Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a speech before the U.N. Security Council this morning about the current tensions regarding Ukraine and Russia. After bombarding the world with assertions of false flag attacks and an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine – even offering dates – that never materialized, the Biden administration has decided to double down, with Blinken claiming that Russia could invade Ukraine “at any time” and “in coming days.”
Blinken also mentioned the need to protect national sovereignty. That’s right, the nation that bombed Yugoslavia and invaded Iraq without UN sanction and violated its UN mandate to facilitate regime change in Libya suddenly wants to bust out their harmonica and sing us all a sad song about the inviolability of national sovereignty.
Blinken has set up his story so that if Ukrainian forces were to attack the Donbas – if this happened it would likely be forces not directly under Zelensky’s control as he certainly realizes by now that it’s not in his interest to invite a Russian military attack – any Russian military assistance to the Donbas would be framed as aggression based on Russia lying or having executed a false flag. Blinken even frames any attempts by Russia under those circumstances to attempt diplomatic action, by calling meetings of the UN Security Council, as “insincere.”
As is customary for the US government in the post-Cold War era, no evidence was presented to back up any of this. After babies in incubators, WMD’s, Viagra-pumped Qaddafi mass rape forces, and moderate rebels in Syria, we’re supposed to just take all of this on faith.
Of course, if none of this comes to pass in the next couple of weeks, Biden can go into his State of the Union and into the mid-term election season with a political win by claiming that he stared down Putin and Putin blinked.
The Biden administration obviously thinks they’re being clever with this stunt, but they sure aren’t being wise.
If you’ve relied on establishment media to follow the events in Ukraine these past eight years, then chances are what you know is wrong. Despite — or, more likely, because — the tumult in Ukraine has reared its head prominently in both US foreign policy and its domestic politics these past few years, the country’s history and its ongoing internal conflicts have been some of the most propagandized for Western audiences.
Dr Volodymyr Ishchenko, a sociologist and research associate at the Institute for East European Studies, has spent years writing about Ukrainian politics, the country’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and the messy intersection of protests, social movements, revolution, and nationalism. He recently spoke with Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic about what Western audiences need to understand about Ukraine and the ongoing international standoff over it.
BM
Why are Ukrainian officials and European governments taking such different stances on the question of the prospects for a Russian invasion than the United States and the UK?
VI
Russian coercive diplomacy and the military buildups are just one part of this, because there are also parallel diplomatic actions. Another part is this media campaign about the imminent invasion, which has its own autonomous logic, is driven by different interests, and should not be taken as an objective reflection of Russian actions. It also has this reinforcing, escalating character. The primary target of this campaign is probably not even Russia or Ukraine, but Germany, which is supposed to be closer to its NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies.
Ukraine at first didn’t even notice this campaign in the Western media. It then tried to exploit the campaign by requesting more weapons and calling for preventive sanctions against Russia. It was only about two or three weeks ago that the Ukrainian government started to make very explicit statements that invasion is not really imminent, that we have been under Russian threat since 2014 and we’re used to this, and that according to their intelligence, this threat isn’t greater than it was in spring last year (during the earlier stage of the Russian buildup, which was done very publicly with very clear intentions).
This Western media campaign has had very material and negative consequences for the Ukrainian economy. The Ukrainian currency has started to be devalued, investors have started to leave — particularly in the Ukrainian real estate market — and the government has been quite scared that even without an actual invasion, the Ukrainian economy may get into quite serious trouble from this. But I wouldn’t take it as simply strategic deception.
BM
Why is Ukraine such an important country, both to Russia, and to the West and the United States?
VI
Economically, Ukraine is actually a big failure. If you look at the economic indicators, Ukraine is probably one of the very, very few countries in the world that has not reached its 1990 level of GDP per capita. There was a huge economic decline in the ’90s, and then Ukraine failed to grow like its Eastern European neighbors. We don’t live better than at the end of the Soviet Union, unlike Poland, for example, or even Russia or Belarus.
For Russia and for the United States, it’s a place through which natural gas is transported. There were some initiatives to have a three-party consortium: Russia as a supplier of gas, the European Union as consumer, and Ukraine as a transitory territory. These were torpedoed in the ’90s and 2000s, particularly by the Ukrainian side, and the result was that Russia just built several pipelines around Ukraine. The Nord Stream 2 is perhaps the most dangerous for Ukraine now, because it may make Ukrainian pipelines obsolete.
