Seymour Hersh: Is the Trump Administration planning a coup against Ukrainian President Zelenskyy?

Seymour Hersh just reported on what he makes sound like a US coup plan against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the current Ukrainian Ambassador to Britain, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi:

Zaluzhnyi is now seen as the most credible successor to Zelensky. I have been told by knowledgeable officials in Washington that that job could be his within a few months. Zelensky is on a short list for exile, if President Donald Trump decides to make the call. If Zelensky refuses to leave his office, as is most likely, an involved US official told me: “He’s going to go by force. The ball is in his court.” There are many in Washington and in Ukraine who believe that the escalating air war with Russia must end soon, while there’s still a chance to make a settlement with its president, Vladimir Putin.

There are indications that Zelensky knows what is coming. He has just shifted or fired three officials: the minister of defense, the prime minister, and the ambassador to the United States. As the US official told me, Zelensky “is beginning to read the danger signs.”

What happens next, the official added, in terms of political violence inside Kiev and elsewhere, depends largely “on the degree to which the population has reached the point where they have no other choice. Zelensky will not go willingly but feet first. Herein lies a US internal debate. Smart side says let the Ukrainians sort it out by themselves and not get the CIA involved to seal the deal. So far, good sense drives the policy. But some unnamed leaders are impatient and this will take time—more than fifty days.” [my emphasis] (1)

I don’t know what to make of this. And it’s easy to imagine numerous ways that someone might spin a story like this to a reporter. Hoping that Zelenskyy and his government may take it as a serious threat is obviously one of them.

Or, it could be some neocon trying to paint Zelenskyy’s critics as Russian dupes or willing collaborators:

Meanwhile, I was unable to learn whether Putin was aware of the US desire to push Zelensky out, but I did learn that Zaluzhnyi has maintained a working relationship with Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces and a Putin confidant. Gerasimov, as I have previously written, was one of the few to know in advance that Zaluzhnyi would tell the Economist that the war was stalemated.

Given the stunning inept diplomacy and ham-fisted actions that we’ve seen during Trump 2.0 so far, the idea that this crew could pull off something so complicated as a coup on behalf of the Russians or on behalf of some Peace President master plan to end the war seems like a real stretch of the imagination.

Hersh also reports a US official telling him is getting desperate to end the war because of the level of Russian casualties:

I have been provided with new Russian casualty numbers, from carefully evaluated US and British intelligence estimates, that show that Russia has suffered two million casualties—nearly double the current public numbers—since Putin started the war in early 2022. “Putin is not afraid of losing power, but he is losing popularity,” the US official said, “and Donald Trump is Zelensky’s supplier and the only one who can keep the Ukraine war going. Who’s got real power? It isn’t Zelensky. His only lifeline is the US. Trump is asking, ‘How do we get the pissants to stop? He thinks he’s the only one who can make the deal.

Given the chaotic mess of the current administration, it wouldn’t surprise me if wild schemes, like this one sounds to be, were kicking around inside it.

But since doesn’t have the diplomatic talent to answer an annoying question from a reporter in an awful way, pulling off a plan this elaborate is very difficult to imagine from the Trump crew. But it may win him the Nobel Prize for Botched Coup Plans.

Or maybe his people suddenly discovered the coup of 1963 against South Vietnam’s endorsed by the Kennedy Administration and decided to try to duplicate it in Ukraine. The coup was supposed to better enable to let the South Vietnamese defeat North Vietnam and the Vietcong. That part really didn’t work out so well.

In a speech to Chatham House in March of this year, Zaluzhnyi made the following opaque remarks:

It was through Ukraine, which seemingly lost the ability to solve the problem of war on its own in 2023, mainly due to the fears of our partners, that forced Russia to openly create the so-called Axis – the Axis of Evil. Who is part of this Axis – you all understand perfectly. And it was then, back in 2024, when these countries were concluding strategic agreements, that it was necessary to consider whether this was a continuation of the policy of revising the current world order system. …

Human and economic losses in Ukraine, spending resources on war, migration, sanctions policy, lack of cheap energy resources and markets, as well as other problems have become a colossal economic burden for the economies of all sides involved in the war, slowing down their development and creating risks of already global crises.

After all, the war in Ukraine has practically exhausted the economic and industrial “margin of strength” in most countries, especially Russia, the United States, and Europe. They really lack resources to continue military actions, while the deployment of weapons production turned out to be excessive if agreements to end hostilities were reached.

Thus, we can assert that there are formal reasons for revising the world order today. The starting point for such a revision, of course, can be considered the future end of the war in Ukraine and the formation of a new world order precisely according to its results. Indeed, the old world order itself is already almost completely destroyed today. For example, it is obvious today that the White House has questioned the unity of the Western world. In addition, Washington is already trying to shift the security and defence of Europe to their own forces, without the United States. (2)

We’ll see what develops. But Hersh’s report is at least worth noticing for reference in the near term.

Notes:

(1) Hersh, Seymour (2025): The End for Zelensky? Substack 07/18/2025. <https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-end-for-zelensky> (Accessed: 2025-18-07).

(2) Valerii Zaluzhnyi: The old world order has been destroyed. Ukraine World Congress 03/07/2025. <https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/valerii-zaluzhnyi-the-old-world-order-has-been-destroyed/> (Accessed: 2025-18-07).

NATO meeting in Vilnius: Ukraine and NATO

Ukraine will be a central topic at the summit, but any immediate membership for Ukraine in the alliance is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, so is any meaningful discussion of the longer-term role of Russia in a postwar European security order.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/nato-meeting-in-vilnius-ukraine-and

Ukraine, NATO enlargement, and the realism to not "do stupid stuff"

The Ukraine crisis has highlighted some of ways foreign policy "realists" understand the world differently from the "neoconservatives" so influential among US Republicans and the "liberal internationalist" outlook that is more dominant among Democrats.

The realists in the 1990s were symbolically shouting into the wind about the plans for NATO enlargement, YOU SHOUD THINK THIS THROUGH MORE CAREFULLY1

While the liberal internationalists were taken with the mission of expanding liberal democracy and neoliberal economics in the world, the neocons were drunk on Cold War triumphalism and hellbent on wrecking large parts of the Middle East, starting with Iraq. But both regarded Russia as essentially a defeated power that could not present any major challenge to US geopolitical plans in any foreseeable future.

Christian Hacke in a 2014 analysis looked at the practical developments since the formal enlargement began in 1999 Der Westen und die Ukraine-Krise: Plädoyer für Realismus Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 64:47-48 (17.Nov.2014):

In the West, at the beginning of the 1990s, there was initially no talk of an expansion of NATO. The Republican US administration under George Bush senior (1989–1993) was still reluctant to make such requests. It was not until the liberal-internationalist administration of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) that enlargement was concretized. In the USA, the historian George F. Kennan led the ranks of realist critics, in Germany, Helmut Schmidt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, as well as diplomats and scientists, made no secret of their concerns. But the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999 and those of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004 were carried out in further disregard of Russian security interests. When the US also pushed for the admission of Georgia and Ukraine at the NATO summit in 2008, it further challenged Russia. [emphasis added; my translation from the German]

Hacke then goes on to refer to the judgment expressed by Über-Realist John Mearsheimer in Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin Foreign Affairs Sept/Oct 2014 (Abridged German version: Putin reagiert: Warum der Westen an der Ukraine-Krise schuld ist. IPG 01.09.2014):

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO.

Possibly the most important aspect of the realist outlook is that it encourages policymakers to think in cautious terms about the likely reaction of other players in the international system. In the classic civil-military division of labor in governments, it's an axiom that it is the job of the military to take account of the capabilities of potential adversaries while it's the job of civilian leaders to make judgments on the other countries' intentions. There's a similarity to the realist outlook, which emphasizes that both factors should be pragmatically understood.

In contrast to the liberal-internationalist view, the "realist" can sound amoral and cynical. Because there is a certain missionary element to the liberal-internationalist approach that is particularly visible in cases of "humanitarian intervention." Neocons also strike a certain kind of moral pose, too, though there's is more along the lines of what's right is what the US wants to do, and to hell with what any foreigners might think. And neocons are happy to borrow liberal-internationalist rhetoric about spreading democracy and supporting human rights.

