By Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 4/1/25

Leaked documents show UK intelligence operatives grooming British politicians to silence academics expressing skepticism of London’s Ukraine proxy war effort. One of the targets, Richard Sakwa, believes the campaign resulted in real-world harassment.

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Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal a high-level British intelligence plot to smear and silence British political scientists such as Richard Sakwa, who is widely regarded as one of the English-speaking world’s foremost authorities on Russia.

In a March 2022 email entitled “Russians in our Universities,” British military intelligence officer and former senior NATO advisor Chris Donnelly accused Sakwa of being a Russian “fellow traveller” who’d been “gradually breaking cover,” insisting the professor was “far too well-informed about Russian strategy to be called just ‘a useful idiot.’” Another email reveals Donnelly fantasizing about publicly exposing the Sakwa for being “funded by Russian entities” – a claim the professor strenuously denies.

Donnelly fired off the emails just two weeks after the UK’s then-Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi pledged that the British government was “already on the case and is contacting [their] universities,” after being asked whether the UK government would intervene directly to stop anti-war academics from “acting as useful idiots for President Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine.”

The Grayzone has revealed Donnelly as a key figure behind a secret British military and spying cell dubbed Project Alchemy, which was created in early 2022 to keep Ukraine fighting “at all costs.” A core component of that effort was to silence journalistic voices and media outlets – including this one – deemed a threat to London’s control of the proxy war’s narrative.

The newly-exposed messages show that Donnelly was conducting similar operations in the academic world as well. Though Professor Sakwa has long challenged dominant Western narratives on Putin’s Russia, criticizing both NATO’s rampant expansionism and its refusal to include Moscow in the European security structure following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, he was effectively disappeared from mainstream debates on the conflict since the Ukraine proxy war erupted.

The leaked emails strongly suggest the direct intervention of Donnelly, a known British intelligence asset, may have been responsible for marginalizing Sakwa. Messages show Donnelly contacted influential UK lawmakers to stamp out the “influence” of Sakwa, whom he called his “number one” target, while calling for the blacklisting of other academics who might expose inconvenient truths about the conflict in Ukraine.

Donnelly’s determination to silence the professor apparently extended beyond the duration of the conflict. In private, he fretted that once “fighting slows down” in Ukraine, “appeasers” would “start talking about lifting the sanctions,” and “the Sakwas of this world will be spearheading the effort to change Western strategy.” In other words, even when the war ended in failure for Kiev and its proxy backers, Connelly and his associates would remain determined to prevent any public reconsideration of the West’s relationship with Russia.

Sakwa “a redoubtable opponent” who’s taken “very seriously”

While recently smeared as a Kremlin apologist and “disinformation” peddler in certain quarters, Sakwa’s works have historically elicited glowing mainstream reviews. Even after the Ukraine proxy war erupted, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs journal positively appraised the professor’s recent books dissecting the Russiagate fraud, and the origins of the Ukraine conflict. Clearly, it was Sakwa’s credibility and formidable body of knowledge that made him a target of British intelligence following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

In emails exchanged with James Sherr, a career think tank staffer who once headed the Russia and Eurasia program at the British government-linked think tank Chatham House, Donnelly expressed discomfort about the prospect of Sakwa’s ideas reaching impressionable Western audiences. Sakwa’s “knowledge of Russian politics is very high,” Donnelly warned Sherr, making him “a redoubtable opponent” whom the “majority” of British students and “junior/mid-level politicians” would likely take “very seriously.”

Sherr responded that he had “no doubt” Sakwa was “on the Kremlin payroll,” but insisted the academic criticized NATO expansion “not [for] money,” but “out of hatred of the United States.” If there was “hard evidence” that Sakwa was “funded by Russian entities, then this should be made known,” Sherr added, but even if footage existed of Vladimir Putin personally “writing [Sakwa] a cheque over dinner… the University of Kent will continue to employ him, and he will continue to be adored by those who adore him.”

