Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 84

Matt Taibbi: Ukraine Detains Socialist Writer, Bans World Socialist Web Site | Russia Formally Charges WSJ Journalist with Spying for the CIA

By Matt Taibbi, Racket News/Substack, 6/13/24

At least Ukraine doesn’t discriminate, when it comes to detaining writers.

On April 25, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained twenty-five-year-old socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk on a charge of treason. Just over a month later, while Syrotiuk remained in detention in the city of Mykolaiv, Ukraine banned one of the outlets with which he’s connected, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), which has faced suppression in the United States in the past, as noted on this site.

In January, Chilean-American writer Gonzalo Lira died in custody after a lengthy detention. Most American media condemned Lira even in death, with headlines like “Kremlin Shill Dies in Ukraine” (The Daily Beast), “Pro-Putin American Expat Dies in Ukrainian Jail” (Newsweek), and “Anti-Ukraine Chorus Seeks to Exploit an American’s Death” (Substack’s own The Bulwark). The SBU also sought to have The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté removed from Twitter, and several organizations have published lists of Ukrainian media “enemies,” with a new one called Texty.Org.UA listing everyone from Noam Chomsky to Carlson as well as ice cream magnate Ben Cohen, Chris Hedges, CODEPINK and others (including me) as spreaders of Russian propaganda. The WSWS doesn’t appear, but someone invested real money and time in an elaborate Western-style media enemies list with snazzy graphics:

A Texti.Org.UA chart of left-leaning enemies of Ukraine. There are similar charts for the American conservatives

The SBU detained Syrotiuk, who leads an organization called the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, in an April raid of his party’s offices in his home city of Pervomais’k, in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian intel agency somewhat absurdly claims to have found a Russian army greatcoat, a backpack marked with a “Z” (ostensibly representing Russian chauvinism), and a gas mask in the party meeting hall, in close proximity to a portrait of Lev Trotsky.

Since his arrest, Syrotiuk has been denied contact with his affiliates at the WSWS. He has also been unable to obtain proper legal counsel or the blood pressure medication on which he relies, according to the WSWS. At one point, Syrotiuk was able to find a lawyer in Kyiv. A week later, his lawyers said that he would not be able to take the case, citing the danger of representing him.

Socialist or communist figures in both Ukraine and Russia have attracted particular official attention since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, perhaps because of the history of successful agitation in the region. Syrotiuk’s Young Guard, a Trotskyist group operating throughout the former Soviet Union, advocates for an end to the war and cooperation between the Russian and Ukrainian working classes, while opposing the governments of both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. A month before war broke out, in January of 2022, they made contact with the World Socialist Web Site, another Trotskyite organization that opposes “all governments” and “the defense of the national state,” not just in Ukraine but everywhere.

“The irony of this is, is that we could see our members who are active in Russia arrested by the Putin government,” says David North, chair of the Socialist Equality Party, which publishes the WSWS. North’s group blames “provocative and aggressive” policies of the U.S. and NATO for starting the conflict, but adds: “Nevertheless, we opposed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”

According to North, part of Syrotiuk’s offense is carrying out propaganda on behalf of a Russian state organ, by which they somehow mean the World Socialist Web Site, a consistent critic of Putin’s. Syrotiuk’s charging papers list North as a “leader of a Russian-controlled propaganda agency.” Ironically, North describes the WSWS as “bitter enemies of the Putin government” and says that the site is “very opposed to this view of Putin as some sort of great leader of a new multipolar movement.”  

That the Zelensky government would take a hard line with a domestic war critic should be unsurprising to anybody who follows speech issues, but the broader question about Syrotiuk’s imprisonment is whether Ukraine’s American partners knew of or approved his detention. North claims Syrotiuk’s charging papers list information to which only he would be privy. After filing a FOIA request on his own behalf, he adds he was told the government could neither confirm nor deny that it was collecting information on his activities. The WSWS this week sent an open letter to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Oksana Makarova, but has not received a response.

It should be noted that similar jailings are taking place in Russia, with some hitting close to home. This past December, Russians arrested Boris Kagarlitsky, a longtime Moscow Times contributor who was the main writer on the “Russian Dissent” Substack sponsored by this site. Boris, a socialist himself but not connected in any way to the WSWS, was denounced as an “inoagent” (a foreign agent) and given a five year sentence, which Russian authorities called “excessively lenient.” The case is one of the more absurd in the history of speech offenses. Kagarlitsky was initially accused of making light of a 2022 explosion on the Krimsky Bridge linking Russia to Crimea, thanks to a video titled “Explosive Congratulations to the Cat Mostik,” sarcastically putting a cat in the frame for the blast. The Russian news agency TASS noted Kagarlitsky’s “negative attitude toward authorities,” and Boris remains in prison. We’re trying to get more information about his status.

For all its horror, the Kagarlitsky case has attracted some coverage from outlets like the BBC and organizations like Amnesty International. Detained Ukrainian dissidents like Syrotiuk have received zero attention in the U.S. Incidentally, the Twitter Files list of social media accounts denounced by the SBU to the FBI, on which Aaron Maté’s name was found, contained a number of socialist or communist organizations, suggesting a broad interest in both old and new left-leaning groups.

The SBU asked the FBI to ban the Communist Party’s account, according to the Twitter Files.

Syrotiuk is the kind of figure who’s rarely defended by American authorities, making his prospects for release poor, absent attention from international organizations. Will left-leaning outlets apart from the WSWS demand answers about our government’s role in this episode?

***

RT, 6/13/24

The Russian Prosecutor General has finalized its indictment against Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich, who is accused of attempting to obtain military secrets for the CIA, it was announced on Thursday.

In a statement, investigators claimed they have evidence that the American citizen was acting on behalf of the US foreign intelligence agency when he tried to collect classified information about Uralvagonzavod, a major Russian producer of tanks and armored vehicles, in Ekaterinburg in March 2023.

The case, which was compiled based on materials provided by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), has been sent for trial at a court in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, it added.

The court has jurisdiction as Uralvagonzavod is located in the region and the alleged crimes were committed on its soil.

Gershkovich and his employer have denied the Russian allegations and have claimed he is being held unlawfully. The newspaper has called on the US government to retaliate and has reportedly been told that Washington is looking for “creative solutions” to resolve the situation.

American officials have reportedly contacted other governments about potentially taking custody of prisoners who they believe may be of interest to Russia in a swap for Gershkovich. Brazil, Norway, Germany, and an unnamed former Soviet bloc country have been approached with such requests, according to Western media.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Russian President Vladimir Putin about Gershkovich during an interview in February, claiming that his fellow US journalist was “obviously not a spy.” Putin responded by saying that “getting classified information in secret is called espionage,” and that Gershkovich was “caught red-handed when he was receiving this information.”

Moscow has no objections in principle to releasing Gershkovich eventually but won’t do so simply as a goodwill gesture because it has already “exhausted” such reserves in dealing with Washington, Putin added.

Glenn Greenwald Interviews Lev Golinkin on Russian Warships in Cuba as U.S. Funds Azov Brigade & War Escalates

YouTube link here.

Newsweek: Russia Abruptly Flips Nuclear Drill Scenario

By Isabel van Brugen, Newsweek, 6/13/24

Russia abruptly changed its nuclear drill scenario on Wednesday, moving it closer to NATO borders, a day after Moscow and its ally Belarus launched joint drills aimed at training their troops in tactical nuclear weapons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the military drills in May in response to what the Kremlin has described as provocative statements and threats from the West.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on May 21 that the first stage of the drills had started involving the “practical testing of the preparation and use of nonstrategic nuclear weapons” in the country’s Southern Military District.

Moscow’s second stage of drills began on Tuesday alongside Belarusian troops.

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during the awarding ceremony at the Grand Kremlin Palace on June 12, 2024, in Moscow, Russia. Russia abruptly changed its nuclear drill scenario on Wednesday. CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES

In a statement shared on Telegram on Wednesday, Russia’s defense ministry said the country’s newly formed Leningrad Military District—stationed close to Finland and the Baltic States—had also joined the nuclear maneuvers. The district was announced in February in response to Finland joining the NATO alliance.

Read full article here.

