Focuses on Putin’s press conference at the SCO summit in Samarkand. He addressed criticisms of the SMO in Ukraine, gave some hints as to what may come, and dealt with some implicit criticisms of himself.
Ukraine Battlefields
Not much happening. More Ukrainian attempts on Russian positions in Kherson. Each has failed. The bridgehead at Adievka may be in its final days because of the stronger current arising from Russia’s destruction of the upriver dam. The Ukrainians have persisted with this bridgehead despite having gained nothing from it (usual demonstration of PR heroics over longer term interest? – OBB)
Further east there has been a flurry of rumors that Russia had withdrawn from the eastern part of Kupiansk (?) on the Ostol river, but this morning it is clear that the area is still under Russian control.
Is this area of eastern Kharkiv essential for Russia? Will it complicate Russian supplies? The British MOD repeated that narrative this morning. Mercouris considers the claim to be nonsense. He notes that Donetsk and Lugansk border on Russia’s Rostov oblast, together with one other. Rostov-on-Don is the official capital of southern Russia, heavily industrialized, and also very agricultural. The majority of Russian supplies go directly from Rostov to the Donbass, and Russia is not at all dependent on Kharkiv.
In the 2014-2015 war between the coup regime’s army and the people’s republics, western powers were so concerned about supplies from Rostov that the entire Ukrainian plan at that time, which failed, was to gain control of the border with Russia and cut off supplies to Donbass from Rostov. This led directly to a battle at which the Ukrainian army suffered a catastrophic defeat.
We are getting more and more information that Russian reinforcements are rolling in to the northern Lugansk region. In the ZPNN region there is much debate about a possible Ukrainian offensive, but nothing so far has happened: the longer Ukraine delays, the more difficult it will become because Russians are reinforcing fast and the climatic conditions will become more challenging for movements across the Dnieper. Likewise in the south Donetsk city of Uglada. There is a lot of news about advances by Donetsk militia around the ring road of Donetsk City. There was a failed Ukrainian attempt to retake Peskiy, at which Ukraine suffered heavy loss of life. There is continuing heavy fighting around Bakhmut.
Putin’s Press Conference (with Russian media only) at Samarkand
Putin received pointed questions from Russian journalists at this televised conference. Mercouris reads from the Kremlin’s own transcript. Western media make lots of claims about what is said at these kinds of event, and their accounts are often based on mistranslations, or taken badly out of context, or simply invented. Russian is a very subtle, nuanced language, and the Kremlin is very careful when it translates into English, seeking to achieve the same nuances that Putin sought to give.
Putin talked about the SMO in response to recent Ukrainian raids, even on Russian soil, and answers a question as to why Russia’s response is restrained. Putin said there is nothing new about this. Western countries cultivate the idea of Russian collapse. They have had a long standing plan, going back to WW1, to split Russia up. Mercouris notes that Putin conflates the Soviet Union with “historical Russia” of which Russia is its nucleus. Let the West address their own challenges, Putin says, and most likely they are doing harm to themselves. He knows the western objective and says it wont succeed, nor will the west’s attempt to pit Russia against China. The west’s trying to do these things will work against the west’s own interests. But they have always been seeking Russia’s dissolution. It is unfortunate they decided to use Ukraine for these purposes.
The SMO was designed to prevent events taking this turn. For Russia, Mercouris explains, the SMO is an existential matter. Russian authorities cannot allow the SMO to fail. Russia has the resources to make it succeed. The ultimate outcome will be Russian victory. Putin would not say Russia’s response is “restrained,” but notes that in the course of the military operation Russia has encountered terrorist attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure. Russia was at first quite restrained but this will not last forever. Recently Russian armed forces have struck blows against Ukraine’s energy system – Putin calls them “warning shots.” If such Ukrainian attacks continue, Russia will respond more forcefully.
Terrorist attacks are a serious matter; it is in the use of terrorist methods such as has been seen in the killing of officials in the liberated territories and attacks on administrative buildings for which the Ukrainian government has taken credit. We even see attempts at perpetrating terrorist attacks on the Russian federation, including attacks near Russian nuclear facilities and nuclear power stations. These may not have been reported. He is not even talking about the ZPNN. Those attacks have been perpetrated by Ukraine, something which has now been acknowledged by Ukrainian officials and by the NYT. Putin says Russia is monitoring the situation and will respond if Ukraine fails to realize that this behavior is unacceptable – they are not different from terrorist attacks – the clearest indicator that the possibility of upgrading the SMO to the status of an ATO is probably about to happen.
This does not necessarily mean a Russian mass mobilization, but may involve calling up reserves. What it does mean is that if the SMO is upgraded to an ATO, then that will give Russian military the freedom to attack civilian infrastructure, perhaps to target Ukrainian military leaders and security officials and perhaps even the political leadership, things which up to this moment in time they have not been permitted to do.
There is a discussion about the special security guarantees that Ukraine is demanding from the West. Putin hasn’t even bothered to read them. If the West were to take them seriously we would be in World War 3 (says Mercouris). Talking about the SMO plan, Putin says the plan will not be adjusted. It leaves open the possibility of an upgrade to an ATO but the terms of reference may still be the same. The General Staff takes real-time decisions: but the main goal is to liberate the entire territory of the Donbass which continues despite Ukrainian attempts to limit the Russian offensive, which is slow and gradual. Putin points out that Russia is fighting with “contracted forces,” not the Russian Army as such. Russia is not “in a rush.” The main task remains the same. So secondary objectives, such as holding on to Kharkiv, are less important. Putin notes Kiev’s active counteroffensive and says “let us see how it unfolds, and how it ends,” and notes that Ukraine has dropped negotiations in favor of winning on the battlefield – let them try!, says Putin.