Donnelly agreed with his friend’s false assessment, but was evidently undeterred from pursuing Sakwa, telling Sherr, “we can try!” He added that Andrew Monaghan, another academic who had long warned of the perils of military confrontation with Russia, hadn’t been heard from “for a while,” and asked Sherr: “who else should we be keeping an eye out for?” A day later, Donnelly posed the same question to his longtime associate Victor Madeira, an academic closely connected to former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove.

This followed another email by Donnelly to Conservative MP Bob Seely, a hawkish military veteran and then-member of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Donnelly asked Seely whether he was “concerned about Russian influence in our Universities,” because “if so, I’ve got some interesting material for you.” Forwarding the unsolicited email to Madeira, Donnelly boasted, “l may have an opportunity to get this addressed,” and bragged that he would soon be discussing the subject with the then-chair of British Parliament’s education select committee.

“cells in the British governmental apparatus…which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy”

In comments to The Grayzone, Sakwa said Donnelly’s actions were “extremely disturbing,” and suggested the emails indicate “there are cells in the British governmental apparatus who are working in ways which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy, tolerance of divergent political views, and the encouragement of open debate and dialogue.”

The professor argues that “by traducing scholars and civic activists,” Donnelly and his collaborators “precisely undermine the values which they are ostensibly trying to defend,” and “practice guilt by association.”

“The assumption [that] questioning official policy on a particular issue must be motivated by mercenary concerns, in this case being in the pay of Moscow, is a dreadful manifestation of the McCarthyism we had hoped we put behind us with the end of the Cold War,” Sakwa adds.

“In fact, it demonstrates [that] Cold War II is potentially more dangerous than the first, with the attempt to blacken the reputation of critical voices, and thus assumedly weaken their public impact. This is not only morally and politically wrong in itself, but also damages the possibility of coherent, informed and dispassionate analysis, and thus weakens the coherence of intelligent policy-making in its entirety.”

When Sakwa retired from his university position in August 2022, he was unaware that British intelligence operatives had waged a plot to silence him for over a year. Now, however, the professor wonders whether an incident that occurred two months prior may have been related. That June, the Canterbury anti-war movement organized an event at which Sakwa was the guest speaker. “To our astonishment, about 20 Ukrainians and associates picketed the meeting, with banners condemning me and the organizers,” he told The Grayzone.

Rather than being turned away, the protesters were invited in – “minus placards,” Sakwa noted. However, “they then proceeded to try to disrupt the meeting,” until the event chair warned them “that if their anti-democratic behavior continued, they would be asked to leave.” Following the warning, the event continued in peace. Sakwa said “most” attendees felt his address “struck the appropriate balance between sympathy for the plight of the Ukrainian people, and political analysis of the situation.”

The incident likely would have ended there, but counter-demonstrators seized on leaflets calling for an official inquiry into the ever-mysterious Bucha incident which were distributed by another attendee. Ukrainian officials and their British backers charge that Russian forces carried out a massacre of innocent civilians in the city of Bucha, but have blocked attempts at UN investigation, and refused to release names of purported victims.

While Sakwa believes calls for such a probe to be “not unreasonable”, he said he had nothing to do with the leaflets’ production, and was unaware of their contents at the time. He only learned of their existence when one of the Ukrainian activists who disrupted the event accused him of condoning “conspiracy theories,” leading the University of Kent to open an internal inquiry.

“To the University of Kent’s credit, they dismissed any potential charge of misconduct, and defended the principle of freedom of speech. The institution lived up to its reputation for collegiality and the robust defence of academic freedom,” Sakwa says. “However, the initial charge was clearly malicious and malevolent, and demonstrates the danger of ‘Ukraine syndrome’ damaging the quality of civic life in England.”