The wars of the last 20 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya provide plenty of material to judge how much democracy, morality, and human rights benefitted from those conflicts. Bad decisions and militarized foreign policy can lead to immoral actions including lots of unnecessary killing. So their actual moral superiority to realism is certainly subject to question.

Hocke responds to the moralistic criticism of the realist outlook in the context of NATO expansion in his 2014 article:

What is new since the 1990s is that the West believes that authoritarian rulers are falling away from their faith and mutating into democrats. It is not Putin who lives "in another world", it is the democratic politicians who live in a dream world with regard to Putin if they believed that he had become a "flawless democrat" [a reference to a particularly ill-advised comment about Putin by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2004]. Not pseudo-democratic trickery, but Realpolitik sobriety and an understanding of limited balance of interests and distance would have been necessary in dealing with Russia. Instead, sultry rhetoric of commonality dominated. Most Western politicians had lost their realistic sense of touch when dealing with Russia. Now, in the Ukraine crisis, they are forced to discover for themselves the Realpolitik laws of power politics. [my translation from the German]

When we think back to the large expansion of NATO that was formalized in 2004, which included incorporating the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, we can also see that plain arrogance played a huge part in the shared assumptions of the liberal internationalist theorists and neocons in that immediate post-9/11 era. They just didn't believe Russia could or would push back in any effective way.

Even if the Obama-Biden Administration didn't always apply the rule adequately, notably in the Libya intervention to take just one example, their supposed guideline of "don't do stupid stuff" is something that US policymakers have often given too little attention, during the Cold War and since.

The Ukraine crisis and Russia-China relations

One important factor in the current Ukraine crisis doesn't seem to get a lot of coverage in the news on the crisis is the relationship of Russia and China.

Giorgio Cafiero and Daniel Wagner wrote about the China factor in the aftermath of Russia's occupation of the Crimea in 2014 (How China Benefits From the Ukraine Crisis 04/01/2014):

Having stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia on the Syrian civil war, China vetoed three United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions on the basis that Syria's sovereignty was threatened by Western powers. Beijing and Moscow have also defended their aligned positions on a plethora of pariah states and international crises -- all under the banner of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign nations. China was therefore placed in a difficult position when Russia was accused of violating Ukraine's sovereignty by interfering in Crimea. Fearful of being accused of moral hypocrisy, China did not want to be seen as overtly supporting Moscow, but at the same time, China was not eager to align with the West against the Kremlin, given Russia's growing importance to China's overall foreign policy.

The emerging China-Russia alliance therefore serves as a counterbalance to the U.S. while advancing China's commercial, energy and military interests. Across their shared 2,700 mile border, China and Russia have increased bilateral trade seven-fold since 2002. China has grown increasingly dependent on Russia, as the world's top energy exporter, to quench its seemingly insatiable thirst for oil and natural gas. China has become the main beneficiary of the Russian Eastern Siberia/Pacific Ocean oil pipeline, and it buys more military equipment from Russia than from any other country. [my emphasis]

China does have investments and interests in Ukraine that are not the same as Russia's. Siegfried Kottel wrote about the shift to closer relations between China and Russia in the context of the Crimean crisis of 2014 in China: Der neue Seehegemon, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 7:2014; my translation from the German):

For a long time, it seemed as if China was treading this path [expanding its regional influence] alone. But it is precisely the Ukraine crisis that is now driving a new ally into China's arms: Russia. With his Ukraine policy, Russian President Vladimir Putin has maneuvered himself into an isolation in which Russia threatens to lose its sales markets for energy and the investments urgently needed for modernization from Western industrialized countries. This has now led the Russian president to seek greater proximity to the Chinese leadership. Chinese President Xi Jinping finds this rapprochement very convenient – for strategic reasons but also because China is always looking for new sources of energy. [my emphasis]

Kottel also noted, "The Ukraine is traditionally an important arms supplier for the Chinese Army."

Yes, there's more going on in the Ukraine crisis than a Cold-War-nostalgia testosterone contest.

Foreign policy “realism,“ liberal internationalism, and the Ukraine crisis

Joseph Nye, Jr. and Richard Haass are both respectable members of the foreign policy establishment. In fact, Haass is going on 18 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most iconic symbol of the foreign policy establishment.

They both thought it necessary to defend their liberal internationalist approach in Foreign Policy in two articles of 02/02/2022, Nye in Realism About Foreign-Policy Realism and Haass in Putin's Ukraine Quagmire.

Advocates of different kinds of foreign policy outlooks aren't required to sign statements endorsing a particular set of principles. The labels aren't copyrighted property! Academics and foreign policy advisors are often reluctant to identify with a defined set of principles. And "foreign policy" encompasses a huge scope of information. So it's impossible for even those consciously adhering to the same school of thought not to have differences on issues.

Nye and Haass are addressing the "realist" foreign policy outlook identified in the immediate postwar years with figures like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Reinhold Niehbuhr, and Henry Kissinger. Its best-known current advocates are Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

Neoconservatism as represented by the Cheney-Bush Administration and their war in Iraq is a major influence in American foreign policy thinking, which is basically an American supremacist view. The MAGA/America First outlook is essentially crude rightwing nationalism and militarism, whose advocates are sometimes critical of US military intervention. But the neocon outlook and the MAGA one are very similar in practice, because jinoigstic MAGA slogans don't easily translate into policy.

At this point, the main dissenting trend of foreign policy thought in the US could be broadly inlcuded in the "restrainer" outlook, currently effectively advocated by the scholars and analysts who associate with Andrew Bacevich's Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Their position applies a skeptical view to militarized approaches to foreign policy.

None of these categories of foreign policy outlook lines up clearly with current left-right differences in US politics. Although the liberal internationalist approach is more prevalent among Democrats and some toxic mixture of neoconservatism and MAGA militarism more in the Republican Party, there are a wide range of shared assumptions between various "schools" of foreign policy thinking.

Which is where the "realists" come in. They argue that the incentives on nations in the international system tend to push them to act in certain ways in their dealings with other nations. And so different theoretical frameworks by foreign policy makers often wind up with similar sets of choices.

Ukraine: A crisis that the realists worried would come

The current Ukraine crisis is playing out a way that realists said was likely when the liberal internationalists and neocons tripping on Cold War triumphalism decided to push for NATO enlargement. Lately, we've seen quite a few references the warning George Kennan, "realist" architect of the postwar containment policy, gave in 1997 (A Fateful Error New York Times 02/05/1997):

[E]xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

The liberal internationalists/interventionists of the Clinton 'Administration and the neocons under Bush cheerfully ignored swuch warnings.

Joseph Nye aregues in his new piece:

Was the current crisis in Ukraine caused by a lack of realism in US foreign policy? According to some analysts, the liberal desire to spread democracy is what drove NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders, causing Russian President Vladimir Putin to feel increasingly threatened. Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that he would respond by demanding a sphere of influence analogous to what the United States once claimed in Latin America with its Monroe Doctrine.

But there is a problem with this realist argument: NATO’s 2008 decision (heavily promoted by the George W. Bush administration) to invite Georgia and Ukraine eventually to join the Alliance can hardly be called liberal, nor was it driven by liberals. In making such arguments, realists point to the aftermath of World War I, when US President Woodrow Wilson’s liberalism contributed to a legalistic and idealist foreign policy that ultimately failed to prevent World War II. [my emphasis]

This is a surprisingly defensive polemic that rests on a simple word play. Outside of the US and Canada, "liberal" in party politics, doesn't mean center-left. Elsewhere, it refers to to a commitment to representative government (i.e., political democracy), the rule of law, and respect for international law. It does not refer to "liberal" as in the Democratic Party in the US. These are the dates of NATO expansion since 1999, all of which enjoyed wide bipartisan support in the US:

1999: Czechia, Hungary, Poland
2004: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia
2009: Albania, Croatia
2017: Montenegro
2020: North Macedonia

One of the implications of the "realist" viewpoint is that it can sound amoral at a theretical level, more so coming from some of its advocates than others. But Nye uses the following example to imply that Realism is inherently amoral:

In a famous historical example of this approach, Winston Churchill, in 1940, ordered an attack on French naval vessels, killing some 1,300 of Britain’s allies rather than letting the fleet fall into Hitler’s hands. Churchill also authorized the bombing of German civilian targets.