Jordan Shilton: Nordic military operations highlight NATO’s preparations to attack Russia from the north

By Jordan Shilton, World Socialist Website, 5/12/24

Recent months have witnessed levels of military activity in the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland that are unprecedented since World War II. One major NATO exercise has followed another, with tens of thousands of troops participating, while the US has expanded its bilateral defence agreements with all three countries to create what resembles a massive American staging ground for an invasion of Russia from the north.

During the first two weeks of March, some 20,000 NATO troops from 13 countries participated in Nordic Response 2024. The exercise was the successor to the long-running biennial Norwegian Cold Response manoeuvre, which was expanded to include Sweden and Finland following their accession to the aggressive US-led military alliance. The deployment included large contingents of ground, air, and naval forces in a simulated battle triggered by the invasion of a “fictitious adversary.” The exercise included the first trial of a Joint Nordic Air Operations Command, with the air forces of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden controlled from one base in Bodo, northern Norway.

Nordic Response was part of the larger Steadfast Defender mobilisation, a series of continuous military manoeuvres involving 90,000 NATO personnel that began in January and extends into June. The area of operations stretches from the Arctic through the Nordic and Baltic regions to Central Europe. In its first stage, the exercise involved the transportation of US military personnel across the Atlantic to support European NATO members in a war scenario. The next stage, which is now well advanced, involves the transit of American personnel from their landing sites along the Nordic coast eastwards towards the Russian border.

Operation Immediate Response started in late April, when a cargo ship carrying large quantities of US military supplies docked at the northern Norwegian port of Narvik. The exercise involved transporting the equipment, which belongs to the 10th Mountain Division of the US Army, by rail and road through Sweden to Finland, where it will be used in the Northern Forest manoeuvre. Around 1,600 US soldiers and 200 military vehicles arrived in Finland this past week after completing the 550-kilometre journey. Another location for the exercise further south was Kalundborg in Denmark, where military equipment was also brought ashore. “This operation is important within the NATO framework. It shows the Americans’ ability and will to deploy rapidly and our ability to receive and be a transit country,” commented Colonel May Brith Valen-Odlo from the Norwegian armed forces. “In line with NATO’s new plans, we could quickly become a transit country to receive forces, prepare them, and send them through Sweden and Finland.”

The last time Norway and Sweden served as “transit countries” was for Nazi Germany during World War II. After the Nazis invaded the country and set up a puppet regime under Vidkun Quisling in April 1940, the Wehrmacht’s Armee Norwegen (Army Norway) was established. As part of the subsequent launching of the war of extermination against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the 163rd Infantry Division was transferred from Norway via neutral Sweden to serve alongside the Finnish army as it invaded the Soviet Union. The Nazi advance along this front took troops within 30 kilometres of Leningrad, which Finnish soldiers helped blockade with their Nazi allies. Armee Norwegen commanders led operations against Soviet troops in Lapland.

In the months leading up to the latest major NATO manoeuvres, the US concluded a series of bilateral agreements with the Nordic countries to secure unrestricted access to dozens of military facilities within striking distance of the Russian border. Three defence cooperation agreements (DCA) concluded with Finland, Sweden, and Denmark in December 2023, and an updated DCA finalised with Norway in February 2024, cover a total of 47 “Agreed areas” of operation across the four countries. In an “agreed area,” which is usually associated with a military base or training ground, US soldiers can operate freely and store materiel to be used in future deployments. A total of 15 of these “agreed areas” are in the Arctic regions of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, close to the Russian border with Norway and Finland. American military personnel also have the power to exercise authority over civilians within or in the “immediate vicinity” of the “agreed areas.” In “extreme cases,” this power can be extended beyond the “immediate vicinity” of an “agreed area.” The agreements make clear that the US has the first right to prosecute its soldiers under American laws for any crimes committed while on- or off-duty.

The initiative for these agreements, which recall the dictates of a neocolonial power over its occupied territories, was taken by the United States. The US government insisted that the first DCA agreed with Norway in 2021 was an “indispensable precondition” for further US investments in military infrastructure in the country. American imperialism views access to the Arctic as essential under conditions in which climate change is opening up the region to resource exploitation and intercontinental trade. Washington is determined to ensure its dominant position in the high north at the expense of Russia, China, and other potential rivals. This includes its erstwhile European allies, who, led by German imperialism, are making their own moves to boost their presence in the region.

Military cooperation is also being expanded dramatically between the Nordic nations themselves. The Nordic Defence Command (NORDEFCO) was established in 2009 by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The collaboration initially served principally as a mechanism to enable Finnish and Swedish forces to participate in NATO exercises, and gain experience in training and using NATO equipment to the alliance’s standards. Now, however, with all the nations in NATO, the command structure is being consolidated to integrate Nordic operational capabilities.

A new Vision 2030 strategy was recently unveiled by NORDEFCO that includes “vigorous joint action” in eight defence and security areas. Writing in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, the defence ministers from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and Iceland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated, “Altogether, we have unique knowledge of the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the Baltic Sea, and an almost 1,500 kilometers long land border with Russia. In total, we have over 250 fighter planes and 350,000 soldiers. Together, we will be able to provide the conditions required for the reception, deployment, and further movement of allied troops to and through our countries.”

One main area of focus is strengthening the “deterrence and defence” of the Nordic and Euro-Atlantic regions by improving operational cooperation. A recent NORDEFCO meeting was held in the Faroe Islands to discuss NATO military options stretching from Greenland in the west, where the US has maintained a military presence since World War II, through Iceland, which relies on its NATO allies for air protection as it has no armed forces of its own, to the Nordic countries in the Arctic and Baltic regions. The alliance also aims to strengthen “host nation support and logistical support” for troops from other NATO allies operating in the region, cooperation in the purchasing of defence materiel, and the “Nordic defence industrial base” to improve the reliability of supply lines.

The strategy document underscores that the ambition is to subordinate all areas of society to the goal of waging war. NORDEFCO will strive for “Total defence to secure adequate support from all sectors of society to the defense sector in all threat scenarios and situations,” the document noted.

Of all the Nordic countries, Finland has gone farthest in implementing a “total defence” strategy. With a population of just under 5.5 million, it can mobilise over a quarter of a million soldiers rapidly and has some 900,000 members in the military reserve. Finland recently spent close to $10 billion to purchase 64 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, the equivalent of a country the size of Germany purchasing around 1,000 of these aircraft.

During a visit to Berlin last week, Finnish President Alexander Stubb received a warm response to his appeal for other countries to “be like Finland.” According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose government has massively increased military spending and revived Germany’s global imperialist ambitions, Germany can learn a lot from the Finnish approach. “We would like to learn from the Finnish experiences with Russia as a neighbour,” Scholz said in connection with Stubb’s visit. “We are also interested in the Finnish approach to civil defence.”

Nicolai Petro & Arta Moeini: The Folly of a New Containment

By Nicolai Petro & Arta Moeini, The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, 5/9/24

The 2020s have seen the return and new appeal of “containment” thinking in U.S. grand strategy. Facing the erosion of unipolarity, the rise of China as a global power, and the newfound assertiveness of other regional and major powers such as Russia and Iran, some American strategists have resurrected and retooled this familiar Cold War concept. For instance, a recent Foreign Affairs article, “To Prevail, Washington Must Revive Containment”, proposes that America deal with its adversaries, especially Russia, through a “new containment”.

By advancing a particular reading of the original containment doctrine, the authors suggest a long-term U.S. strategy that will (1) create a cordon sanitaire around Russia globally while avoiding direct conflict, (2) contest Russian influence in the Global South through development assistance, trade, and investment, and (3) simultaneously contain China as well as Russia. According to the authors, all these objectives could be accomplished by demanding that more of Europe’s military expenditures be marshaled against Russia so that America’s resources can subsequently be shifted to the Indo-Pacific region to counter China.

Such an approach would also pave the way for Ukrainian “victory”, the authors claim, if not through the recapture of lost territory, then through Ukraine’s military and political integration with the West. This would leave Russia dealing with the long-term consequences of a failed invasion, which might just lead to the type of problems that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union after Afghanistan (one can only imagine how thrilled the Ukrainians will be with this comparison). Furthermore, the authors hope that persistent sanctions on Russia will eventually create an economic crisis of the kind “the Soviet Union experienced in the 1980s,” weakening the country’s resolve. Despite favoring containment, however, the authors suggest that the U.S. and Russia should still find a way to have meaningful dialogues on arms control, cyber-warfare, and regional conflicts, and even cooperate on issues such as climate change.

