Cold reality is that Putin is no victim of the West
The West, as he presents it, has been consistently ill-intentioned and aggressive, seeking to encircle Russia through NATO expansion. Russia, in contrast, has been consistently well-intentioned and defensive, merely responding to the West’s belligerence.
Aggravating its culpability, the West, once the invasion was under way, refused to take peace negotiations seriously, rejecting Russian proposals aimed at ending the hostilities.
To be faced with these claims is to struggle with the dilemma a bee faces in a nudist colony: one scarcely knows where to begin.
But given how often it is raised, the constant complaint about NATO expansion, which casts Russia as yet another victim in the unending pantheon of global victimhood, provides a useful starting point.
To view the expansion of NATO as an exercise in encircling Russia is geographically and historically absurd.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the countries it had suborned were left with Communist era militaries desperately needing fundamental reform. Compounding the urgency, there were tensions between those countries that could readily lead to conflict, as tragically occurred in Yugoslavia.
NATO’s programs, going from partnerships to memberships, helped implement sweeping reforms while providing a crucial stabilising degree of mutual assurance.
Those objectives were clearly articulated and explicitly accepted by Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. But even putting that aside, Switzer’s claim encounters obvious difficulties.
To begin with, NATO expansion cannot explain Russia’s attacks on the sovereignty of Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, much less the full-scale invasion of Georgia in August 2008. In none of those cases was NATO even vaguely at issue; nor could those attacks be construed as defensive actions on Russia’s part.
Additionally, the claim misrepresents the outcome of NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008.
Far from endorsing Ukrainian accession, that summit, as journalist Sylvie Kauffmann has painstakingly shown using French and German diplomatic sources, buried it for all time. Moreover, France and Germany, which led the intransigent opposition to Ukrainian accession, made that abundantly clear to Putin while giving firm assurances as to the future.
The summit was therefore anything but a Western provocation; on the contrary, the veto German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy placed convinced Putin he could get away with dismembering Georgia and Ukraine. Then, and in the later failure to counter Russian aggression in Georgia, Donbas and Crimea, it was not Western strength but Western weakness that fuelled the unfolding disaster.
Last but not least, the encirclement hypothesis is at odds with what was the Ukraine invasion’s predictable consequence: not just NATO’s revitalisation but its extension – which the Soviet Union had done everything it could to avoid – to Sweden and Finland, exposing Russia’s northern flank.
Were Russia really concerned about potential NATO aggression, it is impossible to conceive of an outcome that would pose greater strategic risks.
Nor do Switzer’s claims about the Ukraine peace negotiations fare any better. As anyone who followed the discussions surrounding those negotiations knows, the French and Germans were eager, if not desperate, for a deal to be done. And there is every sign the US would have readily accepted a reasonable outcome. What was always lacking was any serious commitment by Putin to halting a war of attrition he firmly believed Russia would win.
In the end, Switzer’s purported explanations, which portray Russia as purely reactive, fail because they ignore the internal dynamics that propel the Putin regime’s incessant aggressiveness. While the seeds of Russia’s turn to authoritarianism were well in place by the end of Yeltsin’s presidency, it is beyond question that the crisis of 2008-09 led the regime to dramatically harden its stance, in a series of moves accentuated by the mass demonstrations of 2011-13 and the crisis in 2014.
As those events unfolded, the regime sought to justify its brutal stifling of domestic opposition by reviving Sergius Uvarov’s trilogy of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality” that had, under Nicholas I (1796-1855) and his successors, served to suppress nascent liberalism and legitimate the forced Russification of the empire’s western provinces. Echoing the extreme nationalism that pervaded the security apparatuses in the late Brezhnev era, when the KGB restated Uvarov’s trilogy as “Traditional values, strong state, Russian civilisation”, the Putin regime’s new rhetoric demonised the West as intent on corrupting Russia, demolishing its culture and rolling back its “natural” frontiers.
At the same time, the regime effectively nationalised all forms of resource extraction, grasping vast rents it could use to pay for military expansion, enrich the kleptocracy and fund social services. With corruption and insecure property rights crippling private investment, the regime reverted to the “internal colonisation” that scholars have regarded, since the pioneering work of Sergey Mikhaylovich Solovyov (1820-79), as the quintessence of Russian autocracy.
Suspicious of genuine private enterprise that might challenge the autocracy and incapable of promoting the efficient use of resources, that purely extractive model of economic development relied on always finding new areas, internal and external, to colonise and exploit – going from the conquest of Siberia to the Soviet era’s “virgin soils” campaigns.
As a result, the Putin regime, once it came under threat, had three powerful reasons to attack its close neighbours. First, so as to justify, on national emergency grounds, ever more draconian internal security laws. Second, so as to quash – as China did in Hong Kong and proposes to do in Taiwan – any state that could act as an example, culturally proximate to Russians, of a less repressive type of government. And third, so as to secure additional natural resources, offsetting the trend decline in its own resource rents due to depletion, underinvestment and poor management.
Switzer ignores the plain, unvarnished truth: that given those dynamics, the Putin regime will pursue its global efforts to destabilise and suborn for so long as it can do so at a cost it finds bearable. And for exactly that reason, a ceasefire will bring a durable peace only if it is accompanied by credible security guarantees – guarantees the US alone has the military capabilities to provide.
But rather than providing those guarantees, the Trump administration is sharing in the loot, compelling Ukraine to pay, through mining concessions, for the assistance it has received.
Unlike Lend Lease during World War II, that assistance had not come with any repayment obligations, and the Lend Lease repayments were more than offset by the Marshall Plan, which reflected the US’s enduring national interest in a prosperous, democratic and secure Europe.
The contrast between then and now is bad enough. To dress it up as morally and politically justified is an appalling error of judgment.
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Writing on these pages (“Cold reality is the US can’t be bogged down in Ukraine”, 4/3), Tom Switzer attempts to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and excuse Donald Trump’s recent actions as morally and politically legitimate. Switzer’s method is simplicity itself.