By Matthew Evangelista, Lawfare, 3/31/24

Editor’s Note: One of the most frightening possibilities of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is that it increases the risk of nuclear war. This risk, however, doesn’t necessarily end once the shooting stops. Cornell University professor Matthew Evangelista explores the implications of extending the nuclear umbrella to Ukraine and argues that the world would be better off without such a shield.

Dan Byman

However and whenever Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine ends, Ukrainians will need a postwar security policy. Their choice holds implications for European security more broadly. Some observers, and many Ukrainians, anticipate Ukraine’s eventual membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a NATO member, Ukraine would benefit from the ostensible protection afforded by “extended nuclear deterrence”—the prospect that the United States might respond to an attack against a NATO ally, even carried out with only conventional forces, by a retaliatory strike with nuclear weapons against the attacker. Others find the proposal for Ukraine to join NATO dubious or undesirable, and some question the credibility of the extended-deterrent threat or worry that it increases the risk of unintended escalation to global nuclear war. The best thing for postwar Ukraine, however, would be to avoid tying its security to nuclear weapons—its own or NATO’s. Instead, it should focus on ensuring its conventional forces are robust and defensively oriented, adequate to deter but not to provoke another Russian attack.

One might have expected Russia’s February 2022 invasion to have shaken confidence in the view that nuclear weapons foster an overall peace. Granted, Ukraine received no extended-deterrent promise from the United States (even though the Budapest Memorandum, signed when Ukraine agreed to relinquish the Soviet nuclear weapons held on its territory after the dissolution of the USSR, offered “security assurances”). Still the proponents of nuclear weapons had touted their contribution to maintaining the peace, beyond the countries explicitly sheltered under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. In 1987, for example, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher criticized Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev’s advocacy of nuclear disarmament—a view he shared with the nuclear abolitionist Ronald Reagan. Thatcher asserted, by contrast, that “we do not believe that it is possible to ensure peace for any considerable amount of time without nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the most powerful and most terrible guarantee of peace that was invented in the 20th century. There is no other guarantee.” Thirty years later, in July 2017, 122 countries meeting at UN headquarters in New York City voted in favor of a legally binding treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The nuclear-armed members of NATO—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—vowed never to sign or ratify the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021. “Accession to the ban treaty,” they argued, “is incompatible with the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace in Europe and North Asia for over 70 years.” In making this claim, they were echoing not only Thatcher but also Vladimir Putin, who had stated in October 2016 that “nuclear weapons constitute a factor of deterrence and a factor guaranteeing peace and security throughout the whole world.” On the contrary, it is possible that Russia’s nuclear arsenal enabled the attacks of both 2014 and 2022, with Putin confident that it would deter NATO from coming to Ukraine’s defense.

Yet confidence in nuclear deterrence persists, based on the understanding that it prevented Soviet aggression against Europe during the Cold War. In fact, however, this claim is incorrect. Nuclear deterrence was never put to the test in Europe, because there was nothing to deter. What Robert Jervis wrote more than 20 years ago remains true today: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike against the United States.” Instead, the archival documents showed that Soviet military plans immediately following World War II were defensively oriented—with forces arrayed in belts at 50, 100, and 150 kilometers from the inter-German border. Only with the deployment to NATO Europe of tactical nuclear weapons in the early 1950s did the Soviet Army adopt an offensive orientation. The introduction of U.S. nuclear weapons into Europe did not enhance security but, rather, fostered instability and raised the risk of war.

Extended nuclear deterrence brought the continent to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in September 1961 during the Berlin Crisis—a lesson on the nuclear umbrella’s risks that bears pondering today. The Vienna summit of June 1961 failed to settle the anomalous situation of West Berlin—a democratic outpost surrounded by communist East Germany and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops—and secure a peace treaty that would formally recognize the postwar borders. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev vowed to pursue his Plan B: a separate treaty with East Germany that would allow its leaders to determine access to Berlin, which they had declared its capital. NATO officials developed plans to deploy military force to ensure access to the city in the event the communist regime tried to deny it. The NATO secretary general declared that “the Alliance will stand ready for nuclear action at all times[,]” including a provision “to employ nuclear weapons selectively in order to demonstrate the will and ability of the Alliance to use them.”