Such talk of New Containment seems like a wasteful exercise of pouring new wine into old wineskins and is increasingly fanciful given the current trajectory of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Fully assessing the problems of New Containment, however, requires a firm grasp of the older, Cold War containment model and the different types of containment strategies one could adopt.

Containments Old and New

Firstly, the Old Containment made strategic sense for the West because the alliance faced a military rival that was highly selective about where it actually intervened, not to mention one that did not threaten our core interests. Since both sides were equally concerned about avoiding threats to the core interests of the other side, our counter-measures to Soviet expansionism could be varied. Initially, Washington focused its resources on promoting economic development and strengthening the political stability of its important allies in key regions. As they grew more confident, American policymakers also adopted an indirect military approach that deliberately avoided or minimized the risk of direct superpower confrontation—orchestrating proxy wars in specific geopolitical chokepoints where (with few major exceptions such as Vietnam) our power projection capabilities were generally superior to those of the USSR.

Today, however, NATO is attempting to project power into areas where Russian power projection capacity is practically unlimited, and which Russia has repeatedly declared to be of vital interest to its national security. It has also demonstrated in Ukraine that it is willing to defend these interests at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives, and even near-total isolation from the West. The risks associated with countering Russia’s “escalation dominance”—the notion that, in regions adjacent to it, Russia has an insurmountable military and logistical advantage over its rivals—wisely deterred the Obama administration from direct and overt intervention in Ukraine in 2014. Such careful and sensible risk management appears to be wholly missing from the outlook of “new containment” proponents.

Secondly, various countries agreed with Washington’s Old Containment policy, because they regarded the West as offering a superior socio-economic model and the potential for economic prosperity, particularly by the 1980s. Most importantly, America and its allies enjoyed a monopoly over access to cutting-edge technologies, which developing countries desperately needed. Today, that is no longer the case. A growing number of countries are willing and eager to invest in alternative political and economic models, such as the BRICS+, that they believe better serve their interests.

Thirdly, the Old Containment’s solution to what George Kennan deemed the USSR’s “implacable” ideological challenge offered hope to the Russians themselves, rather than demonizing them. Containment anticipated the fall of communism in the Soviet bloc but promised their people eventual reintegration with the Western community of nations: it represented a ray of light at the end of a dark tunnel. The post-communist era would signify a return to normalcy, with even Russia welcomed into the global community of nations. Today, given the Manichaean portrayals of our strategic conflict with Russia, this possibility looks increasingly difficult to achieve. Western publics are being encouraged to reject all things Russian, and even to recast elements of Russian culture as originally belonging to other countries. The objective now, it sadly seems, is to erase the memory of Russians having ever been part of Europe and Western culture. While this is probably not the intent of the authors of the Foreign Affairs piece, it will be an almost inevitable consequence of any New Containment policy.

Whereas the Old Containment could appeal to the patriotism of average Russians, by pointing out, as the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn often did, that it was communism that had prevented Russians from being able to worship as they choose, express their political beliefs, or take pride in their history, the New Containment denies them any accomplishments at all, leaving Russian patriots without even the prospect of future partners in the West. The New Containment thus suffers from a devastating absence of any hopeful vision of the future. Were Kennan alive today, we suspect he would advise Western leaders that, while they should denounce Russian aggression, they should be very careful to avoid condemning in the same breath the entirety of Russian art, culture, history, and religion. Indeed, Kennan might have counseled the transatlantic elites to laud Russia’s civilizational contributions to the human story, and stress their anticipation of a time when these achievements could once again be celebrated as part of the West’s common cultural heritage.

It remains to be seen whether current efforts in the West (and more recently in Russia) to simply erase that shared European heritage will succeed, but its immediate result has been to solidify the view in Russia that this is a struggle that it cannot afford to lose. It has also created a new reservoir of sympathy for Russia in the non-Western World, which has long been subjected to similar deculturation and dehumanization by Western elites.

In Russia, and indeed much of the world, the absence of any positive vision beyond containment that would eventually reintegrate Russia confirms that what we are witnessing is a last-ditch effort to preserve the dominance of the liberal international order, now euphemistically referred to as “the rules-based order”. While the ruling class in select nations may buy into this approach, hoping to ride the West’s coattails and thereby maintain themselves in power,  one would be hard-pressed to find many leaders committing to such a reactionary vision over the long term. 

Different Containments

To better understand the dangers inherent in the New Containment, we must also shed the mythology surrounding its current usage and recover what it meant historically and its varied forms.

Back in the Cold War era, there were two iterations of Containment used by America’s Cold Warriors. The first, as proposed by Kennan himself and repeatedly clarified in the intervening decades, was about “the political containment of a political threat” posed by the aggressive global expansionism of Soviet ideology and its universalist eschatology. Kennan, a classical realist, “recognized the limitations of a force-based approach” to political and ideological challenges and “worried about overly-broad and militaristic definitions of U.S. interests.” The second strand, which became the dominant approach in Washington after the Korean War and was promoted by the more hawkish strategists like Nitze, interpreted Containment in global, military, and strategic terms. While the former sought to contain Soviet territorial expansion by neutralizing the appeal of Soviet ideology and the USSR’s propaganda in Western societies, the latter relied on the threat of military confrontations across the globe just short of nuclear war.

By the 1980s, with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Neoconservatism in the United States, Containment was dovetailed by liberalism, which sought to use America’s global image and galvanizing soft power to internally transform Soviet culture and society through persistent campaigns hyping the glamour of the Western way of life. “Rollback”, an aggressive variant of military containment strategy that created global flashpoints against which the Soviets became increasingly over-extended, was thus combined with an expanded and deliberate push for a cultural capture of the USSR by Western values, the spread of which the Soviets could hardly contain. This proved a successful recipe for dismantling the USSR, but it had the long-term cost of recasting Western societies themselves in terms of an ideology, that of “liberalism”.

Kennan’s original intuition—also reflected later by French social scientist Emmanuel Todd who predicted the fall of the USSR—was that the internal contradictions and societal dislocations inherent in Soviet ideology would eventually cause its downfall. All the West had to do, therefore, was to carry on long enough for that ideology to self-destruct under the weight of its own problems. It was Kennan’s particular view that, once this transformation had occurred, and the communist regime was overthrown, it would be wise to leave Russia alone—to give it time to heal until it could re-emerge as a normal, non-ideological, Great Power. But America’s descent into ideology in the intervening years made that a moot prospect, and Washington instead sought in earnest to liberalize and Americanize post-Soviet societies.

As such, since the end of the Cold War, we have slowly witnessed the genesis of a third kind of Containment, mostly theorized outside of the West, that interprets the concept in civilizational terms. The supposed goal of this new variant of containment is to defend or inoculate traditional and non-Western societies against the homogenizing force of Western progressive values and the deracinating effects of the liberal form of life. This civilizational containment model has only accelerated in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The upshot is that, while Western leaders have employed the language of “clash of civilizations” to paint Russia-West relations in ideological binaries as a contest of “democracy” vs. “authoritarianism”, Kremlin-friendly Russian elites such as Aleksander Dugin have begun to identify Russia as a civilizational Katechon meant to contain the spread of liberal Western ideology (which ironically brings to mind the earlier liberal resistance against the spread of Leninism).

Although a defense of cultural particularity against the modern onslaught of Western universalism informed the original appeal of civilizational containment, the perception in Russia of a Manichaean and liberal Western crusadism is now producing, as Maria Engstrom has observed, an equally Manichaean reaction couched in Russia’s own Christian messianic tradition that also sees the world in stark black and white terms. This new ideological framing increasingly pathologizes the initially non-aggressive form of cultural realism that was adopted by Russian intellectuals to affirm and defend the distinctiveness of Russian civilization, allowing Russian hawks to justify “a new wave of militarization and anti-Western sentiment” in Russia.

