In an interesting speech about the way US imperial aggression provokes violence around the world, antiwar commentator Scott Horton made reference to an April 2022 article from Yahoo News that had previously escaped my attention.
The article is titled “In closer ties to Ukraine, U.S. officials long saw promise and peril,” and it features named and unnamed veterans of the US intelligence cartel saying that long before the February 2022 invasion they were fully aware that the US had “provoked” Russia in Ukraine and created a powderkeg situation that would likely lead to war. [https://news.yahoo.com/in-closer-ties-to-ukraine-us-officials-long-saw-promise-and-peril-090006105.html]
“By last summer [meaning the summer of 2021], the baseline view of most U.S. intelligence community analysts was that Russia felt sufficiently provoked over Ukraine that some unknown trigger could set off an attack by Moscow,” a former CIA official told Yahoo News’ Zach Dorfman, who adds, “(The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.)”
Dorfman writes that initial support provided to Ukraine during the Obama administration had been “calibrated to avoid aggravating Moscow,” but that “partially spurred by Congress, as well as the Trump administration, which was more willing to be aggressive on weapon transfers to Kyiv, overt U.S. military support for Ukraine grew over time — and with it the risk of a deadly Russian response, some CIA officials believed at the time.”
Policymakers “would always say, ‘If we do X thing, if we give the Ukrainians X system, how are the Russians going to react?’ And our answer would always be, ‘You can’t look at any one thing in isolation,’” the unnamed former CIA official told Yahoo News. “And we might look and say, ‘Well, it’s just a few hundred MANPADs [man-portable air-defense systems] or a few hundred Humvees,’ but it’s missing the point that the Russians are taking all of this stuff in the aggregate, and they’re drawing this picture of this ever-increasing relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine.”
“I understand the moral argument,” says former CIA official Jeffrey Edmonds regarding the weapons transfers into Ukraine, “but I also understand the argument that, well, why would you want to give these things if it’s just going to increase the chances that Russia does something?”
So while we members of the public were blindly speculating about whether or not Russia would attack Ukraine, the US intelligence cartel was fully aware that the US was taking actions ensuring that that would happen. That’s the environment the US security state knew it was operating under when it continued to taunt the idea of adding Ukraine and Georgia to NATO right up until the final moments before the invasion.
This war wasn’t just provoked, it was knowingly provoked. Off ramp after off ramp was sped past by the US war machine at a hundred miles an hour on its beeline toward a horrific proxy war, because empire managers had calculated that such a war would serve US interests. And now we routinely see US officials like Mitch McConnell openly saying that this war serves US interests.
They really couldn’t be more obvious about it if they tried.
It’s been funny to watch the response of empire apologists to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s surprising refutation of a year and a half of empire propaganda by openly admitting that NATO expansion provoked the invasion of Ukraine and acknowledging that NATO powers rejected Moscow’s proposed compromises which could have averted the war. Basically the only argument they now have after this admission is to say that Russia should not have viewed NATO expansion as an existential threat.
Their only remaining trick is to argue with reality; to basically say that yes it’s reality that NATO expansion provoked this war because Moscow saw it as a threat, but reality shouldn’t have been what reality was. They argue that Russia should have felt completely different feelings about a military threat on its border than nations like the United States would feel, since as we’ve discussed previously the last time there was a credible military threat near the US border the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended.
That’s really all they’ve got: “Yes it’s true that all the people who’ve died and lost their homes in this war did so because we were amassing a hostile military alliance near Russia’s border, but in our defense the Russians should’ve thought different thoughts in their heads than the ones that we ourselves would think about a hostile military threat on our border.”
If all westerners deeply understood all the suffering and danger that has been unleashed upon our world by this war, and deeply understood the fact that their own governments played a role in starting it, the political status quo of the western world would be impossible to maintain. Which is why such unprecedented levels of propaganda and internet censorship have gone into preventing westerners from coming to such an understanding.
Westerners were deceived into supporting yet another evil war, which once again is showing every sign of dragging on for the foreseeable future with no exit strategy in sight. The only difference between this war and all those other wars is that this one is laden with the risk of nuclear annihilation, a risk which the US empire has been treading less and less carefully around as the bloodshed continues.
The more you think about it, the more horrifying it gets.
In December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in February of that year, few thought that Ukraine would survive more than a week, or that its president would remain at his post in Kyiv. But Zelensky, who had been a comedian and actor before his unlikely landslide election victory in 2019, defied Russian airstrikes and mobilized his countrymen, rebuffing Western offers of evacuation: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” His unexpected courage helped to rally Ukrainian forces against Russia’s northern thrust. He also reminded many of the two-time Man of the Year—in 1940 and 1949—Winston Churchill. Also known for defending his country against the aggression of an authoritarian leader, Churchill was, as Time’s tribute noted, “the historical figure to whom [Zelensky] has most often been compared in recent months.”
Comparisons between Zelensky and Churchill are apt, but not only for the reasons that those making them intend. The British Bulldog’s legacy is in fact quite mixed. His biographer Geoffrey Wheatcroft rightly reminds us that a balanced assessment of Churchill must acknowledge “the one irredeemably sublime moment in his life, when he saved his country and saved freedom.” But his actions in Britain’s “finest hour” do not negate the many missteps he made over the course of his political career. As more critical accounts of Churchill’s tenure have emerged—among the best are Robert Rhodes James’s Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 and John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory—it has become harder to ignore his many blunders. These include the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign during World War I (which resulted in around 200,000 casualties) and several miscalculations during the interwar years, when he took a relatively benign view of Mussolini, Franco, and even Hitler, then pursued a mostly one-sided relationship with Stalin (“I like him the more I see him,” he confessed to his wife). Notwithstanding his resolve in the face of a potential German invasion, even his strategizing during World War II was far from masterful. Churchill badly underestimated the Japanese threat and then, in the face of the siege of Singapore, demanded that British forces fight to the bitter end. His cold-blooded attack on the French fleet in Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940 not only constituted shabby treatment of an erstwhile ally but was based on the false assumption that Vichy France planned to turn its ships over to the Axis powers.
Like Churchill, Zelensky deserves a place in history for his actions during a perilous moment. The Ukrainian leader showed great physical courage by staying in Kyiv when it appeared that the Russian Army would seize the capital. But physical courage is not the only thing Zelensky will need to steer his country out of its current conflict. And like Churchill, Zelensky’s track record before and since his finest hour is checkered at best.
Born in the eastern Ukraine mining city of Kryvyi Rih in 1978, Zelensky is an improbable successor to Churchill. His father was a professor and his mother an engineer. As a teenager, he began competing in comedy contests modeled after the popular Russian television show KVN. This set the stage for his successful TV series Servant of the People, in which he played a simple schoolteacher who becomes a reformist president of Ukraine.
Zelensky has a history of defying the odds. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2018, few anticipated that he would defeat Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent, or edge out Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and the darling of the Orange Revolution. He not only prevailed over these veteran politicians but did so handily, winning more than 70 percent of the vote in the second round of elections. Before the ticker tape had settled, he dissolved parliament and called elections, in which his party—Servant of the People, named after the TV program—gained an outright majority. Zelensky went from dark horse to powerful president in the blink of an eye.
Three main factors account for Zelensky’s rapid rise. First, he was considered to be above the fray. Though anti-Semitism is still rampant in the post-Soviet states, the Zelenskys, as a Russian-speaking Jewish family, straddled the country’s ethnolinguistic fault lines. As a Russian speaker, Zelensky could communicate across the border with Russia and could point to his friends and relatives in the eastern, predominantly Russian-speaking region known as the Donbas as evidence of his ability to bridge that divide. Zelensky had also wisely stayed out of the contentious Maidan Revolution in 2014. Neither he nor his close colleagues were active in the movement to overthrow Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, which deeply divided the country. Instead, Zelensky aimed his barbs at targets across the political spectrum, and even performed with his comedy troupe in the Donbas city of Horlivka during the post-Maidan uprising.
Zelensky’s second advantage was timing. His meteoric ascent reflected widespread disenchantment with business as usual—particularly corruption and the war in the Donbas, which had taken the lives of some thirteen thousand people. By 2019, public distrust of the elite was deep-seated. A vote for Zelensky was seen as both a repudiation of the establishment and an act of faith in a brighter future.
Finally, Zelensky was careful to keep his agenda quite vague, so as to avoid disturbing the image that voters had of him as an actor or backing himself into a corner. His biographer Serhii Rudenko has suggested that his voters imagined themselves electing the protagonist of Servant of the People, rather than Zelensky himself. Writing on the eve of the election in the New York Times, the journalist Alisa Sopova explained that keeping his political slate clean was “an asset for him—as well as a canvas onto which people can paint whatever they want.”
No wonder Zelensky’s supporters initially believed he would bring an end to the two scourges plaguing the Ukrainian body politic: its rampant corruption and the festering civil war in the Donbas. That he has failed, so far, to solve either problem constitutes the great missed opportunity of the Zelensky presidency, and has much to do with the tragic predicament that Ukraine finds itself in today.
Zelensky’s resolve to root out corruption flagged early in his term. There are, to be sure, structural features of post-Soviet states—a dependence on only a few industries and natural resources; the legacy of state-owned enterprises—that have long empowered oligarchs to manipulate the political system. But a more recent development is just as central to Ukraine’s endemic corruption. In 2014, during the Maidan Revolution, Yanukovych was toppled by mass protests in which a small group of ultranationalists pushed an extreme agenda. These forces subsequently regarded any move against Yanukovych’s anti-Russian successor Poroshenko as a betrayal of the revolution. In turn, many Ukrainian oligarchs found that wrapping themselves in the Maidan battle flag helped to conceal their nefarious business activities.
On television, Zelensky played an incorruptible teacher turned president, but the reality is more complicated. One of his original backers was Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian billionaire with a controlling interest in the television channel that aired Zelensky’s show, who would later be placed on the U.S. sanctions list for alleged fraud. Despite attempting to distance himself from his former patron, Zelensky has never been able to make a clean break with him. Indeed, Zelensky and his associates have been linked by journalists to some $40 million in offshore accounts associated with Kolomoisky’s notorious PrivatBank.