Today, “Ukraine syndrome” remains alive and well in Britain as Prime Minister Keir Starmer proudly declares his desire to deploy troops and aircraft to Kiev to participate in hostilities despite UK military chiefs warning that London lacks the men and materiel to even consider such a mission. A depressing official review of the British Army has prompted the head of the Financial Times’ editorial board to conclude “their forces would struggle to fight a European war lasting more than a few weeks.”

While Richard Sakwa and other genuine regional experts warned over many years that transforming Ukraine into an anti-Russian bastion would lead to disaster for all involved, Western leaders turned instead to the paranoid pronouncements of spies like Chris Donnelly for guidance on how to respond to Moscow’s forcefully stated opposition to Ukraine joining NATO. And before the belligerent plans of Donnelly and his cadre could be discredited, they made certain that no one would be left to call them out.

Reuters, 4/15/25

Summary

-Russia says not easy to agree Ukrainian peace

-Russia will not give up lands in Ukraine

-Russia will never depend on the West again

-Globalisation of world economy is over, Lavrov says

MOSCOW, April 15 (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that it was not easy to agree with the United States on the key parts of a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine and that Russia would never again allow itself to depend economically on the West.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath” of the three-year war in Ukraine, though a deal has yet to be agreed.

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“It is not easy to agree the key components of a settlement. They are being discussed,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper when asked if Moscow and Washington had agreement on some aspects of a possible peace deal.

“We are well aware of what a mutually beneficial deal looks like, which we have never rejected, and what a deal looks like that could lead us into another trap,” Lavrov said in the interview published in Tuesday’s edition.

The Kremlin on Sunday said that it was too early to expect results from the restoration of more normal relations with Washington.

Lavrov said that Russia’s position had been set out clearly by President Vladimir Putin in June 2024, when Putin demanded Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia.

“We’re talking about the rights of the people who live on these lands. That is why these lands are dear to us. And we cannot give them up, allowing people to be kicked out of there,” Lavrov said.

Russia currently controls a little under one fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and parts of four other regions Moscow now claims are part of Russia – a claim not recognised by most countries.

Lavrov praised Trump’s “common sense” and for saying that previous U.S. support of Ukraine’s bid to join the NATO military alliance was a major cause of the war in Ukraine.

But Russia’s political elite, he said, would not countenance any moves that led Russia back towards economic, military, technological or agricultural dependence on the West.

The globalisation of the world economy, Lavrov said, had been destroyed by sanctions imposed on Russia, China and Iran by the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden.

Biden, Western European leaders and Ukraine describe Russia’s 2022 invasion as an imperial-style land grab, and repeatedly vowed to defeat Russian forces.

Putin casts the war in Ukraine as part of a battle with a declining West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.

By Eugene Doyle, Solidarity, 3/29/25

The Germans have a word for it – as they always do.  Putinversteher – one who “understands” Putin. It is meant as a slur and has recently gained traction in Western IR (international relations) circles but Professor Geoffrey Roberts, a British historian of Russia, embraces the term.  “I think it’s a very good term,” he told me last week. “It’s my professional responsibility to try to understand Putin.”  

He is one of a growing number of ‘free thinkers’ who are rejecting the standard Western propaganda model that frames Putin and Russia as merchants of evil, instead ascribing to them motives that are both pragmatic and commonplace.  This leaves plenty of room to criticize Putin’s regime and its hardball geopolitics.  These academics, however, have shouldered the intellectual’s role to challenge the dominant narrative and expose underlying untruths (“Russia’s totally unprovoked war”, “Russia wants to conquer all of Ukraine”, “If we don’t stop them in Ukraine, the Russians will keep going”, etc). 

“That stuff is absolute nonsense,” Roberts says. “Yeah, Putin does have ambitions; he has ambitions to change the global polity in ways that will suit Russia and Russia’s interests.”

