By Dan Storyev, The Nation, 6/22/26
Dan Storyev is a human rights expert who fled Russia.
“Russia is finished,” cheerfully proclaimed The Atlantic on its May 2001 cover. The headline was wrong, but it proved to be really catchy. It has been echoed for over two decades by a host of experts, academics, and writers, with regular frequency. All the while, Russia, spiteful as ever, does not heed the experts’ opinions and does not seem to be collapsing anytime soon.
Instead, if anything is collapsing today, it is America’s ability to understand Russia, which was never great to begin with. The self-delusion of the foreign-policy “Blob,” coupled with the anti-intellectualism of the second Trump administration, joined by wartime cancel culture, and accompanied by dishonest sources—all created a cocktail of groupthink that posits that Russia is on the brink of collapse.
This cocktail is poison to Washington’s policy vis-à-vis Russia and Russians. It already led to wasteful spending, misguided diplomacy, and even attacks on free speech on US soil.
The sanctions did not manage to permanently reduce “the ruble to rubble,” as then-President Biden prematurely boasted. The combined might of the United States and its allies could not isolate “collapsing” Russia from the rest of the world. In the meantime, voices that could offer a more rational explanation of Russia to the public and policymakers are shunned. Even the most anti-Putin Russian intellectuals are canceled in American forums, while experts who try to argue for more nuance in America’s approach to Russia are branded as Kremlin stooges by the commentariat.
Some of “Russia is finished” fortune-telling is motivated by wishful thinking. There is no doubt that Russia, which has been waging a war of aggression on European soil since 2014, is easily painted as an eternal enemy of the West. Historian Yuri Slezkine even argued that the West still mainly defines itself through othering and fearing Russia. The Kremlin is also all too happy to present itself as a threat to what its propagandists call “the rotting West.”
But there is also no doubt that this wishful thinking is misled at best. Russia is nowhere close to collapsing. The “Russia is finished” articles, books, and video essays often point out genuine faults in the bizarre structure of Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s politics, rampant corruption, and inexorable population decline. They then make vague predictions about a return to the mayhem of the 1990s, a breakup of Russia along ethnic lines, total economic collapse, or a brewing popular uprising.
The temptation to mock the collapse clairvoyance is strong. One could easily list all the objective reasons why Russia isn’t collapsing any time soon. The country’s economy has proven surprisingly resilient, able to withstand sanctions of historic proportions. While the Russian military is stuck in the blood and mud in Ukraine, it has repeatedly shown an ability to adapt rather than collapse.
Russia’s diplomacy, which is traditionally seen in the West as not much more than incoherent gopnik yelps, is making headway in the Global South where Russian state–affiliated media are important players and student exchange programs are in full swing.
Inside Russia, civilians live relatively normal lives and are likely not thinking of rising up with pitchforks against the Kremlin. Many of them enjoy new Hollywood releases, chic cafés, and exhibitions. Yes, life goes on, even as Russian cities are bombed and the economy is slowing down.
There is a feedback loop here: Russia keeps chugging along and pundits keep churning out doomsayings. It is tempting, when producing propaganda, to paint your elected enemy as on the brink of an abyss, needing only a little push to tip over and disappear. This is what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco described in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” writing that propaganda presents an enemy as both “too strong and too weak.” For the foreign-policy Blob, there is nothing better than an eternal weak-strong enemy, in opposition to which the military-industrial complex and its associated content factories can eternally justify their own existence.
As Russians say ironically, “Whatever we try to engineer, we always end up making a Kalashnikov rifle.” A similar ailment befalls the American field of Russia studies, which is riddled with military and intelligence interest. Owing to a robust Cold War heritage, key Russia studies programs and projects in the US are either linked to the Department of Defense or downright funded by it.
A securitized view of Russia is bound to produce a lopsided analysis that ignores or misunderstands Russian society. It already led to some odd investments under the Biden administration. Consider the “decolonization” boom of 2022–23, when many pages of good repute—including the aforementioned Atlantic—posited that the United States must go abroad to destroy the monster of Russian imperialism by breaking Russia apart along its ethnic lines. It would be easy, argued the newly minted anti-colonial activists, because Russia is already on the brink of collapse.
Decolonization forums were hosted at platforms like the Hudson Institute; foundations and pundits popped up all over the marketplace of ideas. Many were eager to take advantage of the robust grant-making system—like the late USAID—built to advance US power around the world. Unlike the anti-colonial movements of the 1970s, the decolonizers were excited to work with the US security services, openly seeking out funding and support.
