I, like most, condemn the military aggression of Putin in Ukraine. My heart aches for the Ukrainian people. However, I do not blame Putin alone for the Ukraine crisis.
In my opinion, a large part of the fault for the long-term existence of this problem falls on NATO; I put much of the blame for inciting that problem to its current level of violence on President Biden. The following explains why.
The long term problem – NATO
Much of the information in this section of this post is derived from Foreign Affairs magazine (digitally available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/) which has contained several articles on Ukraine, Russia, and NATO over the past few years.
Current Russian concerns with NATO originate with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The post-Cold War setup in Europe’s east left Russia without much say in European security, which was centered on NATO.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has aggressively moved eastward, encouraging central and eastern European countries to join NATO. The U.S. argued this was necessary to pursue a policy of containment after the Cold War. NATO determined that there should be no hard line beyond which NATO should not move east and no restrictions on new members.
Article 5 of NATO guarantees that members will treat an attack on one as an attack against all. The closer that NATO moved to Russia the more that cooperation between Russia and the US deteriorated since the NATO expansion essentially placed the availability of U.S. military at Russia’s border.
A 1990 agreement suggests some limitations on expansion. That agreement specifically deals with the reunification of Germany since at that time “few gave the possibility of a broader NATO enlargement to the east any serious thought.” Russia however interpreted the agreement as a broader promise that NATO will not threaten Russia’s border. In January of this year Secretary of State Blinken asserted that “NATO never promised not to admit new members” arguing that it has an “open door policy.”
As more eastern states joined NATO, Ukraine gained more and more importance to both the West and to Russia. The NATO expansion could have been done in such a way as to avoid drawing a new line across Europe, but that was opposed by Washington. “Washington’s error was not to enlarge the [NATO] alliance but to do so in a way that maximized Moscow’s aggravation and gave fuel to Russian reactionaries.”
In 1994 Ukraine, along with other states that held nuclear weapons, signed an agreement with Russia and the U.S. that resulted in those prior Soviet states giving up their nuclear weapons so that all the USSR’s nuclear arsenal would now be held by one country - Russia. As part of the agreement Russia and the U.S. essentially agreed to respect the boundaries of these new independent countries and to not influence them politically or economically.
In 2004 the U.S. backed the pro-Western Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Putin, watching it unfold, stated his anger and disbelief to those with him at the time: “They [the U.S.] lied to me. I will never trust them again.”
The West extended the prospect of NATO membership including article 5 protections to Ukraine in 2008. In 2014 Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine and began supporting pro-Russian militants in the Donbas region. Putin justified this takeover as a necessary response to NATO’s “deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.”
The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 proposed to bring peace to the region, but Ukraine would strike no deals; it would not even accept a compromise that would have allowed for elections in the Donbas region. Diplomatic correspondence between France, Germany, and Russia shows that Western powers fully sided with Ukraine.
While the focus of the West has been on the Russian troop buildup near the Ukrainian border, at the same time NATO countries have expanded their military activities in the Black Sea region and in Ukraine. Tensions have clearly been rising.
In 2021 Ukrainian President Zelensky made a decision to use armed drones in Donbas. Western military advisers, instructors, arms, and ammunition have poured into Ukraine. Russians also suspect that a training center the United Kingdom is constructing in Ukraine is in fact a foreign military base. Putin is particularly adamant that deploying U.S. missiles in Ukraine that can reach Moscow in five to seven minutes cannot and will not be tolerated.
At the end of 2021, Russia presented the U.S. with a list of demands. These included a formal halt to NATO’s eastern enlargement, a freeze on further expansion of NATO’s military infrastructure, and end to Western military assistance to Ukraine and a ban on intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Its message was clear that it sought to address the Ukraine conflict diplomatically, but if that was not possible that Russia would resort to military action.
A clear Russian redline is Ukraine’s accession to NATO or the placement of Western military bases and long-range weapons in its territory. Putin has made it clear that he will not yield on this point. His threat and now use of force comes from his frustration with a stalled diplomatic process and a legitimate concern about hostile forces at his country’s border.
In a December 2021 article Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote:
Putin’s actions suggest that his true goal is not to conquer Ukraine and absorb it into Russia but to change the post-Cold War setup in Europe’s east. If he manages to keep NATO out of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, and U.S. intermediate-range missiles out of Europe, he thinks he could repair part of the damage Russia’s security sustained after the Cold War ended.
We cannot simply look at NATO-Russia or US-Russian relations as good vs bad; to do so has put us in the position we are in now. Historical evidence reveals that US leaders were so focused on enlarging NATO that they did not consider the perils of the way in which they were doing it.
The immediate problem – Biden
In his speech on 2/24, Biden began with the statement that “The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine, without provocation, without justification, without necessity.”
Herein lies one key problem: Biden refuses to hear or understand Russia’s concerns which actually provide Russia with reasonable justification for its current actions (even if in addition they provide an excuse for goals of expansion). Biden’s position is simply that we are right, they are wrong. He has attacked Russia’s expressions of their NATO concerns as unfounded lies. The unwillingness to listen essentially leaves Russia with only one other course of action which they have now taken.
But beyond his failure to listen, thus making invasion essentially a necessity as the only way for Russia to air its grievances, Biden has also almost goaded Putin into taking action. For weeks Biden asserted an imminent invasion but refused to impose new sanctions against Russia or even re-impose those which he had suspended such as those against the Nordstream 2 pipeline. At the same time, his actions limiting energy production in this country increased our dependence on Russian oil, hence giving Russia a strategic advantage.
Biden assured us that sanctions would be imposed at the appropriate time in order to deter Russia from taking action against Ukraine. Thursday, as he actually imposed some (though not the strongest available) sanctions, Biden essentially acknowledged the uselessness of such sanctions.
In answering questions, Biden stated it would take a month or more to see if the sanctions were even working and ultimately stated that “No one expected sanctions to prevent anything.” CBS News' Margaret Brennan pointed out the contradiction; Biden, his VP and members of his foreign policy team, and his press secretary have all been insisting for the past weeks that sanctions would work. That Biden appeared to laugh when stating the sanctions were no deterrent was especially chilling.
Biden continues to tell us he knows what Putin is planning, but he is apparently helpless to stop anything. As noted in my last post, a large part of this is the result of incompetent diplomacy from Biden’s team. They would rather simply see Putin as the evil pinup for an evil Russia whom they have no interest in working with to find peaceful and reasonable solutions to concerns that each country might have.
But beyond that, I see Biden as totally clueless and incompetent. I am not sure he has any understanding of what he has gotten us into; he certainly has no understanding of how to get us out of it. He continues to send troops to the area while promising they will not engage. It is clear he hates Putin and wants to destroy him, and I am not sure that he would hesitate even if he had to destroy everyone and everything in this country in the process. I believe that for Biden it is all about himself and right now he is trying to show the world how great he is. In my view he is not great at all, simply selfish and, with the nuclear codes in his pocket, extremely dangerous.
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