From a military point of view, Russia says that Ukraine may be important because if NATO starts to deploy offensive weapons, there are rockets that can reach Moscow in five minutes from Ukrainian territory. The Russian defensive strategy for centuries was expansion, in order to push its border as far west as possible, creating strategic depth, which led Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler’s invasions to fail — though contemporary wars are not waged in the same way as they were a half-century or two centuries ago.
For the United States, Ukraine is a potential hot spot against Russia. If Ukraine is creating tensions with Russia, it might weaken Russia and may deflect its resources, for example, in case of a Chinese escalation. Some people comment now quite cynically, “Why not let the Russians invade Ukraine, and let’s make Ukraine another Afghanistan for Russia?” Russia would spend a lot of resources, it would be hit with sanctions — probably Nord Stream would also be under sanctions — and it’s not that clear for how long Russia would survive a major escalation in Ukraine. That might be a reason why this war [in the Donbass region] has been going on for such a long time: there’s no actual interest in stopping it. There were several opportunities to do so in 2019 and 2015, and the US government didn’t do as much as they could.
BM
What is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, since the countries’ long and complicated history shapes so many of the political and cultural divisions of modern Ukraine?
VI
There’s nothing close to a consensus on this issue. Some people on the Left, such as some Ukrainian Marxists in the twentieth century, made the case that Ukraine was a Russian colony, and at least in the Russian Empire, it was exploited economically. That was a different story under the Soviet Union, when Ukraine was actually developed very quickly and ended up being one of the most developed parts of the country — one of the reasons why the post-Soviet crisis was so severe. Others would say that Ukraine was more like Scotland to England, and not even close to relations between Western metropoles and their colonies in Africa or Asia, or even between Russia and Central Asia, or Russia and Siberia.
For many Russians, Ukraine is part of their perception of the Russian nation. They simply could not imagine Russia without Ukraine. In the Russian Empire, there was this idea that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were three parts of the same people. And this narrative was recently reiterated by Vladimir Putin, in his article where he claimed Ukrainians and Russians are just one people, artificially divided.
This narrative has a long history in Russian imperial thought. From this perspective, you’d see relations between Ukraine and Russia as a competition of at least two nation-building projects. One would say Ukraine is not a part of Russia; Ukrainians are a separate people. This narrative is the most dominant in Ukraine right now. However, this nation-building project has not succeeded fully — despite three revolutions that had very strong nation-building content, which happened in 1990, 2004, and 2014. Another narrative would claim that Ukrainians are actually part of some bigger Eastern Slavic unity and this nation-building project wasn’t realized because of the weakness of modernization in the Russian Empire.
However, this discussion occupies just a small part of Ukrainian society, intellectuals especially. For regular Ukrainians, it’s not the salient question. According to polls conducted for the thirty years since Soviet independence, the questions of jobs, wages, and prices have been at the top, while identity, language, geopolitical relations, the EU, Russia, and NATO were always down the list of Ukrainian priorities.
BM
Some commentators say that because the far right hasn’t been very successful in post-Maidan elections, its role in the country is negligible. How true is this?
VI
The role of radical nationalists in Ukrainian politics is significant, via direct pressure on the government and dissemination of narratives. If you look at the actual policies that were taken by the post-Maidan government, you’ll see the program of radical nationalist parties, particularly decommunization, banning the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Ukrainianization, which means pushing the Russian language out of the Ukrainian public sphere. Many things that the far right campaigned on before Maidan were implemented by nominally non-far-right politicians.
Nationalist radicalization is very good compensation for the lack of any revolutionary changes after the revolution. If you start, for example, to change something in the ideological sphere — renaming streets, taking away any Soviet symbols from the country, removing Vladimir Lenin’s statues that were standing in many Ukrainian cities — you create an illusion of change without actually changing in the direction of the people’s aspirations.
Most of the relevant parties are actually electoral machines for specific patron-clientelistic networks. Ideologies are usually totally irrelevant. It’s not difficult to find politicians who have switched between completely opposite camps in Ukrainian politics several times during their careers.
The radical nationalist parties, by contrast, have ideology, they have motivated activists, and at this moment, they are probably the only parties in the real sense of the word “party.” They are the most organized, the most mobilized parts of the civil society, with the strongest street mobilization. After 2014, they also got the resources for violence: they got the opportunities to create affiliated armed units and a broad network of training centers, summer camps, sympathetic cafés, and magazines. This infrastructure perhaps doesn’t exist in any other European country. It looks more like 1930s far-right politics in Europe than contemporary European far-right politics — which doesn’t rely so much on paramilitary violence but is instead capable of winning quite a broad part of the electorate…
Ambassador Matlock served, among other postings, as US Ambassador to Checkoslovakia from 1981–83, and, most importantly, as the United State’s last Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987–91 with his duties in Moscow ending only months before the dissolution of the country itself. He is also the author of several books, including Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray—and How to Return to Reality (2010).