The notion of employing nuclear weapons for signaling purposes owes much to the work of RAND strategist Thomas Schelling, who drafted a memorandum advocating such “nuclear bargaining” over Berlin in June 1961. According to McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to President Kennedy, the memorandum made a “deep impression” on the president when he read it on Bundy’s recommendation. Meanwhile, other Kennedy advisers, such as Paul Nitze, were advocating that the United States use its nuclear weapons preemptively to attempt a disarming first strike against the Soviet Union if access to Berlin were blocked. As he described in his memoir, Nitze told the president that a U.S. first strike “could assure us victory in at least a military sense in a series of nuclear exchanges, while we might well lose if we allowed the Soviets to strike first.” The cost would be 9-10 million U.S. casualties in a retaliatory strike by the surviving Soviet weapons, but the other side would suffer 10 times that number, according to Nitze’s calculations.

What was not known at the time, but has been discovered since in Soviet bloc military plans, is that the Soviet armed forces were training to respond to preparations for a NATO nuclear strike with massive nuclear preemption, intended to destroy the NATO weapons before they could be used. Notions of nuclear bargaining, signaling, and graduated escalation were artificial constructs in the minds of U.S. strategists but bore no relationship to how the other side might actually respond.

No wonder prominent US officials, as well as their European counterparts, harbored doubts about the credibility or plausibility of NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons. Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Nixon in early 1969, for example, averred that extended nuclear deterrence “depended on a first strike” by the United States, something he claimed the European allies did not understand. Nixon concurred. The “nuclear umbrella in NATO” was, according to the president, “a lot of crap.”

Is the situation any different today? No one knows how Russian leaders would react to NATO’s threat or use of nuclear weapons—but probably not according to hopeful scenarios of “escalation dominance” that foresee U.S. forces prevailing at each step of the “ladder of escalation” and Russian leaders, clearly anticipating an unfavorable outcome, backing down in advance.

Along with other skeptics of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, I consider a conventional military strategy for Ukraine, such as the one designed by Barry Posen as early as 1994, more promising. It shares elements of ideas developed by European peace researchers during the Cold War to provide defensively oriented conventional forces that were sufficiently dispersed so as not to offer targets for nuclear strikes. Current versions fall under the rubric of “confidence-building defense” and include such strategies as the “spider-in-the-web.” These nonoffensive defense strategies were designed not to threaten the other side and risk provoking an attack during periods of tension. Historical examples include the decentralized, militia-based territorial defense systems of Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Sweden, and Finland. Their forces were suited to defending their territories but not seizing and occupying the territory of their neighbors. For postwar Ukraine, such a system would mean clearly relinquishing an ability to regain any territory lost to Russia—a prerequisite for a stable peace, however unjust. Adopting such a territorial defense strategy would not require a declaration of neutrality and would not preclude cooperation with NATO countries in the provision of conventional weapons, for example, so long as they did not pose an offensive threat to Russia that could provoke it to resume the war. Combining a defensive orientation for Ukrainian military forces with well-prepared mass civilian resistance to occupation—a technique attempted spontaneously with some success in the first months of the 2022 invasion—could serve as a deterrent to aggression, without risking the catastrophic consequences of nuclear escalation.

However much Ukraine’s supporters would prefer an end to the war that would leave the country with its pre-2014 borders intact, a more likely outcome would entail a territorial compromise. Under those conditions, a postwar Ukrainian security policy should be oriented toward robust defense without providing any pretext for renewed Russian aggression. Nuclear deterrence offers no panacea but, rather, incalculable risks. Postwar Ukraine should forswear, not covet, a “nuclear umbrella.”

By James Carden, Responsible Statecraft, 6/6/24

In 1946 reporter John Hersey published a harrowing report from Hiroshima that followed the travails of a number of survivors of the Bomb, including those of Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Jesuit missionary from Germany.

On a search for water for some of the wounded, Kleinsorge came across a group of survivors

“…about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.”

Passages such as these revealed the horrors Japanese survivors endured in the aftermath of the American nuclear attack. Hersey’s Hiroshima became, in the view of essayist Roger Angell, “part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust.”And throughout the Cold War, the idea of fighting a nuclear war was anathema to the respective leaders of the American and Soviet superpowers — a revulsion that found its ultimate expression in the pledge made by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan that “a nuclear cannot be won and should never be fought.”

Yet little by little, as the Cold War has receded into memory, American and Russian leaders have torn up a series of arms control measures beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (2002), the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty (2019), and the Open Skies treaty (2020). For its part, in 2023 Russia unilaterally withdrew from both the Convention Armed Forces in Europe treaty and suspended participation in the landmark New START treaty.

