Putin’s Recycled Rationalizations
Putin’s Recycled Rationalizations
After two years of war in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s talking points are looking worse for the wear.
OVER THE TWO YEARS OF VLADIMIR PUTIN’S WAR in Ukraine, we have heard all sorts of alleged reasons for the invasion—not just from Putin himself, but from his Western apologists, be it Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald or Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s NATO enlargement and Russia’s legitimate fear of NATO bases. It’s the existential threat Moscow sees in a pro-Western, Russia-unfriendly government in Ukraine. It’s the oppression of ethnically, linguistically, and culturally Russian communities in Eastern Ukraine, in territories many Russians regard as historical Russian lands. It’s the need to “denazify” the country. Farther on the fringe, it’s the urgent mission to protect the Slavic world from conquest by the global gay mafia, or the menace of Ukraine’s sinister American biolabs (who knows, maybe they’re injecting Slavic babies with the gay gene!).
Gays and biolabs aside, these excuses are still being recycled—for instance, by Quincy Institute fellow Anatol Lieven writing last week in the Nation, the left half of the left-right Putin apologism horseshoe. Despite a grudging concession that Russia’s neighbors have valid reasons to fear Russian domination, Lieven trots out the familiar talking points: Russia is “mainly reacting to moves by the West”; Russia could not have been expected to acquiesce to Ukraine becoming “a military outpost of the West” with a “radically downgrad[ed] role” for Russian language and culture; and anyway, what if it was the United States and Mexico?
These arguments were always bad. For instance, one could point out that Mexico was far from subservient to the United States during the Cold War, even maintaining friendly relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the United States somehow managed not to invade.
But the two-year mark of Putin’s war is a good occasion to examine how these many justifications are holding up.
Take NATO expansion. It’s pretty clear that if keeping NATO at bay was one of Russia’s important objectives, it has failed spectacularly. Not only have Ukraine’s chances of NATO membership arguably gotten stronger, but NATO’s roster has already grown by two countries since February 2022: Finland, with which Russia shares 830 miles of land border (compared to 1,226 miles with Ukraine), and Sweden, which shares only 4.5 miles of nautical border with Russia but will have a key role in defending the 2,000-mile Baltic coastline. Meanwhile, defense spending by NATO countries other than the United States spiked dramatically in 2023:
Meanwhile, faced with the humiliating prospect of admitting that Russia’s “special operation” has massively backfired as far as containing NATO was concerned, the Putin regime has inadvertently torpedoed its own claims about a NATO threat to its security. This surprising twist came from Dmitry Medvedev, long ago considered a liberal-leaning figure but now understood to be the regime’s designated insane war clown. Last July, as part of a long essay on the conflict between Russia and the West in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government, Medvedev tried to rebut the notion that Russia’s NATO-containment attempt had been a spectacular failure.
Medvedev’s argument is that, actually, Russia never wanted to contain NATO expansion, only to keep it away from “former parts of our country . . . [e]specially those with which we have territorial disputes” (emphasis in the original). Hence the imperative of eliminating “the threat of Ukraine’s membership in NATO.” This claim is bogus on several levels, If Medvedev is talking about the Russian Federation, Ukraine had never been a part of it. In 2008, when NATO first extended the possibility of inviting Ukraine to join the alliance, it had no “territorial disputes” with Russia. There had been some disputes in the 1990s over the Black Sea Fleet and its base in Sevastopol, but two 1998 treaties divided the fleet, gave Russia a long-term lease on the Sevastopol base, and recognized the inviolability of the borders established in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
But Medvedev’s bizarre claim does advance a coherent, if deeply autocratic and imperialistic, view. What he asserts is Moscow’s supposed right to regard Ukraine as a client state still bound to Russia by its status as a “former part” of the empire—and to revive its territorial claims regardless of existing agreements and treaties. The clear implication is that the “threat” of Ukraine in NATO is not a military threat to Russia’s security, but a cultural and civilizational threat to the Kremlin regime’s imperial pretensions. Which is what some of us have been saying all along.
RUSSIA’S CLAIM THAT IT WAS PURSUING “denazification” in Ukraine—transparently absurd from the start given that the “Nazi regime” it sought to topple was led by a Jewish president—has taken new hits as well. For starters, two years of war and Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories have turned up no “Nazis” to speak of, not even among captured soldiers from the Azov Regiment which the Kremlin propaganda machine and its Western enablers have portrayed as a “neo-Nazi” outfit (a blatant lie based in part on the unit’s actual past history of extremism before it was incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces). Indeed, Russia’s willingness to send captured Azov fighters and commanders back to Ukraine in prisoner swaps instead of putting them before Nuremberg-style tribunals has amounted to a tacit admission that the Kremlin wasn’t buying its own narrative. No wonder some propagandists who had peddled that lie, such as Vladimir Solovyov, freaked out over the exchanges.
While some Azov soldiers captured in Mariupol (including noncombatant women whose crime was cooking for the city’s defenders during the siege) have been tried by the pseudo-courts of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” these sham trials have uncovered no evidence of either Nazis or war crimes. In fact, according to international human rights organizations, it’s the trials that amount to a war crime, since prisoners of war are being unlawfully prosecuted for their role as combatants.
The late Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose conflicts with the Russian military brass led him to some startling moments of candor before escalating to the open rebellion that ultimately cost him his life, also had some interesting things to say on the subject of “Ukro-Nazis.” In relatively circumspect remarks in April 2023, he voiced doubt about their existence. In a much longer and more candid interview in late May, when his stance toward the Ministry of Defense was already one of open defiance, the man once known as “Putin’s chief” famously summed up Russia’s supposed denazification effort as: “We came in a dickish way and stomped our boots all over Ukraine looking for Nazis. While we were looking for Nazis, we beat the crap out of everyone we could.”
