Bruce Currie lives in Concord.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a criminal act that is justly condemned by most of the world. But it was entirely avoidable, had the U.S. and NATO been interested in diplomacy that acknowledged Russia’s long-standing security concerns.
Moreover, media coverage here of events that have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war is dangerously one-sided and devoid of context, making it seem as if the invasion came out of the blue. To be clear: nothing justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nor the humanitarian crisis it will create. But years of “Russia-Russia” claims here, based on inaccurate and often outright false claims about Putin and Russia, have memory-holed actions the U.S. has undertaken in Europe over 4 decades that led directly to the present crisis, as well as multiple actions by the U.S. exactly like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that were also flagrant violations of international law.
In 1989, at the end of the Cold War, the U.S., the EU and NATO promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch” eastward. Effectively, the end of the Cold War rendered NATO irrelevant. Nevertheless, in 1996 the Clinton administration began NATO expansion eastward. Many figures in the U.S., George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Robert Gates, Jack Matlock among them, said then that NATO expansion was a bad idea.
Kennan, the architect of containment after WW2, warned that NATO expansion “would be the most fateful mistake of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” His warning was ignored then, in the name of political expediency, and forgotten by most now. Since the reunification of Germany that marked the end of the Cold War, we’ve added 14 nations to NATO, all to the east of Germany. The promise to Gorbachev and the warnings by leading foreign policy experts? All memory-holed.
NATO has also been effectively repurposed by the U.S. for “regime change,” first in Serbia and Kosovo, next in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. In 2008, NATO stated that Georgia and Ukraine were in line for NATO membership. In response, Russia said this was a red line not to be crossed, an understandable reaction given Russia’s experience in WW2. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, in which 25 million Soviet citizens died, came through Ukraine.
Ukraine shares a 1,200-mile-long border with Russia. Besides NATO expansion and its repurposing for regime change, the U.S. has withdrawn from four nuclear arms control treaties since 2001, and NATO missiles are now in Poland and Romania, ostensibly to counter a threat from Iran, but they could easily be “upgraded’ and targeted on Russia. That is four more relevant “memory- holed” facts to give context to the Ukraine crisis from Russia’s viewpoint.
In 2014, we backed a coup in Ukraine that overthrew a democratically elected leader whose chief failing was that he was friendly with both Russia and the West. That coup has gone unmentioned by U.S. media, as has the fact that far-right extremists, many wearing Nazi “Wolfangel” insignias, played a pivotal role in it, and these same far-right forces have received U.S. support and training since 2015. After the coup, Ukrainian far-right forces began attacking the three Russian-speaking regions in eastern Ukraine, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, which received scant coverage in the West.
An estimated ten to thirteen thousand, mostly civilian, deaths have occurred since 2014, most from shelling by Ukrainian government forces, which incorporated the far-right militias leading the attacks. In response, Russia (which had a lease agreement for Crimea) annexed Crimea to protect ethnic Russians there and to defend its threatened naval base on the Black Sea. (Russia has had a presence in Crimea since the 1780s.) All memory-holed.
Luhansk and Donetsk are the two breakaway territories in the east that Russia recognized just before the invasion when attacks by Ukrainian forces grew worse as tensions escalated. These forces have a long history of committing atrocities against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East. The 2015 Minsk 2 accords — agreed to by France, Germany, Russia, U.S., and Ukraine, were intended to end the fighting and give the two regions of Luhansk and Donetsk a measure of autonomy.
However, the far-right forces in Ukraine’s government driving the conflict against the east blocked implementation of the accords. In 2019, Zelensky won the presidency as a peace candidate with 75% of the vote, saying he would abide by Minsk 2. However, he was prevented from doing so by the Ukrainian far-right, who ignored his direct pleas and continued their attacks, and then threatened to hang Zelensky as a traitor if he pursued negotiations. Since then, Zelensky has been made into a Ukrainian Churchill by our media, while implying shortly before the invasion that Ukraine might acquire or make nuclear weapons.
The prospect of a nuclear-armed Neo-Nazi state on Russia’s border, with its weapons aimed at Moscow, is what Russia saw and feared. A militarized and virulently anti-Russian Ukraine as a de-facto NATO member was a bridge too far for Moscow. What would the U.S. do if a similar situation arose on our border?
The U.S. House had passed a bill in 2015 outlawing assistance to Ukrainian far-right Neo-Nazi forces, but it was subsequently overturned after Pentagon objections. Recklessness on our part, and desperation on Russia’s, has brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. Calls for a “no-fly zone” and the assassination of Putin by Lindsay Graham and others are irresponsible in the extreme. Graham, along with John McCain, personally addressed far-right leaders in the Donbas region in 2017, stating, “Your fight is our fight, 2017 will be the year of offense.”
Only diplomacy can solve this crisis before it leads to greater catastrophe. Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis has the world been so close to nuclear war. Then, Khrushchev sent nuclear weapons to Cuba. This time, we are the aggressors, ringing the Russian border with dual-use missiles. The Doomsday Clock remains stuck at 100 seconds to midnight, as close as it has ever been.
If Kennedy and Khrushchev could talk, and Gorbachev and Reagan could talk, so too can Biden and Putin. But unhinged rhetoric about Putin and Russia, coupled with outright censorship of counter-factual sources, can only inflame, not inform, and make real diplomacy impossible.