Mercouris makes an aside to an article by Gordon Hahn, where Hahn discusses a paper written by Ukraine’s forces commander. It is now unequivocally the case that the Ukrainian command is not in favor of these multiple Ukrainian offensives. This demonstrates the rift between Zelenskiy in concert with his British and American advisors, who appear to be throwing away the very reserves that the Ukrainian command want to build up, and his military leaders. Putin clearly thinks Zelenskiy’s approach is the wrong one, that the Ukrainian offensives will ultimately fail.
The press conference ended with an angry debate about Ukraine’s failure to deliver its grain supplies to the Global South (they have mainly gone, instead, to the EU). Ukraine’s exports are now almost entirely agricultural.
What is the ultimate take? Putin is unfazed by Ukraine’s counteroffensive. He is confident in Russia’s General Staff. His main focus is the liberation of Donbass, which is proceeding steadily. It is highly likely that the SMO will be upgraded to ATO. He is clearly indicating that Ukraine’s conduct is setting up a situation that demands this response. This may happen very soon; – Shoigu is due to visit the Russian parliament on Monday and may announce something there.
Russia and India (based on both Russian and Indian transcripts)
Putin’s meeting in Samarkand with Indian premier Modi makes it clear that the relationship between India and Russia is coming to be second in importance to the relationship between Russia and China.
India and China appear to welcome these developments, despite their border tensions. Their mutual links to Russia will help them manage these border issues.
British media are trying to make out that there are problems with these talks between Russia and India (as they did the day before with the discussion between Putin and Jinping, by focusing just on one word – “concerns” – totally out of context). This time, the focus is on some of Modi’s words that British media have interpreted as a rebuke to Putin for the war in Ukraine. The reality is the diametric opposite.
The actual exchange between Putin and Modi shows that Putin said warm things about India, Modi, and the SCO and then specifically addressed the question of Ukraine. He said that he knew Modi’s position on Ukraine and that Russia would do its best to end the war as soon as possible. But it cannot, because Zelenskiy has chosen the objective of battlefield victory over negotiation. To this, Modi says that he knows that today’s era is not one of war, and acknowledges that he and Putin have talked before of these matters and that they will talk further.
It is clear that Modi is not criticizing Putin. He understands that Putin is trying to bring an end to the war but that Ukraine is refusing to negotiate. Unlike Zelenskiy, both Putin and Modi are saying they are committed to diplomacy. Modi was very careful to take an outwardly neutral position on the war, thankful for Ukraine’s efforts to allow the departure of Indian students from Ukraine at the beginning of the war. But if he is critical of anybody he is critical of Ukraine, not Russia. Modi also says that the relationship between India and Russia has strengthened, and has evolved over many decades; Russia’s relationship with India has been and in the eyes of the world is an “unbreakable friendship:” – the journey for both started at the same time. Modi and Putin have had a personal relationship for over twenty years and both men are constantly working to improve it for the benefit of their respective peoples.
Syria and Turkey
Erdogan of Turkey has said that had Assad attended the SCO, Erdogan would have been willing to meet with him, confirming that the rapprochement between Turkey and Syria is intensifying. A summit meeting between the two is in the works. This is a game changer with respect to developments in the Middle East.
*Link to transcript of Putin’s press conference following SCO conference here.
When a major political figure dies, it’s always significant what’s singled out for forgetting. That’s the case with former president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, who’s been lionized in the Western press since his death last week, lauded for his efforts to democratize and bring new freedoms to the former USSR, and whose legacy has now been reduced to tatters by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
World leaders praised him. U.S. president Joe Biden feted Gorbachev as “a man of remarkable vision.” UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said he was “one of the great figures of the 20th century.” The president of the European commision said he was someone whose legacy is “one we will not forget.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul called him “a figure who made the world better” and urged us to “learn from his legacy.” “Putin seems to view himself as the anti-Gorbachev,” writes David Remnick of the New Yorker, expressing his hope that “around the world,” Gorbachev’s belief in “democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power” would “prevail.” Putin’s pointed refusal to attend Gorbachev’s funeral became something of a mini-scandal in the West since his death.
This is largely in line with how the Western press has treated Gorbachev over the last ten years especially, when the former Soviet minister had offered mounting criticism of Putin’s authoritarianism at home. There’s no shortage of coverage of Gorbachev slamming the Russian president, warning of the return of Stalinism and totalitarianism, or his criticisms of dubious Russian elections, points the former Soviet president has made again and again over the years.
But there’s another, overlooked element of Gorbachev’s legacy, one that’s as absent from today’s eulogies as it was ignored by officials when he was alive. That’s Gorbachev’s harsh criticism of U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, particularly toward Russia, along with his frequent warnings that the decision-making in Washington was destabilizing the world, and his urgent demands that the United States and Russia engage in robust diplomacy. It’s not hard to see why this has been erased: many of Gorbachev’s points are today dismissed in the West purely as Putin apologism and pro-war excuse-making.
