Link here.

By Norm Solomon, CounterPunch, 12/8/23

Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. In a March 1983 speech to an audience of evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and, for good measure, “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Weeks later, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov accused the United States of pursuing an arms buildup to win a nuclear war; in his words, “not just irresponsible, it is insane.” Both countries were gunning their military-industrial engines in a feverish drive for more advanced nuclear arsenals.

Such was the frightening distemper of the times. But a grassroots movement calling for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons had quickly gained wide support and political momentum since Reagan took office. In April 1982, he responded to the growing upsurge of alarm with a radio address that tried to reassure. “Today, I know there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war. I welcome that concern,” Reagan said. He added that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Two months later, not mollified by soothing words, 1 million people gathered in New York’s Central Park at a demonstration for nuclear disarmament and peace. That protest was part of a transatlantic uprising against reckless escalation of the arms race. Activists struggled to challenge a spiraling arms contest propelled by two nations with very different political systems but mutual reliance on brandishing huge quantities of nuclear weaponry.

Deeply unsettling as that era was, the specter of omnicide now looms much larger. Inflamed tensions between Washington and Moscow while the Ukraine war rages — as well as between the U.S. and China, over Taiwan and the East China and South China seas — are making a nuclear conflagration plausible via any one of numerous scenarios. Meanwhile, disagreements over how to view relations between the U.S. and Russia are roiling peace groups and much of the left here at home. Fears of being perceived, if not smeared, as pro-Putin or sympathetic to Russia are palpable, with ongoing constraints on advocacy.

We hear next to nothing about the crying need to reinstate the Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaties canceled by President Trump or the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty canceled by President George W. Bush, while the absence of those pacts today makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by their Republican predecessors.

For his part, beginning with the Ukraine invasion, Putin has done much to boost atomic tensions. His threats to use nuclear weapons said the usually untrumpeted doctrine out loud. Both Russia (except for an eleven-year hiatus) and the United States have always been on record as asserting the option to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

The war in Ukraine has thrown the world closer to a thermonuclear precipice than ever. And, while daily horrors are being inflicted on Ukrainian people by Russia’s warfare, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that Putin isn’t worthy of negotiations over much of anything.

But if efforts for détente and arms control should be backburnered when a superpower is making horrific war on a country after an illegal invasion, neither Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin nor President Ronald Reagan got the memo. In 1967, while the U.S. government was escalating the Vietnam War, Kosygin met with President Lyndon Johnson in direct talks that lasted for more than a dozen hours at the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey. Twenty years later, Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House, where they signed the INF treaty; at the time, Soviet troops were continuing their war in Afghanistan, which took an estimated 100,000 Afghan lives, while the CIA provided military aid worth billions of dollars to mujahadeen resistance fighters.

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Midway through 1983, at the end of the published exchanges between E. P. Thompson and me, The Nation told readers that “the debate ventilates important issues, tactical and philosophical, confronting the antiwar movements in this country and in Europe.” Echoes of those important issues are with us now, and the stakes could not be higher.

Renowned as a social historian, Thompson was also a prominent leader of the European disarmament movement during the 1980s. He warned against “sleepwalkers in the peace movement” of the West who, he contended, were toeing the Soviet line while blaming the arms race on the United States. “Neither moralism nor fellow-traveling sentimentalism,” he wrote, “can be of any service in guiding the peace movement in its difficult relations with the Communist states.” The rulers of those states “are the ideological look-alikes of their opposite numbers in the West, thinking in the same terms of ‘balance’ and security through ‘strength.’”

In my view, the history of the nuclear arms race remained significant, with the United States as always in the lead. The fact that the U.S. was a country with far more freedom had not made its government more trustworthy in terms of nuclear weapons. As the Soviet dissident historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev had written a year earlier in The Nation, “despite the more open character of American society . . . the role of successive U.S. administrations has been, and continues to be, more provocative and less predictable than the Soviet Union’s in the global interrelationship between East and West.” They added: “Military-industrial complexes exist in all modern industrial societies, but they are under much less responsible control in the United States than in the USSR.”

At the close of our debate, I expressed doubt that the U.S. movement for disarmament and peace was in danger of being insufficiently critical of the Soviet Union. “A far greater danger is that, eager for respectability and fearful of finding itself in the line of fire of our nation’s powerful Red-baiting artilleries, it may unwittingly reinforce chronic American-Soviet antipathies . . . . We cannot reduce our society’s Cold War fervor by adding to it.”