The US support, however, did not result in much. Russia did not fall apart. In retrospect, it was probably odd to expect concrete results from groups who were trying to win Western support by promoting Manchurian separatists during an event in Kyoto; or at an event in Washington calling for a formation of an independent Novgorod (currently a city tucked within western Russia), with an economy based on “trade with the Hanseatic League”—which has been defunct since 1669.
Any anthropologist or sociologist focused on Russia could probably explain the patent absurdity of trying to break Russia apart. They could point out that the decolonizers have little to no support inside of the country, and that ethnic Russians make up the majority in most of the supposedly “ethnic minority” regions, while minority elites are tightly dependent on the Kremlin. They could say that, for example, Russia’s defense minister comes from the ethnically Turkic Tuva region, where his family long enjoyed elite status. That many in Russia’s ethnic minorities are profiting off the Kremlin’s war. But who wants to listen to anthropologists?
The second coming of Trump and the ensuing collapse of USAID with other grantmaking institutions did not improve the situation. The money might have stopped flowing toward clearly bizarre initiatives—but it stopped flowing toward rigorous study also, owing to the new administration’s apparent anti-intellectual bent.
In the age of unprecedented geopolitical competition, it would be sensible for Washington to invest in serious Russia studies departments at think tanks and universities. Yet American expertise on Russia is in its sundown hour now, as many such departments are shutting down or getting defunded, while think tanks are plagued by financial issues. Some of the leading centers of knowledge on Russia—like the Wilson Center—were shuttered by DOGE. In particular, the administration cut the FLAS funding, prompting even elite Ivies to scale back their Russia research.
Russia itself also became increasingly more isolated from Western researchers, a trend that began in 2014 and only got worse in 2022. Institutions on both sides broke contact: Russian institutions came out in support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (whether willingly or not), which Western institutions could not let slide.
This resulted in the status quo where many Western Russianists were de facto (and often officially) banned from the country they study. Russia even banned the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the chief US conference for such research. Very few American experts nowadays can safely travel to Russia. Moscow discourages Russian officials and experts from speaking to Americans. Unless, of course, these Americans are alt-right influencers like Candace Owens or Andrew Tate.
American institutions—such as Yale University or even the Wild Salmon Studies Center (yes)— have been designated as “undesirable.” This means that any interaction with them could lead to criminal prosecution. A knowledge iron curtain is actively being constructed by Moscow.
This is not to say that the Western political atmosphere is conducive to free and open discourse. Those who advocate studying Russia more thoroughly run the risk of being branded as Kremlin mouthpieces for not demonstrating a sufficiently hawkish position. Meanwhile, the exiled Russian academics who manage to make it to the West are often deplatformed and ostracized not necessarily for their political stance as much as for being Russian.
This form of wartime cancel culture is of course more prominent in the EU, and especially the Baltic States. Take Estonia, which wantonly deported a respected Russian-Australian historian—apparently, for giving a Russian-language talk on North Korea. The idea of automatically rejecting even the most anti-war Russians occasionally rears its head in the US too, like at 2023 PEN America, where a panel of exiled Russian writers was canceled due to fears of Ukrainian boycott, prompting American journalist M. Gessen to quit the PEN board in protest.
As a result, the Russianists American public and policymakers might still see are not just underfunded but are feeling politically constrained by a groupthink that excludes anyone Russian, or even anyone with a nuanced position on Russia. The “politically correct” sources of Russia knowledge are thus reduced to an ever-shrinking group of hawkish exiles or even more hawkish Eastern Europeans, who are willing to perfectly toe the party line and espouse maximalist positions on Russia mixed with hopes of near-collapse.
Eastern European experts, like Ukrainians or Balts, often claim to have a unique expertise on Russia due to their having been on the receiving end of the Kremlin’s imperialism for many years. They are not hiding their default (and perhaps understandable) desire to see Russia collapse. The Russia studies approach popular in Eastern Europe nowadays is aimed at “decentering” Russians, and a popular refrain heard there is that to understand Russia one must listen not to Russians but to Ukrainians or other victims of Russia. To what extent this approach is analytically sound is questionable—after all, we don’t expect Vietnamese or Iranians to have the best insights into American domestic affairs.