And one of the more worrisome developments in a time which does not lack for them has been a worrying epidemic of loose talk about the use of nuclear weapons.

Of late, the Russians have been the worst offenders. Yet perhaps even more troubling is the blithe disregard with which some American analysts dismiss Putin’s stated readiness to deploy these weapons. As Brown University professor of Slavic studies Vladimir Golstein memorably puts the matter:

“Putin conducts nuclear exercises, Putin warns the densely populated areas in Europe, Putin talks about going to heaven as the result of nuclear confrontation — what else does one need? Knowing Russians, I am extremely certain that they would respond. Sooner or later, but they would.”

Consider the, well, explosive language coming from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to the revelation, made by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski on May 25, that the U.S. “told the Russians that if you detonate a nuclear bomb, even if it doesn’t kill anyone, we will hit all your targets and positions in Ukraine with conventional weapons and destroy them all.”

Medvedev responded with threats of his own:

“Americans hitting our targets means starting a world war, and a foreign minister, even of a country like Poland, should understand that. And third, considering that yet another Polack, [President Andrzej] Duda, has recently announced the wish to deploy TNW [thermonuclear weapons] in Poland, Warsaw won’t be left out, and will surely get its share of radioactive ash. Is it what you really want?”

According to a May 28 report in the Chinese-state run news service Xinhua, Russia has accused NATO forces of “practicing nuclear strikes against Russia.” This accusation comes only a week after reports that Russia itself has launched tactical nuclear drills in “response to provocative statements and threats of individual Western officials against the Russian Federation,” according to the Russian defense ministry.

And then there are the alarming statements coming from Russian analysts and government advisers. A video circulating on social media shows Russian political scientist Konstantin Sivkov issuing nuclear threats against Poland, while the noted academic and Kremlin adviser, Sergei Karaganov published an article calling for Russia to launch limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe. As theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists points out, Karaganov’s “proposal and other Russian political and military thinking about nuclear weapons raise profound questions about whether Russia might attempt to conduct a so-called limited nuclear war.”

As can only be expected, certain American politicians are pitching in to make things worse. Within the last few weeks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has called for Israel to do its very worst by invoking the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justification. A month into the Israel-Hamas War, a member of the Israeli cabinet issued his own irresponsible nuclear threat, while the U.S. continues to run diplomatic cover for Israel by denying the existence of its nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, recent statements coming out of Iran hinting at a potential change in its nuclear doctrine have raised alarm bells with the International Atomic Energy Agency which is meeting this week in Vienna to discuss the matter.

Amidst the madness, there’s a silver lining.

There remain multiple organizations that have been doing valuable, utterly necessary work to raise awareness about the omnipresent threat of nuclear catastrophe, including the Nuclear Threat Initiative, NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth, and Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy. The founder of the latter two groups, the activist and award-winning documentary filmmaker Cynthia Lazaroff, believes citizen action is needed — and soon.

“We all have a voice,” says Lazaroff, who urges citizens to “contact their Congressional representatives and tell them how worried they are about the growing threat of nuclear war. Urge them to hold congressional hearings on escalating nuclear dangers,nuclear winter and the catastrophic humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons and to co-sponsor legislation like: H. Res. 77 and H.R. 2775 to back us away from the brink and eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.”

The nuclear age is not past. It is our present — and one that the next administration needs to urgently confront, and ultimately, dismantle.

By Geoffrey Roberts, Responsible Statecraft, 4/23/21

With the death of scholar Paul Schroeder, international historians lost one of their most innovative and distinguished practitioners.

Schroeder’s approach to the study of international relations was ideational: it is not power or interests alone that shapes the behavior of states but prevailing norms, values, and experiences.

As Schroeder showed in “The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848,” the transition from an 18th century dominated by warfare to a predominantly peaceful 19th century was the result of a radical shift in “ideas, collective mentalities and outlooks.”

Driving this transformation was the devasting experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which convinced elites they needed to replace conflictual balance of power politics with the negotiation of differences and the peaceful resolution of disputes. The result of this rethink was the Concert of Europe, which was able to maintain a general continental peace for nearly a hundred years. There were plenty of wars and conflicts, including some notable great power clashes, but none, until 1914, that threatened the existence or stability of the system.

Like most historians, Schroeder was skeptical of historical parallels, but he made a conscious effort to link his studies of the past to the concerns of the present. In that regard, one of his most remarkable, and still relevant, essays was “Containment Nineteen Century Style: How Russia was Restrained.”