“Putinversteher” and Putin’s vision for a post-war world

Professor Roberts has sat in rooms with Putin, heard him speak at length, and unlike 99% of people in the West has taken the time to study his words unmediated by the various arms of the Western media. He seeks to disrupt the perceptions of a world misinformed by cartoonish good guy/bad guy narratives that make resolving crises all but impossible. 

“Putin is a visionary whose overarching goal is to end American global hegemony”, Roberts says, “and usher in a new, post-Western system of international relations – a multipolar system of sovereign states based on diversity, equality and common security. It is not an empire that Putin is seeking to build, but a new world order that will safeguard the long-term security of Russia and its civilisational values.”

Back in October I wrote an article “US is spending $28 billion to colonise your brain” which outlined the staggering sums of money spent on US disinformation/perception management campaigns which involve owning journalists, editors and entire media outlets, and which seeks to dominate our mental landscape by purging alternative voices. Swimming in this ocean of Russophobic, Sinophobic propaganda makes it all but impossible to assess Russia, the Chinese or, until recently, the Palestinians, in anything approaching a balanced way. 

Former head of the CIA Russia desk George Beebe spoke eloquently recently of the duty of analysts to “empathise” with the Russians, to walk in their shoes – which, he pointed out, is different to “sympathising” with the Russians (accepting their positions). Along with former US Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, Quincy Institute scholar Anatol Lieven and people like Pascal Lottaz, Professor Glenn Diesen and others, Geoffrey Roberts enriches our thinking at a time when the Western media seems incapable of nuanced dialogue. 

Fellow British historian Robert Skidelsky, a member of the House of Lords, spoke on Neutrality Studies last week about the danger of dragging out the war in Ukraine and having endless hostility with Russia.

“The whole European position is disingenuous. It’s misleading. It’s self-deluding. It’s as though people have had bits of their brains lobotomized so they can’t think about these things any longer. I find it terrifying.”

This is why, for all the madness, dangers and incoherence, the Trump Moment may at least be a circuit breaker, an opportunity for the West to rediscover the lost art of diplomacy. 

Challenging Putin Myths

Geoffrey Roberts has 50 years of scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union behind him. The author of many books, including Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (who led the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad) and The Soviet Union in World Politics: Coexistence, Revolution and Cold War, 1945-1991 (The Making of the Contemporary World), he has also penned innumerable articles trying to build understanding.

“One of the things I’ve been trying to do all my life is counter this vilification of Russia and, more recently, the demonization of Putin – the complete distortion of Putin’s views.”

Historians like Geoff Roberts prefer the long view, looking at events from a distance, which helps them to be as dispassionate, as objective as possible. But sometimes history calls historians to comment when the smell of cordite is still in the air. 

In terms of Russophobic propaganda, Roberts says, the last three years have been more toxic than anything he has seen.  It has compelled him, he says, to eschew some of his scholarly habits – being an “archive rat” – and step into the ring.

Through articles, interviews, YouTube platforms and his own email database he seeks “to provide alternative perspectives and to cut through the propaganda blizzard in respect to Ukraine. I also do it to make sense of it myself.”   

His 2022 article “Now or Never: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine” appeared in various outlets, including the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies. It made a significant contribution to the discussion. In June last year Brave New Europe published his “Negotiate Now, or Capitulate Later: Ten Incentives for Ukraine to Make Peace with Russia” which spelt out in crisp and sober terms the stark realities that are increasingly obvious to everyone today: Ukraine faces a crushing defeat if they press on, the West is indifferent to the death of Ukrainians, the demographic crisis is real, and to save Odessa and access to the Black Sea, Ukraine should pursue a settlement now. 

Most Ukrainians, Roberts says, now believe that even a bad peace will be better than the continuation of a disastrous losing war. Delaying and fighting on makes no sense.  As some have argued for years: Ukraine would have a brighter future as a bridge between Russia and the rest of Europe, not as a fortified outpost for either side. 

The courage to oppose a dominant discourse comes at a price. Powerful forces are pressing in on academics and others who dare to express alternative views. Staying silent or parroting the party line is the safer option. Geoff Roberts is made of sterner stuff. 

