Dangerous shifting of blame

A closer analysis of the history of the Ukraine war shows that the West's responsibility is greater than the media usually convey.

The main cause of the war in Ukraine is the West's desire for Ukraine to join NATO. The “Russian imperialism” that is talked about almost everywhere in the media does not really exist. Rather, it was invented in order to be able to blame Russia. The well-known US political scientist John J. Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago explains this in his article. He also refutes the usual counter-arguments. Mearsheimer's sober descriptions are a blessing in an environment of dangerous warmongering. With its clear thoughts, this text is able to provide strength.

by Manova's World Editorial Team

[This editorial posted on 8/20/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/gefahrliche-schuldverschiebung.]

The question of who is responsible for the war in Ukraine has been a highly controversial issue since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The answer to this question is of enormous importance because the war was a disaster for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that Ukraine was practically destroyed. It has lost a considerable part of its territory and is likely to lose even more, its economy is in ruins, a huge number of Ukrainians have been internally displaced or have fled the country, and it has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Of course, Russia has also paid a heavy price in blood.

On a strategic level, relations between Russia and Europe, not to mention Russia and Ukraine, are poisoned for the foreseeable future, which means that the risk of a major war in Europe will still exist even if the war in Ukraine becomes a frozen conflict. Who bears responsibility for this catastrophe is a question that will not disappear any time soon, but is likely to become even more important as more people become aware of the scale of the disaster.

The conventional wisdom in the West is that Vladimir Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine. The invasion was aimed at conquering the whole of Ukraine and making it part of a larger Russia, so the argument goes. Once this goal was achieved, the Russians would establish an empire in Eastern Europe, similar to what the Soviet Union did after the Second World War. Therefore, Putin is ultimately a threat to the West that must be countered with all possible force. In short, Putin is an imperialist with a master plan that fits seamlessly into the rich Russian tradition.

The alternative argument, with which I identify and which is clearly in the minority in the West, is that the United States and its allies provoked the war. Of course, this is not to deny that Russia invaded Ukraine and started the war.

However, the main cause of the conflict is NATO's decision to accept Ukraine into the alliance, which virtually all Russian leaders see as an existential threat that must be eliminated. However, NATO enlargement is part of a broader strategy aimed at turning Ukraine into a Western bulwark on Russia's border. Kiev's accession to the European Union (EU) and the promotion of a color revolution in Ukraine - the transformation of the country into a pro-Western liberal democracy - are the other two pillars of this policy. The Russian leadership fears all three areas, but most of all it fears NATO enlargement. To counter this threat, Russia launched a pre-emptive war on February 24, 2022.

The debate over who caused the Ukraine war recently flared up when two prominent Western politicians - former US President Donald Trump and prominent British MP Nigel Farage - made the argument that NATO expansion was the driving force behind the conflict. Unsurprisingly, their comments were met with a fierce counter-attack from the proponents of conventional opinion. It is also worth noting that outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said twice last year that “President Putin started this war because he wanted to close NATO's door and deny Ukraine the right to choose its own path”. Hardly anyone in the West has questioned this remarkable admission by the NATO chief, nor has he retracted it.

My aim is to provide an overview of the key points that support the view that Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is an imperialist who wants to make Ukraine part of a greater Russia, but primarily because of NATO expansion and the West's efforts to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia's border.

***

Let me start with the seven most important reasons for rejecting conventional wisdom.

First, there is simply no evidence from before February 24, 2022 that Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine and incorporate it into Russia. Proponents of the conventional wisdom cannot cite any documents or statements by Putin that indicate that he wanted to conquer Ukraine.

When questioned on this point, proponents of conventional wisdom provide evidence that has little or nothing to do with Putin's motives for invading Ukraine. For example, some emphasize that he said Ukraine was an “artificial state” or not a “real state”. However, such opaque statements say nothing about his reasons for going to war. The same applies to Putin's statement that he considers Russians and Ukrainians to be “one people” with a common history. Others point out that he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

But Putin also said: “Anyone who does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Those who want it back have no brains.”

Others point to a speech in which he declared: “Modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia, more precisely, by Bolshevik, communist Russia.” But this is hardly proof that he was interested in conquering Ukraine. Moreover, in the same speech he said: “Of course, we cannot change the events of the past, but we must at least admit them openly and honestly.”