Imperial Russia emerged triumphant from the Napoleonic Wars and was in a position to become a hegemonic world power. But It didn’t even try, argues Schroeder. Because of its membership of the Concert and the European community of nations, Russia was enmeshed in restraining relationships with its friends and allies.

In making this argument Schroeder contested the stereotype of 19th century Russia as a dangerously aggressive and expansionist power.

Russia did expand into Asia but such extra-European expansion was the norm among great powers. Russian violence and military conquests were no worse than any of its rivals, and neither did its actions upset the equilibrium in the European theatre.

Russia’s European policy was characterized by Schroeder as “conservative, legalistic, anti-revolutionary and oriented towards peace and great power cooperation.” It had ambitions in relation to Turkey and the Black Sea Straits, but these goals didn’t include the destabilization of the Ottoman Empire.

From the U.S. perspective, 19th century Russia was a markedly benign power — the state that stayed away from Latin America and sold it Alaska.

Schroeder stresses that Russian good behavior was not primarily a function of benign intentions but of “the existence and operation of a system — a stable network of rules and relationships between states — that enables statesman effectively to seek peace and, even in a sense, compels them to promote it whether they want to or not. … Russia was restrained not mainly by her moderate impulses, but by a viable international order she herself helped to create.”

Schroeder’s contemporary reference point was the breakdown of the American-Soviet détente in the early 1980s as a result of renewed Cold War tensions. His message was that while the analogy between the foreign policy of Tsarist Russia and that of the Soviet Union was imperfect, historical as well as recent experience suggested that détente was a better way to manage relations with the Soviets than confrontation.

Schroeder was well aware that historical analogies can be distorting as well as illuminating, the most egregious example being the frequent invocation of the Hitler analogy to derail legitimate attempts at appeasement.

Schroeder believed that it was possible to derive from the history of international relations some eternal truths, notably that “any government is restrained better and more safely by friends and allies than by opponents or enemies.”

Schroeder’s prescription for managing Russian power remains relevant, not least because today’s Russia is a self-proclaimed conservative state that still sees itself as primarily a European power and would readily participate in a renewed concert of great powers at the global level.

No policy has been so persistently pursued by Russia and its Soviet predecessor as the creation of an inclusive European security system. The first such proposals came in the 1930s as a means of containing Hitler.  Moscow’s striving for collective security was interrupted by the Nazi-Soviet pact, during the Second World War, Stalin embraced the concept of a peacetime grand alliance with Britain and the United States. After his death in 1953, the Soviets revived the idea of pan-European collective security and waged an extensive campaign to dissolve the Cold War blocs. Most extraordinary was a March 1954 proposal that the USSR could even become a member of NATO

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation sought a new, over-arching European security architecture, including Russian membership of NATO.

In 2009, Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, proposed an all-embracing European Security Treaty. Supported by his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, it reflected Russia’s aspiration for a “Greater Europe” with a multipolar Euro-Atlantic security system.

According to the current Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation that remains the country’s goal: “Russia’s long-term Euro-Atlantic policy is aimed at building a common space of peace, security and stability based on the principles of indivisible security, equal cooperation and mutual trust.”

Medvedev’s initiative was overshadowed and then derailed by the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Western intervention in Libya and the civil wars in Ukraine and Syria.

Russia is now isolated and alienated from Europe and the object of escalating Western sanctions designed to reverse its takeover of Crimea and deter further encroachments on Ukrainian territory. There is no evidence that such sanctions have had any impact on Russian foreign policy in relation to Ukraine or on Putin’s policy in other parts of the world. In his presidential address on April 21, Putin was adamant that Western threats would not stop Russia from defending its interests as it sees fit.

There are those in the West who are clamoring to double-down on a hardline approach to Russia. However, history suggests that a policy of engaging, conciliating, and integrating Russia into the European and global community will be more effective in promoting peace and security for all states, including Ukraine.

Just now, the idea of a European security system with a Russian pillar as well as an American one seems fanciful, to say the least. But consider the following thought experiment:

Imagine that Medvedev’s European Security Treaty proposal had gained some serious traction in Russian-Western negotiations. Would the bottom have fallen out of NATO and the Western security system? Hardly. Would Ukraine have split over its geo-political and geo-economical orientation? Doubtful. Would Crimea still be part of Ukraine? Almost certainly. Would Russia and the West be collaborating rather than competing in the Middle East? For sure. Would we be facing into a new arms race and a new cold war? Definitely not.