Leaving aside how well-known that incident is today - I doubt that even most World War II buffs have ever heard of it - and that brief description Nye gives could be misleading. The vessels in question at that time were under the control of the German-dominatied Vichy regime under Philippe Pétain. (Thomas Parker, When Winston Churchill Bombed France: The Battle of Mers el-Kabir, The National Interest 08/13/2016)

Haass doesn't dunk on the realists as such in his article. But he basically argues that everything seems to be going fine in the current confrontation over Ukraine. Which is a more practical attitude than obsessive fear-mongering about Russia's intentions in the current situation. He puts the argument this way:

But while Putin manufactured the Ukraine crisis believing he held a clear advantage vis-à-vis the West, he committed an error that can prove dangerous even for a skilled martial-arts practitioner: he underestimated his opponent.

While Biden and NATO have said they will not intervene directly on behalf of Ukraine, this is not the same as accepting Russian dominance. In fact, the US has organized a comprehensive response. It has sent arms to Ukraine to increase the costs to Russia of any invasion and occupation. There are plans to fortify NATO member countries closest to Russia. Substantial economic sanctions are being prepared. And rerouting gas to Europe would partly offset the possible loss of Russian supplies.

It's worth noting that in 1997, Haass himself was more cautious than the most enthusiastic American advocates of NATO enlargement, though he declared himself resigned to recognize the establishment consensus on the matter that realist like Kennan warned against (Enlarging NATO: A Questionable Idea Whose Time Has Come Brookings Institute 03/01/1997):

The sixteen members of NATO will soon invite Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and possibly others to join. There are strong arguments for enlarging the alliance, above all securing the democratic and Western orientation of selected former Warsaw Pact states and hedging against political uncertainty in Russia.

But there are arguments at least as strong against enlargement. Expanding NATO could complicate its ability to achieve consensus, weaken the security of those countries not brought in, increase demands on defense budgets when they are already overstretched, and alienate Russia. In the process, Europe’s security could well diminish, not grow.

This debate is increasingly moot. Events have all but reached a point of no return. The costs of going ahead are less than those of changing course. [my emphasis]

(Minor corrections for clarity made on 02/22/2023)

Putin's 2021 public position paper on Ukraine

A text marking an important inflection point for Russia’s current Ukrainian policy is the article published under Vladimir Putin’s name in 2021, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians (linked here at the Russian President’s website).

Andreas Kappeler analyzed Putin's text, which clearly declares a strong inclination for Ukraine to be merged into Russia, in Revisionismus und Drohungen Osteuropa 71:7 (2021). As Kappeler notes, the first part of the paper is about the history of Russia and Ukraine. And while that part makes some contentious and dubious claims, it does have "an academic character" indicating that it was "clearly prepared by one or more professional historians."

Then there is a second part, starting with the paragraph beginning, "Of course, inside the USSR" and continuing to the end, which seems to stem more directly from Putin, with a change of tone clearly notable in the English version. "He repeats well-known theses, sharpens them, and does not shy away from threats to Ukraine and the West. His reasoning here is capricious, in part contradictory and emotional." (All translations from Keppler's article are mine.)

A couple of Putin's arguments are especially important in the current situation. He repeats a previous justification for annexing Crimea, which had been part of Russia but was added to the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, "in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time." He argues that when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it should have been recognized only in its pre-1954 borders, i.e., with Crimea staying in Russia.

That's not what both countries approved in 1991, of course. And it wasn't what the United Nations approved when it recognized Ukraine as an independent sovereign nation. Ukraine's claim to Crimea as its legitimate territory is really not in question as a matter of international law.

While Putin uses events from the Soviet period like the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet and Russian term for the Second World War) as part of his version of Russian nationalism, he also makes an anti-Soviet argument that casts Russia as the victim while not wanting to accept any criticism of Russia relating to anything bad that might have happened during the Soviet period:

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.

... The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external ”patrons“ prefer to overlook these facts. They do not miss a chance, however, both inside the country and abroad, to condemn ”the crimes of the Soviet regime,“ listing among them events with which neither the CPSU, nor the USSR, let alone modern Russia, have anything to do. At the same time, the Bolsheviks' efforts to detach from Russia its historical territories are not considered a crime. And we know why: if they brought about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishe[r]s are happy with that. [my emphasis]

And he also uses a hair-raising ethno-nationalist argument:

But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. As a result of such a harsh and artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian people in all may decrease by hundreds of thousands or even millions. [my emphasis]

The "forced change of identity" line is a version of the far-right Great Replacement theory also used in Europe and the US to justify xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence.

That article is an articulation of the explicitly anti-Soviet, Russian-nationalist part of Putin's ideological position at the moment. So Kappeler is obviously justified in concluding his essay, "When Putin feels himself to be surrounded and cornered, that is as dangerous as his ethno-imperial nationalism, which exploits Russians in Ukraine and the Baltic states. His threats are to be taken seriously."

But taking threats seriously is not the same as leaping to conclusions about Russia's capabilities and intentions in Ukraine at this particular moment.

A section of Putin's article talks about how much Ukraine benefitted from its economic union with the Soviet Union and a rosy picture of how things could be like that again. But that is also simultaneously a recognition that absorbing all of Ukraine into Russia would be a huge new economic and military challenge for a petrostate like Russia whose GDP has recently been comparable to that of Italy. Particularly in the face of the economic sanctions that Putin knows would follow from such a move.

It seems obvious that the US and NATO are not going to give a binding, formal promise to Russia to never, ever allow Ukraine to join NATO. And the Russians surely realize that. As we know from US experience in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Russia knows from its experience in places like Afghanistan and Syria, countries can and do make arrogant and irrational decisions that can wind up hurting them more than helping them. That's why we need good intelligence and a competent and well-staffed State Department to manage situations like the current one over Ukraine is a practical way that decreases rather than escalates the risk of war.

****************************

This 2019 paper from the Carnegie Endowment by Julia Gurganus and Eugene Rumer, Russia’s Global Ambitions in Perspective, gives a background sketch of major Russia foreign policy perspective since the early 19th century. History is important, but doesn't dictate specific decisions in a present-day context.

Appeal from 15 organizations for diplomatic solutions in the Ukraine crisis

The Quincy Institute and Just Foreign Policy organized an appeal of fifteen organizations supporting the Biden-Harris Administration's expressed preference for diplomatic solutions to the current Ukraine crisis.

The talks this week are a high-stakes standoff between Russia and NATO, with the US of course taking the lead role for NATO. There has been no shortage of speculation about the intentions of the Russians in this situation. It has been clear for years, decades actually, that the NATO enlargement would likely produce some kind of Russia reaction. It is also surely part of the current round of Russian provacation of massing troops on the border to Ukraine to test the Biden Administration's response to a (still-) controlled crisis situation.