To prove that Putin wanted to conquer all of Ukraine and incorporate Russia, one must prove that, first, he thought this goal was worth pursuing, second, he thought it was feasible, and third, he had the intention to pursue this goal. There is no evidence in the public record that Putin contemplated, let alone intended, to end Ukraine as an independent state and make it part of Greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that Putin recognized Ukraine as an independent country. In his well-known article of July 12, 2021 on Russian-Ukrainian relations, which is often cited by proponents of conventional wisdom as proof of his imperial ambitions, he tells the Ukrainian people: “You want to create your own state: You are welcome!”

On the question of how Russia should treat Ukraine, he writes: “There is only one answer: with respect.” He concludes his long article with the following words: “And what Ukraine will look like - that is for its citizens to decide.” These statements are in direct contradiction to the claim that Putin wants to integrate Ukraine into a larger Russia.

In the same article on July 12, 2021, and again in an important speech on February 21, 2022, Putin emphasized that Russia accepts “the new geopolitical reality that has emerged after the dissolution of the USSR”. He repeated this point a third time on February 24, 2022, when he announced that Russia would invade Ukraine. In particular, he stated: “We do not intend to occupy Ukrainian territory” and made it clear that he respected Ukrainian sovereignty, but only up to a certain point: “Russia cannot feel safe, cannot develop and cannot exist if it faces a constant threat from the territory of today's Ukraine.” In other words, Putin was not interested in making Ukraine a part of Russia, but wanted to ensure that it did not become a “springboard” for Western aggression against Russia.

Secondly, there is no evidence that Putin was preparing a puppet government for Ukraine, establishing pro-Russian leaders in Kiev or pursuing any policies that would allow for the occupation of the entire country and its eventual incorporation into Russia.

These facts contradict the claim that Putin was interested in wiping Ukraine off the map.

Thirdly, Putin did not have nearly enough troops to conquer Ukraine.

Let's start with the overall numbers. I have long estimated that the Russians invaded Ukraine with at most 190,000 troops. General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the current commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, said in a recent interview with The Guardian that the Russian invasion force was only 100,000 strong. The Guardian had already quoted this figure before the war began. There is no way that a force of 100,000 or 190,000 men could conquer, occupy and incorporate the whole of Ukraine into a Greater Russia.

Bear in mind that the Wehrmacht numbered around 1.5 million men when the Germans invaded the western half of Poland in September 1939. Ukraine is geographically more than three times the size of the western half of Poland in 1939, and there are almost twice as many people living in Ukraine in 2022 as in Poland at the time of the German invasion. If we accept General Syrskyi's estimate that 100,000 Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, this means that Russia had an invasion force that was one-fifteenth the size of the German forces that invaded Poland. And this small Russian army invaded a country that was much larger than Poland, both territorially and in terms of population.

Apart from the numbers, there is the question of the quality of the Russian army. First of all, it was a military force that was primarily intended to protect Russia from invasion. It was not an army equipped for a major offensive to conquer the whole of Ukraine, let alone threaten the rest of Europe.

Moreover, the quality of the fighting forces left much to be desired, as the Russians did not expect a war when the crisis began to escalate in spring 2021. As a result, they had little opportunity to train a qualified invasion force. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, the Russian invasion force was nowhere near comparable to the German Wehrmacht of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

One could argue that the Russian leadership thought that the Ukrainian military was so small and so inferior that their army could easily defeat the Ukrainian forces and conquer the entire country. In fact, Putin and his lieutenants were well aware that the United States and its European allies had been arming and training the Ukrainian military since the crisis erupted on February 22, 2014. Moscow's great fear was that Ukraine would become a de facto member of NATO. Moreover, Russian leaders observed how the Ukrainian army, which was larger than their invading forces, fought successfully in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022. They certainly realized that the Ukrainian military was not a paper tiger that could be defeated quickly and decisively, especially since it had strong backing from the West.

Ultimately, the Russians were forced to withdraw their army from the Kharkiv oblast and the western part of the Kherson oblast in the course of 2022. Moscow thus gave up territories that its army had conquered in the early days of the war. There is no question that pressure from the Ukrainian army played a role in forcing the Russian withdrawal. Above all, however, Putin and his generals realized that they did not have enough forces to hold all the territory their army had conquered in Kharkiv and Kherson. So they withdrew and created more controllable defensive positions. This is hardly the behavior one would expect from an army that was built and trained to conquer and occupy all of Ukraine. In fact, it was not designed for this purpose and therefore could not accomplish this Herculean task.