The actual Russians who are sometimes listened to in this context are a specific brand of exiles. These experts that might have the ear of Western politicians are often outright anti-Kremlin activists. No wonder, since they saw their country being trampled into authoritarianism by Putin and his posse.
But their careers, in many cases, effectively depend on a collapse of Putinism—and perhaps Russia with it—within their lifetimes. They know that they have little to no support inside Russia. As exiled politician Ilya Ponomarev said, they can only return to Russia “through bayonets,” meaning a Western military intervention. As the bayonets are not coming anytime soon, not much is left for the underfunded, disunited, and depressed Russian opposition in exile except hope, which, as Russians say, “dies last.”
This hope leads to assertions about the inevitable collapse of Putin’s regime. In reality, of course, the exiles’ plans for an end to Putin’s regime are limited to finding a window of opportunity. Rational analysis is tainted by political objectives.
The US is thus discouraged from learning about Russia, while Russian intellectuals are discouraged from helping the US learn about Russia. This creates fertile ground for baseless speculations and wishful thinking about a nearing collapse.
Lastly, the cottage industry of predicting Russia’s collapse is also emblematic of a key vulnerability of the Western intellectual scene—a general inability and unwillingness to conceive of a sustainable alternative model to capitalist liberal democracy, what British philosopher Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism.
That is not to say that Putin’s Russia is somehow anti-capitalist or even that it is philosophically antithetical to the West. Russia’s war is now driven primarily by hyper-capitalist mechanics of huge payouts and debt forgiveness for frontline soldiers, supplemented by an economy that rewards investments into the ever-expanding military-industrial complex. Contemporary Russian intellectuals, even the pro-Kremlin ones like Alexander Dugin, ultimately see themselves as a part of a European intellectual tradition.
To add insult to injury, while the United States maintains the largest economy on the planet, it sure does not feel like this to an average American. Amid decaying infrastructure, skyrocketing prices and overall anxiety, it is easy for Americans to get hypnotized by the shiny façade Moscow can offer. MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens are perfectly willing to eat it up when they fawningly visit Russia grocery stores or churches.
Seen from Washington, Russia’s very existence outside of a US-led liberal world order is tantamount to resistance to this order. To those who still like to think that they live at the End of History, the continuing existence of Moscow is anathema because it threatens the very core of their worldview.
And if Russia can manage to not just exist but present a thriving image in comparison to the United States or the broader West—that is offense of the highest order. To accept that Russia can exist and even occasionally punch above its weight in challenging the West, whether through black ops in Africa or political meddling in Europe, is to contend with the idea that the liberal democratic model is not the only logical conclusion for every regime in the world.
And at the non-happening end of history, the US is thus left with a pool of Russia experts and policymakers who are given in to wishful thinking about Russia collapsing on its own, who don’t understand Russia and don’t want to in the first place. They are, as the Russians say, “dividing a hide of an uncaptured bear.” Whether they are doing so because of their lack of imagination or curiosity or they are impelled by some ulterior motives, the result is the same: misguided policies and intellectual decline.
Regarding “the idea that the liberal democratic model is not the only logical conclusion for every regime in the world.”
I think most people are starting to wake up to the fact that the “liberal democratic model” was always an illusion. The Uni-Party betrayals over 4 decades, coupled with Trump’s most blatant corruption, have put a stake through that zombie. Western publics are waking up to the fact that Western governments have always been about piracy and imperialism for capitalist profit. Hegemony, whether British or USA, has been about exploitation of the non-western world to maintain a minimal lifestyle at home so that the Western working class would accept a form of “representative oligarchy” – not democracy. Capitalism has morphed over the years, from slavery and genocidal land theft, to colonization, to economic imperialism, nowadays to a MIC and banking dictatorship. And now as Western capitalism is failing again, oligarchs are attempting another morph into a techno-feudal surveillance state where AI can be used to maintain power via coercion at home, and control of choke points (physical and economic) can be used to maintain control abroad. However, such centralized power breeds arrogance and blind spots as the article outlines. And as the West becomes more isolated from the rest of the world, we see our western oligarchs turning inward to exploit the western public in a last ditch attempt to maintain their neoliberal economic model of privatization as a mechanism of hegemony. And as the exploitation of the public becomes untenable, the illusions and myths about the West being an ideal model of “liberal democracy” will dissolve. The “logical conclusion” will be dispelled, and the oligarch’s downfall will be possible as people realize that we don’t need the oligarchs.