“They Declared Victory”
The man exalted as the “anti-Putin” has often assailed U.S. hubris in foreign policy after the Cold War. In one of his final interviews before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gorbachev criticized the “triumphant mood in the West, especially in the United States” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
“They grew arrogant and self-confident. They declared victory in the Cold War,” Gorbachev complained.
This wasn’t an outburst from an elderly statesman in the twilight of his life, but an echo of criticisms he’d been leveling for years. All the way back in 1998, Gorbachev, writing in Time magazine, lightly admonished Bill Clinton’s talk of making the 21st century “the next American century,” asking how such “rhetoric rings in the rest of the world.” A disappointed Gorbachev noted that when the Soviet Union collapsed, “the West could not resist declaring victory in the Cold War, and the U.S. saw an opportunity to extend its influence to the former Soviet bloc.” He cautioned that the U.S. tendency to see itself as having “a right to decide for others, to impose American institutions and to promote the American way of life” was not a style of leadership conducive to “world peace and stability.”
But as the years wore on, the tone of these criticisms became more stern. “Americans have a severe disease—worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex,” he said in 2006, before attacking then Vice President Dick Cheney and then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “hawks protecting the interests of the military—shallow people.”
“The American media trumpeted … about the victory in the Cold War, that socialism is down,” he complained three years later. “This disease of extreme self-confidence led to it—the [belief] that things would always go on this way. And it did last long … I think that now everyone is learning a hard lesson.” Two years later, he again complained about the “euphoria” and “winner’s complex” that emerged in the “American political elite” after the end of the Cold War.
“The United States could not resist the temptation to announce its ‘victory’ in the Cold War. … The ‘sole remaining superpower’ staked a claim to monopoly leadership in world affairs. That, and the equating of the breakup of the Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War, which in reality had ended two years before, has had far-reaching consequences.”
“They were rubbing their hands, saying, ‘How nice! We had been trying to do something about the Soviet Union for decades, and it ate itself up!’” he said in 2016, complaining that the West failed to embrace the possibilities for cooperation he believed his reforms had opened up.
The “Mistake” of NATO Expansion
Gorbachev often criticized this mentality with particular reference to the U.S.-led policy of NATO expansion, widely criticized at the time as unnecessary and destabilizing, and which officials and commentators today deny has played any role in either the ongoing war in Ukraine, or deteriorating U.S.-Russia relations more generally.
Gorbachev criticized expansion in the harshest terms from the very start. “I believe it’s a mistake. It’s a bad mistake,” he said in a 1997 speech he made in Washington, as the plan was set into motion. “And I’m not persuaded by the assurances that we hear that Russia has nothing to worry about.”
Gorbachev warned—presciently, as it turned out—that the move would spark backlash in Russia, hardening the hardliners and empowering political conservatives. “I feel that if the same kind of games continue to be played, if one country plays some card against the other country, then all of those problems, all of those issues that we have been mentioning today, will be very difficult to resolve,” he said.
Despite receiving a standing ovation in the U.S. Capital, Gorbachev was ignored. Twenty-four years later, his opinion had only hardened.
“The ‘winners’ decided to build a new empire,” he said in 2021. “Hence the idea of NATO expansion.”
“The Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted,” he told the Telegraph in 2008.
In the same interview, Gorbachev complained that “we had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them,” because “the United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently.” The conservative newspaper noted that Gorbachev’s statement “mirrors the most belligerently anti-Western speeches of Vladimir Putin,” and that he “sounded like the ageing hardliners he struggled against in the Kremlin during the 1980s” for railing against the military-industrial complex.
“Whereas American interests extend thousands of miles, and to many continents, let’s accept that Russia has natural interests in the former Soviet states. Let’s have a dialogue about this,” he had said four years earlier. He elaborated on the importance of taking Russia’s interests into account years later in a 2016 interview: “The relations between us are so important and concern everyone else, so we must take the interests of others into account.”
This critique extended right up to the escalating crisis over Ukraine. In the very same 2009 interview in which Gorbachev gave the harshest criticisms of Putin he had offered up to that point, he echoed Putin and his officials’ long-held objections to Ukraine’s potential membership, questioning the wisdom of the idea. By 2016, seven years later, he was more strident.
“NATO has begun preparations for escalating from the Cold War into a hot one,” he warned, in the context of deteriorating diplomatic relations and intensifying military exercises in Europe by Russia and NATO members, the United States in particular. “All the rhetoric in Warsaw just yells of a desire almost to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defense, but actually they are preparing for offensive operations.”
Today, these words—which suggest that even though Moscow bears primary responsibility for the war it chose to launch, we need to understand the role Western foreign policy choices played in triggering such an appalling decision—are anathema in a political climate where everyone from the Pope to Noam Chomsky is attacked as being a war supporter or even a fascist sympathizer for so much as noting the existence of Western provocations.
That same year, in 2016, Gorbachev suggested that a neutral Ukraine was a solution to the worsening crisis, stating that “a democratic and unaligned Ukraine is in the interests of the Ukrainian people,” and that this be codified in the country’s constitution. Instead, three years later, it was Ukraine’s future entry into NATO that was enshrined in the document.
For Gorbachev, this was no doubt a particularly sore point. Both documents and the recollections of the players involved have firmly established that he was assured by U.S. and NATO officials that the alliance wouldn’t move east if a reunified Germany became a member, a promise he failed to get in writing. It wouldn’t be surprising if Gorbachev held a special bitterness over the fact that he’d been misled.