Fourthly, in the months before the war began, Putin tried to find a diplomatic solution to the looming crisis.

On December 17, 2021, Putin sent a letter to President Joe Biden and NATO chief Stoltenberg proposing a solution to the crisis based on a written guarantee that, firstly, Ukraine would not join NATO, secondly, no offensive weapons would be stationed near Russia's borders and, thirdly, NATO troops and equipment that had been deployed to Eastern Europe since 1997 would be moved back to Western Europe. Whatever one may think of the feasibility of an agreement based on Putin's opening demands, on which the United States did not want to negotiate, it shows that he was trying to avoid war.

Fifth, immediately after the war began, Russia reached out to Ukraine to begin negotiations to end the war and work out a modus vivendi between the two countries.

The negotiations between Kiev and Moscow began in Belarus just four days after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. This Belarusian track was eventually replaced by an Israeli and an Istanbul track. All available evidence suggests that Russia was negotiating seriously and was not interested in taking over Ukrainian territory, with the exception of Crimea, which it had annexed in 2014, and possibly the Donbass. The negotiations ended when the Ukrainians, at the insistence of Britain and the United States, broke off the negotiations, which had been making good progress at the time they ended.

Moreover, Putin reports that when the negotiations were taking place and making progress, he was asked to withdraw Russian troops from the area around Kiev as a gesture of goodwill, which he did on March 29, 2022. No Western government or former politician has challenged this claim by Putin, which directly contradicts his assertion that he wants to conquer all of Ukraine.

Sixthly, apart from Ukraine, there is not the slightest indication that Putin has envisaged conquering other Eastern European countries.

Moreover, the Russian army is not even big enough to overrun the entire Ukraine, let alone attempt to conquer the Baltic states, Poland and Romania. Moreover, all of these countries are NATO members, which would almost certainly mean war with the United States and its allies.

Seventh, hardly anyone in the West claimed that Putin had imperial ambitions from the time he took power in 2000 until the Ukraine crisis began on February 22, 2014, at which point he suddenly became an imperial aggressor. Why? Because Western heads of state and government needed a reason to blame him for the crisis.

Probably the best proof that Putin was not seen as a serious threat during his first fourteen years in office is the fact that he was an invited guest at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, where the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members.

Putin was naturally incensed by this decision and vented his displeasure. However, his opposition to the announcement had little effect on Washington, as the Russian military was deemed too weak to prevent further NATO enlargement, just as it had been too weak to stop the 1999 and 2004 waves of enlargement. The West believed it could impose NATO enlargement on Russia once again.

Moreover, prior to February 22, 2014, NATO enlargement was not designed to contain Russia. Given the sorry state of Russian military power, Moscow was in no position to conquer Ukraine, let alone pursue a revanchist policy in Eastern Europe. The former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, a staunch supporter of Ukraine and fierce critic of Putin, tellingly notes that Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014 was not planned before the crisis erupted; it was an impulsive reaction to the coup that toppled Ukraine's pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO expansion was not intended to contain a Russian threat because the West did not believe there was one.

It was only when the Ukraine crisis erupted in February 2014 that the United States and its allies suddenly began to describe Putin as a dangerous leader with imperial ambitions and Russia as a serious military threat that NATO needed to contain. This abrupt shift in rhetoric was intended to serve a key purpose: to give the West the opportunity to blame Putin for the crisis and absolve the West of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, this portrayal of Putin gained significant traction after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

One deviation from conventional wisdom is worth noting. Some argue that Moscow's decision to invade Ukraine has little to do with Putin himself and is instead part of an expansionist tradition that long predates Putin and is deeply rooted in Russian society. This penchant for aggression, supposedly driven by internal forces rather than Russia's external threat environment, has over time led virtually all Russian leaders to behave violently towards their neighbors. There is no denying that Putin is calling the shots in this story, or that he led Russia into war, but it does mean that he has little influence. Almost any other Russian leader would have acted the same way.

There are two problems with this argument. First, it is irrefutable because the long-standing trait in Russian society that gives rise to this aggressive impulse has never been identified.

It is said that Russians have always been aggressive - no matter who is in power - and always will be. It's almost as if it's in their DNA. The same claim was once made about the Germans, who were often portrayed as innate aggressors in the twentieth century.