Intellectuals who have been influential to me have been Vladimir Posner, Stephen F. Cohen, Amb. Jack Matlock, and many others. My own “Truman Moment” (which eroded and then collapsed my own neoconservative mindset) was a closer loom at what really happened in the former Yugoslavia during the Clinton years. I realized that I’d uncritically accepted the “Behind Enemy Lines” version of the story.
Americans seem to have a cultural malady which prevents its elite from seeing matters through the eyes of their adversaries, which always leads to poor strategic judgement. The “Blob” is concerned only with its own pov and with its own goals. There is a congenital inability to engage in strategic empathy.
Perhaps this is true for all “countries” that have empire history such as Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan, and the Netherlands. But it seems that the further back in history the empire is (Portugal, Spain, Netherlands), the more willing its citizens are to engage in strategic empathy. The empires of the British, French, Russians, Turks, and Japanese are all more recent, and of course America’s is current.
The author’s statement that “There is no doubt that Russia, which has been waging a war of aggression on European soil since 2014…” is a foolish statement because it could just as easily been written “There is no doubt that the US, which has been waging a war of aggression against Russia on European soil since 2014…”. The author may also believe that what happened in Kiev in February 2014 was a natural organic revolution rather than the American-backed coup that it was.
President Yanukovich was voted out unanimously in the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, by his own parliamentarians, also all members from HIS OWN party, Partija Regioniv, because president Yanukovich was asked, on several occasions, these days in late winter 2014 to respond questions from the Rada. He refused to come to be present in the Rada. His official political commitments were ceased by Mr. Yanukovich himself.
The same parliamentarians who appointed him to the post of President in 2010, also liberated him from that duty of being head of state of the Republic of Ukraine in 2014. It was a decision taken by fully legal members of the Rada. It was no political coup of the street.
A couple of points off the top of my head:
(1) It is my understanding that there was no legal quorum for that vote.
(2) There was a Europe-brokered agreement only a day or two before the sham parliament vote, where Yanukovich agreed to call an election 3 months later (which he would have almost certainly lost).
(3) The Maidan insurrectionists (for that is exactly what they were – whose actions would be tolerated in no other country) refused to accept the agreement and demanded that Yanukovich resign, which he refused to do.
(4) The insurrectionists sought to capture (and very likely execute) Yanukovich, who felt he had to flee for his life. He escaped to Kharkiv by not traveling in his official vehicle (which was shot at), and then Putin arranged to have him extracted from the Crimean coast to Russia in the dead of night. The Maidan insurrectionists were very close to capturing Yanukovich that night.
(5) What is most disturbing is the immediate recognition of the new government by the US, notwithstanding the circumstances of a vote without a quorum.
(6) The taped phone conversation between US Ukrainian Ambassador Pyatt and Victoria Nuland reveals a great deal about American plotting.
(7) This all started in November 2013 with the EU and other western institutions demanding that Yanukovich sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that forced Ukraine into choosing between the EU and Russia (an impossible choice for Ukraine).
(8) The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement stipulated that Ukraine would adopt the security arrangements of the EU, which meant that Ukraine would become a member of NATO.
(9) Ukraine and Russia had open borders for trade and Ukraine had a sweetheart deal with Russia for energy and its transmission to Europe (and Russia accused Ukraine of stealing energy as well). Russia was very clear that these things would change if Ukraine signed the agreement.
(10) To induce Ukraine not to sign the agreement, Putin offered Ukraine a $15B financial lifeline so that it could refuse the financial help of the West via the World Bank/IMF.
(11) Yanukovich did NOT say no to the EU, but instead suspended the decision, and refused to say yes. He wanted to consider matters carefully. This was November 2013.
(12) This is when all hell broke loose, and Euromaidan protests started and grew rapidly and significantly with the help of new TV stations ans social media channels which appeared suddenly.
(13) In reaction, pro-Russians in Crimea and the Donbas formed “anti-Maidan” counter-protests. These protesters were attacked violently by the insurrectionists (a violent and powerful minority within the Euromaidan movement). The most notable examples of this were the violent attack on a bus of counter-protesters traveling from Crimea to Kiev. If I’m not mistaken, most were beaten and some were killed as the busses burned. And of course, there is the notorious Odesa incident where 48 people were burned alive inside a building set alight by the Ukrainian far-right insurrectionists.