“I had that option of keeping quiet, keeping my head down. But at a certain moment, I guess in 2014 when the crisis broke, I felt compelled to comment. It’s been easier for me to dissent because I’m retired. I’m loathe to criticise anyone in academia for not speaking out. But there are younger academics who dare to speak truth to the powerless. For me, they are the true heroes of the resistance to Russophobia.”

I admire independent thinkers like Geoffrey Roberts.  They risk vilification in order to foster truth and the understanding that Ukraine is a thorny issue with faults on all the many sides of this disaster.  Without this healthy perspectivism, making peace and moving forward is blocked. Does that make me a Putinversteher? So be it. Ich bin Putinversteher.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz. This article may be reproduced without permission but with suitable attribution.

CBS News 60 Minutes, 4/13/25

The Ukrainian president faces a critical moment in his alliance with the United States. In an interview this past Friday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy invited President Trump, here, to Ukraine, to see how Russia’s unprovoked invasion, three years ago, continues to threaten the peace of the Western world. Zelenskyy is navigating a sharp turnabout in Washington. The United States had been leading nato in arming Ukraine and isolating Russia. but since taking office, President Trump has praised the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and criticized Zelenskyy. this past Friday, a Trump official met Putin in Russia about the same time we sat down with Zelenskyy in his hometown. It had been a week since Russia killed 9 children on a playground.

Scott Pelley: You seem to have a real hatred of Vladimir Putin.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): Putin? 100% hatred. Not even 99.9%. Though this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to end the war as soon as possible and transition to diplomacy. But how else can you see a person who came here and murdered our people, murdered children? We’re inside a school bomb shelter right now. The bomb shelter of a school.

The bomb shelter classrooms beneath the city of Kryvyi Rih were silent. School 41 was mourning its students killed on April 4. Swing sets pierced by shrapnel stood where Zelenskyy laid his memorial to the nine children and 10 others cut down by a Russian missile. He asked us to look at their faces and told us that while the great powers endlessly debate war and peace, these children will never speak again.

Scott Pelley: Mr. President, what does an atrocity like this tell you about the progress of the war?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: It means that we can’t trust Russia. We can’t trust negotiations with Russia.

Russia strikes Ukrainian cities daily. 1,700 attacks on schools, 600 children dead. 780 hospitals and clinics attacked. 13,000 civilians killed. And up to 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers dead, all for Vladimir Putin’s vanity war to expand Russia to NATO’s doorstep.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): Our people have paid the highest price possible. There is no higher price. We have given all our money–all we have in terms of finances. But most important, we gave [the lives of] our people.

Those were the points Zelenskyy struggled to make in February as President Trump opened negotiations with Russia and, initially, excluded Ukraine. Then, Trump rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling the democratically elected Zelenskyy…

President Trump on February 19: A dictator without elections. Zelenskyy better move fast or he’s not going to have a country left. Gotta move, gotta move fast ’cause that war is going in the wrong direction.

Scott Pelley: When President Trump called you a dictator and said that Ukraine started this war, what did you think?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): I believe, sadly, Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S. How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war? This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on U.S. politics, and U.S. politicians.

And Zelenskyy told us he heard Russia’s narrative from Trump officials in that disastrous Oval Office meeting in February.

Trump in Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy: You’re gambling with World War III.

Zelenskyy grew tense as President Trump said both sides were suffering, Ukraine’s people and the Russian invasion force.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality, really yes, a shift in reality, and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me. First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions. I tried to explain, “You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim.”

Vice President Vance suggested that Putin could be trusted and it was Zelenskyy who was creating a false narrative.

Zelenskyy in Oval Office meeting: Have you ever been to Ukraine that you see what problems we have? Come once.

Vance in Oval Office meeting: I’ve actually, I’ve actually watched and seen the stories and I know what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr. President.