The letter to Biden invokes the Administration's own stated intentions:

We agree with Secretary of State Tony Blinken that “[d]iplomacy is the only responsible way to resolve this potential crisis.” We share his view that the “most promising avenue for diplomacy is for Russia and Ukraine to return to dialogue in the context of the Minsk II agreements,” and are encouraged that both the Putin and Zelenskyy administrations have reaffirmed their commitment to Minsk. The Minsk II accords would demilitarize the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine and guarantee meaningful political autonomy to the region while retaining Ukrainian sovereignty over the area and its borders. The United States should press both Ukraine and Russia to implement a workable version of the Minsk accords. [my emphasis]

The 15 organizations endorsing the letter include:

• Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
• Just Foreign Policy
• Beyond the Bomb
• Common Defense
• Concerned Veterans for America
• Defense Priorities
• Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)
• Global Zero
• Physicians for Social Responsibility
• Peace Action
• Progressive Democrats of America
• American Committee for US-Russia Accord
• RootsAction 
• Veterans Global Peace Network
• Veterans for Peace

Anatol Lieven's "restrainer" positions on Ukraine and Kazakhstan

Anatol Lieven offers his own "restrainer"-oriented views of the situation with Ukraine and Kazakhstan in these three posts:

My plea for Ukrainian neutrality has just been published by Responsible Statecraft:https://t.co/Xm0a6KXfHt

— Anatol Lieven (@lieven_anatol) January 3, 2022

As US diplomat Wendy Sherman sits down w/ Russia's Sergei Ryabkov today, RS's @lieven_anatol has a few suggestions involving autonomy for the Donbas region and Ukrainian autonomy. MORE: https://t.co/dRV4PValmi pic.twitter.com/03nNTCepJh

— Responsible Statecraft (@RStatecraft) January 10, 2022

There's a great temptation for Washington to get involved in #Kazakistan right now whether it be for the usual democracy promotion or to cause trouble for Russia and China. NEW @lieven_anatol on why this would be the worst move possible: https://t.co/s3Q1nVS2J2

— Responsible Statecraft (@RStatecraft) January 10, 2022

In his post on Kazakhistan, Lieven writes:

The temptation for the United States to become involved in backing unrest in Kazakhstan stems from two sources (apart from the innate tendency of the democratism industry in the West to idealize any protest against an authoritarian regime as “democratic” and to lend it unthinking support). First of course is the desire to make trouble for Russia. Already, while U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has criticized Russia’s dispatch of troops to Kazakhstan, sections of the Western media and commentariat are celebrating the diversion of Russian military force and attention from Ukraine.

The second motive lies in a desire to make trouble for China. One important part of China’s Belt and Road network is intended to run through Kazakhstan. China has invested heavily in Kazakhstan’s infrastructure and created a free trade zone and transport hub at Khorgos on the border with Kazakhstan. [my emphasis]

He also gives some important background on the risk of ethno-nationalist sentiments breaking out in Kazahkhstan:

The deployment of Russian troops to Kazakhstan to support the government is likely to increase anti-Russian feelings; and if God forbid ethnic violence does erupt in Kazakhstan, it could help to produce a future Russian government far more chauvinist than that of Putin. This would be a disaster for Russia, Russia’s neighbors, and above all Russia’s own ethnic minorities. And if Washington were seen to be supporting violence against ordinary Russians, then America will be faced in future with a danger far more formidable than that of Putin: an infuriated Russian nation.

Kazakhstan and Ukraine and NATO policy toward Russia

Kazakhstan has faced serious protests in recent days, which prompted the authoritarian Kazakh government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested the intervention of Russian troops to help suppress the anti-government demonstrations, which Vladimir Putin's government provided. Russia does have a mutual-defense treat with Kazakhstan. But this was not a foreign attack that Kazakhstan faced, but protests against the existing government.

Deutsche Welle news reports on the situation in NATO calls for calm in Kazakhstan 01/07/2022:

It's important to remember that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan held 1,400 nuclear warheads, which it voluntarily gave up, a very important contribution to nuclear nonproliferation. Ukraine also gave up its nuclear weapons. The Russian military actions in Ukraine in 2014 and its annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, along with US-NATO interventions in Iraq and Libya after those countries had given up their "weapons of mass destruction" development programs, sent a very strong message: if you give up your nuclear weapons, that's not guarantee that the US or Russia won't invade you. That makes a very damaging impact on nuclear nonproliferation efforts. The leaderships in Iran and North Korea certainly paid attention to those messages.

The recent Russian intervention in Kazakhstan isn't directly comparable to its actions in Ukraine in 2014, in that the Kazakh government requested it. We don't know to what extent Putin's government may have actually encouraged such a request. But there seems to be no obvious reason to think Tokayev's government was unhappy about the Russian support.

The standoff between Russia on the one side with its troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and on the other with Ukraine and NATO (of which Ukraine is not a member) continues. Hawkish American commentators are promoting the supposed Russian menace to Europe, such as Daniel Fried, who writes in Just Security (As Putin Aims to Re-Divide Europe, Lessons from the Past Can Guide a Response 01/07/2022):

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin demands that the West help restore its empire in Europe, the imposition of which by Joseph Stalin was the original cause of the Cold War. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed a lot about Kremlin views of the countries between Germany and Russia when he said in December that the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact left them not free or sovereign but “ownerless.”

There's always nostalgic value in hearing the golden oldies. But Fried gets there by writing as though the Russians' current negotiating positions, which they know very well that the US and NATO won't accept without changes (duh! that's what they call it "negotiation") as though it were something like a military ultimatum.

Fried even declares, "the Kremlin regards the 40 million Ukrainians and 100 million Europeans from Estonia to Bulgaria as mere property of one or another great power; Moscow lost them as the USSR collapsed and now demands them back." (my emphasis)

I'm tempted to say I'd like some of whatever he's smoking. Russia wants to take over Bulgaria?

Now, it's a reality that great powers are known to throw their weight around in their geographic neighbors, sometimes in more blundering ways than others. Ask Venezuela or any other country in Latin American about that. But Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet government was willing to cut its Warsaw Pact allies loose not least because they were a significant economic burden for the economically troubled USSR.

While Russia clearly sees an interest in keeping Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO, the recent unrest in Kazakhstan is another reminder that Russia realizes that it has plenty of challenges already. Sure, any Russian government would in theory be happy if NATO in its current form didn't exist. But Russia's armed forces are roughly the size of Germany's and France's combined. That it has the capability or the immediate intent to overrun eastern and central Europe really sounds like nostalgic Cold War fantasy.

Fried uses the intervention in Kazakhstan as evidence. "The Russian-led military incursion in Kazakhstan shows that Moscow is willing to use its military in a big, overt way inside its neighbors."

Since the context of Fried's comments is providing an outline of what the US negotiating position should be, and his comments on that seem like a pretty straightforward pragmatic negotiating strategy, I suppose a little hyperbole is to be expected. But hyperbole turning into actual policy - or as justification for policy based on less exalted aims - has happened a lot in US foreign policy.

At least he didn't bring up the Munich analogy!

John Mearsheimer on Ukraine

It seems like I can n ever post about the "realist" foreign policy outlook without declaring my love-hate relationship to it. So this is my official declaration for this post that I love the pragmatism, hate the amoral cynicism and determinism that sometimes seem to go with it (Henry Kissinger, cough, cough).

It's interesting in this video from 2015 on Ukraine that John Mearsheimer's more hawkish view of China figures heavily in his view of US-NATO relations with Russia. He thinks the logic of international balance-of-power politics will put Russia and US into a position whether they cooperate in balancing against China.

Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer 09/25/2021:

Mearsheimer is one of the two main participants in this very recent video conference from the Quincy Institute. And here he sounds almost deterministic in talking about how "realist" assumptions about how nations behave mean the US will engage in a containment policy against China.

Mearsheimer said in another presentation last year, "the United States is a ruthless great power. I have no illusions about the United States' behavior. Most Americans, as you know, think that the United States is an exceptionally benign country and everybody should love the United States. That's not my view of how great powers operate, the United States included."

This lack of sentimentality about the pretensions of US diplomacy puts him and other realists often in the position criticizing US military interventions.

In the 2015 video, Mearsheimer presents the following bullet points:

Mearsheimer contests both sets of conventional assumptions.

There is some hope that the US and NATO will take a pragmatic approach to the current Ukraine standoff: Rajan Menon and Benjamin Friedman, Putin draws lines over NATO, Ukraine: Let the negotiations begin Responsible Statecraft 12/20/2021. Menon and Friedman make this important point:

While Biden cannot possibly meet Putin’s demand for a legal guarantee that Ukraine will be barred from NATO, diplomats can surely negotiate to produce a formulation that provides Russia an assurance to allay its concerns that there will be no short-term change in Ukraine’s status with respect to NATO but does not foreclose Ukraine’s options.