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In the summer of 1985, Gorbachev announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions, and he invited the United States to follow suit. If reciprocated, the move would pave the way for both countries to end their underground detonations of nuclear warheads, closing an intentional loophole that had been left by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. But major U.S. news media were on guard. In the first CBS Evening News report on Gorbachev’s initiative, correspondent Lesley Stahl used the word “propaganda” four times. Influential newspapers were no less dismissive. A New York Times editorial called the moratorium “a cynical propaganda blast.”

Although the U.S. refused to reciprocate, Russia kept renewing its moratorium. In December 1985, when reporting news of an extension, CBS anchor Dan Rather began by saying: “Well, a little pre-Christmas propaganda in the air, a new arms-control offer from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” The Kremlin’s unrequited moratorium went on for nineteen months, while the Nevada Test Site shook with twenty-five nuclear explosions beneath the desert floor.

Later in the decade, the cumulative impacts of grassroots organizing and political pressure helped shift Reagan’s attitude enough to bring about some U.S.-Russian reproachment and genuine diplomacy. A stellar result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987. It was a triumph for activists and a wide array of other outspoken advocates who over the previous years had grown accustomed to epithets like “Kremlin dupes” and “Russia apologists.”

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Four decades later, such epithets are again common. American society’s Cold War fervor is somewhere near an all-time high. It doesn’t take much these days to be called pro-Putin; merely urging a ceasefire in Ukraine or substantive diplomacy can suffice.

“I think Putin is not only thrilled by the divide over whether we continue and at what levels to fund Ukraine, I think he is fomenting it as well,” Hillary Clinton said during a PBS NewsHour interview in October. She added: “When I see people parroting Russian talking points that first showed up on Russia Today or first showed up in a speech from a Russian official, that’s a big point scored for Putin.”

Such smeary tactics aim to paralyze discourse and prevent on-the-merits discussions. The techniques are timeworn. Twenty years ago, opponents of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq were often accused of parroting Iraqi talking points and serving the interests of Saddam Hussein. Now, in the prevalent media and political environments, the kinds of “talking points” that Clinton meant to defame include just about any assertion challenging the idea that the U.S. government should provide open-ended military aid to Ukraine while refusing to urge a ceasefire or engage in substantive diplomacy.

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During Reagan’s first term, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at between three and four minutes to apocalyptic midnight. It is now ninety seconds away, the closest ever.

Crucial lessons that President John Kennedy drew from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he articulated eight months later in his June 1963 speech at American University, are now in the dumpster at the Biden White House: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

But no matter how dangerous Biden’s policies toward Ukraine and Russia are, most sizable arms-control and disarmament groups in the United States have bypassed dissent. Few have pushed for serious negotiations to find a peaceful resolution. Many have, in effect, gone along with treating “diplomacy” as a dirty word. Such stances are particularly striking from organizations with an avowed mission to reduce the risks of nuclear war — even though the longer the war in Ukraine persists and the more it escalates, the greater the chances that those risks will turn into global nuclear annihilation.

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We can’t know E. P. Thompson’s outlook on the 21st century events that led to the current nuclear peril — he died in 1993 — but the core of his seminal 1980 essay “Protest and Survive” resonates now as a chilling wake-up shout to rouse us from habitual evasion. “I have come to the view that a general nuclear war is not only possible but probable, and that its probability is increasing,” he wrote. “We may indeed be approaching a point of no-return when the existing tendency or disposition towards this outcome becomes irreversible.” And yet, Thompson went on, “I am reluctant to accept that this determinism is absolute. But if my arguments are correct, then we cannot put off the matter any longer. We must throw whatever resources still exist in human culture across the path of this degenerative logic. We must protest if we are to survive. Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense.”

The essay quickly became the opening chapter in an anthology also titled Protest and Survive. Daniel Ellsberg wrote in the book’s introduction that “we must take our stand where we live, and act to protect our home and our family: the earth and all living beings.”

What Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism” finds its supreme expression in the routine of nuclear weapons policies, which rely on an extreme shortage of countervailing outcry and activism. The ultimate madness thrives on our daily accommodation to it.

This article was originally published by The Nation.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.

By Prof. Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 11/22/23

Of all the political events that have rocked Europe in recent years, it is probably fair to say that none have been as important, or as tragic, as the mass protest known as ‘Euromaidan’ that began in Ukraine ten years ago, on November 21, 2013. Euromaidan lasted four months, culminating in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. One cannot tell what condition Ukraine would have been in today were it not for Euromaidan. But it’s unlikely that it would have been as dire as the current reality. A full reckoning of what transpired is thus essential.

