in particular, Russian retaliation against British forces anywhere. Regarding France, Moscow blasted its “belligerent” and “provocative” conduct and defied as futile French attempts to produce “strategic ambiguity.”

For now, this particular crisis seems to have abated. There are some signs that the West got the message. NATO figurehead Jens Stoltenberg, for instance, has insisted that NATO is not planning to send troops – openly, that is – into Ukraine.

Yet it would be wrong to feel too reassured. For this crisis was, at its core, a clash between, on one side, a Western problem that has by no means gone away and, on the other side, a persistent Russian policy that, it seems, all too many in the West refuse to take seriously enough.

The Western problem is that a defeat at Russia’s hands would be worse by orders of magnitude than the fiasco of the rout-like retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Ironically, that is so because the West itself has charged its needless confrontation with Russia with the power to do unprecedented damage to NATO and the EU:

First, by insisting on treating Ukraine as a de facto almost-NATO-member, which means that by defeating it, Moscow will also defeat Washington’s key alliance. Second, by investing large and growing sums of money and quantities of supplies into this proxy war, which means that the West has weakened itself and, perhaps even more importantly, revealed its own weakness. Third, by trying to ruin both Russia’s economy and its international standing; the failure of both attempts has resulted in a stronger Russia across these two domains and, once again, revealed more limits of Western power. Fourth, by radically subordinating the EU to NATO and Washington, the geopolitical damage has been, as it were, leveraged.

In short, when the Ukraine crisis started in 2013/14 and then greatly escalated in 2022, Russia had vital security interests at stake; the West did not. By now, however, the West has made choices that have charged this conflict and its outcome with the capacity to do great, strategic harm to its own credibility, cohesion, and power: Overreach has consequences. That, briefly, is why the West is at an impasse and remains there after this crisis.

On the other side, we have that persistent policy of Moscow, namely its nuclear doctrine. Much Western commentary tends to overlook or downplay this factor, caricaturing Russia’s repeated warnings about nuclear weapons as “saber-rattling.” Yet, in reality, these warnings are consistent expressions of a policy that has been developed since the early 2000s, that is, for almost a quarter-century.

A key feature of this doctrine is that Russia explicitly retains the option of using nuclear weapons at a relatively early stage in a major conflict and before an adversary has had recourse to them. Many Western analysts have described the purpose of this posture as facilitating a strategy of “escalating to deescalate” (sometimes abbreviated as E2DE), here meaning specifically to end a conventional conflict on favorable terms through a limited use of nuclear weapons to deter the adversary from continuing.

The term “escalate to de-escalate” emerged in the West, not Russia, and this Western interpretation of Russian policy has played an important role in Western politics and debates and, thus, has its critics as well. In addition – but this is a separate question – some analysts point out that the idea of E2DE is less of any country’s national property than something inherent in the logic of nuclear strategy, that other nuclear powers have had similar policies, and that the whole idea, whoever adopts it, may not work.

In addition, Russia’s nuclear doctrine is, as you would expect, complex. And, while France’s President Emmanuel Macron has made a habit of strutting a constant inconstancy he calls “strategic ambiguity,” Moscow is capable of inflicting some genuine calculated uncertainty on its adversaries, with less bragging but more effectively. Thus, one side of its nuclear doctrine stresses that nuclear weapons could only be used if the existence of the Russian state was in danger, as has just been underlined again by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. But to misunderstand this as a promise that Moscow would only use nukes if Moscow were under siege and half of Russia’s territory or population gone already, would be foolish.

In reality, there also is room in its nuclear doctrine for treating the “unconditional territorial integrity and sovereignty” of Russia as critical thresholds. How do we know? From multiple Russian documents, which need not be cited here because Ryabkov has reminded us of this facet of Moscow’s policy, too. In the same statement in which he emphasized the criterion of “state existence.” Take that, Emmanuel.

A final point, it seems, needs highlighting as well: Russia has never restricted its option of using nuclear weapons, indeed any type of weapons, to the area of a specific local conflict, for instance, Ukraine. The opposite is the case. Moscow is explicitly reserving the right to strike beyond the confines of such a battlefield. That is something that President Vladimir Putin has made crystal clear in his address to Russia’s Federal Assembly in February of this year. It is exactly that message that Britain has received as well in the recent crisis.

Whichever way you parse it, official Russian nuclear doctrine has specific messages for potential adversaries. Moscow has consistently applied this doctrine throughout the Ukraine War and in its recent warnings – by drill and by diplomatic demarche – to its Western opponents.

But there is the rub: The West has a history of obstinately not hearing Russian messages. That is how we ended up in this war in the first place. Russia had warned the West repeatedly since, at the latest, President Vladimir Putin’s well-known speech at the Munich Security Conference in – wait for it – 2007. The last major warning came in late 2021, when Russia – with Sergey Ryabkov, incidentally, in the forefront – offered the West what turned out to be a last chance to abandon its unilateralism and specifically NATO expansion and, instead, negotiate a new security framework. The West brushed this offer off. With nuclear weapons in play, it is time that Western elites learn to, finally, listen when Russia sends a serious warning.