But he also made clear the issue was about something bigger. As a committed multilateralist, Gorbachev viewed NATO’s expansion—along with its transformation from a defensive alliance to a vehicle for proactive military force—as a blow to a budding world order where problems would be resolved via international law, diplomacy, and institutions like the United Nations.
“The United States and its allies instead decided to expand NATO eastward, bringing that military alliance closer to Russia’s borders while claiming for it the role of a pan-European or even a global policeman,” he said in 2011. “This usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it.”
“International organizations, particularly the United Nations, crippled by the unilateralism of the United States and NATO, are still faltering, unable to fulfill their task of conflict settlement,” he concluded.
Even before the turn of the century, he had made this point, quoting John F. Kennedy’s vision of a peace that wasn’t defined by “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” but was a “product of many nations.” This meant prioritizing working through the UN rather than through NATO, he had said.
Unilateralism “Unworthy of a Great Power”
These critiques of U.S. foreign policy weren’t limited to NATO expansion. Echoing numerous experts and even Putin himself, Gorbachev was scathing about a host of instances of Washington unilateralism that dented relations between the two countries, starting with NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.
“The United States is conducting itself irresponsibly on the world stage,” he charged that year, in an early criticism of what he called Washington’s “superiority and victory complex.”
Gorbachev called the Bill Clinton administration’s decision to resolve the Kosovo crisis through a unilateral bombing campaign “uncivilized” and “unworthy of a great power.”
“The argument that you intervened in Yugoslavia ‘because you could’ only encouraged nuclear-threshold countries to do everything possible to arm themselves with nuclear weapons,” he warned.
The same year, he told Larry King that NATO’s air strikes, done without UN authorization, were a “mistake.”
“I believe that instead this will boomerang and they will certainly rue this and the view of the people, not just the Yugoslav people, but the people throughout the world, is very negative,” he said. Meanwhile, he urged the Russian government to “not lose our heads,” and “stick to the position that it is for a political settlement.” (The later deployment of Russian troops to the conflict nearly triggered war between the two nuclear powers).
The NATO bombing was arguably the most pivotal early episode in the decline of U.S.-Russian relations, even more so than the alliance’s first eastward expansion. The pro-Western president Boris Yeltsin announced he was “deeply angered,” cut Moscow’s ties to NATO, and recalled his chief military representative to the alliance, while a Russian man shot up the U.S. embassy in Moscow with a submachine gun. Decades later, Putin himself pointed to the bombing as the starting point of deteriorating relations, as well as to justify his illegal annexation of Crimea.
Gorbachev continued to inveigh against Washington foreign policy as the years went by.
“While America’s role is acknowledged throughout the world, her claim to hegemony, not to say domination, is not similarly recognized,” he wrote in 2000 in an open letter to the newly elected George W. Bush. He accused the United States of continuing “to operate along an ideological track identical to the one it followed during the Cold War — but now without a cold war,” pointing to “the expansion of NATO eastward, the handling of the Yugoslav crisis, the military theory and practice of U.S. rearmament,” and said that responsibility for worsening relations “must be shared between Russian and American leadership.” In one particularly prescient passage, he wrote that:
“For 10 years, U.S. foreign policy has been formulated as if it were the policy of a victor in war, the Cold War. But at the highest reaches of U.S. policy-making no one has grasped the fact that this could not be the basis for formulating post-Cold War policy. In fact, there has been no ’pacification.’ On the contrary, there has been a heightening of inequalities, tension and hostility, with most of the last directed toward the United States. Instead of seeing an increase in U.S. security, the end of the Cold War has seen a decline. It is not hard to imagine that, should the United States persist in its policies, the international situation will continue to deteriorate.”
Calling for finding “mutually acceptable” solutions as U.S.-Russia relations seemed to warm a year later, Gorbachev chided those in the United States who wished to deploy a missile defense system and enlarge NATO over Russian objections. “The subtext is: if, to achieve these goals, we must sometimes talk nice to the Russians, let’s do so,” he wrote. “The same pundits and politicians are equally blunt about consultations with American allies and partners: we can talk, but in the end we shall do what’s good for us.” (Gorbachev’s words eerily anticipated Clinton’s deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott’s later explanation for the U.S. push to expand NATO: “We do what we can in our own interest.”).
“One would have to be very naïve to think that such a strategy would not be resisted,” Gorbachev warned.
Ten years later, Gorbachev charged that “as long as the West insisted on its purported victory in the Cold War, it meant that no change was needed in the old Cold War thinking … such as using military force and political and economic pressure to impose one model on everyone.” Pointing to the 1999 NATO bombing, the Iraq War, and U.S. military threats against Iran, he lamented that, especially in the United States, “policy-making and political thinking are still militarized,” and that this mindset had made the UN and Security Council “expendable or at best an impediment.”
A few years later, he laid out his hypothetical advice to Putin—who had by then returned to the Russian presidency for a third term over Gorbachev’s public objections—for managing U.S.-Russia relations:
“I learned that you can listen to the Americans, but you cannot trust them. When they get an idea to do something, they’ll turn the world onto a different axis to get it done.”