Another sign that Zelensky was not going to clean out Ukraine’s Augean stables came in March 2020, when he fired the prime minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, whose anticorruption efforts were creating waves. An assassination attempt on Zelensky’s adviser Serhiy Shefir, reportedly due to anticorruption efforts, seems to have further reinforced the steep cost of pursuing good governance. This January, amid continued allegations of corruption, several high-ranking ministers were forced out, along with a raft of regional governors.
Zelensky’s commitment to end the war in the Donbas has suffered a similar fate. While the prospect of settling things through peaceful negotiation looks increasingly remote after more than a year of all-out war, at the beginning of Zelensky’s administration conditions were far more favorable. According to research collected by the San Diego State University political scientist Mikhail Alexseev, around 70 percent of Ukrainian poll respondents in the years leading up to the 2019 presidential election said that ending the war in the Donbas was their “number one concern.” Voters in the eastern region turned out in droves for Zelensky in the second round of presidential voting in April 2019. That November, a poll administered by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation found that 73 percent of respondents supported a negotiated settlement.
Russia also seemed amenable to negotiations. A spokesman for the Russian president Vladimir Putin said that the country’s primary interest in the 2019 Ukrainian election was to see a candidate win who would work to settle the conflict. Putin maintained through 2021 that “the Donbas is an internal issue of the Ukrainian state,” and waited until the eve of the February 2022 “special military operation” to support the independence of the rebellious Donbas oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk. This suggests that Putin’s initial strategy was to ensure that pro-Russian Ukrainians retained veto power to counterbalance Kyiv’s increasingly Western tilt. The New York Times quoted the former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev’s claim that Russia would have traded the Donbas for “other things”—the promise that Ukraine would not join NATO, for example.
Zelensky initially seemed inclined to pursue a negotiated settlement along lines worked out in a series of meetings in Minsk in 2014 and 2015. The so-called Minsk process began in the fall of 2014, once the war in the Donbas had shifted in favor of the separatist rebels (and their Russian backers). The Minsk agreements, signed in September 2014 and February 2015, mandated a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, the deployment of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors, the demobilization of militias, the departure of foreign fighters, and eventual Ukrainian control of the international border, following elections. It called for a decentralization of power, a special status for Luhansk and Donetsk, the holding of local elections within the self-proclaimed republics, and general amnesty for fighters on both sides. Economically, the agreements focused on the resumption of commercial ties between the Kyiv-controlled and rebellious provinces. Finally, they enumerated provisions for humanitarian aid and the exchange of civilian and military prisoners. After a rebel victory at Debaltseve in 2015, the parties returned to the negotiating table to discuss elections and decentralization in detail. The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier then proposed that the regional elections be held under auspices of OSCE.
Soon after taking office, Zelensky took steps to implement this framework, agreeing to a prisoner-of-war exchange in early September 2019. He also embraced Steinmeier’s proposal to hold elections in October and was preparing to move Ukrainian forces back from the line of contact in the Donbas—a key Putin demand—in anticipation of a December summit in Paris. But that meeting would prove to be the zenith of Zelensky’s peace campaign, as he soon ran up against one of the forces that had also helped to stymie his anticorruption efforts: the nationalist far right.
Though Russia’s claims of a neo-Nazi government in Kyiv were never credible, there remains a dark undercurrent in Ukrainian politics. Far-right parties, some with a clear neo-Nazi bent, include the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, Svoboda, the Ukrainian National Union, the Right Sector, and the National Corps. Ultra-right-wing forces have not done well electorally in recent years, but they have nonetheless proven influential, in part because they are willing to resort to extra-parliamentary action. Radical nationalist groups have also been successful in making alliances with influential political players, including several powerful oligarchs. Few of these oligarchs endorse the far right’s ideology, but some seem to regard it as less threatening to their interests than the anticorruption agenda embraced by Ukrainian liberals. In addition, ultranationalists are overrepresented in the armed and security forces, including movements with their own militias such as S14, the Misanthropic Division, the Carpathian Sich (associated with Svoboda), Aidar, and Azov (associated with the National Corps). These battalions proved themselves to be effective early in the Donbas uprising, at a time when Ukraine’s army was in disarray. As the army rebuilt with substantial aid from the West, several of these paramilitary groups were incorporated into the regular forces.
In October 2019, after Zelensky had proposed a ceasefire and the withdrawal of forces from the line of contact, he went to the front to persuade the various battalions to honor it. A widely circulated video from the visit shows Zelensky debating the leader of the National Corps, Denys Yantar, who warned that there would be protests if the president agreed to a ceasefire. This was just one of many such warnings passed along by veterans’ groups. The Poroshenko ally Volodymyr Ariev warned that “if the president signs anything granting Russian influence in Ukraine, it would cause riots.”
These were not idle threats. The right never accepted the Minsk process, and met Zelensky’s tentative steps toward peace with stiff opposition. This began with smaller protests in Kyiv in October 2019. Then, on December 8, around ten thousand hard-liners rallied on the Maidan to encourage the president to say “no” to Putin. Rudenko notes that their “speeches in the center of Kyiv were, of course, a warning to Zelensky himself.” The website Myrotvorets, which makes an infamous list of allegedly anti-Ukrainian journalists and public figures, briefly included the president’s wife Olena Zelensky, claiming that she had inadvertently revealed sensitive information about the movements of Ukrainian armed forces on her Facebook page.
Such opposition would be daunting for any leader, but Zelensky promised that he was the man for the job. “I am not afraid to make difficult decisions,” he declared. “I am ready to lose my popularity, my ratings if needed, or even my post as long as we achieve peace.” Yet his enthusiasm for the Minsk agreements quickly wilted in the face of hard-line opposition. In a statement following the December 2019 summit, Zelensky echoed many of the right wing’s red lines when laying out Ukraine’s position. At that meeting, Zelensky had established a new formula for peace that included a limited special status for the Donbas (no different than any other Ukrainian region), and proposed only a piecemeal military disengagement. In July 2020, he signaled a lack of interest in the OSCE-coordinated Trilateral Contact Group—which had been a central platform for the negotiations—by appointing the former president Leonid Kravchuk, who was then eighty-six, as Ukraine’s representative. In early 2021, Zelensky moved substantial numbers of troops back toward the line of contact, closed pro-Russian media outlets, and charged the leaders of the breakaway republics with treason. Soon after these moves, Russia began building up its military forces on the other side of the border.
A charitable view of Zelensky’s failure to end corruption or peacefully settle the Donbas conflict might be that he had little room to maneuver in either case. Corruption is deeply ingrained in the structure of post-Soviet states, and the sort of negotiated peace needed to finish the civil war could have compromised the country’s sovereignty to an extent that would have been anathema to large numbers of Ukrainians, some of whom had guns and a propensity to use them. Addressing these issues would have posed political and perhaps even personal risks. But Zelensky did have opportunities—and, for a time, an overwhelming political mandate—to do so. That he folded so swiftly contradicts his well-managed image of integrity and courage; more importantly, his failures of foresight and fortitude meant that Ukraine squandered its chance to avoid the current conflict. Indeed, if Zelensky could have stood down his domestic opponents, particularly in the honeymoon period after his 2019 victory, perhaps he would not have had to stand up to the Russians in February 2022.
What explains Zelensky’s failure? To begin with, he and his team always favored style over substance. The Economist, which had expressed ardent support for Zelensky during the campaign, voiced concern just before his landslide victory, noting that he had “offered little indication of what exactly he plans to do, beyond vague assurances to maintain Ukraine’s Western course, improve the investment climate and end the war in the east.” Roman Bezsmertny, whom Zelensky appointed and then fired from the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group, said that when he met with the president in the summer of 2019, he asked him how he viewed the situation in the Donbas: “He replied that by the new year, i.e., by 2020, we have to resolve the issue with the Donbas. And I already realized that he had no idea what it was. Because the words ‘solve the issue with the Donbas’ sounded like ‘tackle corruption,’ ‘engage in economic reform’—that is, do nothing.”
While Zelensky’s career in show business taught him to craft inspiring narratives, it provided him with little in the way of practical political experience. The former economics minister Tymofiy Mylovanov told the New York Times that Zelensky and his advisers “think differently” than typical politicians. “They think in terms of dramaturgy. They think, Who is the villain, who is the hero, what is the roller coaster of emotions?” Rudenko explains in his biography that “Servant of the People just stood for a popular TV series in which Zelensky, in the guise of Vasyl Holoborodko, skillfully defeated the government that hated the people.” But there was a yawning chasm between that simplistic drama and the real situation in Ukraine.
In a strikingly similar fashion to Churchill, Zelensky seems to be at his best during periods of chaos. Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel told the Financial Times that he was “a person of chaos. In war, it is chaos, he feels at home.” War, as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously teaches, is a realm of disorder and uncertainty, and great wartime leaders are often those who thrive in such an environment. In his philosophical treatise On War, Clausewitz distinguishes between physical courage, which Zelensky may be said to have shown during the early days of the Russian invasion, and moral courage, or “courage before responsibility, whether it be before the judgement-seat of external authority, or of the inner power, the conscience.” Zelensky’s foreign supporters like to describe him as the conscience of the West, but there are many instances in which he has lacked moral courage in this sense.
This has been evident not only in his failure to stand up to extremist forces at home, but also in his dealings with Ukraine’s allies, as exemplified by his infamous phone call with Donald Trump in July 2019 when he was asked to investigate the Bidens. Zelensky’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Trump were bad enough, but perhaps can be explained by virtue of America’s importance to Ukraine and Trump’s transactional approach to politics. More troubling was Zelensky’s eagerness to denigrate others for little discernible reason. A transcript of the call records him carping about how the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the French president Emmanuel Macron were not doing enough for Ukraine, telling Trump that he was “absolutely right. Not only one hundred percent, but actually one thousand percent” when he said of European leaders that “all they do is talk.” He likewise echoed Trump’s view that the recently recalled American diplomat Marie Yovanovitch was “a bad ambassador.” As the French journalist Sylvie Kauffmann put it in the New York Times:
This popular maverick comedian turned real-life politician after playing one in a TV series, this promising reformer that President Emmanuel Macron of France had hosted at the Élysée even before he was elected, was in fact another spineless, unprepared leader jumping into President Trump’s every trap.