For this, one has to explore the context that made Euromaidan possible. This requires one to look at both internal and external factors, namely the divisions that existed within Ukrainian society, the peculiar ideology of Ukraine’s pro-European liberal intelligentsia, and the manner in which Ukraine became a battleground for competing geopolitical interests.

In 2013, Ukraine was what political scientists call a ‘cleft country,’ in other words a country containing more than one distinct cultural grouping. Roughly speaking, the two main groups consisted of a largely Russian speaking east and a largely Ukrainian speaking west. Religious, economic, and political differences also divided these two. The east, for instance, was the home of heavy industry, while the west was more rural. The east and the west also voted for different political candidates. In 2004, for instance, Viktor Yanukovych won over 90 percent of the vote in the eastern area of Donbas, while his rival Viktor Yushchenko won over 90 percent of the vote in the western region of Galicia. The political divisions were very stark indeed.

Ukraine nevertheless survived, in part because the balance between the two sides was fairly even and each took turns to hold power. As long as neither side sought to impose its vision of Ukrainian society too firmly on the other, they were able to sustain what was an unstable equilibrium but an equilibrium nonetheless.

Euromaidan changed all that, as the violent overthrow of Yanukovych broke all the previous rules of the game. So too did the determination of Euromaidan’s leaders to make what they called a ‘civilizational choice’ against Russia and for Europe. From the late Soviet period onward, the most deeply held mantra of Ukrainian, and also Russian, liberal intellectuals has been the need to ‘return to civilization,’ by which is meant full-scale absorption into the cultural and political milieu of Western Europe. Europe is regarded as the embodiment of ‘normality,’ whereas Russia is seen as the embodiment of Soviet backwardness and oppression. The path to Europe will involve the eradication of the ‘Sovok,’ the ‘Soviet person,’ supposedly characterized by submissiveness to authority, aggressive imperialism, and retrograde social values. In the Ukrainian context, the Sovok was often identified with the working class of the east of the country. Becoming European implied the elimination of the culture, values, and historical memory of that particular class.

When President Yanukovych declared in November 2013 that he would not sign an association agreement with the European Union, he struck a massive blow to the identity of Ukrainian liberal intellectuals. It was this that sparked the Euromaidan revolt. At the same time, the cultural language of the Euromaidan protestors posed a direct threat to the identity of their ‘Sovok’ opponents. During the 2004 Orange Revolution, the pro-European camp had avoided talking in terms of ‘civilizational choices.’ In 2013, they were not so cautious. In her book about Euromaidan entitled The Ukrainian Night, American academic Marci Shore recounts how one of the protestors told her: “To these people [those opposed to Euromaidan] it seems that their history, their lives, are being taken from them. Perhaps that’s so, Marci. It will seem strange to you, but we don’t feel sorry for these people at all, and we do not even want to understand them.” Needless to say, ignoring others in this way proved to be an extremely foolish attitude.

Unfortunately, it was a folly that Western states did their best to encourage. In 2008, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, both well known for their Russophobic tendencies, successfully persuaded the EU to adopt a new ‘Eastern Partnership’ program, which promised funds for democracy promotion and economic development in former Soviet states. Documents published by Wikileaks make it clear Sikorski and Bildt aimed to pull post-Soviet states away from Russia’s orbit and into that of the EU. The program’s originators viewed its “purpose [as] challenging Russia’s influence in the target countries,” with the Eastern Partnership’s being “a tool to expand EU cooperation with the likes of Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, and to loosen Russia’s grip on these countries.”

By advancing this agenda, Sikorski, Bildt, and the EU were playing with fire. From the start, the Kremlin viewed the Eastern Partnership as a direct threat to core national interests. As an American diplomat cable published by Wikileaks stated, the Russians had a deep “suspicion of EU member-states” motives, particularly with Sweden and Poland as the main drivers behind the proposal. According to the cable, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told EU ambassadors that the partnership program was equivalent to NATO expansion. In Moscow’s eyes, the EU was intruding into areas where it had “privileged interests,” and was creating “new barriers” between Russia and other countries. Russia was determined to resist.

Western states were well aware of Russia’s attitude, but the EU pressed on anyway, offering Ukraine an association agreement. This came at considerable cost to Ukraine. For instance, its terms meant that Ukraine would have to come into line with European free trade regulations by cutting subsidies to Ukrainian industries. This would directly threaten Yanukovych’s electoral base in the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine. In return, all the EU had to offer were promises of marginally improved access to European markets, along with a small loan that fell far short of the Ukrainian government’s immediate financial needs.