…I know it’s considered gauche to actually listen to what Vladimir Putin says, but on occasion he provides information that might be relevant for assessing the nature of geopolitical problems. During an hour-and-a-half-long interview with NBC News in June 2021, which can be watched in full here, Putin was pressed on a previous “buildup” of Russian forces around the border with Ukraine. (By the way, imagine Biden sitting for a televised interview with Russian media for any length of time.) In response, Putin noted that the US had just been conducting its own large-scale military exercises in conjunction with NATO throughout Eastern Europe. And he was factually correct. The US media does not report on the existence of these operations to any real extent — you have to dig deep into the relevant documentation to learn, for example, that “DEFENDER-EUROPE-21” included live-fire drills in the country of Estonia, which happens to sit on the border of Russia. Putin bringing this up in a US context would doubtless get him accused of “whataboutism,” but at the same time — what about it? Why is the US conducting large multinational military exercises in such close proximity to Russia, and how ought that to reflect on the US tendency to immediately characterize any of Russia’s own military exercises as inherently aggressive?
This context gets ignored, and the insane possibility of the US triggering some sort of catastrophic war in Ukraine is just accepted, thanks in large part to the propagandistic onslaught of the past several years — which completely warped how many Americans perceive the “threat” of Russia, and completely mangled the US media’s ability to question US policy toward Russia. Remember when merely having “Russian contacts” was suddenly considered an extreme political liability? Is anyone surprised that this eventually led to the deterioration of US-Russian diplomatic relations?
The moment Donald Trump did something on the foreign stage that appeared relatively non-belligerent, such as professing his eagerness to achieve a kind of “détente” with Russia — or, relatedly, meeting with Kim Jong Un — a huge faction of Democrats and the media pounced to accuse him of only doing these things for sinister reasons, such as abetting a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin. Political incentives therefore skewed in favor of Trump taking the more aggressive option, to demonstrate that he was not collusively in thrall to Russia. So the “détente” that Trump long claimed he wanted (though without using that highfalutin word) never came to pass, relations with Russia cratered to what many regard as a post-Cold War lowpoint, and now we’re in this predicament of quasi-brinkmanship in Ukraine where the main function of US policy appears to be egging on conflict. Seems like that “confrontation” so many were pining for is working out fantastically well!
Simply by generating tensions that wouldn’t have otherwise existed (as alleged by Zelenksy) the US is making more likely the outbreak of full-on war, which could arise from something as minor as an unforeseen accident or miscommunication. I don’t think World War III should be invoked lightly, but prominent US officials have raised it as a distinct possibility. This psychotic op-ed by Evelyn Farkas, who served as a Pentagon official during the 2014 Ukraine coup and then tried to marshal that distinguished experience into a Cable News sinecure — before unsuccessfully running for a House seat in New York as a Democrat, naturally — almost has to be read to be believed. Farkas predicts a breakout of World War III unless the Biden Administration prepares immediately for “direct combat” between US troops and Russian forces. She seems oblivious that if anything is liable to spark World War III, it’s the lunatic plan she advocates.
Is the situation in Ukraine likely to culminate in World War III? Probably not, but even the most remote possibility of World War III is probably something that should be strenuously avoided if at all humanly possible. Biden is sending more US troops to Eastern Europe, China is declaring its support for Russia’s goals in Ukraine — and none of this makes for a reassuring dynamic. At a recent appearance with Emmanuel Macron, Putin warned that war in Ukraine would engulf the whole of NATO.
So if the worst does happen, the aggression and paranoia spawned by Russiagate — and its irrational influence on US policy-making and public opinion — will have played an under-recognized role. Where is the opposition to the conflict-instigating posture of the US? Democrats have been largely habituated into viewing anti-Russia antagonism as a wonderful “progressive” virtue, while Republicans are largely useless, trying to score cheap points against Biden by idiotically accusing him of “appeasement” every chance they get. Journalists often think they are bravely holding the powerful to account by demanding more proactive US intervention. In sum, the key segments of US society are primed for sleepwalking into a war they claim they don’t want, but keep taking actions to precipitate. If this all gets out of hand, which is ominously plausible, I hope the “Kremlin agent” pot-shots from 2016 to 2020 were worth it.