The lack of moral courage Zelensky displayed during the exchange was not only personally embarrassing; it also boded poorly, as Kauffmann noted, for his ability to deal with the domestic problems he had been elected to confront.
While Russia is of course a major actor in Ukraine’s tragedy, the West, and the United States particularly, bears its own share of responsibility for Zelensky’s failures. America has done little since 2013 to advance a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and its most recent actions have only inflamed tensions. Under Barack Obama, the United States was guilty, in the judgment of the Brookings Institution scholar Alina Polyakova, of “absenteeism” in the Minsk process. Trump, meanwhile, seemed interested in Ukraine only so far as it could advance his own political fortunes. And soon after taking office, Joe Biden began undermining the Minsk agreements. Speaking in Washington on February 7, 2022, Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken grumbled about Minsk’s “sequencing,” a sign that the United States was unlikely to play a constructive role in the peace process.
Once the Russians launched their attack, of course, U.S. policy turned decisively against a negotiated settlement, even as the Zelensky government was talking with the Russians. In March 2022, Biden mused publicly about regime change, saying of Putin that “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Putin complained in September of that year that peace talks with Ukraine had been going well until the West ordered Kyiv to “wreck all these agreements,” a charge that Western analysts and politicians have essentially confirmed. Though head of a NATO member country, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan complained that “the West has only made provocations and failed to make efforts to be a mediator in the Ukraine-Russia war,” which is likely why Turkey assumed a mediator role in 2022.
During the early days of the conflict, it briefly appeared that Russia and Ukraine were converging on a peace deal. In an interview with ABC News on March 7, 2022, Zelensky even said that he had “cooled down” on joining NATO. But later that month, he abruptly adopted a hard-line position, stepping back from compromise in the Donbas. At this point, any suggestion of territorial or diplomatic concessions to Russia were, in Zelensky’s increasingly Churchillian mindset, nothing more than a rerun of the 1938 French and British surrender in Munich (brokered by Churchill’s rival and predecessor Neville Chamberlain).
Meanwhile, Zelensky’s ambitions keep growing. Last December, he told the U.S. Congress, quoting FDR, that he intends to achieve an “absolute victory.” This victory would entail not only reclaiming territory seized by Russia since 2022, but also liberating the Donbas and Crimea. Following the dramatic Ukrainian counterattacks in the fall of 2022, which liberated large chunks of Russian-occupied territory, Zelensky’s star reached its zenith. This July, during the NATO summit in Vilnius, Zelensky struck a very different tone than he had sixteen months earlier, tweeting that it was “unprecedented and absurd” that Ukraine had not been provided with a time frame for joining NATO.
Zelensky and his advisers are now hoping to do more than make the Russian bear bleed for attacking Ukraine; they imagine they can rout Russia’s army and bring about Putin’s demise. Zelensky has increased his demands for sophisticated weaponry—including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and cluster munitions—and continues to insist on sanctions against Russia. He is also pushing to expand the geographical focus of the war. Ukrainian drone and artillery strikes on pre-2014 Russian territory have been increasing. Most alarmingly, in November 2022 the Ukrainian president doggedly maintained, with no evidence, that a missile that struck Polish territory and killed two Poles was a Russian attack rather than an accidental strike by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft battery. Had there been evidence for Zelensky’s claims against Russia, he might have triggered NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, widening and escalating the war.
Is Volodymyr Zelensky the right leader to settle this conflict? Here the comparison to Churchill may once again be apt, though not in a way that reflects well on Zelensky. Churchill’s Conservative Party was voted out of power in July 1945, two months after the end of fighting in Europe and before the surrender in the Pacific. Churchill seemed out of touch with British voters, who were disturbed by his distaste for social reform after six years of war. Zelensky has at times, like Churchill, become a hero outside of his country while his standing is diminishing at home. Where he once merely kowtowed to the far right during the Minsk process, he now seems to be embracing some of its leading figures, like the Azov commander Denys Prokopenko. And while it is not uncommon during wartime for democracies to restrict the press, the Zelensky Administration is doing so to such an extent that some claim journalism in the country has devolved into a “marathon of propaganda.” According to the Financial Times, Ukrainians are “already debating whether their leader, like his illustrious British predecessor, may be the right man for a war of national survival but the wrong one for the peace that follows.”
Reflecting on Poroshenko’s lack of enthusiasm for the Minsk framework, The Economist suggested that Zelensky’s predecessor came to see the Donbas conflict as a diversionary war, removing the pressure for domestic reforms. The nightmare scenario is that Zelensky will similarly recognize the frustration of his domestic agenda and find, like many other wartime leaders before him, that the only thing harder than conducting a war is governing in peace. Indeed, given the likelihood of a prolonged military stalemate between Ukraine and Russia—and the fact that, the longer the war drags on, the longer elections can be delayed under martial law—Zelensky may feel less pressure to consider diplomatic measures than he did in the early days of the conflict. Perhaps Zelensky’s biggest moral failure will prove to be prolonging a war that in a year or two won’t look any different on the ground, save for much larger cemeteries on both sides.
“There is certainly a moral component to the question of supporting a war that almost certainly cannot be won. It is troubling to know there are some in the West who remain content knowing thousands of someone else’s sons and daughters will be sacrificed in the vague hope of weakening Russia.”
—Former US Army Lt. Colonel Daniel L. Davis
On June 4, at the insistence of Western governments clamouring for Russia’s strategic defeat, Ukraine’s military launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive. Since then, Ukrainian casualties have soared, leaving the country in a weak position on the battlefield and with little leverage at the still empty negotiating table.
Western officials and media commentators have gradually acknowledged that the counteroffensive is not going to plan. At the same time, they have sought to focus attention on Ukraine’s meagre territorial gains along the 700 mile front, suggesting the military effort is “gaining momentum” and “could yet pay off.”
By framing the narrative in this way, they are obscuring the reality of an existentially dangerous war where the risks of escalation—either nuclear use or an attack on NATO—are rising fast. Indeed, even if Ukraine achieves the goals of its ill-fated counteroffensive, it will still lose the war.
What has the counteroffensive achieved, and at what cost?
Despite the Ukrainian army’s relentless attacks on Russian defences, its gains to date have been insignificant.
A map produced by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) shows that, as of September 8, the territory retaken by the Ukrainian military so far is negligible.
Since the counteroffensive began, and despite repeated attacks on Crimea, Ukrainian forces have recaptured no part of the peninsula.
In some areas, such as the Kupiansk region, not only has Ukraine failed to retake any territory, but Russian forces have advanced, as shown in a map published on September 8, 2023 by CNN.
According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, “in the first two weeks of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Ukraine seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory.”
Ukraine’s minimal territorial gains have also come at an enormous human cost.
Based on publicly available information, numerous reports confirm that Ukraine has suffered massive losses, possibly in the range of 40,000 casualties in little under four months.
Evidence that Ukraine has sustained severe losses is also consistent with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s desperate efforts to reconstitute his army.
Six weeks after Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, Zelensky extended martial law and general mobilization for three months.
Three weeks later, he dismissed all of Ukraine’s regional military commissars and announced that Ukrainian authorities had launched 112 criminal proceedings against 33 regional officials, alleging corruption in the process of military conscription.
Since the beginning of the invasion, Ukrainian authorities have apprehended approximately 20,000 military-aged men who sought to leave the country, either by avoiding border checkpoints or by attempting to pass through them with forged documents.
Many other Ukrainian men succeeded in avoiding conscription, often by paying bribes.
Now, a representative of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party has declared that Ukraine expects all Western European countries that have accepted Ukrainian refugees to send men of military age back home so that they can be drafted into the army and sent to the front.
Several days ago, Ukrainian media reported that Poland might extradite Ukrainian ‘draft dodgers’ back to Ukraine, where they could be compelled to participate in near-suicidal assaults on heavily fortified Russian positions.
Austria’s government then rejected extradition, stating “That would be a massive encroachment on our statehood, we would never do that. That would be an attempted intervention in our asylum system and in our statehood, Austria could not entertain that.”
Germany followed Austria’s lead, as did Hungary.
Zelensky’s plan to reconstitute his army by means of extradition might now be in tatters.
To mitigate the effects of draft evasion, Ukraine’s government has also imposed harsh penalties on conscientious objectors. As the New York Times recently reported: “Conscientious objection to military service is an internationally recognized right, one enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky instituted martial law. With that, the right to alternative service related to conscientious objection effectively evaporated.”
Not only is conscientious objection a “human right,” said Eli S. McCarthy, a professor of justice and peace studies at Georgetown University, it is “critical to commitments that Ukraine has made” to international bodies and aspirations to join the European Union.
Why Ukraine’s counteroffensive is sputtering
Emboldened by the success of its counteroffensive operations last year in the regions of Kharkiv and Kherson, Ukraine and NATO boldly projected the swift attainment of Ukraine’s latest military objectives. Zelensky’s chief of military intelligence went so far as to proclaim publicly that Ukraine would retake Crimea by the end of spring.
There were at least three fatal flaws in this reasoning.
First, the Russian army that Ukraine faced in the autumn of 2022 is not the same army that it now confronts. Late last year, Russia completed the mobilization of nearly 300,000 soldiers. Moreover, as Russian forces accumulated experience on the battlefield, they inevitably fought with greater sophistication and lethality.