(13) Crimea made haste to separate from Ukraine and join Russia. There is a great deal of evidence to say that this was a free and fair vote and that this referendum was entirely legitimate.
(14) A little later, anti-Euromaidan residents in the Donbas started an insurrection in places like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk against what they considered to be an illegitimate authority in Kiev.
(15) It is evident to the people of the Donbas that Kiev wants the land and resources of the Donbas, but not its people. The first act of the new regime in Kiev (subsequently repealed as being most unwise) was to eliminate Russian as an official language, even though the lingua franca of Ukraine was Russian. The primary language of most people living in Crimea, the Donbas, Kherson, Kharkiv and Odesa is Russian. Even Zelensky’s mother tongue is Russian, and I understand his Ukrainian is not that good.
(16) Kiev authorizes its infamous “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO) which effectively starts the civil war in the Donbas. This civil war results in the deaths of over 13,000 Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas, mostly civilians (+10K) and mostly as a result of shelling by the Ukrainian army under the command of ultra-right-wing nationalists associated with the Azov Battalion and Right Sector (some of whom are shown to be neo-nazis).
(17) The Donbas resistance is perplexed and angry as to why Russia has moved to bring these oblasts into the Russian Federation as it did with Crimea. It is apparent, however, that there are volunteer Russian soldiers and equipment on the ground.
(18) By September 2014, the Minsk Protocol is signed by Ukraine, Russia, the OSCE, and the leaders of the Donbas oblasts (Luhansk & Donetsk). This attempt to end the civil war failed almost immediately.
(19) A Minsk2 protocol was established in Feb 2015 under the Normandy Format that involved Germany and France as guarantors. This also failed. After Putin started the “Special Military Operation” Poroshenko, Merkel, and Hollande each admitted that Minsk2 was intended to buy time for Ukraine to become ready for war with Russia. That is, Minsk2 was negotiated in bad faith by the west.
(20) In 2019, Ukrainians in both the west and the east overwhelmingly support Zelensky for President on the basis of his promises to stop the civil war.
(21) no sooner is Zelensky elected than he is told by the hardline forces in Kiev what the real deal is, even to the point of threatening Zelensky’s life (captured on video).
(22) Trump’s relationship with Ukraine in his first term becomes the basis for the impeachment of Trump. This has to do with the suspension of arms shipments to Ukraine because Trump was seeking info on Hunter Biden (Burisma etc.). Here is the point: the Trump1 admin was extremely active in providing Ukraine with weapons, training, biolabs, and military bases such as Ochakiv (stone’s throw from Crimea). The US is expecting war with Russia.
(23) Biden becomes POTUS in January 2021 and by March Zelensky is talking about retaking Crimea and desiring nuclear weapons. Putin publishes an op-ed in the WSJ in July, and serious discussions between Russia and the US are happening by the Fall and the main issue is Ukraine & NATO. In December 2021, Putin more or less puts an ultimatum to the US that insists on a new security architecture for Europe and Ukraine not in NATO. NATO refused to say that Ukraine would not become a member (admitted a couple of years ago by NATO’s Stoltenberg).
(24) By January 2022, Ukraine is building up forces in the Donbas and it is evident to the Russians that there will shortly be an attempt to retake Crimea. By mid-February 2022, the UAF’s indiscriminate shelling of Donetsk and other places in the Donbas rises from 100/day to 1000/day by mid-Feb (according to OCSE observers).
(25) On Feb.15th, the Russian Duma authorized Putin to recognize the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin did so on Feb.21st, which was ratified by the Duma on Feb.22. Many residents of the Donbas were angry at Putin for not doing this much sooner or as early as 2014. It is significant that Putin did not make this move until 2022.
(26) On Feb24th, Putin announces the SMO specifically citing Article 51 of the UN Charter regarding the Responsibility to Protect (as NATO countries had done wrt their bombings of Serbia and Libya).
(27) Russia invades Ukraine and the fight is on, and the collective west immediately sanctions Russia in all kinds of ways. At one point migratory birds were prohibited from flying over Russian airspace. Most importantly, on Feb28th the collective West froze approx. $300B of Russian central bank assets, sending a strong signal to the rest of the world that the financial system owned and operated by the collective West was not trustworthy. China has since been unloading US debt. BRICS+ starts to develop further, especially its New Development Bank.