This unfortunate development ultimately poses a far greater challenge for the West than simple strategic competition among great powers, particularly as each side seems to be increasingly defining the ideological/civilizational encroachment of the other as an existential threat to itself. On the one hand, Russia (along with many other regional and civilizational powers in the Global South) aims to protect its cultural sovereignty; on the other, the West seems to regard any resistance to its cultural hegemony as reactionary, revisionist, and adversarial. Furthermore, the fact that the West threatens the so-called rogue states with an ever-expanding list of generally ineffective or counterproductive sanctions has also put into doubt the supremacy of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

As Europe uses the war in Ukraine to establish its territorial expanse to the exclusion of Russia, and Moscow turns increasingly hostile to the West, the schism between Russia and Europe appears to be calcifying. A potential ontological othering between Russia and the West would create a permanent us vs. them dynamic that could raise anti-Westernism in Russia and Russophobia in the West, reducing both civilizations into ideological effigies justifying endless cycles of conflict and escalation. 

Confronting this bleak possibility—especially in a multicivilizational-multipolar world order that is currently taking shape—necessitates, therefore, abandoning the exhausted, antiquated containment framework for a fundamentally new approach informed by cultural realism: one that affirms both the uniqueness of different forms of life and their plurality, and which aims for a global modus vivendi based on strategic empathy, civilizational engagement, and diplomacy.

From Containment to Concert of Civilizational Powers

The advocates of a New Containment yearn to restore the Cold War’s supposedly Golden Age of relatively peaceful discontent in which a permanent quest for global hegemony appeared both normal and possible to attain. The closest the Western and Soviet elites ever came to such coexistence, however, was during the brief détente of the Nixon era. The rest of the time, both sides were plagued by neuroses and anxieties that they sought to suppress by spending more and more money on their respective military establishments. The comforting familiarity of this remedy forms, perhaps, a large part of containment’s appeal today.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, by the end of the 1990s, the two inspirational godfathers of containment, Kennan and Nitze, both strongly opposed NATO expansion and warned against adopting an aggressive stance against Russia. They saw these policies as undermining half a century of painstaking efforts to cultivate in Russia the view that the West was ultimately not its enemy even if it did not always have the most friendly or honorable of intentions. Today, however, our policies have left us both overextended and with few friends inside Russia (and similarly in China).

The West’s obsession with the complete military defeat of Russia in Ukraine makes it glaringly obvious, in the rest of the world if not in Washington, that this is a fight to preserve America’s global dominance. Under the veil of moralistic and rhetorical language lies a contest for expanding the West’s power and sphere of influence, not values. Moreover, the view that Ukraine must continue to fight, no matter the costs, rather than negotiate for peace, brings to mind the famous quote of an American Major after the battle of Ben Tre, Vietnam, that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The truth is that the Uniparty in Washington is still wedded to the idea of global hegemony, setting the ultimate aim of U.S. grand strategy in terms of maintaining an unchallenged global position—as the world’s sole permanent superpower. The bipartisan consensus in the Beltway continues to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that America can achieve this impossible target by weakening our great power competitors through war and conflict. The trouble, as George Washington presciently warned, is that strategic entanglement in such distant conflicts actually weakens us in the process.

Russia, after all, is already reduced to a regional power that is struggling even to retain its sphere of influence in its near-abroad. Russia is not the Soviet Union, nor is it a great power: it is nonsensical to marshal resources to try to “contain” an already-diminished power. By insisting on Containment in this new strategic environment, we reveal ourselves to be guided by our ideological and ontological constructs instead of reality, while manufacturing security dilemmas that have real, lasting consequences. We also convey to the Russians that we seek their total subordination to American (Western) interests, in much the same manner that the defeated Axis powers were subordinated to the United States after the Second World War. Such a Western posture only makes the ongoing conflict appear more existential for Russia, as a fight for the very survival of its way of life.   

Containment, old or new, therefore functions on antiquated presumptions about how the world used to work. It perpetuates two false narratives: 1) that Moscow has no agency or strategic autonomy and can only ever react to Western policies, and 2) that Russian ontological insecurity in relation to Western actors is unimportant in the formation of Russian strategy and geopolitical behavior. These assumptions are compounded by the blithe premise that Russia, despite every evidence to the contrary, will suffer irreparable losses if isolated by the West, and therefore must eventually yield to our will. Beneath the containment logic, there also exists an equally fanciful belief that China and BRICS+ nations will also eventually be forced to see the world as we do.

This is all wishful thinking. By attempting to isolate Russia, we have managed to isolate ourselves. Not only has Russia decisively turned its back on the current generation of Western leaders, but it is fast forging new relations and bonds with the rest of the world. The new global dynamic is accelerating the Great Transition to multipolarity and will increasingly undermine Western influence if it fails to adapt to this new world, ending not only its geopolitical but also its cultural hegemony. A Zeitenwende indeed!

New Containment cannot meet the challenge of a changing world order and a new balance of power that benefits Russia, China, Iran, and the other middle powers in the “non-West”, because it is out of step with the new structural realities—accelerated by multipolarity and our own highly costly and myopic strategic culture. It is also bound to fail, because, fundamentally, as power becomes more evenly distributed in a multiplex system, a shrinking fraction of the world cannot contain the whole.

There is a better way to enhance both American security and global stability that abandons the familiar but problematic logic of bloc-thinking and its zero-sum framing of the world for a cultural realism that emphasizes global cultural pluralism, the importance of dialogue and engagement among civilizations, mutual recognition of interest, and strategic empathy. Building on what Richard Hass and Charles Kupchan have called a “global concert of powers”, such a realist and interest-based, neo-Metternichian approach prioritizing a global equilibrium could give way to a “concert of civilizations” that advances peaceful co-existence and global stability in the multipolar world.

How to develop this new strategic mindset, that reconceives America’s role in the world in alignment with the “Concert”, would require a cultural reset as much as anything. But that is a topic for future discussion. For now, though, we must create space for diplomacy and engage in dialogue with our adversaries to resolve the ongoing global conflicts that threaten to spiral out of control—to allow us to reach that time of fundamental reconceptualization in one piece.

State Department-Linked Group Smears Antiwar.com & Contributors in ‘Anti-Ukrainian’ List

Well, I guess I’ve hit the big time since I actually appear on this list…along with some good company:

https://texty.org.ua/projects/112617/roller-coaster/#Natylie%20Baldwin

Antiwar.com, 6/9/24

A State Department-linked Ukrainian NGO published a study on June 6 that listed hundreds of individuals and organizations that oppose aid to Ukraine in an effort to smear them as spreading “Russian propaganda.”

The NGO Texty.org.ua listed Antiwar.com and several of its staff members, including Eric Garris, Scott Horton, Kyle Anzalone, and many Antiwar.com contributors. Organizations that Antiwar.com works closely with were also named, including the Libertarian Institute and the Ron Paul Institute.

The American Conservative, which was also included in the list, reported that Texty.org.ua was co-founded by Anatoly Bondarenko. Bondarenko has worked as an instructor for a State Department program known as TechCamp, which provides training for foreign journalists and activists.

Screenshot of a chart from the study

TechCamp’s website lists Bondarenko as a trainer for a Ukraine program that brought together “more than 60 local journalists, civil society, community leaders, and private sector partners in Eastern Europe” with the goal of helping to increase “digital and media literacy.”

The Texty.org.ua report is titled “Roller Coaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the US impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.”

The study acknowledges that most of the people listed “do not have direct, proven ties to the Russian government or propagandists.” But it claims that “the arguments they use to urge authorities to distance themselves from Ukraine echo key messages of Russian propaganda aimed at depriving Ukrainians of the ability to defend themselves with Western weapons and funds.”

The report links to Antiwar.com’s Ukraine news page as an example of “anti-Ukrainian statements.”

Other listed people and organizations are from across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Dozens of Republican members of Congress were named, including Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), J.D. Vance (R-OH), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and many others.

Media outlets frequently linked to on the front page of Antiwar.com were also listed, including Responsible Statecraft and The Grayzone. Peace groups, including CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, World Beyond War, and others, were also smeared.