Second, Ukraine’s supporters exaggerated the scale of the army’s success in its counteroffensives of December 2022. As explained recently by Professor John Mearsheimer, a former US Air Force officer and West Point graduate:
“We [in the West] misread what happened in Kharkiv and Kherson… These were not great Ukrainian victories… Before the Russians withdrew [from Kherson], they really hammered the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians suffered enormous casualties on the West Bank of the Dnieper River in Kherson before the Russians evacuated. The Russians were not ‘pushed out.’ And you see a similar situation in Kharkiv. So these were not great victories that presaged what was going to happen in the counteroffensive.”
In a recent, detailed analysis of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Mearsheimer described it bluntly as a “colossal failure.”
Third, months before the counteroffensive began, Western military experts telegraphed Ukraine’s plans to the Russians by accurately predicting that Ukrainian forces would attempt to sever the land bridge from mainland Russia to Crimea by thrusting southward to the Russian-controlled city of Melitopol, near the Sea of Azov.
Their advanced warning gave Russia’s military command both the incentive and opportunity to prepare heavily fortified positions in the south, particularly between the line of contact and Melitopol.
Ukraine’s forces stood little chance of advancing beyond Russia’s dense minefields, which lie to the north of its main fortifications. Under ideal conditions, navigating these minefields would be a significant challenge, but conditions for Ukraine were far from ideal: its beleaguered forces were obliged to cross these minefields while operating at a huge disadvantage in both air power and artillery.
What’s more, Ukraine’s army has had to depend on a daunting array of diverse and often outdated Western weapons, each presenting its own specifications, strengths and weaknesses.
A grim New York Times assessment highlights the problem:
“Ammunition is in short supply, and there is a mixture of munitions sent from different countries. That has forced Ukrainian artillery units to use more ammunition to hit their targets, Ukrainian soldiers said, because accuracy varies widely between the various shells. In addition, some of the older shells and rockets sent from abroad are damaging their equipment and injuring soldiers. “It’s a very big problem now,” said Alex, a Ukrainian battalion commander.”
Finally, Ukrainian soldiers received inadequate training from NATO forces. Not only was their training too brief, but it was also administered by instructors with no real-world experience of fighting a peer enemy in a large-scale land war. Leaked documents from the end of February revealed that nine Ukrainian brigades being equipped and trained abroad in Poland, Romania, and Slovenia had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15 percent trained.
There is a world of difference between fighting the rag-tag Taliban—which possessed little more than Soviet-era small arms—and the Russian military, a modern force equipped with an extensive array of artillery systems, hypersonic missiles, fighter jets and bombers, advanced air defence systems, satellite imagery, and electronic warfare capabilities.
It is probably fair to suggest that, at this stage of the conflict, Ukrainian combat veterans likely know a lot more about fighting Russians than just about any NATO instructor.
What if the counteroffensive succeeds?
Let’s imagine that Ukraine’s army miraculously takes Melitopol before the autumn rains impede the movement of armoured vehicles. What then?
From Melitopol, which is close to the Sea of Azov, Ukrainian forces would acquire fire control over the narrow strip of land between the city and the coastline, thereby severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.
At that stage, Russia would still control all of Crimea, sizeable chunks of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, and most of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, including Donetsk City and Mariupol.
Zelensky’s government has consistently defined ‘victory’ as the recovery of all territories that formed part of Ukraine when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. When a senior NATO official recently suggested that Ukraine might have to make territorial concessions in exchange for NATO membership, Zelensky was outraged. One of his senior advisors complained that “Trading territory for a NATO umbrella? It is ridiculous. That means deliberately choosing the defeat of democracy, encouraging a global criminal, preserving the Russian regime, destroying international law and passing the war on to other generations.”
Even if Ukrainian forces managed to sever the land bridge to Crimea, Ukraine would remain far from its own standard of victory.
Some might argue that a rupture in Russia’s land bridge could precipitate a rapid collapse in Russian control over Crimea and the Donbas. Based upon recent history, however, there’s no reason to expect such a collapse to occur.
From 2014 (when Russia annexed Crimea) to the launch of Russia’s invasion in early 2022, Russian forces controlled the peninsula without the benefit of a land bridge. Despite this, Ukraine was unable to mount any serious challenge to Russia’s hold over Crimea during that period. It is even less likely to do so now, because Ukraine’s military is in a far weaker state than it was before Russia’s invasion began.
Similarly, from 2014 to 2022, pro-Russian rebels controlled much of Donetsk and Luhansk without the benefit of any land bridge from mainland Russia to Crimea. During that period, few regular Russian forces were entrenched in these regions. Today, they would be far harder for Ukraine’s battered army to recover, given the extent of Russian military formations and defensive fortifications.
In June of last year, I predicted that Ukraine would lose this war. At the time, I was by no means the only person who had come to that conclusion, yet those who dared utter it were dismissed as Putin stooges and conveniently ignored.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, a realistic scenario in which Ukraine can achieve victory, as Zelensky defines it, by recapturing the territory lost to the Russians since 2014. Anyone possessing a modicum of objectivity understood this long ago.
A proxy war fuelled by disinformation
Critics of the West’s arming of Ukraine insist that this conflict is, in essence, a US-led proxy war against Russia.
American casualties in the Vietnam War, which were far lower than those being sustained by Ukraine now, generated so much public backlash in the US that the government increasingly resorted to the use of proxy forces that could sustain the hardships of war while fighting with American-made weapons. The war in Ukraine constitutes the apotheosis of this morally depraved strategy.
Predictably, those of us who have accused NATO of waging a proxy war have been derided as pro-Russian propagandists. Yet, even Leon Panetta, the former director of the CIA, recently acknowledged that the war in Ukraine is indeed a “proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not.” Many other leading foreign policy experts including former American Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock and Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich share this view. As Lily Lynch wrote recently in The New Statesmen, “The realists were right.”
To generate and sustain public support for the war, Western governments and most of the mainstream press have engaged in what Al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara calls “official deception” with “little or no attempt at balance or objectivity.”
How this deception is playing out is worth examining closely.
Foreign policy hypocrisy
If recent history demonstrates anything, it is that the US and its allies hold democracy and international law in contempt.
To dispense with the fiction that Western powers are motivated by such ideals, one has only to recall the US-led wars on Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan, the myriad of elected governments that the US and Britain have subverted, or the acts of torture that CIA operatives committed (with total impunity) at black sites around the world.
The historical record leaves no doubt that Western powers cynically invoke democracy and international law when it furthers their agenda, but casually ignore these same ideals when they become inconvenient to their geopolitical interests.
Whatever one may think of Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, we should at least be able to agree that the West’s motivation for provoking and sustaining this war has little (if anything) to do with democracy and international law.
Moreover, whatever the West’s true motivation may be, Ukraine is a flawed and corrupt democracy at best.
Zelensky suspended eleven opposition parties (including Ukraine’s largest). He ‘nationalized’ opposition television stations. He imposed martial law, suppressed religious freedom, linguistic rights and press freedom, and openly mused about deferring Ukrainian elections until the war (which could go on for many years) is finally over.
Even before Russia’s invasion, the CATO Institute and other knowledgeable observers warned of Ukraine’s accelerating slide into authoritarianism. Since the invasion began, conditions have deteriorated dramatically.
Defenders of Zelensky often argue that he has had to resort to authoritarian measures to protect the Ukrainian state from alleged pro-Russian collaborators. Yet a recently leaked report by Swiss intelligence concluded that Zelensky “is showing authoritarian traits” by attempting to ‘eliminate politically” a key rival, Vitali Klitschko.
Klitschko is the mayor of Kyiv. No serious observer would claim that he is pro-Russian or a potential collaborator.
Western elites have implored us to believe that Zelensky is a ‘Churchillian’ colossus bestriding the world stage. The truth is that he is behaving in a fashion similar to most autocrats, and we in the West are funding his government at the expense of our own societies.
How reliable are polls in wartime Ukraine?
Time and again, proponents of NATO’s proxy war have argued that, as long as the Ukrainian people prefer war over a negotiated peace, the West has a duty to arm Ukraine.
In support of that argument, they cite polls which purport to show widespread opposition in Ukraine to any concessions to Russia.
How reliable are those polls? Do they seek the views of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the country, or the millions more who live (many of them voluntarily) in parts of Ukraine that are now under Russian control?
One such example is a poll conducted in August 2023 by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives foundation and the Razumkov Center think tank. According to that poll, less than five percent of Ukrainians are ready to make territorial concessions for peace, and only 18 percent are ready to concede Ukraine’s future membership in NATO. That poll, however, did not include Ukrainians who had fled the country or who were situated in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, and those areas where “active hostilities are taking place.”
Moreover, are Ukrainians living in Kyiv-controlled regions truly free to express their support for a negotiated peace? The Ukrainian government’s persecution of peace activists suggests otherwise.
As reported last month by German independent media outlet AcTVism Munich, Ukraine’s secret service recently raided the home of Yurii Sheliazhenko of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. Mr. Sheliazhenko is now under house arrest and faces up to five years in prison. His ‘crime’ is that he advocated for a ceasefire and diplomacy—and did so while fiercely condemning Russia’s invasion.
In an environment where anti-war activism has been criminalized and political dissent has been all but eliminated, polls purporting to show majority opposition to a negotiated peace are plainly unreliable.
Myths about Russian grand strategy
Time and again, Western audiences have been told that Ukraine is but the first domino in Putin’s alleged plan to reconstitute the Russian empire. If the Ukrainian domino falls, then other European dominoes will follow. Ukraine, we are told, is fighting not only for its freedom—it is also fighting for our freedom.
Yet, as Mearsheimer has argued, there is no evidence to support this theory:
“With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did notv envision NATO expansion and EU expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. NATO expansion, EU expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.”
Neither Putin nor any other representative of the Russian government has ever expressed an intention to conquer the territory of a NATO country. Given the alliance’s obligation of reciprocal defence and its possession of thousands of nuclear weapons, any attempt to do so would be suicidal for Russia. Putin and other senior Russian officials undoubtedly understand this.
If Russia’s government ever had motivation to attack a NATO country, it has such motivation now, because neighbouring NATO countries (particularly Romania and Poland) have become transit and repair hubs for massive flows of Western weaponry into Ukraine. That weaponry is used not only to kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine, it is also increasingly wielded to strike targets deep within Russia’s borders.