Scott Pelley: Would you invite President Trump to Ukraine?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: With pleasure. Please.

This, Zelenskyy apparently wanted President Trump to hear in English.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: We want you to come, and I think to come and to see. You think you understand what’s going on here. Okay, we respect your position. You understand. But, please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead. Come, look, and then let’s — let’s move with a plan how to finish the war. You will understand with whom you have a deal. You will understand what Putin did. And we will not prepare anything. It will not be theater, with preparing actors in the streets and the [city] center. We don’t do this. We don’t need it. You can go exactly where you want, in any city which been under attacks. What I said to them, just to come and to understand.

With his invitation on its way, he switched to Ukrainian.

Scott Pelley: Does the United States have your back?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): (PAUSE) Even in this pause of mine there’s a problem. Because I want to answer truthfully and quickly that the United States is our strategic, strong partner. But the pause is doubt. I don’t doubt that the people of America are with us. But in a long war, many details are forgotten. In Europe everyone fears that the United States may drift away from Europe.

Scott Pelley: Can you do without the United States?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): I think without the United States we will suffer great losses. Human and territorial. So, I wouldn’t like to consider that. But this is our destiny, our land, our life. One way or another, we will end this war.

The U.S. has donated about $175 billion in aid. Roughly 100 billion of that was military, most of which was spent in the U.S. on manufacturing American weapons.

Scott Pelley: What would you say that the American people have gotten for that money?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): We have always believed that this is our shared struggle, that Ukraine is defending our shared values, that we are defending Europe as a whole. I can only thank the people of the United States of America for their support, their strong support. But the people dying right now, with all due respect to the U.S. and Europe, the ones dying right now are Ukrainians. This is why I say that by giving us weapons, other countries are protecting their own people.

But in the Trump administration, U.S. aid has all but stopped. Last month the White House announced partial ceasefires, but they haven’t happened. And now, Trump says he is losing patience with Putin.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): Putin can’t be trusted. I told that to President Trump many times. So when you ask why the ceasefire isn’t working – this is why. Putin never wanted an end to the war. Putin never wanted us to be independent. Putin wants to destroy us completely – our sovereignty and our people.

Putin’s troops occupy about 20% of Ukraine. The 600-mile front is largely frozen – World War I trench warfare plus drones. It’s estimated that as many as 200,000 Russian troops have been killed.

Scott Pelley: What does a just peace look like to you?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): To not lose our sovereignty or our independence. We, no matter what, will take back what is ours because we never lost it – the Russians took it from us, the temporarily occupied territories. We will not recognize [as Russia] those territories that the Russians temporarily occupy. We will bring them back. When or how, I cannot say. [But] what we can’t bring back are the human [lives]. There’s only one thing that can be done, justice. We cannot let go the issue of justice. Those who killed must pay for the murders.

Zelenskyy told us any true ceasefire must include a guarantee of Ukrainian security. He imagines an international peacekeeping force and would like the U.S. to be part of it.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): This could mean a [force] protecting airspace and providing air defense, which may consist of airplanes rather than boots on the ground.

Trump in campaign speech: I will end the war in Ukraine immediately I will get it done while I’m president-elect.

During his presidential campaign, Trump boasted he would end the war before Inauguration Day. Instead, today, Palm Sunday, Russian missiles struck the Ukrainian city of Sumy — at least 32 civilians are dead, including another 2 children.

Scott Pelley: In your view, what is at stake in this moment?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): Security. The security of the world is at stake. If we do not stand firm, he will advance further. It is not just idle speculation; the threat is real. Putin’s ultimate goal is to revive the Russian Empire and reclaim territories currently under NATO protection. And the United States being part of NATO means it will be involved in any potential conflict. Considering all of this, I believe it could escalate into a world war.

Scott Pelley: A risk to the world.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Translated): Yes, for the world. There won’t be a safe place [not a] safe place for [anyone].