Like all states, Russia has its interests, concerns, aspirations, and sensitivities. The threat of war with the West as a result of Russia’s borderland disputes and tensions with Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and the Baltic States is very small but far from negligible. As Paul Schroeder said, “war sometimes just happens; peace is always caused.”

History also shows that the best way to influence and restrain a powerful and resurgent Russia is not to treat it as an enemy but make it your friend.

Kremlin website, 6/5/24

News Director at DPA Martin Romanczyk (retranslated): Good evening, Mr President. Good evening, everyone.

Chancellor Scholz has agreed to supply arms to Ukraine. I would like to ask you how you would react if Scholz changed his mind. And what do you think this implies for Germany? Did you try to warn, caution or maybe threaten Mr Chancellor when he made the decision to send weapons to Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin: Why would you think we would threaten anyone? We never threaten anyone, least of all the head of another state. That would be mauvais ton, unacceptable in polite society.

We have our own viewpoint on certain issues. We know the European states’ approach, including Germany’s approach, on the current developments in Ukraine.

Everyone believes that Russia started the war in Ukraine. But no one – I want to emphasise this – no one in the West, no one in Europe is willing to remember how this tragedy began. It started with an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine. This was the beginning of the war. But is Russia to blame for that coup? No. Have those who are trying to blame Russia today forgotten that the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany and France went to Kiev at the time and signed the settlement document as guarantors of a peaceful constitutional resolution of the crisis? This is something Europe, including Germany, prefers to forget. Because if they remembered, they would have to explain why the leaders of Germany, along with the other signatories, never demanded that the perpetrators of the coup in Ukraine return to the constitutional framework. Why did they neglect their obligations as guarantors of agreements between the incumbent government and the opposition like this? They are as responsible for what happened as the forces in the United States that provoked the unconstitutional seizure of power. Don’t you know what followed? The residents of Crimea made a decision to secede from Ukraine, and the residents of Donbass refused to obey those who carried out the coup in Kiev. This is what followed. This is how this conflict began.

After that, Russia made every effort to come up with a formula for a peaceful settlement. What is now known as Minsk agreements were signed in Minsk in 2015. By the way, they were institutionalised by a UN Security Council resolution. It was an actionable document. Instead, they chose to resolve this issue militarily. They used artillery, tanks and aircraft against civilians in southeastern Ukraine. For some reason, no one, I repeat, no one wants to talk about this either in Germany and other European countries, or the United States. So be it.

We facilitated the signing of the Minsk agreements, but it turned out that no one was going to act on them. The former Chancellor of Germany and the former President of France have publicly stated so.

What does this mean, Mr Romanchik? They made a public confession that they were not going to implement the Minsk agreements, and signed them just in order to buy time to arm Ukraine and to create proper conditions for continuing hostilities. All they did was pull the wool over our eyes. Is that not so? Is there any other way to explain what happened?

For eight long years we have been trying to achieve a peaceful solution. Eight years!

A former chancellor once told me, “You know, in Kosovo, we, NATO, went ahead without a Security Council resolution, because blood was spilled for eight years in Kosovo.” What about the blood of Russian people spilled in Donbass? Was it water, not blood? No one wanted to pay attention to it.

In the end, this is what we were forced to do when the then Ukrainian authorities said that they did not like a single clause of the Minsk agreements, and the then Foreign Minister said they were not going to fulfill them.

Do you realise that these territories were plunged into economic and social degradation? Eight years. I am not even talking about murders, constant killing of women, children, and so on.

Considering this, we were compelled to recognise their independence. We did not recognise their independence for almost eight years. We were looking forward for both sides to come to terms and to resolve this issue peacefully. Eight years! When they said they were not going to implement any peace agreements, we had to use military force in order to bring them into compliance.

We were not the ones to start this war. The war started in 2014 following the coup and their attempt to use cannons to break resistance of the people who opposed the coup.

And now for people following international events and international law. What happened next? What did we do? We did not recognise this for eight years. What did we do when we realised that the Minsk Agreements will never be fulfilled? Please note everyone: we recognised the independence of these self-proclaimed republics. Could we do this from the point of view of international law, or no? As Article One of the UN Charter says, we could. It is about the nations’ right to self-determination. The UN International Court of Justice ruled (it is put in writing) that, if any territory of a country decides to become independent, it is not obliged to appeal to the higher authorities of that country. All this was done regarding Kosovo. There is a decision of the International Court of Justice, which reads: if a territory has decided on independence, it is not obliged to apply to the capital for permission to exercise this right.