Supporters of the Russian empire theory selectively invoke a speech in which Vladimir Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” They conveniently ignore countervailing statements by Putin, for example: “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”
As Russia expert and professor Mark Galeotti has explained, Putin’s “comment about a ‘geopolitical catastrophe’… was made in a very specific context, about the way the partition of a country left large communities of ethnic Russians or Russian-speakers effectively stranded in other countries.” In other words, the “catastrophe” was not that Russia had lost the ability to dominate Eastern European countries. Rather, it was that tens of millions of ethnic Russians suddenly found themselves in newly independent countries whose governments were, to varying degrees, hostile to Russians.
To save Ukraine, this war must end
Ukraine’s situation has become so dire that former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp—previously one of Ukraine’s most vociferous boosters—recently authored an op-ed in The Telegraph in which he warned that the West “must prepare for humiliation.”
With all due respect to Mr. Kemp, this is not the time for Western leaders to worry about humiliation. Ukrainian solders are dying on an industrial scale. We must do all we can to stop the killing. Western leaders can massage their bruised egos later.
At this stage, the humane and rational thing to do is to oppose the escalation of this war, and to advocate for reasonable, mutual compromises to achieve a lasting peace. This is a war that Ukraine cannot win in any meaningful sense of the word. The best that Ukraine can hope for is a bloody, horrific stalemate that will gradually sap the state’s remaining lifeblood.
With each passing minute, more Ukrainians become permanently disabled. More become displaced. More Ukrainian children become fatherless. More Ukrainian infrastructure is destroyed. More landmines, other unexploded munitions and long-lasting contaminants proliferate among Ukraine’s rich agricultural lands, and more towns and cities become uninhabitable.
The hole out of which Ukraine must eventually dig itself is becoming only deeper. At some point, that hole will become so deep that Ukraine will never come out of it. We are rapidly approaching that point, if we have not passed it already.
By insisting upon Russia’s strategic defeat and excluding any possibility of meaningful compromise with Russia, we doom Ukraine to destruction. To save Ukraine, we must stop this war.
There are events that at the time seem to portend one thing but years later take on a very different hue. So it is with the dramatic political crisis that erupted in Russia 30 years ago this week, a crisis that ended with tanks of the Russian army blasting the country’s parliament, the Supreme Soviet, into submission.
Back then, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was a hero in the West. Optimism ran high that the post-Soviet Russian Federation would rapidly evolve into a fully functioning Western-style liberal democracy and capitalist free market economy. All that stood in its way were a few hold-outs from the old communist system who sought to challenge Yeltsin from their power base in the parliament. By eliminating them, Yeltsin had secured the bright future that Russia deserved. Or so many believed.
Looking back on it, though, more and more analysts now take the opposite view: that the events of October 3-4, 1993 constituted the moment that Russia took a fatal turn in the wrong direction.
Three factors precipitated the political crisis. The first was the policy of economic reform undertaken by Yeltsin, known as shock therapy. This began with a decree liberalizing prices (which had been fixed by Soviet central planners at artificially low levels). The aim was to create incentives for producers to bring goods to the market. And indeed, soon afterwards the shops were full again. The downside was enormous inflation. The government tried to reduce this by classic monetarist means—reducing the money supply by cutting spending, including state subsidies to industries. This threatened millions of Russians with unemployment. The central bank, however, was under the control of the parliament not the president, and refused to follow the monetarist prescript, continuing to issue large amounts of funds to troubled Russian enterprises. This allowed people to keep their jobs, but the result was that inflation soon became hyperinflation.
The second factor behind the crisis was that the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the Russian Federation without a clear division of powers between the president and the parliament. In October 1991, the parliament granted Yeltsin the right to enact economic reform by means of decree. Before long, however, many parliamentarians began to have doubts about shock therapy and tried to claw back the emergency powers they had granted to Yeltsin. By contrast, the government took the view that parliament was obstructing reform and that the only way to enact it properly was by concentrating authority in the hands of the president.
A third factor was the attitude of liberal reformers toward political opposition. They tended to view reform through a moral lens. Supporting it was morally good. Opposing it was morally bad, even outright evil. Any measures were justified in fighting opposition, including undemocratic ones.
The result of this attitude was a growing preference for what one might call liberal authoritarianism. Russian liberals recognized that economic reform was likely to prove unpopular. Consequently, if the people had power they would try to halt it. Power would instead have to be centralized in the hands of “democrats” (i.e. liberal reformers) so as to force reform through against the will of the people. As the future head of privatization, Anatoly Chubais, put it in a 1990 article: “There is a fundamental contradiction between the aims of reform (the forming of a democratic economy and society) and the means of their achievement, including measures of an anti-democratic nature.”
A favoured model was that of General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. In April 1991, a group of Russian economists visited Chile to investigate the free market reforms undertaken under Pinochet. Among the group was Alfred Koch, who later became deputy prime minister under Yeltsin. Koch remarked that:
A strong hand, when it’s really strong, that’s harmonious; it’s a dictatorship in its complete, mature form. Pinochet didn’t try to pass himself off as a democrat, which he was not. He knew they needed to build a liberal economy, and he built it; he knew they need to stifle the opposition, and he stifled it, just as he was supposed to do. … Chile 1973. Total collapse. The economy just stopped. The country was bankrupt. Politically, a dead end. Then, like in a bad movie, fast forward on the calendar, twenty years later … What better example do we need to see that we must act and not just gab about reforms?
In April 1993, Russians voted in a referendum asking four questions: whether they supported the president; whether they supported his economic reforms; whether they favoured early parliamentary elements; and whether they favoured early elections. In the subsequent vote, 60 percent supported the first question, 54 percent the second, and 60 percent the third, but only 49 percent backed the fourth (an early presidential election) with 51 percent against. Yeltsin and his supporters interpreted the result as giving him the right to rule by himself. The president then acted accordingly.
On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the parliament, transferring control of the central bank to his authority, and ordering elections to a new parliament, the State Duma. The decree went far beyond Yeltsin’s constitutional authority. The Supreme Soviet responded by impeaching him. On the night of October 3, a crowd of parliamentary supporters attempted to storm the central TV station. Yeltsin then ordered the army to attack the Supreme Soviet building, the “White House.” This it proceeded to do on October 4, when army tanks shelled the parliament, forcing it into submission. Some 150 people died in the two days’ violence, most of them civilians killed by security forces and the army during the attacks on the TV station and the Supreme Soviet.
Western politicians welcomed Yeltsin’s actions. “It is clear that the opposition forces started the conflict, and President Yeltsin had no other alternative but to try to restore order,” said US President Bill Clinton. Russian liberals were equally supportive. The head of the presidential human rights office, Sergei Kovalyov, for instance, said that, “There is no doubt that the victory of [Supreme Soviet speaker] Khasbulatov and his supporters… would have meant the end of democracy, the end of parliamentarism and the final result, the end of freedom in Russia.” While acknowledging that Yeltsin had violated the constitution, he argued that it wasn’t the most important thing. “What is constitutionalism—following the bad letter of a bad law or the fundamental principles of constitutionalism?” he asked. “Democracy in Russia played a very malicious joke on the process not just of economic, but also political reform,” claimed Chubais, “a strong hand plus the market is undoubtedly technically much more attractive.”
Even more passionate was the outspoken former dissident Valeriia Novodvorskaia. She wrote:
On the night of 4 October … we had a choice: to kill or to die. We preferred to kill and even found moral satisfaction in it. … And if during the night they had given tanks to us, democrats and humanists, … nobody would have hesitated. The “White House” wouldn’t have survived till morning, not even ruins would have remained of it. … We are not dealing with people, with equal opponents, but with some evil black fog … To deal with it, we need bullets. … I know that 20 percent of my fellow citizens regularly vote for communists, fascists, Zhirinovsky and simple filth … and I am completely prepared to get rid of every fifth person. … I am no longer afraid of Pinochet. I am prepared to use any methods to win this civil war.
Former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, by contrast, was a bit more cautious. He noted after the attack on the Supreme Soviet that “It immediately became clear that the first casualty was democracy itself. On the morning of October 3, President Yeltsin was still only one of many players on the Russian scene. … On the morning of October 5, all the power in the country was in his hands. We had leapt from the gelatinous dvoevlastie (dual power) into a de facto authoritarian regime.”
This proved to be the case. Following the destruction of the parliament, Yeltsin pushed through a new constitution that centralized power in the hands of the president. The authoritarian system that has governed Russia under his successor, Vladimir Putin, was thus not Putin’s creation. Rather it was a product of the events of October 1993.
In the context of the time, Yeltsin’s actions were understandable. In 1993, Russia was stuck in a political impasse. Existing institutions were clearly inadequate. Something had to be done to move the country forward. The chosen method, though, proved decidedly problematic. Yeltsin’s supporters imagined a liberal authoritarianism that would in due course so change the culture of the country that the authoritarian elements could be dropped, creating a truly liberal order. It seems not to have occurred to them that the system they created could fall into the hands of illiberal elements who might push it in a different direction. It’s a mistake for which they have paid a heavy price.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
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Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 30 Years Ago – U.S. Praised “Superb Handling”
Washington D.C., October 4, 2023 – Thirty years ago in Moscow, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered tanks and airborne troops to shell and storm the “White House,” the Russian Parliament (Supreme Soviet) building, to suppress the opposition trying to impeach and remove him – a landmark turning point in Russia’s failure to develop democracy.
Declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive detail the complete American support for Yeltsin’s actions, including the transcript of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s phone call to Yeltsin the next day to praise him, and the memcon in which U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher subsequently told Yeltsin this was “superb handling.”
Also published in today’s briefing book are State Department cables from the U.S. Embassy Moscow that paint a more complex and less personalized portrait of the causes and consequences of the October events, the Supreme Soviet’s resistance to Yeltsin’s rule by decree, popular discontent with radical economic change, Yeltsin’s decision for military force, and the Russian electoral landscape.