To learn more about what life was like for many Russians during the 1990s, you can read my interview with a cross-section of Russian people here about their experiences and memories of that time. As long as the liberal opposition in Russia wants to view the 90’s era in Russia as primarily about new-found freedom and democracy (which only a few privileged Russians really experienced during that time) rather than the massive poverty, appalling mortality crisis, violent crime, and chaos that many were forced to endure, they will continue to have no traction among the Russian masses. They will just continue to be obnoxiously out-of-touch. – Natylie

The Bell, 4/22/24

Team Navalny film about 1990s oligarchs divides Russia’s opposition

The 1990s were a turbulent period following the collapse of the Soviet Union — and 30 years later it remains the most controversial era in modern Russian history. The rapid democratization of society and the switch from a planned to a market economy was accompanied by poverty, rampant crime and the wholesale redistribution of state property into the hands of a few oligarchs close to power. In Russian society, the lingering sense of the “wild 90s” as a national trauma has been exploited by Putin-era propaganda, threatening a return to those chaotic times unless Russians staunchly support the “stability” of the current regime. At the same time, there is another widespread point of view of the era: one of an age of liberty, when people could speak and think freely after having thrown off the shackles of Soviet-era censorship. 

What happened during this pivotal decade — the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union — is directly linked to the state of modern Russia today. Many prominent businessmen and active government officials cemented their positions at that time. Shortly before his death, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused the liberal elite of the era of paving the way for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. Last week, his team released a documentary further developing that idea. The main narrator and ideologist was Maria Pevchikh, one of the leading figures in Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Her narrative, while containing no new revelations, annoyed many members of the opposition.

• Team Navalny released the first episode of a new documentary series, titled “Traitors” last week (another two episodes should soon be released), in which they explain how oligarch Boris Berezovsky won control of the main Russian TV channel — at the time known as ORT, now Channel One. Berezovsky could not have taken control of such a key asset without money provided by fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, best known as the owner of Chelsea Football Club. Abramovich, in turn, was vying to bring together two state-owned oil extraction and refinement enterprises. In exchange for the funding, Berezovsky persuaded Boris Yeltsin to approve Abramovich’s deal by threatening to use the power of ORT to sink his 1996 presidential election campaign if he did not agree. Yeltsin won the election, and within less than four years had named Putin as his successor.
• It is believed that Valentin Yumashev played an important role in Putin’s rise to power. He started out as a journalist and then got to know Yeltsin in the late 1980s. Yumashev was Yeltsin’s literary aide and worked in the presidential administration, heading it for a time. In 2001, after Yeltsin had left office, Yumashev married Yeltsin’s daughter (now Tatyana Yumasheva). The pair were Yeltsin’s closest advisors before he resigned, a unit collectively known as “the Family”. Yumashev repeatedly told Yeltsin that Putin, his former subordinate and at the time head of the FSB, was the most suitable successor. Although as journalist Ilya Zhegulev wrote in his book, there wasn’t much competition at the time. “Here we have Putin — out of desperation,” a source in the presidential administration told Zhegulev. After Putin became president, Yumashev worked for him as an adviser on a voluntary basis. 
• The Pevchikh film provides no new detail or revelations about this period. It is based largely on the memoirs of Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s security chief, as well as transcripts of court hearings in the Berezovsky vs. Abramovich case. The oligarchs famously clashed in a London court in the early 1990s, with the court filings revealing the ins and outs of doing business in Russia at that time. Berezovsky had demanded $5.6 billion in compensation from Abramovich, who he claimed had forced him to sell his stake in two Russian companies at a cut-down price. The court threw out Berezovsky’s claims and ordered him to pay Abramovich’s costs. Less than a year after the verdict, Berezovsky committed suicide.
• As soon as it was released, the film faced almost unanimous criticism from Russia’s scattered opposition. It was accused of “smoothing over” a complex story, turning a blind eye to the historical context, sympathizing with the leftist agenda (in 1996, Yeltsin’s most dangerous opponent was Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov), rewriting history, producing propaganda and marginalizing the Russian opposition. Disgraced Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who made his fortune in the period, said that the film left him “ideologically bewildered.” According to him, Pevchikh could have focused on more important issues of the era, such as the war against Chechen separatists or the internal political conflict of 1993 that led to tanks firing on the parliament building in Moscow.
• Few would disagree that it is necessary to dredge through difficult events of the past. Reviewing controversial historical periods is a generally accepted way of working through collective trauma, one that helps foster a consensus of what happened, and reduces the risk of a repeat. However, both the film and the reaction to it suggests that even in a part of society that is genuinely interested in having this conversation, common ground is still far away.

Why the world should care:

On the day the film was released, Time magazine ran an interview with Yulia Navalnaya, who it named one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Following the death of her husband, Navalnaya is trying to take his place as the overall leader of the Russian opposition. The interview was headlined: “Putin is my enemy. The Revolution of Yulia Navalnaya.” One of her key beliefs is that Russian antiwar and opposition movements exist — and that they can be brought together. “As for uniting the opposition, the last demonstrations showed that it’s not hard to unite around a good, collective action. That is the main source of unity,” she said. The reaction of opposition bloggers to Pevchikh (who Navalnaya sees as the curator of effective international sanctions) once again casts doubt on that belief.