Matthew Evangelista: The False Promise of Nuclear Deterrence for Postwar Ukrainian Security

By Matthew Evangelista, Lawfare, 3/31/24

Editor’s Note: One of the most frightening possibilities of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is that it increases the risk of nuclear war. This risk, however, doesn’t necessarily end once the shooting stops. Cornell University professor Matthew Evangelista explores the implications of extending the nuclear umbrella to Ukraine and argues that the world would be better off without such a shield.

Dan Byman

However and whenever Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine ends, Ukrainians will need a postwar security policy. Their choice holds implications for European security more broadly. Some observers, and many Ukrainians, anticipate Ukraine’s eventual membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a NATO member, Ukraine would benefit from the ostensible protection afforded by “extended nuclear deterrence”—the prospect that the United States might respond to an attack against a NATO ally, even carried out with only conventional forces, by a retaliatory strike with nuclear weapons against the attacker. Others find the proposal for Ukraine to join NATO dubious or undesirable, and some question the credibility of the extended-deterrent threat or worry that it increases the risk of unintended escalation to global nuclear war. The best thing for postwar Ukraine, however, would be to avoid tying its security to nuclear weapons—its own or NATO’s. Instead, it should focus on ensuring its conventional forces are robust and defensively oriented, adequate to deter but not to provoke another Russian attack.

One might have expected Russia’s February 2022 invasion to have shaken confidence in the view that nuclear weapons foster an overall peace. Granted, Ukraine received no extended-deterrent promise from the United States (even though the Budapest Memorandum, signed when Ukraine agreed to relinquish the Soviet nuclear weapons held on its territory after the dissolution of the USSR, offered “security assurances”). Still the proponents of nuclear weapons had touted their contribution to maintaining the peace, beyond the countries explicitly sheltered under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. In 1987, for example, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher criticized Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev’s advocacy of nuclear disarmament—a view he shared with the nuclear abolitionist Ronald Reagan. Thatcher asserted, by contrast, that “we do not believe that it is possible to ensure peace for any considerable amount of time without nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the most powerful and most terrible guarantee of peace that was invented in the 20th century. There is no other guarantee.” Thirty years later, in July 2017, 122 countries meeting at UN headquarters in New York City voted in favor of a legally binding treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The nuclear-armed members of NATO—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—vowed never to sign or ratify the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021. “Accession to the ban treaty,” they argued, “is incompatible with the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace in Europe and North Asia for over 70 years.” In making this claim, they were echoing not only Thatcher but also Vladimir Putin, who had stated in October 2016 that “nuclear weapons constitute a factor of deterrence and a factor guaranteeing peace and security throughout the whole world.” On the contrary, it is possible that Russia’s nuclear arsenal enabled the attacks of both 2014 and 2022, with Putin confident that it would deter NATO from coming to Ukraine’s defense.

Yet confidence in nuclear deterrence persists, based on the understanding that it prevented Soviet aggression against Europe during the Cold War. In fact, however, this claim is incorrect. Nuclear deterrence was never put to the test in Europe, because there was nothing to deter. What Robert Jervis wrote more than 20 years ago remains true today: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike against the United States.” Instead, the archival documents showed that Soviet military plans immediately following World War II were defensively oriented—with forces arrayed in belts at 50, 100, and 150 kilometers from the inter-German border. Only with the deployment to NATO Europe of tactical nuclear weapons in the early 1950s did the Soviet Army adopt an offensive orientation. The introduction of U.S. nuclear weapons into Europe did not enhance security but, rather, fostered instability and raised the risk of war.

Extended nuclear deterrence brought the continent to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in September 1961 during the Berlin Crisis—a lesson on the nuclear umbrella’s risks that bears pondering today. The Vienna summit of June 1961 failed to settle the anomalous situation of West Berlin—a democratic outpost surrounded by communist East Germany and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops—and secure a peace treaty that would formally recognize the postwar borders. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev vowed to pursue his Plan B: a separate treaty with East Germany that would allow its leaders to determine access to Berlin, which they had declared its capital. NATO officials developed plans to deploy military force to ensure access to the city in the event the communist regime tried to deny it. The NATO secretary general declared that “the Alliance will stand ready for nuclear action at all times[,]” including a provision “to employ nuclear weapons selectively in order to demonstrate the will and ability of the Alliance to use them.”

The notion of employing nuclear weapons for signaling purposes owes much to the work of RAND strategist Thomas Schelling, who drafted a memorandum advocating such “nuclear bargaining” over Berlin in June 1961. According to McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to President Kennedy, the memorandum made a “deep impression” on the president when he read it on Bundy’s recommendation. Meanwhile, other Kennedy advisers, such as Paul Nitze, were advocating that the United States use its nuclear weapons preemptively to attempt a disarming first strike against the Soviet Union if access to Berlin were blocked. As he described in his memoir, Nitze told the president that a U.S. first strike “could assure us victory in at least a military sense in a series of nuclear exchanges, while we might well lose if we allowed the Soviets to strike first.” The cost would be 9-10 million U.S. casualties in a retaliatory strike by the surviving Soviet weapons, but the other side would suffer 10 times that number, according to Nitze’s calculations.

What was not known at the time, but has been discovered since in Soviet bloc military plans, is that the Soviet armed forces were training to respond to preparations for a NATO nuclear strike with massive nuclear preemption, intended to destroy the NATO weapons before they could be used. Notions of nuclear bargaining, signaling, and graduated escalation were artificial constructs in the minds of U.S. strategists but bore no relationship to how the other side might actually respond.

No wonder prominent US officials, as well as their European counterparts, harbored doubts about the credibility or plausibility of NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons. Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Nixon in early 1969, for example, averred that extended nuclear deterrence “depended on a first strike” by the United States, something he claimed the European allies did not understand. Nixon concurred. The “nuclear umbrella in NATO” was, according to the president, “a lot of crap.”

Is the situation any different today? No one knows how Russian leaders would react to NATO’s threat or use of nuclear weapons—but probably not according to hopeful scenarios of “escalation dominance” that foresee U.S. forces prevailing at each step of the “ladder of escalation” and Russian leaders, clearly anticipating an unfavorable outcome, backing down in advance.

Along with other skeptics of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, I consider a conventional military strategy for Ukraine, such as the one designed by Barry Posen as early as 1994, more promising. It shares elements of ideas developed by European peace researchers during the Cold War to provide defensively oriented conventional forces that were sufficiently dispersed so as not to offer targets for nuclear strikes. Current versions fall under the rubric of “confidence-building defense” and include such strategies as the “spider-in-the-web.” These nonoffensive defense strategies were designed not to threaten the other side and risk provoking an attack during periods of tension. Historical examples include the decentralized, militia-based territorial defense systems of Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Sweden, and Finland. Their forces were suited to defending their territories but not seizing and occupying the territory of their neighbors. For postwar Ukraine, such a system would mean clearly relinquishing an ability to regain any territory lost to Russia—a prerequisite for a stable peace, however unjust. Adopting such a territorial defense strategy would not require a declaration of neutrality and would not preclude cooperation with NATO countries in the provision of conventional weapons, for example, so long as they did not pose an offensive threat to Russia that could provoke it to resume the war. Combining a defensive orientation for Ukrainian military forces with well-prepared mass civilian resistance to occupation—a technique attempted spontaneously with some success in the first months of the 2022 invasion—could serve as a deterrent to aggression, without risking the catastrophic consequences of nuclear escalation.

However much Ukraine’s supporters would prefer an end to the war that would leave the country with its pre-2014 borders intact, a more likely outcome would entail a territorial compromise. Under those conditions, a postwar Ukrainian security policy should be oriented toward robust defense without providing any pretext for renewed Russian aggression. Nuclear deterrence offers no panacea but, rather, incalculable risks. Postwar Ukraine should forswear, not covet, a “nuclear umbrella.”

James Carden: Suddenly, the ‘nuclear age’ is today

By James Carden, Responsible Statecraft, 6/6/24

In 1946 reporter John Hersey published a harrowing report from Hiroshima that followed the travails of a number of survivors of the Bomb, including those of Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Jesuit missionary from Germany.

On a search for water for some of the wounded, Kleinsorge came across a group of survivors

“…about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.”