The electronic briefing book publishes for the first time a prescient memo written by the former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, for the new Clinton officials in January 1993, comparing the Yeltsin/parliament struggle to the English parliament’s historic efforts to rein in royal power, only after which could political parties emerge.[1] Braithwaite’s memo also criticizes the Yeltsin reformers for their failure to address Russia’s “rustbowl” industries, backbone of the opposition to Western-oriented economic “reform,” while acknowledging that no one in the West had much of an answer either.[2]
The Web posting features two oral history accounts, one from then-Russian Defense Minister General Pavel Grachev about his specific role, including his orders to fire the tank cannon that set off a “beautiful fire” that blackened the White House, and the other from then-U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering who believed the U.S. had “no choice” but to support Yeltsin.
Already discussing the 30th anniversary, Russian media such as the leading independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the news website Meduza.ru (now based in Europe rather than in Moscow because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) are publishing multiple articles, historic photos and video footage of the events. The Novaya Gazeta headline – “How Russia’s autocracy started” – argues that October 1993 was the crucial turning point towards Putin’s repressive centralized system today.
Three Decades after the Storming of the Russian White House
By Svetlana Savranskaya
Thirty years ago today in Moscow, President Boris Yeltsin resolved his standoff with the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation by storming the White House, which resulted in numerous casualties, but even more importantly, in the loss of faith in democracy and in the overwhelming preponderance of executive power in Russia ever since.
New documents published today by the National Security Archive provide a glimpse into how the situation was viewed from Washington and from the Kremlin. At the time, from these two vantage points, the picture was black and white—democratic and free market reformers on Yeltsin’s side and a communist and fascist opposition trying to force the country back into its totalitarian past. Since power in Russia never changed hands other than by way of transfer to a chosen successor, full public examination of evidence of the events of 1993 never took place. However limited, the selection of documents published today shed new light on the complexity of the events and the high stakes the Clinton administration saw in Russia in the fall of 1993.
The events of September-October 1993 are the subject of extensive coverage and intense controversy in Russia today as citizens re-examine those experiences. Unfortunately, no Russian documents on the events of 1993 are available in the archives yet. Novaya Gazeta has republished its issue of October 6, 1993, which gave comprehensive contemporaneous coverage and put blame on both sides for the first significant bloodshed in Moscow since the October revolution of 1917.[3] According to columnist Boris Vishnevsky, “after the fall of 1993, a practically unlimited autocracy triumphed in Russia.”
By the time the Clinton administration came to office in January 1993, the momentum of Russian reform was on the decline. Faced with severe consequences of market reform coupled with the effects of disintegration of economic ties after the dissolution of the USSR and the absence of any meaningful foreign economic assistance, Russia’s population and political elites began questioning the pace of the reform and the forceful methods of its implementation. The team of young reformers that Yeltsin appointed in late 1991 was decimated under the pressure from the Supreme Soviet, and Yeltsin had to replace Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar with Victor Chernomyrdin in late 1992.
Rather than negotiating with the Parliament, Yeltsin habitually ruled by issuing Presidential Decrees. The opposition led by Vice President Alexander Rutskoy and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov was growing in the Parliament and in the regions, and blocking most of the president’s initiatives, which led to a paralysis of governing. The incoming U.S. administration started its dialog with Russia in a state of virtual civil war between the executive and the legislature.
The declassified telcons and memcons of early Clinton-Yeltsin conversations show instant chemistry between the two leaders, genuine warmth and optimism and an incredibly rich agenda on which Russia and the United States agreed to cooperate (Document 5. See also EBB 640). Clinton mostly set the agenda, while Yeltsin, eager to build a genuine partnership with America, enthusiastically agreed to work together with him. Clinton was deeply committed to Russia’s transformation into a democracy and market economy as well as to its full integration into the Western world. Another top U.S. priority was to safely manage the post-Soviet re-gathering of nuclear arsenal back to Russia and to help it to dismantle and secure weapons and fissile materials, which was accomplished in the framework of the Nunn-Lugar programs (See EBBs 447, 528 ).
Given this setting, Yeltsin, with his resume of a democratically elected Russian leader and a defender of democracy during the coup of 1991, seemed like an ideal partner who could deliver on all U.S. priorities. According to Strobe Talbott, some of Clinton’s advisers were concerned about Yeltsin’s unwillingness to consult and compromise with the Parliament and advised Clinton to focus on “principles and process,” not personalities. The president, however, was committed to Yeltsin as a personification of the revolutionary change and responded that this was “a zero-sum” thing.[4] This perception only intensified during Yeltsin’s final showdown with the Supreme Soviet in the final days of September 1993.
According to Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Yeltsin sent Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev to notify four key Western ambassadors about his intention to dissolve the Parliament and call for new elections (Document 7). In Clinton’s first phone call to Yeltsin immediately after the latter issued Decree 1400, dissolving Parliament and setting a date for early elections and a constitutional referendum, the U.S. president expressed his full support and accepted Yeltsin’s assurances that there would be no bloodshed and the reform would move faster now that there would be no obstacles. U.S. support for Yeltsin remained unwavering all through the confrontation and after the Russian President issued the order to storm the parliament (after initial violence on the part of the opposition).
On the morning of October 4, Muscovites awakened to the awful sight of the burning Parliament building—the White House they had defended against the putsch in August 1991, where Yeltsin had stood on a tank and led the democratic forces. On October 5, the day after the bloodshed, Clinton called Yeltsin and congratulated him for his handling of the situation; he did not ask about the loss of life. Even stronger support was expressed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, while visiting in mid-October, who practically lauded Yeltsin for his actions during the crisis. Documents show that the Clinton administration saw no alternatives to Yeltsin and was prepared to support him no matter what.
This situation grew out of the extreme personification of U.S.-Russia policy but also from the black-and-white picture the Yeltsin camp presented of the political situation in Russia, painting his opponents as “fascists” and unreformed communists. In fact, it was the same Supreme Soviet that was elected in the lauded free elections of 1990, that elected Yeltsin its chairman, and that granted him emergency powers to implement the radical economic reform in October 1991. As the year 1993 progressed and the political confrontation in Russia deepened, the U.S. administration dealt exclusively with the Yeltsin camp and came to regard the opposition as their Russian interlocutors presented them. But most importantly, the stakes were very high: Yeltsin was a good partner who was willing to play on U.S. terms, and any alternative—even democratically elected—was deemed unlikely to be as cooperative or reliable. The Clinton administration was therefore highly invested in Yeltsin and, as Ambassador Pickering says he told Strobe Talbott, “you’ve got no other choice” than to support Yeltsin and hope that the December elections would be free and fair.
Not all actors on the U.S. side shared that opinion. Chargé d’Affaires James Collins’ cables show a more nuanced reading of the crisis and a deep concern about the fairness of the elections and the authoritarian potential of Yeltsin’s new Constitution, which Collins calls “half-baked.” (Document 10). The Pickering oral history also points to differences of opinion within the Embassy (Document 7). These disagreements did not seem to affect Clinton’s consistent support for Yeltsin’s handling of the opposition. U.S. backing remained constant after the disastrous election results in which Yeltsin’s party received only 15 percent of the vote and the Constitution barely passed the referendum. The system that emerged was essentially super-presidential, which did not worry most senior U.S. officials as long as a true democrat, in their view, held the post of president.
Thelast document in today’s published selection is an excerpt of an oral history interview with Yeltsin’s Defense Minister Pavel Grachev conducted by Petr Aven and Alfred Kokh (Document 15). Grachev’s account of events provides a graphic picture of how the Yeltsin camp viewed the opposition and their methods of dealing with it. It also gives great insight into the complexity of the situation and the role of the armed forces.
The Clinton administration at the time saw Yeltsin as the guarantor of Russia’s democratic transition and thus viewed the outcome of the crisis as a victory for democratic forces, however unfortunate the loss of life was. Many Russian democrats, however, considered the events of 1993 as the turning point from democracy to an increasingly paternalistic and autocratic rule by Yeltsin and his successor. Thirty years later, the controversy over the constitutional crisis of 1993 is not over and final judgments will have to await, among other things, the declassification of top-level Russian documents.
William J. Clinton Presidential Library release 2015 from MDR 2013-0449-M
This prescient memorandum comes to the new Clinton administration (not yet inaugurated as of January 12) from Britain’s leading Russia expert, Rodric Braithwaite, fresh from four consequential years (1988-1992) as Margaret Thatcher’s ambassador to Moscow, where he dealt with both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and helped lubricate the peaceful end of the Cold War. At the point Braithwaite wrote this memo, he was serving as foreign policy adviser to Thatcher’s successor as British prime minister, John Major, and as chair of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. Major would pay a state visit to Bill Clinton in February 1993, yet at that point neither of Clinton’s key choices for managing Russia policy (Strobe Talbott as special ambassador for all the newly-independent Soviet states, Thomas Pickering as ambassador in Moscow) had yet been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. (Talbott’s subsequent memoir, The Russia Hand, identifies Clinton himself as the title character always in charge of Russia policy.)
Notable is the Braithwaite tone, as if he is lecturing an introductory class on Russian history, with references to the 1917 revolution arising from the failures of democratic reformers, and the reality of tsarist Russia, an autocracy “tempered by assassination.” Perhaps most insightful is Braithwaite’s analogy of the Yeltsin/Supreme Soviet struggle in Russia to the long arc of British parliamentary struggles to restrain royal power, only after which did political parties emerge in England.
Braithwaite bemoans the historical lack of political parties in Russia, and Gorbachev’s failure to create any. Braithwaite’s incisive description of Communist Party internal jockeying and networking, the system that produced Yeltsin, warns about the latter’s characteristic “bullying, impetuous, autocratic” tendencies. Yet, “Ordinary Russians loved him precisely because he got drunk, fell into rivers, and hated the Communists – just like they did.”