Such arguments are not taken seriously in the academic world for good reason.

Moreover, between 1991 and 2014, when the Ukraine crisis erupted, hardly anyone in the United States or Western Europe described Russia as inherently aggressive. Outside of Poland and the Baltic states, fear of Russian aggression was not frequently voiced during those 24 years, which is what one would expect if Russians were predisposed to aggression. It seems clear that the sudden emergence of this argument was a convenient excuse to blame Russia for the Ukrainian war.

***

Let me shift gears and lay out the three main reasons why NATO enlargement was the main cause of the Ukrainian war.

First, Russian leaders of all kinds repeatedly said before the war began that they saw NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat that must be eliminated.

Putin made this argument publicly several times before February 24, 2022. In a speech to the board of the Ministry of Defense on 21 December 2021, he stated:

"What they are doing or trying or planning to do in Ukraine is not taking place thousands of kilometers away from our national border. It is happening right on our doorstep. They need to understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat to. Do they really think we are oblivious to these threats? Or do they believe that we will stand idly by and watch threats to Russia emerge?"

Two months later, at a press conference on February 22, 2022, just a few days before the start of the war, Putin said:

"We are categorically against Ukraine joining NATO because this is a threat to us, and we have arguments to support this. I have spoken about this repeatedly in this hall."

He then made it clear that he understands that Ukraine will become a de facto member of NATO. The United States and its allies, he said, “continue to pump the current Kiev rulers full of modern types of weapons”. He went on to say that if this was not stopped, Moscow “would be left with an ‘anti-Russia’ armed to the teeth. That is completely unacceptable”.

Other leading Russian politicians - including the defense minister, the foreign minister, the deputy foreign minister and the Russian ambassador in Washington - also emphasized the central importance of NATO expansion as the trigger for the Ukraine crisis. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it in a nutshell at a press conference on January 14, 2022: “The key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastwards.”

One often hears the argument that Russian fears are unfounded because there is no chance that Ukraine will join the alliance in the foreseeable future, if at all. In fact, it is claimed that the United States and its European allies paid little attention to Ukraine's admission to NATO before the war. But even if Ukraine were to join the alliance, it would not pose an existential threat to Russia, as NATO is a defensive alliance. Therefore, NATO enlargement could not have been a cause of either the original crisis that erupted in February 2014 or the war that began in February 2022.

This reasoning is wrong. In fact, the Western response to the events of 2014 was to double down on the existing strategy and bring Ukraine even closer to NATO. The Alliance began training the Ukrainian military in 2014 and trained an average of 10,000 soldiers per year over the following eight years. In December 2017, the Trump administration decided to supply Kiev with “defense weapons”. Other NATO countries soon followed suit and supplied even more weapons to Ukraine. In addition, the Ukrainian army, navy and air force began to participate in joint military exercises with NATO forces.

The West's efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military explain in large part why it fared so well against the Russian army in the first year of the war.

A headline in the Wall Street Journal in April 2022 read: “The Secret to Ukraine's Military Success: Years of NATO Training.”

Aside from the Alliance's ongoing efforts to make the Ukrainian military a more effective fighting force capable of operating alongside NATO troops, there was a renewed enthusiasm in the West for Ukraine's admission to NATO during 2021. At the same time, President Zelensky, who had never shown much enthusiasm for Ukraine's inclusion in the alliance and was elected in March 2019 on a platform calling for cooperation with Russia in resolving the ongoing crisis, changed course in early 2021 and not only endorsed Ukraine's NATO membership, but also took a hard line on Moscow.

President Biden, who moved into the White House in January 2021, had long campaigned for Ukraine to join NATO and was a super hawk on Russia. Unsurprisingly, NATO issued a communiqué at its annual summit in Brussels on June 14, 2021, stating:

“We reaffirm the decision taken at the Bucharest Summit in 2008 for Ukraine to become a member of the Alliance.”

On September 1, 2021, Zelensky visited the White House, where Biden made it clear that the United States was “firmly committed” to “supporting Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic aspirations”. On November 10, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba signed an important document - the “Charter of Strategic Partnership between the United States and Ukraine”. The aim of both parties, the document states, is to “underscore the commitment to the implementation of deep and comprehensive reforms in Ukraine necessary for full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” It also explicitly reaffirms the US commitment to the “Bucharest Summit Declaration of 2008”.