Passages such as these revealed the horrors Japanese survivors endured in the aftermath of the American nuclear attack. Hersey’s Hiroshima became, in the view of essayist Roger Angell, “part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust.”And throughout the Cold War, the idea of fighting a nuclear war was anathema to the respective leaders of the American and Soviet superpowers — a revulsion that found its ultimate expression in the pledge made by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan that “a nuclear cannot be won and should never be fought.”

Yet little by little, as the Cold War has receded into memory, American and Russian leaders have torn up a series of arms control measures beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (2002), the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty (2019), and the Open Skies treaty (2020). For its part, in 2023 Russia unilaterally withdrew from both the Convention Armed Forces in Europe treaty and suspended participation in the landmark New START treaty.

And one of the more worrisome developments in a time which does not lack for them has been a worrying epidemic of loose talk about the use of nuclear weapons.

Of late, the Russians have been the worst offenders. Yet perhaps even more troubling is the blithe disregard with which some American analysts dismiss Putin’s stated readiness to deploy these weapons. As Brown University professor of Slavic studies Vladimir Golstein memorably puts the matter:

“Putin conducts nuclear exercises, Putin warns the densely populated areas in Europe, Putin talks about going to heaven as the result of nuclear confrontation — what else does one need? Knowing Russians, I am extremely certain that they would respond. Sooner or later, but they would.”

Consider the, well, explosive language coming from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to the revelation, made by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski on May 25, that the U.S. “told the Russians that if you detonate a nuclear bomb, even if it doesn’t kill anyone, we will hit all your targets and positions in Ukraine with conventional weapons and destroy them all.”

Medvedev responded with threats of his own:

“Americans hitting our targets means starting a world war, and a foreign minister, even of a country like Poland, should understand that. And third, considering that yet another Polack, [President Andrzej] Duda, has recently announced the wish to deploy TNW [thermonuclear weapons] in Poland, Warsaw won’t be left out, and will surely get its share of radioactive ash. Is it what you really want?”

According to a May 28 report in the Chinese-state run news service Xinhua, Russia has accused NATO forces of “practicing nuclear strikes against Russia.” This accusation comes only a week after reports that Russia itself has launched tactical nuclear drills in “response to provocative statements and threats of individual Western officials against the Russian Federation,” according to the Russian defense ministry.

And then there are the alarming statements coming from Russian analysts and government advisers. A video circulating on social media shows Russian political scientist Konstantin Sivkov issuing nuclear threats against Poland, while the noted academic and Kremlin adviser, Sergei Karaganov published an article calling for Russia to launch limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe. As theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists points out, Karaganov’s “proposal and other Russian political and military thinking about nuclear weapons raise profound questions about whether Russia might attempt to conduct a so-called limited nuclear war.”

As can only be expected, certain American politicians are pitching in to make things worse. Within the last few weeks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has called for Israel to do its very worst by invoking the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justification. A month into the Israel-Hamas War, a member of the Israeli cabinet issued his own irresponsible nuclear threat, while the U.S. continues to run diplomatic cover for Israel by denying the existence of its nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, recent statements coming out of Iran hinting at a potential change in its nuclear doctrine have raised alarm bells with the International Atomic Energy Agency which is meeting this week in Vienna to discuss the matter.

Amidst the madness, there’s a silver lining.

There remain multiple organizations that have been doing valuable, utterly necessary work to raise awareness about the omnipresent threat of nuclear catastrophe, including the Nuclear Threat Initiative, NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth, and Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy. The founder of the latter two groups, the activist and award-winning documentary filmmaker Cynthia Lazaroff, believes citizen action is needed — and soon.

“We all have a voice,” says Lazaroff, who urges citizens to “contact their Congressional representatives and tell them how worried they are about the growing threat of nuclear war. Urge them to hold congressional hearings on escalating nuclear dangers,nuclear winter and the catastrophic humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons and to co-sponsor legislation like: H. Res. 77 and H.R. 2775 to back us away from the brink and eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.”

The nuclear age is not past. It is our present — and one that the next administration needs to urgently confront, and ultimately, dismantle.

Geoffrey Roberts: Restraining Russia through friendship: Lessons from the 19th century

By Geoffrey Roberts, Responsible Statecraft, 4/23/21

With the death of scholar Paul Schroeder, international historians lost one of their most innovative and distinguished practitioners.

Schroeder’s approach to the study of international relations was ideational: it is not power or interests alone that shapes the behavior of states but prevailing norms, values, and experiences.

As Schroeder showed in “The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848,” the transition from an 18th century dominated by warfare to a predominantly peaceful 19th century was the result of a radical shift in “ideas, collective mentalities and outlooks.”

Driving this transformation was the devasting experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which convinced elites they needed to replace conflictual balance of power politics with the negotiation of differences and the peaceful resolution of disputes. The result of this rethink was the Concert of Europe, which was able to maintain a general continental peace for nearly a hundred years. There were plenty of wars and conflicts, including some notable great power clashes, but none, until 1914, that threatened the existence or stability of the system.

Like most historians, Schroeder was skeptical of historical parallels, but he made a conscious effort to link his studies of the past to the concerns of the present. In that regard, one of his most remarkable, and still relevant, essays was “Containment Nineteen Century Style: How Russia was Restrained.”

Imperial Russia emerged triumphant from the Napoleonic Wars and was in a position to become a hegemonic world power. But It didn’t even try, argues Schroeder. Because of its membership of the Concert and the European community of nations, Russia was enmeshed in restraining relationships with its friends and allies.

In making this argument Schroeder contested the stereotype of 19th century Russia as a dangerously aggressive and expansionist power.

Russia did expand into Asia but such extra-European expansion was the norm among great powers. Russian violence and military conquests were no worse than any of its rivals, and neither did its actions upset the equilibrium in the European theatre.

Russia’s European policy was characterized by Schroeder as “conservative, legalistic, anti-revolutionary and oriented towards peace and great power cooperation.” It had ambitions in relation to Turkey and the Black Sea Straits, but these goals didn’t include the destabilization of the Ottoman Empire.

From the U.S. perspective, 19th century Russia was a markedly benign power — the state that stayed away from Latin America and sold it Alaska.

Schroeder stresses that Russian good behavior was not primarily a function of benign intentions but of “the existence and operation of a system — a stable network of rules and relationships between states — that enables statesman effectively to seek peace and, even in a sense, compels them to promote it whether they want to or not. … Russia was restrained not mainly by her moderate impulses, but by a viable international order she herself helped to create.”

Schroeder’s contemporary reference point was the breakdown of the American-Soviet détente in the early 1980s as a result of renewed Cold War tensions. His message was that while the analogy between the foreign policy of Tsarist Russia and that of the Soviet Union was imperfect, historical as well as recent experience suggested that détente was a better way to manage relations with the Soviets than confrontation.

Schroeder was well aware that historical analogies can be distorting as well as illuminating, the most egregious example being the frequent invocation of the Hitler analogy to derail legitimate attempts at appeasement.

Schroeder believed that it was possible to derive from the history of international relations some eternal truths, notably that “any government is restrained better and more safely by friends and allies than by opponents or enemies.”

Schroeder’s prescription for managing Russian power remains relevant, not least because today’s Russia is a self-proclaimed conservative state that still sees itself as primarily a European power and would readily participate in a renewed concert of great powers at the global level.

No policy has been so persistently pursued by Russia and its Soviet predecessor as the creation of an inclusive European security system. The first such proposals came in the 1930s as a means of containing Hitler.  Moscow’s striving for collective security was interrupted by the Nazi-Soviet pact, during the Second World War, Stalin embraced the concept of a peacetime grand alliance with Britain and the United States. After his death in 1953, the Soviets revived the idea of pan-European collective security and waged an extensive campaign to dissolve the Cold War blocs. Most extraordinary was a March 1954 proposal that the USSR could even become a member of NATO

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation sought a new, over-arching European security architecture, including Russian membership of NATO.

In 2009, Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, proposed an all-embracing European Security Treaty. Supported by his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, it reflected Russia’s aspiration for a “Greater Europe” with a multipolar Euro-Atlantic security system.

According to the current Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation that remains the country’s goal: “Russia’s long-term Euro-Atlantic policy is aimed at building a common space of peace, security and stability based on the principles of indivisible security, equal cooperation and mutual trust.”