Braithwaite provides some pointed criticism of the failure of Yeltsin’s “reformers” (and the West’s advisers) to come up with any credible plan to deal with the “rustbowl” defense industry in Russia. Braithwaite’s core advice was simply that there was not much the West could do for Russia – their future was theirs to make – except treat them with respect, as a great power (even if not a superpower anymore), to be included in all international geopolitical decisions. This advice Bill Clinton would follow through his entire presidency, relying on his personal connection with Boris Yeltsin.
U.S. Department of State declassification M-2006-01499
This is the first phone call between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin shortly after Clinton’s inauguration. Clinton lays out his foreign policy priorities emphasizing that “Russia [will] be a top priority for U.S. foreign policy during my Administration.” He states his determination to build “the closest possible U.S.-Russia partnership,” and to do “whatever we can to help Russia’s democratic reform to succeed.” He tells Yeltsin that the appointment of “a very close friend and an expert on Russia, Strobe Talbott,” will guarantee a “high degree of personal involvement” on his part. Yeltsin is very encouraged by Clinton’s words and thankful for the offer to build a partnership and cooperate on major international issues. He accepts Clinton’s invitation to meet in person and wants it to happen as soon as possible at any place that would be convenient for the U.S. president. The relationship starts on a high note with high expectations on both sides.
William J. Clinton Presidential Library release 2023 from MDR 2016-0118-M
This newly declassified cable from the U.S. Embassy Moscow details the Kremlin meeting between Yeltsin and a high-level bipartisan U.S. Congressional delegation (CODEL) led by the House Majority Leader, Democrat Richard Gephardt of Missouri, together with the House Minority Leader, Republican Robert Michel of Illinois. Also speaking during the meeting were the Majority Whip, David Bonior of Wisconsin, and Michel’s chief rival for Republican leadership, future House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia.
The CODEL visit is timely indeed, just days after the Vancouver summit between Clinton and Yeltsin, and two weeks before the April 25 national referendum Yeltsin has engineered in order to show public support for his presidential rule. Already engaged in a power struggle against the Supreme Soviet (and the larger Congress of People’s Deputies), Yeltsin intends to expand executive power, define his opponents as resisting the inevitable reforms that Russia needed, and here brags that he has 60 percent popular support.
The visiting American Congressmen add their support. Gephardt tells Yeltsin, “The Congress and the American people will stand by Yeltsin in his further efforts toward democratic and economic reform.” The Republicans echo the message: “Michel stressed that the U.S. has a warm regard for Yeltsin and for all he symbolizes” while “Rep. Gingrich said he supported bipartisan aid for Russia and asked Yeltsi[n] about what could be done to help.”
Yeltsin tells them Congress needs to take the Cold War restrictions off Russia, and mentions a five-page list he had given to Clinton at Vancouver. “How is it possible to treat a partner like that?” Yeltsin asks. Missing altogether from the CODEL discussion is any Congressional sympathy for their erstwhile peers in the Supreme Soviet, or any sense of legislative-versus-executive struggle like that baked into the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the CODEL exhibits the same kind of identification of U.S. policy with Yeltsin personally that Bill Clinton has already adopted.
U.S. Department of State declassification M-2006-01499
This is a copy of a cable containing the memcon between Yeltsin and Clinton with a cover note from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Strobe Talbott instructing him to review the memcon before his forthcoming meeting with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov. In the handwritten notes he also records his impressions from the meeting. He is “struck by […] B[ill] C[linton]’s command of the issues […] his dominance in [meeting] (hard to do with Yeltsin), and “no rhetoric or posturing on either side.”
This memcon is important because it shows the impressive variety of issues on which Clinton and Yeltsin had a productive exchange and agreed to cooperate: replacing COCOM with a new regime; a deal on highly enriched uranium (HEU) that Russia was going to remove from the nuclear warheads being withdrawn from Kazakhstan; Ukraine and Belarus and partly return to Ukraine as fuel for nuclear power stations and partly sell to the United States in the framework of the Megatons for Megawatts program; working with Ukraine to return the nuclear weapons to Russia; progress on CTBT; non-proliferation, and specifically limiting Russia’s sales of reactors, missiles, and submarines to Iran and India; getting North Korea to the negotiating table; peacekeeping in Georgia and Nagorny Karabakh; and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Baltics.
On the latter, Yeltsin made an official request that the U.S. side conduct an investigation of the laws in Estonia to determine if they discriminate against ethnic Russians (Christopher in his cover note recommends giving Yeltsin a proper legal response even if it is negative). The breadth of issues helps one understand that Yeltsin truly was an indispensable partner for Clinton across the range of U.S. priorities in the former Soviet Union and even globally. Only once is there a signal that Yeltsin is in a complicated place domestically. Mentioning that the Supreme Soviet has just passed a bill declaring Sevastopol a Russian city, Yeltsin says, characteristically, “Thank God no one takes the Supreme Soviet seriously!”
Clinton calls Yeltsin two months after they last talked at the G-7 summit in Tokyo, knowing that his counterpart is “going through some difficult times,” to express his support for the embattled Russian president. They go over the results of the recent trip by Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to Washington for the first meeting of the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, which was a success. Turning to Ukraine, Yeltsin shares the news of his very successful meeting with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in Crimea where the two leaders settled the issue of the Black Sea Fleet and negotiated on the withdrawal of strategic nuclear weapons from Ukraine. Yeltsin tells Clinton he is pulling Russian troops out of Poland “next week,” and will withdraw from Latvia and Estonia when they pass legislation protecting Russian minorities.
Clinton tells his Russian partner that the $2.5 billion assistance package for Russia has passed the House and that he will work hard to make sure it is approved by the Senate. He also assures Yeltsin again that he is working to “eliminate the legislative remnants of the Cold War,” about which (“60 pieces of legislation”) Yeltsin complained during their first summit in Vancouver. They touch on Yugoslavia, and Yeltsin assures Clinton that his administration will “put pressure on the Serbs.” On every issue they mention, Yeltsin comes through as a good cooperative partner, supporting U.S. foreign policy priorities.
Only at the end of the conversation do they touch on the Russian domestic crisis—Yeltsin’s confrontation with the Supreme Soviet. Already preparing his move against the legislature, Yeltsin promises Clinton that he will call him in “a very short time” regarding the “situation in the parliament.” He explains cautiously that he is “right now engaged in a bit of fighting with the parliament which is moving away from reforms.” Clinton is aware of the situation; he tells Yeltsin, “We will be pulling for you.”
U.S. Department of State declassification M-2006-01499
Clinton calls Yeltsin immediately after the Russian president makes a speech announcing his Presidential Decree 1400-dissolving the Parliament and setting the date for early elections to a new legislature and a referendum for the draft Constitution. Clinton expresses his full support for Yeltsin but also a concern about the fate of reform and democratic process in Russia. In response, Yeltsin paints a black-and-white picture of the political struggle saying that the Supreme Soviet “has totally gone out of control. It no longer supports the reform process. They have become communist.” He assures his U.S. partner that “there will be no bloodshed,” and that “all the democratic forces are supporting me.” Clinton underscores the importance of holding the elections “in a fully democratic manner,” and providing the opposition full access to free press without hindrance. Yeltsin promises to stick to democratic principles and reiterates his commitment to peaceful solutions. Clinton mentions that a $2.5 billion assistance package is being considered by Congress at the moment and the preservation of democratic order would be important for its passing. Yeltsin promises that now the “reforms will go much faster” and thanks the U.S. president for his continuous support.
Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, Virginia, www.adst.org,https://adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Pickering-Thomas-Reeve.pdf, pp. 357-362 (15th of December, the Ides of December 2006) and pp. 386-391 (19th of February 2007).
This extremely useful oral history collection includes interviews with more than 2,000 former U.S. diplomats. The interviews with Tom Pickering took place over an extended period from 2003 to 2007 after his retirement from the Foreign Service, and produced a transcript totaling 722 pages ranging from his ancestry to postings as far afield as Zanzibar and San Salvador. Pickering served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1993 to 1996, among the most momentous years in Russia’s post-Soviet history, and a large section of the oral history covers his time in Russia. The particular pages related to the October 1993 events are in two parts, one from pages 357 to 362 on the overall policy and the Clinton-Yeltsin relationship, and the other, his extremely detailed eyewitness account of the assault on the White House, from pages 386 to 391. Pickering recounts his strong advice to Washington that there was “no choice” other than to back Yeltsin. He says, “There are some who argue that he, Yeltsin, was illegal in his actions and preemptory in his decisions and wrong in the outcomes. I totally disagreed with that…. Were Yeltsin to have failed to do what he did, there was a good chance that there would have been another effort at the top to return Russia to communism. I cannot but believe that would have resulted in greater bloodshed and a long civil conflict.” (p. 362) On the possibility of a negotiated settlement, Pickering comments, “[T]here were talks back and forth, not very fruitful ones because the Russian government then was in a position of deciding whether it was going to treat with these people and deal with compromises or take back the White House. They decided that they were going to take back the White House. They had the troops and the capability of doing that.”
William J. Clinton Presidential Library declassification 2015-0782-M-1
This phone call takes place on the day after Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the building of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow(the “White House, the same building outside which Yeltsin had stood on a tank to reisist the hard-line coup attempt in August 1991). Clinton calls him to express support and inquire about the Russian president’s plans for the upcoming elections and political settlement after the constitutional crisis. Yeltsin calls his opponents “fascist,” putting all the blame on the opposition, telling Clinton that the supporters of the Parliament “brought to Moscow a gang of people from the Transdniester region, the Riga OMON-these were special forces. They had them come here, gave them machine guns and grenade launchers, and had them fire on peaceful civilians.” He says he had no alternative than using force. Yeltsin expresses regret that “some people were killed,” […] “thirty-nine people have now been killed on our side,” (estimates of casualties range in the hundreds) but assures Clinton that now both the transition to democracy and market reform will move faster and he might call for early presidential elections because at the time “no real rivals to me are visible.” (Vice President Rutskoy and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Khasbulatov were in prison, the prosecutor general was forced to resign and the Constitutional Court was suspended after its Chairman declared Yeltsin’s decree 1400 unconstitutional.) None of that appears to undermine Yeltsin’s democratic credentials in Clinton’s eyes. Clinton never asks about the loss of life among civilians and the opposition. He says just what Yeltsin wants to hear: “you did everything exactly as you had to and I congratulate you for the way you handled it.” The Russian president responds: “Thank you for everything. I embrace you with all my heart.”