However, if it is like it is written in the UN court decision, then these unrecognised republics, the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, had the right to do so. And they did. Did we have the right to recognise them? Of course, we did. And we did recognise them. Next, we entered into an agreement with them. Could we sign an agreement with them or not? Yes, of course. The agreement provided for assistance to these states in the event of aggression. Kiev waged a war against these states, which we recognised eight years later. Eight years.

Could we recognise them? We could. And then, in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, we provided them with assistance. You know, no matter what anyone says, this is exactly what I told Mr Guterres, the logic we followed, step by step. Where is the mistake here? Where are the violations of international law here? There are no violations, considering international law.

Then we hear the answer: well, you attacked anyway. We did not attack, but defended ourselves, just to make it clear to everyone. The first step towards the war was taken by those who encouraged the bloody unconstitutional coup d’etat.

Now regarding the arms supplies. Arms supplies to a conflict area is always a bad idea. Especially when those who are supplying weapons not only supply them but also operate them. It is a very serious and very dangerous step. You and I know this, and the Federal Republic doesn’t deny it (I certainly don’t know how it made its way to the press), that a Bundeswehr general discussed where and how to deliver a strike: either at the Crimean Bridge or at some other facilities inside Russia, including a territory that no one doubts belongs to Russia.

When the first German tanks, tanks made in Germany, appeared on Ukrainian soil, it produced a moral and ethical shock in Russia because the attitude in Russian society to the Federal Republic has always been very good. Very good. Now, when they say that some missiles are to appear that would attack facilities on Russian territory, it will certainly destroy Russian-German relations for good and all. But we understand that, as one of the well-known German politicians said, after World War II the Federal Republic of Germany has never been a sovereign state in the full sense of the word.

We were in contact with Mr Scholz, we met on many occasions. I don’t want to assess the performance of the Federal Government, but it’s the German people, the German voters who are making such assessments. European parliamentary elections are coming up; we will look at what is going to happen there. As far as I know – of course, I actually care about Germany, I have many friends there, whom I am trying not to contact, not to subject them so some obstruction in the country, I am trying not to maintain relations with them, but I simply know these people for many years, I know that they are reliable friends and I have many of them in Germany. So, I am also aware of the balance of forces in the political arena. As far as I understand, if I am not mistaken, the CDU/CSU now has somewhere around 30 percent, the Social Democrats have about 16 percent, the Alternative for Germany already has 15 percent, and all the others are lower. This is the elector’s response. This is the Germans’ mood, the mood of the German people.

I understand the dependence of the Federal Republic in the area of defence, in security in general. I understand its dependence in politics, in information policy, because wherever you point to there, to any major publishing house (I don’t know where you work) its ultimate beneficiary is located overseas, some US foundation. Well, I applaud those American foundations and those who are conducting such policy: It’s great that they are holding the information field of Europe so firmly in terms of their interests. And they are also trying hard not to reveal themselves.

It’s all understandable. The influence is tremendous and it is very difficult to oppose it. It is clear. But there are some elementary things. Speaking about these elementary things – it is strange that nobody in the current German leadership protects German interests. It’s clear that Germany does not have full sovereignty, but Germans are still there. Their interests should be taken into account and protected, at least a little bit.

Look: the ill-starred pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea have been blown up. No one is even indignant – as if this is the way it should be. We nevertheless continue to supply gas to Europe through the territory of Ukraine. We continue to supply gas. There were two pipeline systems there, and Ukraine closed one of them, screwed the valve, just closed it and that’s all, although there were no grounds for this. It left only one pipeline system – well, okay. But gas goes to Europe through it, and European consumers receive this gas. Our gas also goes to Europe through Turkey via Turkish Stream, and European consumers receive it.

OK, one Nord Stream pipe was blown up, but another Nord Stream pipe is intact, thank God. Why doesn’t Germany want to receive our gas through this pipe? Can anyone explain the logic? You can get it through Ukraine, you can get it through Turkey, but you can’t get it through the Baltic Sea. What kind of nonsense is this? There is no formal logic in this, I don’t even understand it.

They would better say that Europe should not get gas at all. OK, fine, we’ll get over it, Gazprom will survive. But you don’t need it, you need to buy overpriced liquefied natural gas shipped from across the ocean. Don’t your ‘environmentalists’ know how liquefied natural gas is produced? By fracking. Ask the people in the United States where they produce this gas – sometimes they get slop instead of water running from their taps. Your ‘environmentalists’ who are in power in the government, don’t know that? They probably do.