(28) By the end of March 2022, the Russians and Ukrainians have used diplomacy to work out an agreement that was initialed by Ukrainian negotiators, the central pillar being Ukraine not seeking membership in NATO.
(29) At which point, UK PM Boris Johnson rushes to Kiev and convinces Zelensky to abandon this agreement and continue fighting Russia because the collective West will back Ukraine “for as long as it takes, no matter what the cost”.
(30) At the expense of its own citizens, the West has since shoveled $470B (and still rising) of borrowed money into Ukraine’s war effort, although some if this has been financed by interest on Russian frozen assets, but the EU was unable to convince Belgium (Euroclear) to allow the EU to seize the frozen funds.
(31) Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost by both Russia and Ukraine. There is reason to believe that the loss of lives is well over 1M.
(32) Zelensky has refused to call an election since 2019 and has banned opposition political parties, politicians, and media.
(33) Compare the $470B to Putin’s $15B offer in 2013. Imagine if this amount had been productively invested directly into Ukraine. No war and a prosperous Ukraine as an EU member (but not NATO).
(34) I agree with analysts like Stephen F. Cohen who have said that what really needed to happen was for Ukraine to become a bridge between Europe and Russia, and not a barrier. The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement really needed to be an EU-Ukraine-Russia agreement.
(35) But the US/NATO wanted war with Russia and succeeded in inducing Russia to become the aggressor.
(36) and the world has been plunged into an abyss where the use of nuclear weapons is probable if escalation continues.
(37) It is the nature of warfare that escalation is predictable but escalatory measures are themselves unpredictable. This is why nuclear weapons should not be ruled out.
(38) Euromaidan has been characterized by the West as a natural organic spontaneous democratic revolution. This is absolutely false. It was a US-Europe backed coup d’etat that ended up putting the deceptive and corrupt Poroshenko into power. (It is widely acknowledged even by pro-Russians that Yanukovich was also corrupt, but this is apparently par for the course in Ukraine.)
(39) In a conference before 2013, Victoria Nuland stated that the US (state dep’t et al) had “invested” $5B into Ukraine. After 2022 she admitted to a congressional comittee that the US had many biolabs in Ukraine. Hunter Biden’s role in Ukraine has been much discussed, to say nothing of V-P Joe Biden’s interference in the judicial anti-corruption processes of Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1B of funding.
(40) The plot is so thick in Ukraine that it is hard to know where to start the analysis/story. We could start with Khruschev handing over Crimea to Ukraine at Russia’s expense in 1954 on the 300th anniversary of the treaty of Pereyaslav (noting exactly who Kruschev’s 2nd wife was and her influence on USSR policy). Or how about the “construction” of Ukraine by Lenin? Many analysts begin the story with the dissolution of the USSR.
(41) I find it extremely interesting and important that MIT’s Dr. Barry Posen was commissioned in 1994 to write a paper called “A Defense Concept for Ukraine” where he posits that Ukraine’s future adversary would be Russia. In this paper, he discusses 3 possible strategies, and rules out 2 of them, and settles on the 3rd, which is the establishment and defense of a bastion. It seems like the Ukrainians have now tried all 3 strategies and have settled on Posen’s choice – the determined defense of the well-fortified bastion. The Russians have forced the bastion back to Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, and we’ll see what happens in the next year.
(42) What ever happened to Bush Sr.’s promise to Gorbachev that if the USSR pulled 400K military personnel out of East Germany, and allowed German reunification, and allowed the unified Germany to remain in NATO, that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”. At least one of the parties to that discussion was there is good faith with the idea that the USSR was ready to join the west. But what the US really wanted was all of the USSR to join the west EXCEPT Russia. Jeffrey Sachs has much to say about this.
(43) Like I said, this is all top of mind and written in a rush so please forgive errors & omissions. I know there’s many important facts I haven’t mentioned such as the Budapest Memorandum and the expulsion of Tatars from Crimea. These are also important matters, but in my mind, this is and always has been a proxy war between the US/EU/NATO and Russia on the land of and with the bodies of Ukrainians. It didn’t have to be this way. Ditto the events in the middle east. It comes down to the US wanting to be the boss of the world. What the US will have to deal with in the future is a bifurcated global economy where it must take a back seat to China because the US is the biggest debtor in the world. Word to the wise: inflation is a debtor’s best friend.