William J. Clinton Presidential Library declassification 2015-0782-M-1
This memo from National Security Advisor Anthony Lake clarifies two items in the October 5 conversation with Yeltsin (see Document 4). When Yeltsin referred to armed persons from Riga and Moldova who came to Moscow to support the opposition, Lake points out, they were “from the elite Russian security forces stationed in Riga and Moldova,” not representatives of the Moldovan or Latvian governments. The second important correction refers to the fact that Yeltsin did not answer Clinton’s question about freedom of the press in the period before the scheduled December elections. Yeltsin only said that there “would be no restrictions on the elections,” and his interpreter translated it as “no restrictions on the press.” In fact many oppositional newspapers were banned. President Clinton writes on the memo: “OK-but it wasn’t the time for me to raise the newspaper issue on the 5th.”
Department of State Declassification, Date/Case ID; 6 MAR 2003 200001030
Chargé d’Affaires and future Ambassador to Russia James Collins sends Secretary Christopher a briefing cable in advance of his visit to Moscow where he is expected to meet with Yeltsin and other government officials. This is the first visit of any Western senior official to Moscow after Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Parliament and the October 3-4 bloodshed in the center of Moscow. In the cable, Collins describes the pre-electoral landscape in Russia on the eve of Christopher’s visit. Although 92 parties are registered for the election, that in itself does not guarantee free and fair elections.
The cable describes Yeltsin’s decision to push through the new “half-baked” Constitution, which concentrates the “preponderance of authority in the hands of the chief executive.” Collins points out that “even many reformers worry about establishing a new Russian democracy so heavily tilted toward presidential power.” The cable describes the split within the reformist camp into “radical” and “cautious” reformers, the confusion at the regional levels regarding whether the elections would be held for regional legislatures, and the continuing ban on nationalist and right-wing parties and their newspapers.
Collins notes the personal nature of the confrontation: “Boris Yeltsin’s face during his October 6 speech was proof the Russian President had cast his hardline opponents into a personal anathema.” He also raises concern about the methods used by Moscow police and city government in implementing the state of emergency, such as “systematic police cleansing of non-Russian people from Central Asian and Caucasian states,” and racist remarks about dark-skinned people by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. In the end of the cable, Collins cautions that although the actual voting is likely to be fair, “the question will be the democratic content of the entire electoral process.”
U.S. Department of State. Date/Case ID: 04 MAY 2000 200000982
In the follow-up to the previous cable (Document 6), Chargé d’Affaires Collins reviews foreign policy issues Christopher is expected to cover in Moscow in his meetings with Yeltsin and Kozyrev and emphasizes that Yeltsin is looking for gestures of support from the United States. New elections are scheduled for December and Yeltsin needs all the support from the West he can get. Collins advises the secretary of state to be sensitive to Yeltsin’s and Kozyrev’s need for Russia to be seen domestically as a partner with whom the West consults and does not just take for granted, and he lists some controversial issues: NATO expansion, the post-Soviet space, and Ukraine.
On NATO, Collins notes that the Russians are aware that the U.S. internal debate is reaching a crucial moment about expansion and they want to be assured that the door is open to Russia, not just to East Europeans. In Collins’ view, “what the Russians hope to hear from you is that NATO is not moving precipitously and that any policy NATO adopts will apply equally to them.” Their “neuralgic” attitude stems from the fear that they will “end up on the wrong side of a new division of Europe.” Therefore, Collins counsels Christopher to make sure the Russians know that the U.S. is actively promoting Russia’s “complete reintegration into the family of Western states.”
U.S. Department of State. Date/Case ID: 11 MAR 2003 200001030
On his trip to Europe to explain the U.S. position on NATO expansion, Secretary Christopher comes to Moscow after meetings in Budapest. He and special ambassador Strobe Talbott meet with Foreign Minister Kozyrev and his deputy, Yuri Mamedov, before they visit Yeltsin at his country residence. Christopher raises concerns about the fairness of the upcoming elections with his Russian counterparts. He mentions that the United States has $12 million to contribute and is willing to send monitors or observers, which Kozyrev welcomes, saying they might help to guard against fraud by communist-leaning local authorities in rural areas where “the old kolkhoz mentality” still prevails. Christopher puts special emphasis on ensuring a free press since the order banning opposition newspapers was still not lifted. Kozyrev does not have a definitive answer to the question regarding banned newspapers and he says only six or seven political organizations will be banned from participating in the elections.
In this memo about the Kozyrev meeting, Christopher is very brief about the NATO discussion. He tells Kozyrev that the U.S. is sensitive to the Russian position and has developed a new proposal as a result: the Partnership for Peace (PFP), which would be open to all countries on an equal basis. Christopher does not directly address Kozyrev’s concern about the decision regarding expansion, but, misleadingly, lets it sound as if PFP is the alternative for the time being.
The rest of the conversation deals with crucial issues on which the United States needs Russian cooperation, such as support for Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine.
U.S. Department of State. Date/Case ID: 08 MAY 2000 200000982
Christopher is taken to Yeltsin’s country house, Zavidovo, for a meeting that lasts only 45 minutes. Yeltsin has most likely already been briefed by Kozyrev about his conversation with the secretary of state. In the beginning of the conversation, Yeltsin reviews the events of September 21-October 4 in Moscow and expresses “special appreciation to President Clinton and Secretary Christopher for their early and very supportive backing. The Russian president talks about the upcoming elections, which he calls “the first free and fair election for the parliament since 1917,” and assures Christopher that the country has calmed down after the crisis. Yeltsin praises the new Constitution that is “up to the standards of the best Western democracies,” which would allow them to “end the old totalitarian regime with the power assigned to the soviets.” He also welcomes the Clinton visit to Moscow planned for January 1994.
Christopher starts with strong praise for Yeltsin’s handling of the constitutional crisis with the Parliament, passing on “high appreciation” and emphasizing that Clinton is “extremely supportive” of his “superb handling of the crisis.” According to Christopher, Clinton “admired the restraint” that Yeltsin has practiced since September 21 and that in the end he acted in a way that “caused the least loss of life.” He adds that “on Sunday October 3, the President also closely followed events and wanted to tell President Yeltsin that […] our thoughts were with you in Moscow all day.” Christopher offers technical assistance for the election and notes that “there are already numbers of our experts here who could be helpful but we would like to assist in any way in which we could do so.” Essentially, Christopher lauds Yeltsin’s handling of the crisis and never raises any concerns mentioned in Collins’ cable (see Document 6, above) about irregularities in the electoral process or the nature of Yeltsin’s constitution.
At the end of the conversation they briefly touch on the sensitive question of NATO expansion. Christopher leaves Yeltsin with the impression that the Partnership for Peace is an alternative to expansion (see Document 8 in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 621). Yeltsin is extremely pleased with everything Christopher says at the meeting. He concludes “by saying that he appreciated immensely President Clinton’s early continuing and extremely generous support and that he wanted to pass on his highest esteem for the President.”
William J. Clinton Presidential Library declassification 1015-0782-M-1
Clinton calls Yeltsin to check on the political situation after the elections and talk about his upcoming visit to Russia in January 1994. At the beginning of the conversation both presidents put the best spin on the disastrous election results where the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky finished with 23 percent, the Communist Party of Gennady Zyuganov with 12 percent and Yeltsin’s party, Russia’s Choice, headed by Yegor Gaidar, only got 15 percent. Clinton is concerned about Yeltsin’s ability to continue his economic reform with the strong nationalist-communist-agrarian opposition in Parliament. Yeltsin assures him that he is committed to the reform and will be able to work with the Parliament, “especially since the working relationship is supported by a strong democratic foundation in the new constitution.” He says that now “there is no room for extremism or fascism in the new parliament.” At the same time, he asks the U.S. president not to invite opposition party leaders to a meeting when Clinton comes to Moscow “so as not to give them an exaggerated opinion of themselves.” Clinton tells Yeltsin that they decided not to talk much about Zhirinovsky and “to play him down.”
The rest of the conversation focuses on preparations for the upcoming summit with Clinton’s three-part agenda: “economic assistance to support your reforms; our common effort to convince Ukraine to go non-nuclear; and our foreign policy agenda.” He promises to start a “quiet study” of how to increase IMF and World Bank assistance to Russia. Yeltsin is grateful for the support and emphasizes the importance of cooperation on denuclearization of Ukraine. He enthusiastically accepts Clinton’s program.
Interview conducted by Petr Aven and Alfred Kokh and ultimately published in their book, Gaidar’s Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation of Russia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 297-333.
Two of Yegor Gaidar’s close associates during the “second Russian revolution” of 1989-1992 went back 20 years later, after Gaidar’s death, to interview 10 of the other key players in that period, including the Defense Minister Pavel Grachev (the only American interviewed was former Secretary of State James Baker). Aven and Kokh published short versions of each interview in the Russian edition of Forbes between 2010 and 2012, and longer versions in their book. In the biographical listing in the back of the book, the authors sneer at Grachev as a corrupt incompetent, while for most others listed they simply provide the dates and titles of their positions. But they give Grachev more than 30 pages of space to recount his versions of multiple controversial topics. This excerpt, titled “The Army and the Putsch of 1993,” from pages 325 to 330, includes Grachev’s story of his 3 a.m. discussions with Yeltsin and his security chief Korzhakov, during which “we drank a little,” leading to the assault on the White House. Grachev says he personally gave the orders for a tank to fire “inert” projectiles into specific windows in the White House, after which “a fire started. It was beautiful.” When Aven asks how many they killed in the assault, Grachev answers, “a lot.” When Aven says, “from 200 to 400, by various estimates,” Grachev responds, “many, in short.”