The Road to Another Versailles
Gorbachev’s condemnations of U.S. foreign policy were often paired with warnings about humiliating or ignoring Russia, and the deleterious effect it would have both on public opinion and political sentiment within the country, as well as global stability more generally.
“I think we have a unique chance to create a new quality of relations with the West,” he said in 2004, at the tail end of Putin’s early attempts to ally Russia with the United States, viewed within Russsia as one more unreciprocated bit of outreach by another pro-Western president. “But we don’t want to be beggars. We don’t want to be treated by the EU or by the United States like we are down; that is something we will not accept.”
Seven years later, Gorbachev would bemoan that that despite “numerous declarations of cooperation and even strategic partnership,” post-Soviet Russia “is still being treated as an outsider,” and had not been “given a voice in resolving key problems, and obstacles were put in the way of its integration into the European and global economy.” Shortly after, in 2014, Gorbachev again cited this treatment to explain the emergence of a New Cold War. The West had “tried to turn us into some kind of backwater, a province,” and tried to “push us out of politics” instead of treating Russia like an equal partner.
“Our nation could not let that pass,” he said. “It’s not just about pride. It’s about a situation where people speak to you however they want, impose limitations, and so on. It’s America calling the shots in everything!”
By 2008, the U.S.-Russia relationship had again reached a nadir, owing to a confluence of factors. On the Russian side, there was Putin’s increasing authoritarianism at home and his meddling in Ukrainian politics, and his anger at U.S. criticism of both. On the U.S. side, there were a series of foreign policy decisions Moscow had stressed were contrary to its foreign policy interests, including Bush’s controversial announcement that he would pursue neighboring Ukraine and Georgia’s membership into NATO.
“Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts,” Gorbachev protested in a New York Times editorial in 2008, four months after Bush’s declaration. “Here’s the independence of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?”
Pointing to talk about rethinking the U.S. approach to Russia, Gorbachev urged officials to rethink one thing in particular: “the habit of talking to Russia in a condescending way, without regard for its positions and interests.”
“The politicians in America sometimes act in a way that seems disrespectful toward our country and our people,” he cautioned a month later. “The Russians are people who value their dignity. You better not mess with that.”
In Gorbachev’s warnings, we can see the shadows of the road not traveled after World War One. After that conflict, the Allies embarked on a short-sighted attempt to contain a future resurgent Germany, treating the nation as a defeated power, imposing on it a harsh reparations regime, and generally implementing measures felt by Germans to be a national humiliation—all of it feeding into a dangerous upsurge of German nationalism that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, a second World War.
Gorbachev himself had explicitly brought up this comparison in 1997, warning the West not to impose the kind of peace that the Allies had on Germany after World War One.
“You may not humiliate a nation, a people, and think that it will have no consequences,” he said.
Dialogue At All Costs
But arguably Gorbachev’s most important words—just as ignored and unspeakable in today’s political climate—were his warnings about nuclear war and his urgent calls for peace. Despite his brutal assessment of U.S. foreign policy, Gorbachev simultaneously spent the past thirty years urging cooperative U.S.-Russia relations, and calling for dialogue between the two governments without delay, in spite of their deep mutual mistrust and what he viewed as serious oversteps by U.S. administrations.
Writing for the Times in 2001, Gorbachev celebrated what seemed to be warming relations between the two powers under Putin and Bush, who had recently convened a summit in Ljubljana. He praised the two leaders for “understand[ing] the importance of the relationship” between their nations and defying “the hawks in Washington and Moscow who would like to put Russian-American relations on the foreign policy back burner.”
“Something else was said at the summit: Russia and the United States are not enemies,” he wrote. “Continuing to emphasize this truth is of crucial importance.”
This was a theme Gorbachev would stress again and again over the coming decades: that, as he put it in 2004, dialogue between the two nuclear powers must “not be broken off whatever the challenges and complications we have to face.” Even as U.S.-Russia relations deteriorated and ultimately fell apart, Gorbachev continued to insist, to the leadership of both countries, that the two could still “develop a serious agenda” for cooperation, that they should rebuild trust through dialogue and the lifting of sanctions, and hold a summit “with a broad agenda, without preliminary conditions.” He urged the same approach from Europe, calling for the same kind of summit between Russia and the EU, and for European powers to “defrost relations” with Russia.
“We shouldn’t be afraid that someone would ‘lose face,’ or that someone would obtain a propaganda victory,” he wrote. “This should all belong to the past. We should think of the future.”
Gorbachev’s calls for dialogue continued despite—or rather, because of—the ever-escalating crisis over Ukraine, and the steadily worsening U.S.-Russian relationship that came with it. A longtime proponent of arms control who called again and again for nuclear weapons to be abolished, Gorbachev cautioned that the ratcheting tensions had put the world on a “dangerous threshold.”
“This is extremely dangerous, with tensions as high as they are now,” he wrote back in 2014, when tensions were nowhere near where they sit today. “We may not live through these days: someone could lose their nerve.”
Gorbachev’s calls to “return to the path we charted together when we ended the Cold War” were based not on idealism, but on experience. As Soviet president, he had, after all, forged a close working relationship with Ronald Reagan, a virulent anti-communist who had repeatedly branded his country an “evil empire,” and whose language was so extreme it sparked alarm even among European allies. It was at a nadir in U.S.-Soviet relations—after, among other things, Moscow had shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, killing a U.S. congressman and sixty-two other Americans—that Gorbachev and Reagan began their successful pursuit of diplomacy, ultimately signing a landmark arms control agreement and paving the way for ending hostilities.