Medvedev’s initiative was overshadowed and then derailed by the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Western intervention in Libya and the civil wars in Ukraine and Syria.

Russia is now isolated and alienated from Europe and the object of escalating Western sanctions designed to reverse its takeover of Crimea and deter further encroachments on Ukrainian territory. There is no evidence that such sanctions have had any impact on Russian foreign policy in relation to Ukraine or on Putin’s policy in other parts of the world. In his presidential address on April 21, Putin was adamant that Western threats would not stop Russia from defending its interests as it sees fit.

There are those in the West who are clamoring to double-down on a hardline approach to Russia. However, history suggests that a policy of engaging, conciliating, and integrating Russia into the European and global community will be more effective in promoting peace and security for all states, including Ukraine.

Just now, the idea of a European security system with a Russian pillar as well as an American one seems fanciful, to say the least. But consider the following thought experiment:

Imagine that Medvedev’s European Security Treaty proposal had gained some serious traction in Russian-Western negotiations. Would the bottom have fallen out of NATO and the Western security system? Hardly. Would Ukraine have split over its geo-political and geo-economical orientation? Doubtful. Would Crimea still be part of Ukraine? Almost certainly. Would Russia and the West be collaborating rather than competing in the Middle East? For sure. Would we be facing into a new arms race and a new cold war? Definitely not.

Like all states, Russia has its interests, concerns, aspirations, and sensitivities. The threat of war with the West as a result of Russia’s borderland disputes and tensions with Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and the Baltic States is very small but far from negligible. As Paul Schroeder said, “war sometimes just happens; peace is always caused.”

History also shows that the best way to influence and restrain a powerful and resurgent Russia is not to treat it as an enemy but make it your friend.

Putin’s Meeting with heads of international news agencies (excerpt re Ukraine)

Kremlin website, 6/5/24

News Director at DPA Martin Romanczyk (retranslated): Good evening, Mr President. Good evening, everyone.

Chancellor Scholz has agreed to supply arms to Ukraine. I would like to ask you how you would react if Scholz changed his mind. And what do you think this implies for Germany? Did you try to warn, caution or maybe threaten Mr Chancellor when he made the decision to send weapons to Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin: Why would you think we would threaten anyone? We never threaten anyone, least of all the head of another state. That would be mauvais ton, unacceptable in polite society.

We have our own viewpoint on certain issues. We know the European states’ approach, including Germany’s approach, on the current developments in Ukraine.

Everyone believes that Russia started the war in Ukraine. But no one – I want to emphasise this – no one in the West, no one in Europe is willing to remember how this tragedy began. It started with an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine. This was the beginning of the war. But is Russia to blame for that coup? No. Have those who are trying to blame Russia today forgotten that the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany and France went to Kiev at the time and signed the settlement document as guarantors of a peaceful constitutional resolution of the crisis? This is something Europe, including Germany, prefers to forget. Because if they remembered, they would have to explain why the leaders of Germany, along with the other signatories, never demanded that the perpetrators of the coup in Ukraine return to the constitutional framework. Why did they neglect their obligations as guarantors of agreements between the incumbent government and the opposition like this? They are as responsible for what happened as the forces in the United States that provoked the unconstitutional seizure of power. Don’t you know what followed? The residents of Crimea made a decision to secede from Ukraine, and the residents of Donbass refused to obey those who carried out the coup in Kiev. This is what followed. This is how this conflict began.

After that, Russia made every effort to come up with a formula for a peaceful settlement. What is now known as Minsk agreements were signed in Minsk in 2015. By the way, they were institutionalised by a UN Security Council resolution. It was an actionable document. Instead, they chose to resolve this issue militarily. They used artillery, tanks and aircraft against civilians in southeastern Ukraine. For some reason, no one, I repeat, no one wants to talk about this either in Germany and other European countries, or the United States. So be it.

We facilitated the signing of the Minsk agreements, but it turned out that no one was going to act on them. The former Chancellor of Germany and the former President of France have publicly stated so.

What does this mean, Mr Romanchik? They made a public confession that they were not going to implement the Minsk agreements, and signed them just in order to buy time to arm Ukraine and to create proper conditions for continuing hostilities. All they did was pull the wool over our eyes. Is that not so? Is there any other way to explain what happened?

For eight long years we have been trying to achieve a peaceful solution. Eight years!

A former chancellor once told me, “You know, in Kosovo, we, NATO, went ahead without a Security Council resolution, because blood was spilled for eight years in Kosovo.” What about the blood of Russian people spilled in Donbass? Was it water, not blood? No one wanted to pay attention to it.

In the end, this is what we were forced to do when the then Ukrainian authorities said that they did not like a single clause of the Minsk agreements, and the then Foreign Minister said they were not going to fulfill them.

Do you realise that these territories were plunged into economic and social degradation? Eight years. I am not even talking about murders, constant killing of women, children, and so on.

Considering this, we were compelled to recognise their independence. We did not recognise their independence for almost eight years. We were looking forward for both sides to come to terms and to resolve this issue peacefully. Eight years! When they said they were not going to implement any peace agreements, we had to use military force in order to bring them into compliance.

We were not the ones to start this war. The war started in 2014 following the coup and their attempt to use cannons to break resistance of the people who opposed the coup.

And now for people following international events and international law. What happened next? What did we do? We did not recognise this for eight years. What did we do when we realised that the Minsk Agreements will never be fulfilled? Please note everyone: we recognised the independence of these self-proclaimed republics. Could we do this from the point of view of international law, or no? As Article One of the UN Charter says, we could. It is about the nations’ right to self-determination. The UN International Court of Justice ruled (it is put in writing) that, if any territory of a country decides to become independent, it is not obliged to appeal to the higher authorities of that country. All this was done regarding Kosovo. There is a decision of the International Court of Justice, which reads: if a territory has decided on independence, it is not obliged to apply to the capital for permission to exercise this right.

However, if it is like it is written in the UN court decision, then these unrecognised republics, the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, had the right to do so. And they did. Did we have the right to recognise them? Of course, we did. And we did recognise them. Next, we entered into an agreement with them. Could we sign an agreement with them or not? Yes, of course. The agreement provided for assistance to these states in the event of aggression. Kiev waged a war against these states, which we recognised eight years later. Eight years.

Could we recognise them? We could. And then, in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, we provided them with assistance. You know, no matter what anyone says, this is exactly what I told Mr Guterres, the logic we followed, step by step. Where is the mistake here? Where are the violations of international law here? There are no violations, considering international law.

Then we hear the answer: well, you attacked anyway. We did not attack, but defended ourselves, just to make it clear to everyone. The first step towards the war was taken by those who encouraged the bloody unconstitutional coup d’etat.

Now regarding the arms supplies. Arms supplies to a conflict area is always a bad idea. Especially when those who are supplying weapons not only supply them but also operate them. It is a very serious and very dangerous step. You and I know this, and the Federal Republic doesn’t deny it (I certainly don’t know how it made its way to the press), that a Bundeswehr general discussed where and how to deliver a strike: either at the Crimean Bridge or at some other facilities inside Russia, including a territory that no one doubts belongs to Russia.

When the first German tanks, tanks made in Germany, appeared on Ukrainian soil, it produced a moral and ethical shock in Russia because the attitude in Russian society to the Federal Republic has always been very good. Very good. Now, when they say that some missiles are to appear that would attack facilities on Russian territory, it will certainly destroy Russian-German relations for good and all. But we understand that, as one of the well-known German politicians said, after World War II the Federal Republic of Germany has never been a sovereign state in the full sense of the word.

We were in contact with Mr Scholz, we met on many occasions. I don’t want to assess the performance of the Federal Government, but it’s the German people, the German voters who are making such assessments. European parliamentary elections are coming up; we will look at what is going to happen there. As far as I know – of course, I actually care about Germany, I have many friends there, whom I am trying not to contact, not to subject them so some obstruction in the country, I am trying not to maintain relations with them, but I simply know these people for many years, I know that they are reliable friends and I have many of them in Germany. So, I am also aware of the balance of forces in the political arena. As far as I understand, if I am not mistaken, the CDU/CSU now has somewhere around 30 percent, the Social Democrats have about 16 percent, the Alternative for Germany already has 15 percent, and all the others are lower. This is the elector’s response. This is the Germans’ mood, the mood of the German people.