By Mark Episkopos, Responsible Statecraft, 3/31/25

Alexander Vindman’s recent book, “The Folly of Realism,”throws down the gauntlet, as the name suggests, at the “realists” he thinks were responsible for failing to deter Russia and seize opportunities for defense cooperation with Ukraine.

According to Vindman, the former National Security Council official who testified against President Trump during his impeachment trial in 2019, this “realist” behavior incentivized Moscow’s continued imperialist predations, culminating in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Vindman’s proposed antidote to what he considers the lapses of the past three decades is Benjamin Tallis’ framework of “neo-idealism,” a lightly repackaged menagerie of post-Cold War transatlanticism’s greatest hits that is bizarrely presented as a novel outlook on the international system.

Fully squaring all the historical misjudgments presented in these 240 pages demands an exegesis of at least as many pages, and not just because there are so many — though one certainly doesn’t find themselves pressed for material — but because Vindman’s central arguments flow from larger, decades-long narratives about Russia and post-Cold War U.S. policy that simply do not stand up to scrutiny.

Nuclear policy emerges as one of the main causal drivers of Vindman’s story. No one can quarrel with the proposition that successive administrations took seriously the cause of nonproliferation in the post-Soviet sphere — they had every reason to — and that nuclear concerns shaped U.S. engagement with the Russian Federation to a significant even if not decisive degree.

But to suggest, as Vindman does, that the thrust of early U.S./NATO policy toward Russia boils down to nuclear concerns is to lapse into a narrowly tendentious reading of events that history doesn’t lend itself to.

Vindman, who interviewed the officials involved in negotiating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum from the U.S. side, was careful not to retread the solecisms so heartily indulged by many of his allies and fellow travelers. He concedes, and not insignificantly so considering how deeply this narrative has entrenched itself in recent years, that the signed memorandum did not contain U.S. security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for relinquishing its supposed nuclear arsenal.

“There’s no question in my memory and in my mind that the Ukrainians understood completely the difference between security assurances and Article 5 security guarantees. And they understood they were getting security assurances,” Vindman quoted Nicholas Burns, Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs at the National Security Council, as saying.

These assurances, as I explained with my colleague Zach Paikin, did not commit the U.S. to undertake any specific commitments beyond what it agreed to in previous treaties. Indeed, it’s precisely because the memorandum was not legally binding and contained no concrete defense commitments that it did not have to be ratified by the Senate, as all treaties must be.

But this whole “denuclearization” business calls for a greater degree of technical scrutiny than Vindman affords it. Three of the 15 states that emerged from the Soviet collapse — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus — did not in fact “inherit” thousands of nuclear weapons. These were Soviet nuclear weapons, stationed across the Soviet Union but controlled from Moscow. After the Soviet collapse, these became Soviet nuclear weapons left over on the territories of former Soviet soviet states.

It was never established that Ukraine exercised legal, political, or operational control over these weapons, nor that the nascent Ukrainian state disposed of the considerable resources required to maintain them. Ukraine did not, in this sense, possess a nuclear inheritance that could be bartered away for Western security guarantees or anything else.

What we have before us, then, is not a geostrategic question but a largely operational challenge of removing these weapons, to which Ukraine had no recognized claim, from Ukrainian territory in an orderly way. This rather unremarkable process, though unquestionably a major part of the story of 1990s U.S.-Russia relations, is lent a degree of long-term political significance by Vindman that it simply doesn’t deserve.

So, what, then, is the larger picture and how does it fit into Vindman’s argument that the West’s woes stem from a decades-long policy of, if not appeasing, then at least turning a blind eye to “Russian ambition and exceptionalism?”

One cannot help but escape the sense that Vindman’s story suffers from the plight of Alexander the Great, who wept that he had only one world to conquer. His analysis is strongly tinted by the endless, yet strategically vacuous, expressions of goodwill, optimism about Russia’s Western path, and other such millenarian effusions that characterized U.S.-Russia relations up to the mid-2000’s.