Poland has closed its Yamal-Europe pipeline. Gas was going to Germany through Poland. We didn’t shut it down, the Poles did. You know better than I do the effect the termination of our ties in the energy sector has had on the German economy. It’s a sad result. Many large industrial companies are looking for a place to land, but only not on German territory. They are opening in the USA and in Asia, but the business conditions there make them uncompetitive. And this, by the way, can have severe consequences for the European economy as a whole, because the German economy (everyone is well aware of this, no offence to any other Europeans) is the locomotive of the European economy. If it sneezes and coughs, everyone else will immediately get the flu. France’s economy is also teetering on the brink of recession right now, everyone knows that. And if the German economy goes down, all of Europe will be shuddering.

I am not suggesting that the Euro-Atlantic ties should be broken. Otherwise, someone (not necessarily you) might hear what I am saying and infer that I am calling for breaking up Euro-Atlantic solidarity. Listen, your politics are flawed, and you are making glaring mistakes every step of the way. I think the current developments represent a major mistake for the United States itself. In a push to maintain their leadership using the means they are using, they are, in fact, causing harm to themselves. But things are even worse for Europe. Indeed, you could say, “We support you in this, that, and that, but this belongs to us. Look, if we undermine our economy, everyone will feel the consequences. You cannot do that, we are against it, it is taboo, do not touch it.”

But the federal government is not doing that, either. Frankly, sometimes I get confused and cannot see the logic behind this line of conduct. Okay, they were going to undermine Russia’s economy, and they thought it would take them three to six months to get there. However, everyone can see that this is not happening. Last year, our economy grew by 3.4 percent. This year, it grew by 5.4 percent in the first quarter. Moreover, according to international financial and economic organisations – the World Bank re-ran some numbers (it was our goal) – and we were in fifth place in terms of purchasing power parity in the world and we set ourselves the goal of making it to the fourth place. I think you are following the calculations of our colleagues from international financial institutions. Quite recently, last week, I think, the World Bank ran the numbers on our GDP only to find out that we were outdoing Japan in this regard. According to the World Bank, Russia is the world’s fourth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity meaning that we achieved that goal.

That is not what really matters, though. This is not an end in itself. What is important, though, is to keep up the pace and progress. So far, we have been able to do so, because in the first quarter, as I said earlier, our GDP amounted to 5.4 percent. The reason I am saying this is not to brag about it. I want those who are trying to get in our way, to cause us harm and to slow down our progress realise that what they are doing does more harm to themselves than to us. They should realise this, draw conclusions and mend their ways for their own benefit. But we do not see it happening.

No offence, but I think that the level of professional training of the decision-makers, including in the Federal Republic [of Germany] leaves much to be desired.

Andrei Kondrashov: Thank you, Mr Romanchik.

I think it would be logical to not wander away from the European theme and give the floor to France: a country that admits quite officially that European troops can be sent to Ukraine.

Our guest is Editor-in-Chief for Europe at France-Press, Karim Talbi. Mr Talbi speaks excellent Russian, because, like Martin Romanchik, he worked as a correspondent in Moscow for quite a long time.

Please, Mr Talbi, your question.

AFP Editor-in-Chief for Europe Karim Talbi: Mr President, my question also concerns Ukraine.

Why cannot you still disclose the number of losses among Russian soldiers in Ukraine during the hostilities?

Vladimir Putin: If this is the only thing you are interested in, I can say that, as a rule, no one ever talks about this. If they do, then, as a rule, they distort the real figures.

I can tell you with complete confidence that our losses, especially as concerns irreparable losses, unfortunately, then they are several times less than on the Ukrainian side.

I can tell you exact numbers captured by the both sides, or war prisoners. There are 1,348 of our soldiers and officers held by the Ukrainian side. I know the exact numbers because we work with them every day. As you know, there was an exchange just recently: 75 people were exchanged for 75 people. We have 6,465 Ukrainian soldiers.

If we talk about approximate irretrievable losses, then the ratio is the same: one to about five. This is what we will proceed from. This is precisely the reason of the attempt to carry out total mobilisation in Ukraine: because they suffer great losses on the battlefield.

You know, this is how it looks: according to our calculations, the Ukrainian army loses 50,000 people per month as sanitary and irretrievable losses both, although their irretrievable and sanitary losses are approximately 50/50. The total mobilisation effort, which is now underway, does not solve the problem, because, according to our data (we get it from various sources), they recruit around 30,000 [people] per month by force or without force, but mostly by seizing men on the streets. There are not many people willing to fight there.