But will Russia be satisfied with that? Ideally Moscow wants a neutral Ukraine, a la Cold-War Austria. Will it be willing to settle for something short of that? We won’t know - and perhaps even the Russians don’t - until the effort is made to find language that reconciles Ukraine’s insistence on self-determination and Russia’s demand that its security interests be respected. Given the continued danger of war, the effort is certainly worth it.

Ukraine and the significance of the European Union's mutual-defence obligation

The Deutsche Welle News program To the Point presents this half-hour discussion of the Ukraine situation, Russia’s troop build-up: Will the West stand by Ukraine against Putin? 12/09/2021.

One of the panelists, Thomas Wiegold, journalist and author of the Augen Geradeaus! blog, observes just after 6:35 "we shouldn't forget that the EU as such also has a mutual defense clause which in itself is even stronger than the NATO defense clause."

Neither the EU nor the NATO treaties require mandatory sending of troops by all members in the case of a defence action under the treaties. But both are serious commitments.

And those mutual defence obligations are major considerations in incorporating Ukraine, Georgia, or Moldova into the EU or NATO while Russia is in de facto control of parts of their national territory. That's especially so in the case of Ukraine, where Russia has formally (though in violation of international law) incorporated the Ukrainian territory of Crimea into Russia itself.

Alexander Vindman offers his (conventional) observations on the Ukraine crisis

Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council staff member made famous by Donald Trump's shameful treatment of him, has an op-ed on US policy toward Ukraine, and gives a bullet-point version of it in a Twitter thread.

A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support makes an authoritarian Russia unviable in the long term.

— Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) December 10, 2021

od nor bad in itself. But he is clearly arguing for a very active foreign policy that aims not just at defending international law and European security interests but at changing the current regime in Russia.

In the broad sense, any critic of Putin's authoritarian, oligarchic regime would prefer to see a different kind of government in Russia. And not all those critics would agree on what type would be most preferable.

• So my first cautionary point here is: We need to remember that US regime change operations have a very dubious record. See: Cuba, Venezuela, to take just two examples. Even the "success" stories like Iran 1954 and Afghanistan 2001 don't all show a promising outcome.

In fact, since 1979 our regime change efforts in Afghanistan has been the gift that keeps on giving: Shabnam von Hein. Afghanistan opium trade booms since Taliban takeover DW News 10.12.2021.

• Also, just how "unviable" do we want to try to make the government of nuclear-armed Russia?

It may even convince the Russian people — who share a culture, history and religion with Ukrainians — to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition.
To be sure, this doesn’t happen overnight. A generational investment is necessary to realize such a vision.

— Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) December 10, 2021

• I also like to think that effective examples of democratic government are contagious. There's plenty of evidence to make that argument. Here it's worth remembering that the Arab Spring which began with demands for democratization in Tunisia spread to other countries. But I wouldn't argue that the results were unambiguously successful or even nesessarily a net benefit to the NATO countries. I hope in another 10 or 20 or 50 years, people will look back on the Arab Spring as an important turning point that led to successful democratic government. But they don't provide reasons to be glib about their short-term success, particularly for a US looking to promote regime changes.

But Vindman does make his main focus the strategic role of Ukraine as an independent country, which doesn't have to mean a democratic one:

The big issue at stake: the vital role a free & sovereign Ukraine plays in advancing U.S. interests against those of Russia and China.

Statements that U.S. interests end at NATO’s borders have only emboldened Mr. Putin to ignore international norms.

— Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) December 11, 2021

• China does have investments in Ukraine which could potentially clash with those of Russia. But it's also not clear that China sees Russian influence in Ukraine as simply bad for Chinese interests. Or that China would see a Ukraine more aligned with NATO, or one with a government that Russia dislikes, as in itself bad for China's interests.

And Vindman makes this argument:

The more important issue to consider is that negotiations with Russia should be dealt with at the level of European security. These talks should devise off-ramps that alleviate both European and Russian security concerns.

— Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) December 11, 2021

This is a good example of diplo-speak which we often see in analyses addressed to the foreign policy "blob". And there's nothing inherently wrong there, either. Here, this is a roundabout way of saying that Russia is making the issue of Ukrainian membership in NATO (and the EU) an issue around Ukraine. But since the Western negotiating position understandably claims that an independent country's decision to join NATO. But all parties involved know that the NATO membership issue is a real issue at stake here for both NATO and Russia, whatever diplomatic smoke either side may want to blow around it.

The discussions of Ukraine often include a sequencing in which Ukraine would first join the EU, which in theory would be less threatening to Russia than NATO membership, before a later acsension to NATO could take place. But what is not mentioned enough in the public reports and discussions is that EU membership includes a mutual-defence comittment: “If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations charter".

Russia's control of territory within Georgia and Moldova, and even more drastically in Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea, is a very real practical barrier to the entry of any of those countries to the EU as well as NATO. Mutual-defence commitments mean agreements on the territory to be defended. If a country with some of its territory controlled by Russia joins either the EU or NATO, it creates an explicit commitment to defend the agreed borders of the member country. How that could be done in those cases without a willingness to engage in direct conflict with Russia is not clear. We do have diplomats in order to come up with creative workarounds on such things. But that is far from an easy one.

Russia's support of separatist "republics" in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine is a real and legitimate issue. Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian Crimea is even more so. In the case of Crimea, it is a serious problem for nuclear nonproliferation, because Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in its negotiations with Russia for independence in exchange for a Russia commitment not to engage in military aggression against Ukraine.

Why NATO shuns the "Azov Battalion" of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry

Aljazeera English reports on a unit called the Azov Battalion, formerly a private militia that the Ukrainian government incorporated into their National Guard seven years ago. The National Guard is under the Interior Ministry, not part of the army. But NATO countries that are providing training to non-NATO member Ukraine have all along refused to provide training to the Azov brigade because of their far-right political leanings. Russia-Ukraine tension: NATO sidelines Kyiv’s far-right fighters 12/09/2021:

The existence and nature of the Azov Battalion is one set of data in a much larger and very complicated confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. But it is obviously a problem from NATO's point of view in this situation.

See also: Congress bans arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis The Hill 03/27/2018:

“White supremacy and neo-Nazism are unacceptable and have no place in our world,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), an outspoken critic of providing lethal aid to Ukraine, said in a statement to The Hill on Tuesday. “I am very pleased that the recently passed omnibus prevents the U.S. from providing arms and training assistance to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine.”

The United States has been aiding and training Ukrainian forces in their fight against Russian-backed separatists since 2014, and recently expanded that aid to include arms. The omnibus includes about $620.7 million in aid for Ukraine, including $420.7 million in State Department and foreign operations funds and $200 million in Pentagon funds.

The Azov Battalion was founded in 2014, and its first commander was Andriy Biletsky, who previously headed the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine. Several members of the militia, which has been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard, are self-avowed neo-Nazis.

Ben Makuch reports, "Some American neo-Nazi extremist groups see Azov as a future model for themselves in the U.S. once their fantasy race war takes place and the federal government collapses." (Ex-US Soldier Turned Influencer Criticized for Ukraine War Trip With Neo-Nazi Vice 05/14/2021)

So, if you hear about the group in polemics over Ukraine, its existence isn't a propaganda construction. But as always, claims over military confrontations always need to be subjected to critical scrutiny.

US political rhetoric over the current Ukraine situation

Anne Applebaum tends to lean hawkish on issues involving Russia. These tweets fit with that pattern.

On the other hand, Tucker Carlson is a rightwing twit. So it's always worth doing a double-take when you might find yourself maybe agreeing with him on something.

On the other other hand, there's the Stopped Clock rule that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Or, in the Rick Perry version, even a stopped clock is right once a day.

Of course, the notion that the only relevant fact in the Ukraine-Russia situation is that Vladimir Putin "just wants to keep his western border secure" is also a gross oversimplication. (Yeah, I know, it's Twitter, so what can we expect?)

Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook (12/08/2021) adds some details. (The scariest information in this excerpt is the fact that Victoria Nuland is still in the government, as an Undersecretary of State no less.)