As Gorbachev repeatedly stressed over the years, it was the very process of dialogue and negotiations, pursued in spite of the serious difficulties and mistrust in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, that helped reduce tensions and lay the foundation for peace. “The dialogue that president Reagan and I started was difficult,” Gorbachev later wrote. But,
“in the final outcome, our insistence on dialogue proved fully justified. … While addressing these vital tasks, we changed the nature of relations between our two countries, moving step by step to build trust and to test it by concrete deeds. And in the process, we—and our views—were changing too.”
Gorbachev credits this painstaking diplomatic work for Reagan’s 1988 recanting of his “evil empire” label, and to his and George H. W. Bush’s joint declaration a year later that the Cold War was over.
Forgetting At Our Own Peril
There’s so much more one could mention that’s been wiped clean from today’s tributes to Gorbachev, from his criticism of U.S.-led globalization and Washington’s decades-long blockade of Cuba, to his insistence that environmental degradation and growing inequality and poverty were the true security challenges of our time. But as the United States and Russia stand on the brink of outright war, it’s his tireless advocacy for U.S.-Russian cooperation—an appeal he made equally to the hawks in both countries—and his decades of warnings about the consequences of short-sighted Washington foreign policy choices that are most urgent today.
Liberal commentators in the West have justifiably made much of Putin’s rollback of Gorbachev’s democratizing reforms at home, and the erasure of his legacy that it represents. But there’s next to no introspection about how that same liberal establishment has itself undermined the other major part of Gorbachev’s legacy: his work to normalize relations between the United States and Russia, his calls for restraint and strategic empathy in Western foreign policy, and his insistence on dialogue and diplomacy. There’s little of Gorbachev’s spirit among the leading liberal voices of today, who by and large mock diplomacy as appeasement or surrender, dismiss criticism of Western foreign policy choices like NATO expansion as irrelevant propaganda or even war-justification, and speak of inflicting defeat or even regime-change on Russia.
More importantly, it should be a wake-up call that Gorbachev—a man lauded this past week as the antithesis of Putin, and valorized for his liberalism, his wisdom, and his foresight—shared many of the same complaints about U.S. foreign policy that have been cited not just by Moscow’s current leadership, but by a host of foreign policy thinkers who are today targeted in the crudest McCarthyite terms.
Contrary to the Telegraph’s 2008 assessment, Gorbachev didn’t turn into a hard-liner or into Putin as he aged—in fact, his criticism of the Russian president only became harsher over time. The record shows that Gorbachev consistently made the same warnings and complaints, often prescient ones, from as far back as the 1990s, as he reacted with dismay to what he regarded as arrogant and foolish foreign policy decisions that ran counter to the spirit of U.S.-Russian cooperation he thought he’d forged in the Soviet era.
It should all cause serious rethinking of the belief that simply replacing Putin, even with a liberal alternative, will solve current U.S.-Russia tensions, or allow the past decades’ direction of U.S. foreign policy in that part of the world to carry on unimpeded. And it should trigger serious self-reflection in the West: that maybe Putin, as bad as he is, is not the only thing that has to change for the sake of peace and stability.
I shouldn’t have to say this but just because I post an article on this site doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with everything in it. This site is not about satisfying anyone’s confirmation bias. In the case of this article, it is important to be aware of what Ukrainians think about what is going in their country. – Natylie
By Janina Dill, Carl Muller-Crepon, Mamie Howlett, The Conversation, 9/12/22
Kyiv’s counteroffensive in the north-east of Ukraine appeared to take everyone by surprise, not least Russia’s war planners who had been moving troops south to meet an offensive in the Kherson region which Ukraine had been trumpeting about for several weeks. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is claiming that his military has won back 700 square miles of territory, including key Russian supply bases Kupiansk and Izium.
Ukraine’s military success must have equally surprised politicians and pundits around the world who have, over the last six months, urged Ukraine to offer concessions in order to secure a peace settlement with Russia. Giving up territory in the east or pledging to remain neutral would save Ukrainian lives and reduce the risk of a Russian nuclear strike, they argue. But this has raised the question as to what sort of settlement would be acceptable to Ukrainians and whether they would support ceding territory or sovereignty to end the violence.
Ukraine has a just cause for war – self-defence. Russian opinions excepted, this is something most of the rest of the world agrees on. But even a war with a just cause may not be worth fighting. Moral philosophers and lawyers caution that a war of self-defence must still be proportionate – the projected costs should not exceed the benefits.
Calls on Ukraine to negotiate or surrender often echo this argument. Ukraine can’t expect to defeat its large neighbour in the long run, so it should give up self-defence now to limit the costs of the war. But should resistance to aggression really be constrained by such cost-benefit calculations?
You could just as easily think about self-defence in absolute terms. Some outcomes are unacceptable – regardless of how costly it is to resist. The many reports of war crimes in Russian-occupied territory could well motivate Ukrainians to want to fight to the end to resist Russian control.
What is victory worth?
To find out how Ukrainians think about self-defence, in late July 2022 we surveyed a representative sample of 1,160 Ukrainians in all regions not contested by Russia. We asked our respondents about what concessions they might accept, offering various scenarios.