According to our data, last month and the month before that they recruited about 50,000–55,000. But this does not solve the problem. You know why? Because this mobilisation can only cover losses. All of these men are sent to make up for losses. This is the basic problem that leads to a lowering of the mobilisation age: from 27 years old down to 25 now.

We know from the Ukrainian side (it’s an open secret there; there are no secrets there at all): the US administration insists that the threshold be gradually lowered from 25 to 23 years, then to 20 years, and then to 18, or immediately to 18 years, because right now they are already requiring 17-year-old boys to register. We know this for sure: this is a demand from the US administration to the Ukrainian leadership, if it can be considered leadership after the election was cancelled.

Anyway, as I have said in one of my recent public appearances – I think it was when I talked to the media while returning from my visit to Uzbekistan – I believe that the United States administration would force the current Ukrainian leadership to take these decisions on lowering the mobilisation age all the way down to 18 years, and once that is done, they will simply get rid of Zelensky. But first, he will have to do it. In fact, this is not an easy thing to do. They will have to enact a law and take specific steps to make this happen.

We are in June 2024 right now. I think that they would need a year to do this. This means that they would tolerate him until the beginning of next year, as least, but once he does everything they expect from him, they will just wave him goodbye and replace him with someone else. There are several candidates for this job, as far as I understand.

However, all this entails so many casualties. I mentioned the 50,000 figure, but this is as conservative as you can get. The 50,000 figure is what we see on the battlefield, but we can see that there were other losses too, without being able to count them. They happened deep in the rear, behind the lines, and once you factor them in, the number becomes much bigger. This is what I can say about the casualties.

By Scott McConnell, Modern Age, 7/17/23

For baby boomers, a first encounter with George Kennan likely came in a college history assignment to read American Diplomacy, the published lectures Kennan gave at the University of Chicago in 1951. Or perhaps with Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the historic essay, written under the pseudonym “X,” published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs. There Kennan distilled the message of the “Long Telegram” he had dictated from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow the previous year, crystallizing Washington’s thinking about how to deal with the Soviet Union in the new postwar era. 

A first-time reader might have sensed the beauty of Kennan’s prose, unusual for those writing about foreign policy. Then might have followed a realization that the arguments he made seemed like no one else’s. 

Foreign-policy debates during the Vietnam era fell almost invariably into two ideological camps. Some writers scorned the United States, finding fault with nearly every aspect of the country’s conduct because it was imperialist or bellicose or insufficiently humanitarian—the Marxist and liberal positions often overlapped. 

Others—most government officials and Cold War liberals and conservatives—presented American policies as an outgrowth of good or reasonable intentions, directed against genuine threats, or as efforts to right genuine injustices. If those policies were sometimes flawed or ineffectual, the purposes behind them were moral and sound. 

And here was Kennan, very much a part of the American establishment, yet highly critical of American policies. All too often they were, he argued, manipulated populist impulses disrespectful of the realities of power and arts of diplomacy. He lamented an American proclivity for legalism and moral posturing in foreign affairs, decried his country’s tendency to present America’s opponents as embodiments of evil, worried over America’s hubris and lack of humility. He concluded (in 1951) that we were a far less secure country than we had been in the nineteenth century. 

While several excellent biographies of George Kennan have been published, it’s not obvious that any of them give a better sense of the man or more reading pleasure than his own voluminous published writings. One of his biographers, the noted historian (and Kennan’s close personal friend) John Lukacs, says in George Kennan: A Study of Character that Kennan “was, and remains, the best and finest American writer about [interwar] Europe at that time: better and finer than hundreds of others, including Hemingway.” 

That judgment is based simply on Kennan’s verbal sketches and diary entries written as a young Foreign Service officer, stationed in interwar Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics, well before he was famous. Fame did ensue after the Long Telegram and the X article, which led to a few years of genuine influence in government, followed by a lengthy post-government career at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. There Kennan became a prize-winning diplomatic historian, producing after the age of fifty a body of scholarship which would exceed that of most Ivy League professors. 

In addition, he wrote two volumes of widely read and touted memoirs, some remarkable polemical sallies (most notably against the 1960s student left), and a best-selling work of political philosophy that was published when he was approaching ninety. 

Yet in Kennan’s diaries and memoirs there runs a skein of almost constant complaint about his own lack of influence over the direction of his country, regular expressions of woe that, while he was treated with a kind of respect, he was never (apart from the interlude of the late 1940s) taken seriously.