But in the most important ways, U.S. policy has been guided all along by something quite similar to Vindman’s neo-idealism. The Soviet collapse gave Western leaders a generational opportunity to go about the difficult but necessary task of building a new security architecture that includes mechanisms not just to deter Russia, but also to engage it in ways that do not lead to security spirals in Eastern Europe. U.S. policymakers, less driven by balance of power concerns than they were enchanted by the seductive vision of a Europe “whole and free,” brushed aside the concerns of George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and a great many others to greenlight the limitless expansion of NATO, an alliance explicitly arrayed against the Russian Federation’s Soviet predecessor.

It seems to be a source of consternation for Vindman that Ukraine was not invited into NATO in those early days. Vindman’s implication that Ukraine was thus abandoned to Russia’s sphere of influence incorrectly frames the problem at hand. Washington’s fervid devotion to NATO’s “open door” membership policy and dogged refusal to countenance any framework for delimiting NATO’s boundaries shows that the lack of progress in this area was purely tactical in nature and certainly not grounded in systemic realist thinking.

There is also the peccadillo of democratic values, defense of which is supposed to be NATO’s entire raison d’être. In point of fact, polling shows most Ukrainians had no desire to join the alliance until as late as the mid 2010s, when it became impossible due to outstanding territorial conflicts with Russia.

Vindman’s indictment of what he wants the reader to believe passes for “realism” — more on that shortly — hinges on viewing Russia as an innate aggrandizer emboldened by the failure of successive U.S. administrations to deter it.

It all falls apart upon the most basic attempt at a more sophisticated structural analysis — one which would find that Russia’s behavior is consistent not with a grand strategy of conquest for its own sake but with what most realists would identify as balancing behavior in response to the eastward expansion of Western military and security institutions into the post-Soviet sphere, and Russian actions intended to preemptively deny such expansion.

Trudging through this book, with its unique blend of endless encyclopedic tedium heaped on top of the analytical equivalent of a children’s pop-up story, can be best likened to navigating a swamp that’s shallow yet impossibly vast. But this rather unpleasant journey at least gives the reader ample time to meditate on the book’s central conceit.

Vindman unfortunately displays a woefully inadequate grasp of that which he tries to impugn: at no point does he demonstrate anything more than a cursory understanding of realist approaches to the issues he tries to elucidate.

One is left grasping in vain for any evidence that Vindman can pass the simple theoretical Turing Test of explaining any school of realism — let alone to distinguish between them — to the satisfaction of a realist. But Vindman’s underlying thrust is not to meaningfully engage with realist arguments on Ukraine’s post-Soviet transition, 1990’s U.S.-Russia relations, or nuclear proliferation in the former Soviet sphere.

Instead he wants to launder what has largely been an idealist, atlanticist handling of these issues since 1991 by pinning the neoconservatives’ manifold sins and lapses on a haphazard cluster of ideas and approaches clumsily christened by him as “realism.” There was no realism in the strategically shortsighted decision — condemned by many realists at the time — to enable successive waves of NATO expansion and encourage, against genuine U.S. and European security interests, the integration of post-Soviet states into the West’s collective defense umbrella.

The well-established idealist framing of American engagement with competitors as a manichean confrontation between democracy and autocracy is anathema to realism and, indeed, to a healthy understanding of U.S. national security priorities.

But it is true that actual realist ideas are rapidly making their way back into the foreign policy discourse after decades in the wilderness. As is always the case after an exiled intellectual movement rediscovers the levers of power, there will and should be a vigorous debate on what form these ideas will take when filtered through the vicissitudes of American politics and applied to the pressing challenges of our time, including the Russia-Ukraine war and the broader task of building a sustainable architecture of European security.

And whatever missteps are made along the way pale in comparison to a disastrous status quo that can be described by many names. Realism, it is not.