Some of these included upfront territorial concessions, while others didn’t. What’s more, the scenarios featured strategies with different projected costs and benefits after three more months of fighting. They varied regarding projected military and civilian deaths, the risk of a nuclear strike and the likely political outcomes.
We found that Ukrainians strongly prefer strategies that preserve Ukraine’s political autonomy and restore its territory, including Crimea and the Donbas region. This is the case even if making concessions would reduce projected civilian and military deaths, or the risk of a nuclear strike over the next three months.
Of the people we surveyed, 79% opposed all options that would lead to a Russian-controlled government in Kyiv. Importantly, the minority of people who accepted a Russian-controlled government did so because they prioritised restoring Ukraine’s territory in the choice they faced.
Russian control of the government in Kyiv or of territories in the east would put the lives of many Ukrainians at risk, as it is well documented that Russia has committed widespread human rights violations in temporarily occupied territories.
One way to interpret our findings is that Ukrainians reject Russian political control or territorial concessions because they prefer the immediate costs of self-defence – civilian and military fatalities and nuclear risk – over the long-term costs of Russian control. But our findings suggest that not giving in to Russia is about more than the important aim of saving Ukrainian lives overall.
How many extra deaths or increased nuclear risk after three months would lead to a similar rejection by respondents as a Russian-controlled government? The answer we found after extrapolating our statistical analysis is it would take about 12 million additional civilian deaths or more military fatalities than the country has inhabitants (44 million) – or the certain prospect of a nuclear attack – for Ukrainians to react as strongly as they reject a Russian-controlled government.
Clearly, this is unrealistic – no realistic strategy for self-defence could have such costs after three months. So these calculations reveal that Ukrainians take an absolute stance: they categorically reject Russian control and territorial concessions – regardless of the costs.
Why does it matter what Ukrainians think?
We conducted this study because the voices of ordinary Ukrainians have been absent from the intense international debate about whether – and how – Ukraine should defend itself. We worked closely with the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology to gather reliable data while ensuring the safety of interviewers and respondents.
It’s difficult to conduct surveys in a war zone, but we have at least three urgent reasons to care about what Ukrainians think. First, the costs of self-defence, but also the costs of potential concessions, are primarily borne by ordinary Ukrainians. They deserve a say in which of many difficult paths their country takes.
Second, we cannot properly judge what is at stake in Ukraine’s defensive war without understanding how strongly Ukrainians oppose Russian control and how highly they value territorial integrity. A cost-benefit calculation from afar is unsound.
Third, it is dangerous for the international community to pressure Zelensky and his government to pursue a strategy that contradicts what Ukrainians want. Trying to go against the wishes of the people could destabilise the government and would ultimately be unsuccessful.
Put simply, it is neglectful, unsound and unwise to judge Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia – and make political demands based on such judgments – without understanding how Ukrainians think about the costs and benefits of self-defence. Back in April, the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky urged Kyiv to settle, even if it meant territorial concessions, famously asserting that Ukraine and its western allies should “pay attention to the reality of the world”.
As Ukrainian troops bravely advance east, we have a fuller picture of this reality. Ukrainians categorically reject Russian control and territorial concessions – regardless of the immediate costs of resistance.
A recurring feature of the Cold War was that the United States almost always placed great store on the optics of a Soviet-American affair while Moscow chose to concentrate on the end result. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best known example where the denouement was about the publicized abandonment of the planned Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba and a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. But it later came to be known that there was also an unpublicised part, namely, the dismantling of all of the Jupiter ballistic missiles that had been deployed to Turkey.
The behavioral pattern remains the same in Ukraine. Per the western narrative, Russia is staring at the abyss of defeat amidst the “rout” in Kharkov Region. Interestingly, though, at the responsible levels in the Beltway, there is a noticeable reticence about beating the drums presumably because of their awareness that the Ukrainian forces simply re-entered the Balakleysko-Izyum direction to occupy areas that the Russians had planned to vacate.
Moscow is once again leaving the optics almost entirely to the American journalists while Moscow concentrates on the end result, which has had three dimensions: one, complete the ongoing evacuation from the Balakleysko-Izyum direction without loss of lives; two, exploit the Ukrainian troop movements to target the forces that came out into the open from well-fortified positions in the Kharkov Region; and, three, concentrate on the campaign in Donetsk.
The last part is becoming very sensitive for Moscow, as a significant section of Russian “war correspondents” carried sensational reports that it is apocalypse now. Even senior politicians such as Gennady Zyuganov, General Secretary of the Communist Party, and a powerful voice in the State Duma, feels agitated.
Zyuganov said at the first plenary meeting of the Russian State Duma’s fall session on Tuesday that the “special operation” has grown into a full-fledged war and the situation on the front has “changed drastically” in the past couple of months.
A fragment of the speech posted in the Communist Party’s website also quoted Zyuganov as saying that “every war requires a response. First and foremost, it requires maximum mobilization of forces and resources. It demands social cohesion and clear prioritisation.”
Although intended as constructive criticism, Zyuganov’s advice will almost certainly be passed over by the Kremlin. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has responded with alacrity, saying,“At this moment — no, it (full or partial mobilization) is not on the agenda.”
President Putin’s support base remains as strong as ever. The recent Russian regional and local elections partly turned into a “referendum” on the Ukraine situation. And the fact that the ruling party received one of the best results in its history by winning about 80 percent of the mandates in regional and local parliaments shows a resounding vote of confidence in Putin’s leadership.