Meanwhile, the “denazification” narrative has led the Kremlin regime into some very dark places. Take Putin’s obsessive and obscene attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “bad Jew” installed by his Western patrons to front for a Nazi regime (and equally obscene attempts to smear Zelensky as a Holocaust denier). Add to this Putin’s creepy history lectures in which Ukrainian nationalists get all the blame for the Holocaust in Ukraine while the SS is off the hook, and in which Poland provoked Hitler into the invasion that started World War II. Also add in the genocidal rhetoric of Russian war propagandists, some of whom overtly argue that Ukrainian identity is a delusion in need of forcible cure and those resistant to such treatment may have to be exterminated. At the end of the day, it makes sense to ask if Putin and his minions may be more likely to find a Nazi in the mirror than in Ukraine.
THEN THERE IS RUSSIA’S SUPPOSED MISSION to rescue the Russian speakers of Eastern Ukraine. Tensions over language and culture in Ukraine are real and complicated, and are often paralleled by political divisions. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in April 2014, less than two months after the Euromaidan (the “Revolution of Dignity”), found that compared to the population of Western Ukraine, people in the East and especially those whose primary language was Russian had a much more negative view of the new government in Kyiv. They were also much less pro-Western and much more sympathetic to Russia. Even so, more than two-thirds wanted Ukraine to remain united, and even among Russian speakers only about a quarter wanted regions to be able to secede.
While the persecution of the Russian-speaking population by the post-Maidan government was almost entirely a Kremlin propaganda fiction, policies intended to boost Ukrainian language could get heavy-handed. (A 2019 law which severely restricted the use of Russian in print and broadcast media was criticized not only by Moscow but by the Council of Europe and even by then-President-elect Zelensky, whose first language is Russian.) Yet, even leaving aside the fact that such policies are not a legitimate casus belli, there is little doubt that the backlash against Russian language and culture in Ukraine was largely a response to Russian aggression—specifically, Putin’s annexation of Crimea and incursions into Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Not surprisingly, Russia’s escalation from eight years of low-intensity war in the Donbas to all-out war targeting the entire country has vastly magnified this backlash.
All of which is to say that—ironically and predictably—the war supposedly undertaken to stop the menace of an anti-Russian Ukraine and protect beleaguered Russian-Ukrainians has turned many of those Russian-Ukrainians rabidly anti-Russian.
Last July, even the formerly Russia-friendly mayor of multicultural Odesa, Gennady Trukhanov—who has continued to defend the city’s connections to its rich Russian heritage—responded to a devastating missile attack on the city center with a powerful video message in which he switched from Ukrainian to Russian solely to tell Russians, “If you only knew how much Odesa hates you. Not just hates you, despises you.”
AS FOR THE KREMLIN NARRATIVE of the urgent need to stop a “genocide” of ethnic and cultural Russians in the Donbas region, the speciousness of that talking point was obvious from the start. A refresher: While it’s true that some 3,000 civilians died in the conflict in Donbas in 2014–15—mostly in Ukrainian strikes on Russian-sponsored armed groups hiding among and behind civilians—the civilian casualties dropped dramatically after the 2015 Minsk ceasefire agreements. In the three years preceding the Russian invasion, they totaled about 25 a year, and even those deaths were due almost entirely to ceasefire violations initiated by the pro-Russian side. It also bears repeating that there would have been no armed conflict in Donbas, and no civilian deaths, if Russia hadn’t started an illegal war in the region under the cover of a separatist insurgency.
That last point is not exactly new, but it has been confirmed again and again by people with firsthand knowledge of those events. One such person is Pavel Gubarev, an ex-businessman (and ex-neo-Nazi, but of the Russian nationalist variety) who helped start the Donbas insurgency in 2014 by proclaiming himself the “People’s Governor of Donetsk” and leading a group of pro-Russian rioters in seizing a regional administration building. Gubarev remains a Russo-fascist to the core (he’s one of the unabashed proponents of genociding all Ukrainians who can’t be talked out of their “demonic possession”), but he’s also one of the angry war hawks who think Russia has botched the war, and disaffection seems to have led him to some startling revelations. In an interview with the Russian “patriotic” site Knizhniy Mir (Book World), Gubarev painted a very grim picture of the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk:
Donbas ended up in this nomenklatura/mafia world which exists in Russia, which everyone knows about. The territory essentially came under Russian patronage, and that was what happened. Our two republics—they essentially became banana republics or gangster states, in which everyone was only looking for profit. . . . The bureaucrats in Moscow who should have regarded these two newly formed entities as a geopolitical project regarded them solely as a resource to exploit. The entire eight years before the special operation, we were simply being looted.
(Ukrainian blogger Denis Kazansky, who could not resist an “I told you so,” wryly commented that the Russia-controlled areas of Donbas became “banana republics, but without bananas.”)
In another interview in November, Gubarev freely confirmed another open secret: that the “insurgent” republics would have collapsed in the summer of 2014 if it weren’t for illegal Russian armed intervention.
So much for the Kremlin narrative in which Russia had to save the people of Donbas after eight years of violence and mistreatment from Ukraine. The truth, the “People’s Governor of Donetsk” now tells us, is that Russia had spent those eight years turning its Donbas enclaves into playgrounds for local thugs and feeding grounds for Moscow bureaucrats—and giving the Ukrainian armed forces solid reasons to try to reclaim those territories. Is there any doubt that the real goal of Putin’s “special operation” is to turn as much of Ukraine as he can grab into a gangster-run banana republic without bananas?