Sensing an opportunity, the Russian government stepped in to nix the deal, offering Yanukovych a large loan at a very favourable interest rate, with no conditions attached. The Russian offer was far more attractive than the European one. At the last minute, therefore, Yanukovych backed off from the EU association agreement and took the Russian loan instead. Their dreams of European integration shattered, the Ukraine’s pro-European liberals came out to protest, and Euromaidan began. The rest, as they say, is history.

One might well argue that Russia had no right to a zone of ‘privileged interests’ and that the social, economic, and political reforms endorsed by the EU’s Eastern Partnership and the Euromaidan protestors were in Ukraine’s interests. The problem lay not in the actions of the EU or the Maidan protestors but in the violent response to them. There is much to this argument. But any plan that ignores how others respond to it cannot be a good one. This was something that the West and its Ukrainian supporters never seemed to have considered. Both seemed to imagine that they could ‘damn the torpedoes’ and go full speed ahead, ignoring opposing interests and imposing their will without any adverse reaction. Sadly for Ukraine, they were proven to be horribly wrong.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

Link here.

By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 12/7/23

As the prospect of a Russian military victory in Ukraine looms ever larger, speculation is growing about the extent of President Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions. How far westward into Ukraine will his tanks, drones and troops roll?

There is also a lot of lobbying. Russian hardliners are pressing Putin to seek Ukraine’s total defeat and occupation, while Western moderates hope for a peace that will limit Russia’s territorial acquisitions to Crimea and the already-occupied provinces of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe. Such a settlement would leave Ukraine with 80% of its prewar territory, a buffer zone against Russia east of the Dnieper river, and economically vital access to the Black Sea.

The stated goals of the so-called Special Military Operation (SMO) launched by Putin in February 2022 were to demilitarise, denazify and neutralise Ukraine. There were no territorial demands or claims. Russia’s official recognition of the secession from Ukraine of Donetsk and Lugansk and the signing of defence pacts with the two statelets provided the pretext for war but they didn’t join the Russian Federation until October 2022.

When Russia attempted to negotiate a ceasefire and a peace deal with Ukraine in March 2022 the proposal on the table was that Donetsk and Lugansk would remain independent. There was even a suggestion the Donbass rebels could eventually return to Ukrainian sovereignty, albeit with a very high degree of regional autonomy.

It was the failure of the Istanbul peace negotiations and the continuation of the war that made Russia’s annexation of the Donbass inevitable; same was true of Kherson and Zaporozhe. Occupied as part of Russia’s military operations to safeguard the Crimean peninsula’s strategic situation, these two Black Sea coastal provinces, also contain large numbers of ethnic Russians who want to secede from Ukraine, though far fewer than those in the Donbass.

in September 2022 all four provinces staged referendums that, predictably, produced astronomical majorities in favour of uniting with Russia. Putin signed the accession decrees on 30 September and was adamant the referendum results reflected the free choice of millions of people. He called on Kiev to return to the negotiating table but told Russia’s Federation Council: ‘the choice of the people in Donetsk, Lugansk. Zaporozhe and Kherson will not be discussed. That decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it’, he proclaimed to rapturous applause.

Yet the boundaries of these newly incorporated territories were not specified. Had Russia annexed the entirety of the four regions or just those bits it currently occupied? In the case of Donetsk, for example, 40% of the province remained under Ukrainian control. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, further muddied the waters when he stated the borders of Donetsk and Lugansk would be those extant in 2014, while the precise boundaries of Zaporozhe and Kherson would be determined following local consultations.

On this matter Putin has kept his own counsel, but for symbolic as well strategic reason, he will certainly strive to complete the conquest of the two Donbass territories, though the question of whether that area is co-terminus with the provincial boundaries of prewar Ukraine remains unclear.

Russian hardliners hope he also harbours ambitions to capture the Black Sea port of Odessa and, in the north, to seize Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkov. But while both cities fall within the territorial boundaries of what Putin regards as historical Russia, they are also populated by large numbers of ethnic Ukrainians as well as Russian speakers, many of whom continue to support the Kiev regime.

Notwithstanding Russia’s many military successes in Ukraine, so far its armed forces have managed to capture and hold only one very large city – Donetsk’s Mariupol. Absent a complete Ukrainian military collapse, the battles for Odessa and Kharkov would be long, hard and costly to the Russian side. There would also be massive civilian casualties, including among pro-Russia Ukrainians.