I understand the dependence of the Federal Republic in the area of defence, in security in general. I understand its dependence in politics, in information policy, because wherever you point to there, to any major publishing house (I don’t know where you work) its ultimate beneficiary is located overseas, some US foundation. Well, I applaud those American foundations and those who are conducting such policy: It’s great that they are holding the information field of Europe so firmly in terms of their interests. And they are also trying hard not to reveal themselves.

It’s all understandable. The influence is tremendous and it is very difficult to oppose it. It is clear. But there are some elementary things. Speaking about these elementary things – it is strange that nobody in the current German leadership protects German interests. It’s clear that Germany does not have full sovereignty, but Germans are still there. Their interests should be taken into account and protected, at least a little bit.

Look: the ill-starred pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea have been blown up. No one is even indignant – as if this is the way it should be. We nevertheless continue to supply gas to Europe through the territory of Ukraine. We continue to supply gas. There were two pipeline systems there, and Ukraine closed one of them, screwed the valve, just closed it and that’s all, although there were no grounds for this. It left only one pipeline system – well, okay. But gas goes to Europe through it, and European consumers receive this gas. Our gas also goes to Europe through Turkey via Turkish Stream, and European consumers receive it.

OK, one Nord Stream pipe was blown up, but another Nord Stream pipe is intact, thank God. Why doesn’t Germany want to receive our gas through this pipe? Can anyone explain the logic? You can get it through Ukraine, you can get it through Turkey, but you can’t get it through the Baltic Sea. What kind of nonsense is this? There is no formal logic in this, I don’t even understand it.

They would better say that Europe should not get gas at all. OK, fine, we’ll get over it, Gazprom will survive. But you don’t need it, you need to buy overpriced liquefied natural gas shipped from across the ocean. Don’t your ‘environmentalists’ know how liquefied natural gas is produced? By fracking. Ask the people in the United States where they produce this gas – sometimes they get slop instead of water running from their taps. Your ‘environmentalists’ who are in power in the government, don’t know that? They probably do.

Poland has closed its Yamal-Europe pipeline. Gas was going to Germany through Poland. We didn’t shut it down, the Poles did. You know better than I do the effect the termination of our ties in the energy sector has had on the German economy. It’s a sad result. Many large industrial companies are looking for a place to land, but only not on German territory. They are opening in the USA and in Asia, but the business conditions there make them uncompetitive. And this, by the way, can have severe consequences for the European economy as a whole, because the German economy (everyone is well aware of this, no offence to any other Europeans) is the locomotive of the European economy. If it sneezes and coughs, everyone else will immediately get the flu. France’s economy is also teetering on the brink of recession right now, everyone knows that. And if the German economy goes down, all of Europe will be shuddering.

I am not suggesting that the Euro-Atlantic ties should be broken. Otherwise, someone (not necessarily you) might hear what I am saying and infer that I am calling for breaking up Euro-Atlantic solidarity. Listen, your politics are flawed, and you are making glaring mistakes every step of the way. I think the current developments represent a major mistake for the United States itself. In a push to maintain their leadership using the means they are using, they are, in fact, causing harm to themselves. But things are even worse for Europe. Indeed, you could say, “We support you in this, that, and that, but this belongs to us. Look, if we undermine our economy, everyone will feel the consequences. You cannot do that, we are against it, it is taboo, do not touch it.”

But the federal government is not doing that, either. Frankly, sometimes I get confused and cannot see the logic behind this line of conduct. Okay, they were going to undermine Russia’s economy, and they thought it would take them three to six months to get there. However, everyone can see that this is not happening. Last year, our economy grew by 3.4 percent. This year, it grew by 5.4 percent in the first quarter. Moreover, according to international financial and economic organisations – the World Bank re-ran some numbers (it was our goal) – and we were in fifth place in terms of purchasing power parity in the world and we set ourselves the goal of making it to the fourth place. I think you are following the calculations of our colleagues from international financial institutions. Quite recently, last week, I think, the World Bank ran the numbers on our GDP only to find out that we were outdoing Japan in this regard. According to the World Bank, Russia is the world’s fourth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity meaning that we achieved that goal.

That is not what really matters, though. This is not an end in itself. What is important, though, is to keep up the pace and progress. So far, we have been able to do so, because in the first quarter, as I said earlier, our GDP amounted to 5.4 percent. The reason I am saying this is not to brag about it. I want those who are trying to get in our way, to cause us harm and to slow down our progress realise that what they are doing does more harm to themselves than to us. They should realise this, draw conclusions and mend their ways for their own benefit. But we do not see it happening.

No offence, but I think that the level of professional training of the decision-makers, including in the Federal Republic [of Germany] leaves much to be desired.

Andrei Kondrashov: Thank you, Mr Romanchik.

I think it would be logical to not wander away from the European theme and give the floor to France: a country that admits quite officially that European troops can be sent to Ukraine.

Our guest is Editor-in-Chief for Europe at France-Press, Karim Talbi. Mr Talbi speaks excellent Russian, because, like Martin Romanchik, he worked as a correspondent in Moscow for quite a long time.

Please, Mr Talbi, your question.

AFP Editor-in-Chief for Europe Karim Talbi: Mr President, my question also concerns Ukraine.

Why cannot you still disclose the number of losses among Russian soldiers in Ukraine during the hostilities?

Vladimir Putin: If this is the only thing you are interested in, I can say that, as a rule, no one ever talks about this. If they do, then, as a rule, they distort the real figures.

I can tell you with complete confidence that our losses, especially as concerns irreparable losses, unfortunately, then they are several times less than on the Ukrainian side.

I can tell you exact numbers captured by the both sides, or war prisoners. There are 1,348 of our soldiers and officers held by the Ukrainian side. I know the exact numbers because we work with them every day. As you know, there was an exchange just recently: 75 people were exchanged for 75 people. We have 6,465 Ukrainian soldiers.

If we talk about approximate irretrievable losses, then the ratio is the same: one to about five. This is what we will proceed from. This is precisely the reason of the attempt to carry out total mobilisation in Ukraine: because they suffer great losses on the battlefield.

You know, this is how it looks: according to our calculations, the Ukrainian army loses 50,000 people per month as sanitary and irretrievable losses both, although their irretrievable and sanitary losses are approximately 50/50. The total mobilisation effort, which is now underway, does not solve the problem, because, according to our data (we get it from various sources), they recruit around 30,000 [people] per month by force or without force, but mostly by seizing men on the streets. There are not many people willing to fight there.

According to our data, last month and the month before that they recruited about 50,000–55,000. But this does not solve the problem. You know why? Because this mobilisation can only cover losses. All of these men are sent to make up for losses. This is the basic problem that leads to a lowering of the mobilisation age: from 27 years old down to 25 now.

We know from the Ukrainian side (it’s an open secret there; there are no secrets there at all): the US administration insists that the threshold be gradually lowered from 25 to 23 years, then to 20 years, and then to 18, or immediately to 18 years, because right now they are already requiring 17-year-old boys to register. We know this for sure: this is a demand from the US administration to the Ukrainian leadership, if it can be considered leadership after the election was cancelled.

Anyway, as I have said in one of my recent public appearances – I think it was when I talked to the media while returning from my visit to Uzbekistan – I believe that the United States administration would force the current Ukrainian leadership to take these decisions on lowering the mobilisation age all the way down to 18 years, and once that is done, they will simply get rid of Zelensky. But first, he will have to do it. In fact, this is not an easy thing to do. They will have to enact a law and take specific steps to make this happen.

We are in June 2024 right now. I think that they would need a year to do this. This means that they would tolerate him until the beginning of next year, as least, but once he does everything they expect from him, they will just wave him goodbye and replace him with someone else. There are several candidates for this job, as far as I understand.

However, all this entails so many casualties. I mentioned the 50,000 figure, but this is as conservative as you can get. The 50,000 figure is what we see on the battlefield, but we can see that there were other losses too, without being able to count them. They happened deep in the rear, behind the lines, and once you factor them in, the number becomes much bigger. This is what I can say about the casualties.