I stated (17) The Donbas resistance is perplexed and angry as to why Russia has moved to bring these oblasts into the Russian Federation as it did with Crimea.
but I meant to say “why Russia has NOT moved”
(unable to edit so had to make correction this way)
Tony, that was an excellent summary of the US neocon-sponsored ukraine coup and war.
The ukraine war was clearly provoked.
I totally agree with your sentiments regarding the late Professor Stephen F. Cohen. We sure could use his sage judgment and towering scholarship at this time.
Thank goodness that Natylie provides us with informative articles.
Thank you for a very interesting article with a good analytic comparision on many themes! I and probably many readers may appreciate this highly.
In the modern world, normally functional countries can not either running out of money, go bankrupt or close down the shop and go home forever, it just does not happen. There are full of international economical institutions which can temporarily stabilize industrial national economies in crisis.
Some few rare malfunctional countries may totally fall out of this model, and all the heaviest burden of an economical disaster ends up fully with a suffering population, like in North Korea, a country with no in combination working economical, political and social system.
The critical sphere inside Russia to check out coming months and year(s), is the domestic bank system. It will show – and decide – if the putinist system is ”survivable”. Already now, we hear and experience that many Russian citizens are taking out their bank savings from their bank accounts, but that will be to no good in case a hyperinflation will smash the Russian post-war economy, these money at home in the bed mattress will be of almost no value, as during the Russian economical crashes both in January 1992 (when the Soviet planned economy finally crashed) and in the Asian economical break-down in August-September 1998. Most Russian citizens more or less ended up in personal bankrupcy, trying to sell out whatever they owned.
The coming post-war economy is what the Russian political and economical elites may fear and also misjudge, as the Russian economy of today has transferred and sunken into a full military industrial economy. The bitter lesson from the post-war German economy after the First World War in 1919-1921 is the most well-known historical and cautionary tale.
Ukraine has in that case a much better international position, it is fully based economically and politically being solidly both integrated and covered by the European and party also North American economical systems, altogether more than 25 times larger than the pre-war Russian national economy, and Ukraine today militarily being a fully de facto member of Nato. That is strategical hard facts. And it is not in the favour of the putinists. Europeans has seen this scenario before: the Franco era in Spain 1939-1975, isolated, brutal, repressive, poor and in stagnation with a non-existing political model, very close to the Russian situation today.
Because would countries like China – or even today’s very pro-western India – today be prepared and willing to help a putinist system in a post-war era economically, when at the same time risking the most more important trade with Europe and North America? Here seen from the Chinese-European economical axis being the largest and most important in the world economy, because here the both critically and heavily export dependent China to risk its export economy with Europe, the as the European Union economy is still larger than China’s. That will be the future Chinese headache. Because China’s growth and success is to its majority built up by European money in the first hand, the Americans on second place of importance. It is not a very nice choice for the Chinese economy, because they will be under heavy pressure, as also the Russian oligarch assets still being frozen, its majority in Europe.
Russia’s oil wealth funds (based on the Norwegian oil fund model) to be a national wealth security for the Russian future, are both soon fully exhausted, and as what we hear in and among open intelligence and analytical sources, so called ”OSINT”, soon over 75% of the Russian gold reserve is indeed sold out on the international bank market, receiving acute fast money, soon to disappear in the putinist warfare’s quicksand and quagmire.
So the Russian Achilles heel here is, and will be, in the end how the Russian bank system is and will handle the ”final war weeks and months” and the even far worse dangerous post-war economy, because this factor will be the harsh decisive factor for the survival of the putinist system, and if the population will be fronted by the economical disastrous results like in January 1992, August 1998 or the many social-economical blows for the North Korean people since the 1990’s. Because which international economical institutions in the world will – and also want to – help a post-war Russia still ruled by the putinists?
It is a question to which only the Sphinx of Delphi can reply.
ADMINISTRATIVE MESSAGE####TO THE EDITOR’S – NOT FOR PUCLICATION####
I see here that my text message reply here to you from 8th July at 12:05 PM all misses the (by me) division into parts/paragraphs have disappeared and resulted here in a full concentrated text without more elegant different pieces – if you want me to I can arrange this once again – because I did it originally.
Thanks for very nice text article and theme today!!
Many thanks im advance and kindest regards!
JN
Take care!
####MESSAGE#####To the EDITOR’S – NOT FOR PUBLICATION#####