That said, the “angry patriots” pose a headache. That is why the latest situation around Bakhmut in Donetsk assumes particular significance. Bakhmut is undoubtedly the lynchpin of the entire fortification that Kiev erected in Donbass in the past 8 years. It is a strategic communication junction with roads in many directions — Lysychansk, Horlivka, Kostiantynivka, and Kramatorsk — and control of the city is vital for establishing full supremacy over Donetsk Region.
The Russian troops and allied militia groups have been trying since August 3 to break into the Ukrainian defenses in the Bakhmut-Soledar direction but with patchy success. Now comes reports that the Russians have entered Bakhmut city and taken control of the industrial zone in the northeastern parts.
Some reports say the Russian military contractors known as the Wagner Group have been deployed in Bakhmut. These are highly trained ex-military personnel.
The stakes are exceedingly high. For Kiev, the entire logistics of the operations in Donetsk can unravel if it loses control of Bakhmut. As for the Russians, the breakthrough in the Bakhmut-Soledar direction will clear the main hurdle for the crucial offensive towards the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk axis to the west, the last conglomeration of Ukrainian forces in Donetsk. Bakhmut is only 50 kms from Slavyansk-Kramatorsk.
Speaking about the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” last weekend to National Public Radio, General Mark Milley, US chairman, Chiefs of Staff, had made some interesting points:
-Ukraine has amassed a good amount of combat power. How do they use that will now be the determining factor. Things will clarify “in the coming days and weeks.”
-Ukrainian military so far fought extraordinarily well in defence. Defense has always been the stronger form of war.
-Ukraine is now moving into offensive operations where it is critical to integrate fire power into their manoeuvre in order to achieve superiority.
-Therefore, “it remains to be seen” what is happening in the next few weeks. “It is a very, very difficult task that the Ukrainians are undertaking” – combining their offence with manoeuver.
The Ukrainian offensive in Kharkov was planned as a flank attack to encircle and destroy the Russian groupings in the area of Balakleya, Kupyansk and Izyum. But the Russian command anticipated such an attempt, as its frontline had thinned out lately. The Ukrainian forces outnumbered the Russians by almost 4-5 times.
Interestingly, in anticipation of a Ukrainian offensive, civilians who agreed to leave the region for Russia were evacuated from the threatened settlements in military convoys. Using mobile defense tactics under the cover of specially organized units, Russians finally succeeded in withdrawing their forces.
In effect, the Ukrainian/US/NATO plan to manoeuvre a flank attack and encircle the Russian troops was thwarted with minimal losses. On the other hand, Ukrainians also admit that Russians inflicted significant losses of manpower on their opponents (who included a big chunk of fighters from NATO countries.)
But the Russian military also made mistakes. Thus, their forward positions were not mined—inexplicably enough; frontline intelligence gathering was deficient; and, the residual Russian troops (drawn down to one-third of full strength) were not even equipped with anti-tank weapons.
The single biggest outcome of the past week’s happenings is that the conflict has assumed the nature of a full-fledged war. Zyuganov was not off the mark when he said in his Russian state Duma speech: “The military-political operation… has escalated into a full-fledged war, which has been declared against us by the Americans, NATO members, and a unified Europe.
“A war is fundamentally different from a special operation. A special operation is something you announce – and something you can choose to put an end to. A war is something you can’t stop even if you want to. You have to fight to the end. War has two possible outcomes: victory or defeat.”
Putin has a big decision to make now. For, while the good part for the Russian military may be that the frontline has been straightened and large Russian reserves are being transferred to the battlefields, de facto, a state of war exists now between Russia and NATO.
The recent phone calls to Putin in quick succession by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, after an interlude of months, signals that an exigency may have arisen to re-engage the Kremlin leader.
The proposal emphasizes Ukraine’s desire to become a NATO member and says that until Kyiv joins the Western military alliance, it needs security guarantees from other countries.
The document says that the “strongest security guarantee for Ukraine lies in its capability to defend itself.” It says building up a sufficient defensive force requires “a multi-decade effort of sustained investment in Ukraine’s defense industrial base, scalable weapons transfers and intelligence support from allies, intensive training missions and joint exercises under the European Union and NATO flags.”
The security guarantees Ukraine seeks from other countries is a commitment for them to support Ukraine’s ability to create this force to deter future attacks through military aid, funding of reconstruction, training, intelligence sharing, and joint exercises.
According to the document, the countries Ukraine wants security guarantees from include but are not limited to “the US, UK, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Turkey, and Nordic, Baltic, and Central European countries.”
As part of this arrangement, Ukraine seeks a “massive training and joint maneuver program of Ukrainian forces and partners on Ukrainian territory with international trainers and advisors.”
Zelensky on Wednesday welcomed the plan, which was drawn up with the help of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary-general. Zelensky said that the report “should become the basis of the future security compact.”
Russia condemned the document as the threat of NATO expansion into Ukraine was one of its main motivations for launching the invasion. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that many of the proposals are already being implemented as Ukraine is receiving billions in aid from Western countries.
“Weapons have been supplied to Ukraine non-stop,” Zakharova said, according to the Russian news agency TASS. “The financial assistance being channeled to Ukraine in all of its forms, be it money transfers, or loans and so on, is unprecedented in recent history.”
