Exposing Putin’s lapdogs

In a recent article in Australian Outlook, Tom Switzer, the executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), correctly observes that promoters of the view that the Russian-Ukrainian War is “NATO’s fault,” like the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, have become somewhat marginalised.

The New Statesman, for instance, paints Mearsheimer as an “isolated figure”and a “tragedy.” Yet that doesn’t hinder the repeated reliance on his views (partly, I suspect, because he is such a “contrarian” and controversial figure who generates “views”). Despite claiming that the mainstream media ignores Mearsheimer and his supporters, Tom Switzer and others have published more articles in Australia’s mainstream media promoting the ”NATO’s fault” argument than there have been articles specifically opposing that position.

Both Mearsheimer and Switzer regularly defend their position by taking Putin at his word. In support of the idea that “all Putin wants is to shore up Russia’s security,” they claim that Putin has never said he wants to occupy Ukraine. However, they never refer to the fact that in 1997 Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma signed the NATO-Ukraine Charter.

Nor do they mention that at Sochi on 17 May 2002, Putin actually did say that “at the end of the day” Ukraine’s decision about NATO is one that “is to be taken by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.” It seems there was a time when Putin thought (or at least thought it prudent to state publicly) that “Ukraine exists,” and is not required as a “security buffer within Russia’s sphere of influence.”

Proponents of the “NATO fault” thesis also repeatedly raise the false analogy that the US would not tolerate a Russian military alliance with Mexico or the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba. Yet, despite the proximity of Cuba to the US, and its alliance with the USSR during the Cold War, the US did not invade Cuba (although Cuban exiles made an incursion at the Bay of Pigs, which was rather like the Freedom of Russia Legion that twice raided the Kursk Oblast from Ukraine).

Ironically, Ukraine had neutrality enshrined in its constitution in 2014 when Russia invaded and occupied both Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and its Donbas region. Ukraine’s neutral position was supported by a majority of Ukraine’s citizens in 2013. It was only after Russia’s invasion in the Donbas that Kyiv’s parliament incorporated a NATO membership goal in the Constitution, and now there is overwhelming Ukrainian public acceptance of the need to join NATO.

However, if such arguments are aimed at merely popularising the idea that “It’s all the West’s / NATO’s fault,” why do they also insist on using the exact terminology that Vladimir Putin uses? All arguments regularly apply the following terms: “Ukraine crisis” is used to describe the “Russian-Ukrainian War” (denying agency to Ukrainians); according to them there was a “US/Western backed coup” in Kyiv in 2014 rather than a “Maidan Revolution of Dignity” (denying legitimacy to the Ukrainian government); and 2014-15 was a “civil war” instead of the “Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region” (promoting the idea of Ukraine being “deeply divided”).

That the last was a Russian invasion and not a “civil war” is attested to by the now imprisoned Colonel Igor Girkin who led those Russian forces. No wonder Mearsheimer’s famous “30 million views” 2015 lecture (which number is held up by Tom Switzer as “proof” of the veracity of its contents) is promoted by Russian embassies.

It is important to note that such arguments require the minimising of the crimes of the Russian armed forces in their occupation. Mearsheimer promoted a Kremlin narrative in his 7 April 2022 podcast with Katrina vanden Heuvel (editor of The Nation, an American Far Left pro-Russia magazine). A week after the Russian executions of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the outer-Kyiv suburb of Bucha had come to light Mearsheimer’s view was that, being pressed by the US to do so, the Ukrainian government had issued civilians with rifles as Russian forces drew near the capital, and therefore such deaths were naturally to be expected.

In a 2018 AIIA talk on “The Perils of Russophobia,” Switzer parroted Kremlin propaganda channels, partiularly Russia Today, in saying that there had been a “brutal Ukrainian military assault on those ethnic Russian breakaway regions … that sparked a refugee crisis and the deaths of about ten thousand civilians.” Those same accusations against Ukraine were made by the Russian Federation, and on 18 July 2023 were dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights as “myths of Russian propaganda.”

According to official UN numbers, there were 13,300 deaths  in the Donbas war up to 2022 (of which only 3,390 were civilian deaths—the vast majority having died by 2018), and the regions were not “ethnic Russian” (only around a third of their population was and 90 percent saw Ukraine as their “motherland”). In other words, they were not “breakaway republics,” and of a million and a half refugees caused by Russia’s invasion the vast majority fled to free Ukraine—towards the “brutal Ukrainian military.”

In his 2015 lecture, delivered after Russia had already invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region, Mearsheimer asserted that “Putin is no Hitler.” Rather, he was “too smart” to invade Ukraine because it would become “a briar patch” for Russia. That line was pursued right through the build-up of Russian forces surrounding Ukraine during the latter half of 2021, helping to convince Western observers that Putin “wouldn’t do it.”

When Putin did “do it,” Mearsheimer was forced to shift his narrative to suggest that perhaps the Russian forces might now come up to the left bank of the Dnipro River—the absurd implication being that Putin would be content with staring across the river at his goal, the Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), that would link Russia’s history to Kyiv.

Under the “Russian historical myth” hypothesis, which holds that Ukrainians “don’t exist,” and Kyiv is therefore the “birthplace of Russia,” Putin’s ultimate goal is to control Kyiv and its ancient churches and monasteries. These narrative shifts are often caveated by the claim that these gentlemen don’t endorse “Putin’s style of domestic leadership” or the illegality and immorality of Moscow’s conduct.

For Mearsheimer, the biggest shift in his narrative is the role of Ukrainian agency. In 1993 Mearsheimer argued in Foreign Affairs that Russia was “the state that [Ukraine] fears most” owing to a “history of mutual enmity,” and was certain to invade Ukraine unless the latter held onto its nuclear weapons (which he incorrectly predicted it would do). While he did say that Ukraine joining NATO would create enmity in Russia, his prediction of a Russian invasion was independent of “NATO expansion.”

By 2014 Ukrainians were viewed as mere gullible pawns in  a larger game being played out between the US and Russia. I don’t know what better evidence there is of the folly of that position than the experience of the last two and a half years, during which Ukrainians, by their resistance to the brutal full-scale Russian invasion, have earned the admiration of the whole world.

In the absence of Ukrainian nuclear weapons or Ukraine’s membership in NATO (which Owen Harries, like Mearsheimer in 1993, doubted would even respond to a Russian threat owing to the “decline of the West”) one scenario that Mearsheimer foreshadowed was an anti-Russia military alliance of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine (which together with Lithuania would have reconstituted the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had kept expansionist Muscovy in check for centuries). In other words, if there was no NATO, those countries closest to Russia were expected to form a defence pact. Would such a pact have been seen as “poking the Russian bear” and causing it to attack in self-defence to “protect its near abroad”?

In 1940, viewing the growing troubles of German revanchism, Winston Churchill wrote down what would become another famous quote, and perhaps one more relevant to the current situation in Ukraine. On discussing appeasement he said, “Each one hopes if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” Churchill knew who the crocodile was in 1940, and I’m sure his biographer Lord Andrew Roberts would confirm that he would have immediately recognised the crocodile in the rise of Putin. Sixty years later Margaret Thatcher told a captive  audience that she had “looked for a trace of humanity” in Putin’s behaviour during Russia’s first Kursk (submarine) disaster of this century, but concluded “I should have known better.”

I think we can guess with a high degree of certainty on which side of this debate those two most outstanding British leaders of the 20th century would have stood.

This article was published by The Australian Institute for International Affairs.