There seems little doubt that Ukraine was well on its way to becoming a member of NATO by the end of 2021. Nevertheless, some supporters of this policy argue that Moscow should not have worried about this outcome because “NATO is a defensive alliance and poses no threat to Russia”. But that is not what Putin and other Russian politicians think about NATO, and it depends on what they think. In short, there is no question that Moscow saw Ukraine's accession to NATO as an existential threat that could not be tolerated.

Second, a significant number of influential and highly respected figures in the West recognized before the war that NATO expansion - particularly into Ukraine - would be viewed by Russian leaders as a mortal threat and would eventually lead to catastrophe.

William Burns, who now heads the CIA but was US ambassador to Moscow at the time of the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, wrote a memo to then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in which he succinctly described Russia's thinking on accepting Ukraine into the alliance. “Ukraine's accession to NATO,” he wrote, ”is the clearest of red lines for the Russian elite (not only for Putin).

In the more than two and a half years that I have had conversations with key Russian players, from sharpshooters in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's fiercest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who sees Ukraine's admission to NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” NATO, he said, “would be seen as a strategic gauntlet. Today's Russia will react to this. Russian-Ukrainian relations would be put on hold. (...) That would create fertile ground for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

Burns was not the only Western decision-maker in 2008 to recognize that Ukraine's admission to NATO was fraught with danger. At the Bucharest summit, both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke out against Ukraine's NATO membership because they knew it would alarm and anger Russia. Merkel recently explained her rejection: “I was very sure (...) that Putin would not simply allow it. From his point of view, that would be a declaration of war.”

To go one step further: Numerous American politicians and strategists spoke out against President Clinton's decision to expand NATO in the 1990s, when the decision was still up for debate. It was clear to these opponents from the outset that the Russian leadership would see this as a threat to their vital interests and that this policy would ultimately lead to disaster. The list of opponents includes prominent establishment figures such as George Kennan, both President Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Perry and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, Paul Nitze, Robert Gates, Robert McNamara, Richard Pipes and Jack Matlock, to name but a few.

The logic of Putin's position should be perfectly understandable to Americans long committed to the Monroe Doctrine. This states that no distant great power may enter into an alliance with a country in the Western Hemisphere and station its military forces there.

The United States would see such a move as an existential threat and would do everything in its power to eliminate this danger. Of course, this also happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when President Kennedy made it clear to the Soviets that their nuclear missiles would have to be withdrawn from Cuba. Putin is deeply influenced by the same logic. After all, great powers do not want distant great powers settling in their backyard.

Thirdly, the central importance of Russia's deep fear of Ukraine joining NATO is illustrated by two developments since the start of the war.

During the Istanbul negotiations, which took place immediately after the invasion began, the Russians made it clear that Ukraine would have to accept “permanent neutrality” and could not join NATO. The Ukrainians accepted Russia's demand without serious resistance, no doubt because they knew that it would otherwise be impossible to end the war. More recently, on June 14, 2024, Putin made two demands that Ukraine would have to meet before he would agree to a ceasefire and the start of negotiations to end the war. One of these demands was that Kiev “officially” declare “that it is abandoning its plans to join NATO”.

None of this is surprising, as Russia has always seen Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat that must be prevented at all costs. This logic is the driving force behind the war in Ukraine.

Finally, it is clear from Russia's negotiating position in Istanbul, as well as Putin's statements on ending the war in his speech on June 14, 2024, that he is not interested in conquering all of Ukraine and making it part of a larger Russia.

Editor's note: This text by John J. Mearsheimer appeared on substack.com/@mearsheimer on August 5, 2024. Many thanks for the author's permission to reprint the German translation. The translation was prepared by Thomas Mayer.

In addition to NATO's eastward expansion, there are other factors that led to the Ukraine war, such as nationalism in Ukraine and the oppression of the ethnic Russian population. The complex background to the war in Ukraine is described in detail in the book “Wahrheitssuche im Ukrainekrieg - Um was es wirklich geht” by Thomas Mayer.

There is little point in just stewing in your own, albeit exquisite, juices. That's why Manova's world editorial team regularly collects and publishes voices from all over the world. What do critical contemporaries in other countries and cultures think about geopolitical events? What ideas do they have for solving global problems? What developments are they observing that we in Europe may soon be facing? Thinking outside the box is also encouraging, as it makes it clear that we are many, not alone!