Some observers believe that sooner or later Russia will seek to occupy all of Ukraine east of the Dnieper including the provinces of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Chernihiv and Poltava – the aim being to reduce Kiev-controlled Ukraine to a rump dysfunctional state that, even with continuing Western support, will no longer constitute a strategic threat to Russia. Such is the fervent hope of many Russian nationalists, but the conquest and sustained occupation of that much territory would require further rounds of Russian military mobilisation and could take years to complete.

The Russian army’s current actions and dispositions indicate an intention to maintain the war of attrition with Ukraine all along the line of contact, to capture Avdiivka and then advance 100 kilometres or so to the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk line, thereby occupying most of Donetsk. Russia is also steadily building up its armed forces and armaments to a level that would enable it to execute large-scale, war-winning offensive manoeuvres, but probably not before summer 2024.

At the Valdai Club annual meeting in Sochi in early October, Putin described the Ukraine war as primarily a ‘civilisational’ rather than territorial a conflict, the SMO’s initial main aim being to protect the people of the Donbass, who were being bombarded by Ukraine’s armed forces.

At that same gathering, Margarita Simonyan, the RT TV chief, asked Putin where the SMO would stop, specifically whether its territorial bounds would include the historically Russian city of Odessa. Putin replied:

“As for where we should stop, it is not about territories, it is about security guarantees for the peoples of Russia and the Russian state, and this is a more complex issue than some territory. It is about the security of people who consider Russia their Motherland and whom we consider our people. This is a complex question that requires discussion.”

Another Valdai question for Putin was: wherein lies Russia’s ‘greatness.’ Again, he sidestepped the territorial issue:

“With regard to Russia’s greatness, it currently lies in strengthening its sovereignty. Sovereignty is based on self-sufficiency in technology, finance, the economy in general, defence and security.”

At a meeting of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation on 3 November. Vladimir Rogov, the head of occupied Zaporozhe’s regional government, pressed Putin to commit to capturing the province’s namesake capital, which remains under Ukrainian control:

“I come from the city of Zaporozhe which is occupied by a gang of drug addicts and Nazis at the moment. When other locals learnt that I would attend a meeting with you, they wanted to relate to you that the city of Zaporozhe is waiting for Russian troops. Zaporozhe residents say: “Russians Help Russians”, and “Everything for the Front, Everything for Victory.”

Putin refused to be drawn. Instead he restated his well-known views about the arbitrary historical formation of modern Ukraine’s frontiers and reminded his audience that the root causes of the war were Ukrainian persecution of its ethnic Russian citizens and NATO expansion into Ukraine. Pointedly, he added that had Russia’s relations with Ukraine remained ‘fraternal’, it would not have been necessary to take any action at all, not even in relation to Crimea. But ‘we had to protect people from this Nazi scum. What were we supposed to do? They simply forced on us a choice where we could do nothing else but stand up in defence of the people living there. The same thing happened with Donbass and with Novorossiya [i.e. Kherson & Zaporozhe].Of course, we need to do everything we can to ensure that the entry of these territories is smooth, natural, and that people feel the result as quickly as possible.

Another local politician keen to commit Putin to specific territorial goals is Vladimir Saldo, the chief of the Russian-occupied parts of Kherson province. In a speech to a conference on the theme of ‘Proud Russia’ organised by Putin’s United Russia party at the end of November, he pledged that Kherson’s namesake provincial capital – from which Russia’s armed forces had been forced to retreat a year earlier – would definitely return to Russian control. On his Telegram channel he went even further, writing:

“I spoke on Friday with the Supreme Commander-in-Chief [Putin] and with the military – everyone is determined to return to Kherson. We will liberate our land. Next will be Nikolaev, Odessa and Izmail”.

So far, there has been no Kremlin confirmation that Putin said or indicated any such thing, or that the SMO’s aims include the capture or re-capture of these cities. In all likelihood Saldo’s claim is no more than his wishful thinking, which is not to say his dreams will remain unfulfilled.

On the basis of Putin’s stated position, his territorial ambitions in Ukraine could be quite limited and he may be willing to forego future territorial gains for the sake of peace terms that will guarantee Russia’s security and safeguard the welfare of his compatriots that remain part of Ukraine. Howeve, his security before territory stance keeps all options open, including the occupation of far more Ukrainian territory.

The longer the war goes on, the further into Ukraine that Russia’s armed forces advance, the more Ukraine’s defences falter – the greater will be the temptation for Putin to listen to the siren voices of his so-called turbo-patriots and grab as much Ukrainian territory as he can.