Russia depends on petroleum exports and is currently waiting on approval from German regulators to start pumping gas through the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea. The U.S. says Germany has agreed to shut the pipeline down if Russia invades Ukraine. This puts pressure on Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who took over today when Angela Merkel stepped down, but the European Union is talking about permitting the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, to sanction foreign countries without getting each country to sign on individually. Sanctions would go into effect unless a majority of the E.U. countries voted to lift them, imposing unity that would create a powerful economic weapon against Russia.

Meanwhile, Foreign Policy magazine’s national security reporter Jack Detsch tweeted yesterday that, according to Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, the U.S. is considering sanctions that could “[isolate] Russia completely from the global financial system.” That’s a threat to cut Russia out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a banking cooperative in Brussels that facilitates financial transactions around the world. European leaders considered cutting Russia off from SWIFT after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 but decided against it because the effect on Russia would be so extreme: Russia relies on SWIFT to move its payment for petroleum exports. [my emphasis]

Russia is a petrostate. Europe is heavily dependent on oil and natural gas imports from Russia. Russia is heavily dependent on that income. The US and its NATO allies made a calculated risk in extending NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia) and even to three former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania).

Russia in response has been supporting breakaway "republics" (separatist movements) in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. They also formally (and illegally) annexed Crimea, which is part of Ukraine. This effectively prevents those three countries from joining NATO. Because joining a mutual defense treaty means agreeing on the borders to be defended. Accepting those countries into NATO without resolving the border disputes would essentially mean declaring war on Russia.

Another ugly wrinkle in this is that when Ukraine separated from the former Soviet Union, they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons stationed on their soil in exchange for Russia's commitment never to invade them. That example, plus Iraq (which had given up its nuclear program) and Libya (which the Cheney-Bush Administration touted as a success story of a country giving up their "weapons of mass destruction" program), means that the US and Russia have sent a message to non-nuclear powers: "If you have nuclear weapons, we won't invade you. If you give up your nuclear weapons ... tough luck, suckers!"

Great powers taking nuclear nonproliferation as seriously as they should would not act this way.

It would be trite to say that the current situation with Ukraine is complicated. And Ukraine is by no means the only issue in the relations among the US, Russia, and Europe. But with characters like Victoria Nuland on the case who will be only to glad to paint this is as a good-vs.-evil situation, people who aren't fond of unnecessary wars need to remember that it's complicated.

Russia, NATO, China and the tensions over Ukraine

Sarah Rainsford reminds us that Russia concerns about further NATO expansion on its border is a key issue at play in the current Ukraine-Russia tensions. (Russia-Ukraine border: Why Moscow is stoking tensions BBC News 11/28/2021) It's not the only one. And of course the Russians would be glad to magnify the significance of that concern in the service of diplomacy and propaganda.

But it's unthinkable that it's not a real concern on their part, aside from the fact that they've been saying it for years. It's kind of a banal thought exercise, and oversimplified, but it might help to imagine how the US would regard Canada or Mexico joining a mutual defense treaty with Russia or China. In the world of today, it's hard to imagine that it would be regarded in the mainstream, and by most hardcore "restraint" advocates, as a very real and legitimate national security concern.

Rainsford reports:

["Most analysts"] see the Kremlin sending a message that it's ready to defend its "red lines" on Ukraine: above all, that it must not join Nato.

"I think for Putin it's really important. He thinks the West has begun giving Ukraine's elite hope about joining Nato," political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya at R.Politik told the BBC.

"The training, the weapons and so on are like a red rag to a bull for Putin and he thinks if he doesn't act today, then tomorrow there will be Nato bases in Ukraine. He needs to put a stop to that."

Ukraine's desire to join the security bloc is nothing new, nor is Russia's insistence on vetoing that ambition in what it sees as its own "back yard".

But Moscow has been rattled recently by the Ukrainian military using Turkish drones against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine; the flight near Crimea of two nuclear-capable US bombers was an extra irritant.

There's also concern that the so-called Minsk agreements, a framework for ending Ukraine's seven-year-old conflict that's too contentious to actually implement, could be jettisoned for something more favourable to Kyiv. [my emphasis]

On the other hand, Russia's actions in 2014 would seem to have already effectively block Ukraine from joining NATO. Or rather, from NATO allowing Ukraine to join. Because Russia not only controls but has formally annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, unquestionably in violation of international law. Russia also controls the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, though without formally annexing them.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made this comment on NATO's relation to Ukraine on 11/30/2021 (Doorstep statement NATO):

Our presence in Eastern part of the Alliance is, of course, defensive.

It was actually the increased presence of NATO troops in this Eastern part of the Alliance, in the Black Sea region, and in the Baltic region was triggered by Russia's use of force against Ukraine back in 2014, with the illegal annexation of Crimea, and with the continued destabilization of Donbas, Eastern Ukraine. So there's no doubt that this was a defensive response to what we saw back then.

I think it is important to distinguish between NATO Allies and partner Ukraine. NATO Allies, there we provide [Article 5] guarantees, collective defence guarantees, and we will defend and protect all Allies.

Ukraine is a partner, a highly valued partner. We provide support, political, practical support. Allies provide training, capacity building, equipment and I am absolutely certain that Allies will recommit and reconfirm their strong support to Ukraine also during the meeting today.

But as I said there's a difference between a partner Ukraine and an Ally like for instance Latvia. [my emphasis]

There are other closely-related issues, such as Russian pipelines serving Western Europe and its ambitions to hold Belarus as more oriented toward Russia than towards Poland and the West - the latter a situation which certainly seems to be the case at the moment!

What I have not seen much remarked on in recent news analyses of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is how it plays in Russia-China-USA relations. After all, the US from the Nixon Administration to the fall of the USSR pursued a balancing strategy of US China to balance against the Soviet Union. Russia and China have generally good relations right now. With the "New Cold War" against China getting a lot of attention during the Biden-Harris Administration, China can't be entirely sorry to see the US and NATO engaged with tensions with Russia involving Ukraine.

China has been pursuing closer relations with Ukraine for years. (Nicolas Tenzer, Europe can't ignore Chinese encroachment in Ukraine EUObserver 11/22/2021) So China definitely figures into this mix. In this case, both Russia and China have reason to be concerned about closer Ukrainian ties to the West. Although that doesn't mean China's and Russia's interests are completely aligned on Ukraine. Putin's government presumably has concerns about China gaining what it sees as excessive influence in Ukraine, too.

The Ukrainian government is not a passive pawn in all this. They are pursuing their own goals which also don't match up precisely with those of NATO, Russia, and China. See:

• Dan De Luce and Veronika Melkozerova, Fed up with the U.S., Ukraine cuts deals with China and shuts up about the Uyghurs NBC News 11/29/2021
• Emil Filtenborg and Stefan Weichert, Should Ukraine take Chinese cash for its huge roads upgrade project? Euronews 09/30/2021
• Maxim Samorukov and Temur Umarov, China’s Relations with Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova: Less Than Meets the Eye Carnegie Institute Moscow 12/31/2020
•  Valbona Zeneli and Nataliia Haluhan, Why China is Setting its Sights on Ukraine The Diploma 10/04/2019

Rumors of war over Ukraine

All of a sudden - or at least so it probably seems to most news consumers in the US and Europe - there's hair-raising talk in the press about a confrontation between the US/NATO and Russia over Ukraine.

BBC News provides this summary, Why tensions are rising with Russia 11/20/2021:

In the geopolitical jockeying among Russia, the US, and other powers in Europe, the rumors of war over Ukraine are happening simultaneously with the confrontation with Belarus and Poland, also along with Latvia and Lithuania, which haven't gotten as much attention as Poland in the international news.

There is a useful discussion on this between Emma Ashford and Matthew Kroenig, the latter of which is mainly taking a knee-jerk hawkish position (usually a very safe stance for people operating in the foreign policy Blob), while Ashford is notably more pragmatic: Is Russia Preparing to Invade Ukraine? Foreign Policy 11/19/2021.

Their discussion includes the key role that Russian energy business plays in this situation, which plays a key role in Russian relations with both Ukraine and Belarus, and which also gives both Russia and the EU (particularly Germany) an incentive to avoid political and especially military escalation in either place. But Putin's government also has practical reasons to see benefits in saber-rattling, as well.

Ashford notes:

... on the upside, [Belarusian President] Lukashenko is also his own worst enemy. In addition to the migration crisis [he staged on the borders to Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania], he started to suggest last week that he might cut off oil and gas shipments to Europe. This week, he announced an unplanned three-day “maintenance” stoppage on the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil to Poland.

But I don’t think he’s going to get very far with this ploy. Putin’s response to this suggestion last week was to tell reporters that any move against pipelines carrying Russian energy to Europe would “risk harming ties between Moscow and Minsk [Belarus].” The Russian state depends on energy revenues — and on being a reliable supplier. If Lukashenko tries to disrupt that, I think he’ll find his support from Moscow drying up faster than the Polish oil supply. [my emphasis]

A lot of the mainstream commentary on Russia that I see doesn't give enough weight to Russia's status as a petrostate, a situation which is simultaneously a big blessing and a big curse.

Anatol Lieven of the pro-realism/pro-restraint Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote about the Ukraine issue of the moment in Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World The Nation 11/15/2021:

Since the Ukrainian revolution and the Donbas rebellion of 2014, successive Ukrainian governments have vowed to recover the Donbas — by force if necessary. Despite a ceasefire in 2015 that suspended full-scale war, probing attacks and retaliations by both sides have led to repeated clashes, as in March and April of this year. Successive US administrations have expressed strong support for the Ukrainian side and for future NATO membership (so far blocked by Germany and France), though they have stopped short of promising to defend Ukraine militarily. ...

Only the most insane of US politicians and commentators actually want to go to war with Russia in Ukraine. But as the outbreak of World War I demonstrated, leaders who do not intend to go to war may stumble into a situation in which they are unable to stop or turnback.

Do I need to add that in the era of Donald Trump, Paul Gosar, and Kyle Rittenhouse, the phrase "most insane of US politicians" is not empty hyperbole? After all, one of those three was still President this time last year, actively plotting a coup to remain in office after losing the Presidential election.

The consequences of a direct US-Russian clash in Ukraine would be catastrophic. A full-scale conventional war would have the strong potential to escalate into nuclear war and the annihilation of most of humanity. Even a limited war would cause a ruinous global economic crisis, necessitate the dispatch of huge US armed forces to Europe, and destroy for the foreseeable future any chance of serious action against climate change. China might well seize the chance to conquer Taiwan, leaving the United States to face a war with the world’s other two greatest military powers simultaneously. Finally, given the huge superiority of Russia’s armed forces over Ukraine’s, the very limited number of US forces in Europe, and the deep unwillingness of European countries to confront Russia militarily, the strong likelihood is that Russia would win a limited war in Ukraine, seizing much more Ukrainian territory and imposing a shattering humiliation on the US and the West. [my emphasis]

If the latter seems like a terrifying scenario, that's not least because the existence of nuclear arsenals in the US and Russia has the potential to make any direct military confrontation between the two powers a potential humanity-ending event. See Cuban missile crisis. And the lesser-known but probably even closer call, the Able Archer incident.

But this is also the kind of calculation that foreign policy analysts should be making, looking as realistically as possible at the threats, options, stakes, capabilities, priorities, and alternatives in a situation.

Even states that may be otherwise closely allied and sharing similar political and economic systems can't be indifferent to each other illegally seizing territory, as Russia clearly did by occupying and even annexing Crimea in 2014, which is legally part of Ukraine. Spain and the UK generally get along very well and are both members of NATO, but Spain still wants Gibraltar back. Argentina and Great Britain have generally good relations, but Argentina still claims sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands (Falkland Islands to the Brits). In both cases, the weight of international law is against Britain. But this doesn't mean that either Argentina or Spain are likely to go to war with the UK. Although Argentina made a disastrously unsuccessful attempt at it in 1982.

But Ukraine is not a member of NATO. And the US has no mutual-defense treaty with Ukraine. And it seems unlikely as a practical matter that Russia would accept NATO membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus. No less an authority than George Kennan famously warned in 1997, when the first post-Cold War NATO enlargement (outside the former East Germany) was being actively considered, "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era." (A Fateful Error New York Times 02/05/1997)

But in 1997, Cold War triumphalism was in full bloom.

Speaking of nuclear weapons, it worth remembering that when the Soviet Union broke up, they had such weapons stationed in Ukraine. As Gerhard Wettig writes (Gorbatschow-Reformpolitik und Warschauer Pakt 1985-1991; 2021):

Die Unabhängigkeit des ukrainischen Staates schien sowohl durch das generelle Bekenntnis zur Unverletzlichkeit der Grenzen als auch speziell durch eine Garantie seines Territoriums gewährleistet, die Russland als Gegenleistung für die Übergabe der dort stationierten sowjetischen Kernwaffen zusagte.

The independence of the Ukrainian state seemed to be guaranteed both by the general commitment to the inviolability of the borders and specifically by a guarantee of its territory, which Russia promised in return for the transfer of the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed there. [my translation, my emphasis]

This is what made Russia's annexation of Crimea and the support of separatist mini-republics inside it a particular blow the nuclear nonproliferation. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the US/NATO armed intervention in Libya in 2011 sent a similar signal, since both had agreed to give up their programs to develop "weapons of mass destruction."

So why would the leaders of North Korea, India, Pakistan, or Israel agree to give up their nuclear weapons if they see that existing nuclear powers refuse to honor their pledges to respect their territorial integrity?

Russian pullback from the buildup against Ukraine

Steven Rosenberg analyses the current drawdown of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border, What is Russia doing? BBC News 04/23/2021:

Although Russia has shrugged off the build-up as training exercises in response to "threatening" actions from Nato, it is also said to be planning to cordon off areas of the Black Sea to foreign shipping. Ukraine fears its ports could be affected.
Russia said all along that these were nothing more than military exercises.
But Moscow knew very well that its troop movements close to Ukraine and in annexed Crimea were making a lot of people very nervous: in Ukraine, Europe and in America.

And that was the point.

Here is an English-language Deutsche Welle report on the drawdown, Russia withdraws troops from Ukraine border 04/22/2021:

Clara Ferreira Marques reports on one important element of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the need for Russia to supply water to Crimea, the Ukrainian area that Russia illegally annexed in 2014: (Crimea’s Water Crisis Is an Impossible Problem for Putin Bloomberg Opinion 03/19/2021):

Ukraine dammed the North Crimean Canal seven years ago, cutting off the source of nearly 90% of the region’s fresh water and setting it back to the pre-1960s, when much was arid steppe. Add a severe drought and sizzling temperatures last year, plus years of underinvestment in pipes and drilling, and fields are dry. In the capital Simferopol and elsewhere, water has been rationed.

Tiny Crimea gave Putin a boost, when, following protests that overthrew Kyiv’s Russia-friendly government, he seized a territory that belonged to Moscow for centuries but had been part of an independent Ukraine since 1991. The annexation of the territory that’s equal to less than 0.2% of Russia’s total helped lift Putin’s national popularity to record levels in the year or so that followed. That bump has since faded.

Today locals, who were made ambitious promises in 2014, are struggling with the fallout from a wide-ranging nationalization drive that's not always served their interests, a poorly handled, muffled coronavirus crisis — and dry taps. Sanctions-inflated prices, high even after a $3.7 billion bridge over the Kerch Strait linked the territory to Russia, have meanwhile eaten away at pension and salary increases. Opinion polls are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence reveals building frustration. [my emphasis]

Another major assumption on which Putin's foreign policy has relied is to prevent any additional countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, from becoming part of NATO. The former Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became full NATO members in 2004. As Laurence Peter report in 2014 (Why Nato-Russia relations soured before Ukraine BBC News 09/03/2014):

In 1999 - nearly 10 years after the Berlin Wall fell - Nato admitted three former Warsaw Pact countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

More former Soviet bloc countries joined Nato in 2004: the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Russia was particularly riled by the expansion of Nato to the Baltic states, which were formerly in the USSR and viewed from Moscow as part of the "near abroad". That phrase, commonly used by Russian politicians, implies that ex-Soviet states should not act against Russia's strategic interests. [my emphasis]

Peter also reported, "In early 2008 Nato also held out the prospect of future Nato membership to Georgia. The Kremlin saw that as a direct provocation, just as it saw closer Nato ties with Ukraine." And in both Georgia and Ukraine, Russia is now supporting small, pro-Russian "independent republics" on the territories of Georgia and Ukraine. And they occupied and formally annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. As a practical matter, this blocks those countries from joining NATO. Because to incorporate them into NATO, the NATO allies would either have to formally accept the Crimean annexation and the "independent" mini-republics, or commit themselves to defending the whole current legal territories of Georgia and Ukraine. Which means NATO would be committed to engaging in a war with Russia to push its forces out of the occupied areas.

It's entirely possible and very likely that Western diplomats have spun some theoretical scenarios in which Georgia and Ukraine could become NATO members without that being a de facto declaration of war on Russia. That's part of what diplomats do. But it's hard to see how that could actually be pulled off in the real world.

Military posturing in Ukraine

Biden's foreign policy is of course unfolding. And relations with Russia and China are a major part of that, of course.

There is a lot of maneuvering between Russia and the US over Ukraine, as shown in some recent reports. Anatol Lieven provides some important background in Again, Washington jumps to conclusions over Ukraine-Russia skirmish Responsible Statecraft 04/02/2021

The initial reaction of Biden administration officials to the latest clash between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian militia (or Russian soldiers serving as militia) in eastern Ukraine exemplifies a very dangerous pattern in U.S. and Western behavior: to believe whatever “our” side in a given crisis tells us, automatically, and without checking facts.

How often in the past has the United States been seduced into disastrous international actions by local actors who knew the right American buttons to push and the right misinformation to feed to Washington? Iranian monarchists, British intelligence, the United Fruit Company, Vietnamese politicians; Cuban, Iraqi and Libyan exiles, Arab princelings, Afghan warlords, an almost endless succession of Latin American generals and oligarchs — I could go on.

While four Ukrainian soldiers died in the recent fighting, we have no independent evidence at all of who started it, or why, and more careful media outlets like the Financial Times have avoided apportioning blame in their reporting.

Ukraine, like Georgia and Belarus and Moldova, was formerly part of the Soviet Union. Russia wants to block closer alliances, particularly military alliances, between those countries and the West. The former Baltic Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are all now members of the European Union and the NATO military alliance.

In Georgia and in Ukraine, Russia is political and militarily supporting breakaway mini-republics on the territory of both those cuontries. And Russia has formally annexed Crimea, which is legally part of Ukraine. In international law, Georgia and Ukraine are right in rejecting those claims. But as a practical matter for Russia, those partial occupations have the practical function of making it very difficult for NATO countries including the US to form formal military alliances with Georgia or Ukraine. Because to have a formal military alliance, you have to define the territory to be defended. That creates risks, and not only risks from the Other Side. As Lieven recalls in the context of:

... the U.S. and Western response to the outbreak of the Georgia-Russia war in August 2008; for here, the evidence, far from being ambiguous and opaque, was always entirely clear. The war began with Georgian troops moving inside the disputed territory of South Ossetia and attacking Russian “peacekeeping” troops there. Nobody has ever produced the slightest credible evidence otherwise. Russia then counter-attacked and defeated the Georgian forces. Yet this obvious truth was turned by the Bush administration, the entire bipartisan establishment, and the U.S. media into a story of “Russian aggression against Georgia.”

To say this does not mean taking one side or the other on the underlying rights and wrongs of any of these conflicts. What it does mean is maintaining a respect for evidence and the truth in each specific case, without which it would be impossible to maintain either the integrity or the wisdom of the policymaking process and foreign policy debate: Garbage in, garbage out.

The Georgia-Russia war also demonstrates another sinister effect of this syndrome, which is to reduce the ability of the United States to learn from its mistakes — something that used to be to be considered a key advantage of liberal democracy over its closed and authoritarian rivals. The bipartisan establishment and media had agreed on pushing NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, and encouraged the Georgians to see themselves as allies for whom the United States would fight to defend in a war with Russia. They did this despite warnings from certain regional experts (including me), both of the risks they were encouraging Georgia to run, and of the obvious truth that America would not risk nuclear war with Russia for the sake of Georgia. [my emphasis]

Leonid Bershidsky writes about the current situation in Ukraine (Putin’s Ukraine Build-Up Is About Gaining Attention, Not Territory Bloomberg Opinion 04/09/2021):

The almost theatrical massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border in recent days, which some researchers have described as the heaviest since 2015, brings home to Western leaders an uncomfortable truth: If Russia had the appetite for a major military operation, Ukraine would be at its mercy.

Putin the opportunist, who seized a moment of confusion in 2014 to grab Crimea, surely sees a similar chance now, and he has little to fear at home if he launches a military operation. Yet there are good reasons to conclude that what Putin really wants is not more Ukrainian territory, but greater respect from the U.S. and his European neighbors for what he thinks of as his ability to advance Russia’s interests. [my emphasis]

But some of Bershidsky's commentary strikes me as pretty shaky, e.g., "Putin no longer needs to worry about legitimacy." Even dictators need some kind of legitimacy in their societies. Even Pol Pot did. And: "The Kremlin also isn’t too concerned about the coronavirus and its fall-out: Minimizing deaths is not a political priority when domestic politics are meaningless, and you can manipulate death statistics."

I think Bershidsky may be confusing the Putin who is the authoritarian President of Russia with some comic book villain he's been following.

Andrew Langley and Daryna Krasnolutska report (Merkel Joins Diplomacy Rush to Avert Ukraine Military Misstep 04/08/2021)

[German chancellor Angela] Merkel told Putin on during a phone call Thursday that Russia must reverse the buildup of troops in the area of eastern Ukraine to help achieve “a de-escalation of the situation,” according to her spokeswoman, Ulrike Demmer.

While Russia has played down the likelihood of an imminent attack by either side, its heightened military presence around the conflict that erupted after President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea in 2014 risks setting off a renewed spiral of violence. More intense battles in recent days between Ukraine’s army and Kremlin-backed insurgents have already added to the death toll of more than 13,000.

It's not surprising to see this kind of posturing in the early days of the Biden-Harris Administration. But these sorts of actions always have risks. And some people are being killed in these skirmishes.

Ilya Arkhipov and Daryna Krasnolutska look at the situation in Kremlin Warns of Risk of Broader War in Ukraine Conflict Bloomberg Quint 04/09/2021:

Amid the deepening crisis, Turkey said its NATO ally the U.S. had notified it that two warships would cross into the Black Sea and remain there until May 4. Russia continued nationwide military exercises announced by the Defense Ministry on Tuesday.

Calling the current escalation “rather unprecedented,” [Russian spokesman Dmitry] Peskov’s comments seemed to reflect a hardening of Russia’s position. They came a day after the Kremlin’s top envoy for the conflict seemed to play down the significance of what Moscow claims is a military buildup by Kyiv in the contested region. [my emphasis]

Aljazeera reports (Ukraine says soldier killed in shelling by Russia-backed forces 04/11/2021):

In recent weeks, fighting has intensified between Ukraine’s army and pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east, with signs of a Russian troop build-up in the region raising concerns of major escalation in the long-running conflict.

Ukraine has accused Russia of amassing thousands of military personnel on its northern and eastern borders as well as on the annexed Crimean peninsula.

The Kremlin said on Sunday it was not moving towards war with Ukraine, but that it “will not remain indifferent” to the fate of Russian speakers in the conflict-torn region.

Meanwhile, Moscow said it feared the resumption of full-scale fighting in eastern Ukraine and could take steps to protect civilians there. Kyiv has said it will not launch an offensive against the Russia-backed separatists.