Previous Subchapter → 3.7 Self-Determination - For me, not for thee
So all being said the picture is quite murky, the Russians have had legitimate grievances regarding NATO expansion in the past, which caused unnecessary confrontation that brought us towards the conflicts we’re in now, but the Russians are definitely not innocent either, they have a huge part to play in their current dilemma.
After all, NATO in the first place was founded as a counterweight to the Soviet Union’s interventionism, where it had grabbed huge portions of Europe either as annexed territories or satellite states in the aftermath of World War 2, that legacy of Soviet expansionism is why many former Eastern Bloc countries sought to join NATO after achieving their independence, and since then the forceful interventions of the USSR’s successor, the Russian Federation, to resolve the territorial disputes of its neighbours, have only increased that ambition.
For every Transnistrian, Abkhazian or South Ossetian separatist that felt protected by Russia’s interventionism during the Post-Soviet Wars, there was a Moldovan or a Georgian feeling threatened, and nations that feel threatened seek security guarantees.
And let’s not forget, at each stage of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia was the instigator, they created the Euromaidan crisis in the first place by strong arming Ukraine’s government into dropping negotiations with the EU, they turned that crisis into a war by annexing Crimea and fueling the insurgency in Donbas, and then they widened the scope of that war by launching the 2022 invasion, every one of these stages has pushed Ukraine to turn further westward and closer to NATO.
We can and should critique Ukraine’s responses to this meddling: The unconstitutionality of Yanukovytch’s removal, the thuggish street wings of the Maidan movement and their legitimisation as foot soldiers of the Donbas war, or the fact that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations brought forward the war they were supposed to deter, but the reality is at each stage of this crisis, fault has been with the Kremlin, they have absolutely no right to play victim.
The Russian leadership has no self awareness on this at all, they complain endlessly that others don’t understand their growing opposition to NATO expansionism and interventionism, yet they fail to understand why their neighbours would turn to NATO as Russia itself becomes more expansionist and interventionist.
Russian militarism has essentially acted as a perfect ad campaign for NATO engagement and NATO membership; It’s almost like the Streisand Effect, the more you try to stop it, the more it keeps happening.
These politicians in the Kremlin are hatching plans intended to ensure Russia’s security, but these plans come at the expense of the security of their neighbours, and that turns these neighbours towards the Anti-Russian alliance, a feedback loop, they somehow have failed to grasp this, the fact that they are the catalyst for their own nightmare.
A possible explanation for this is that they simply haven’t even considered the views of these NATO applicants, because they believe these countries are simply being controlled from abroad, they don’t realise that any country could actually want to join NATO, in the Russian propaganda narrative, it’s all through force, a conspiracy, and this is their, potentially fatal, mistake, they believe their own lies.
And ironically Moscow’s obsession with Ukraine hasn’t just alienated its wary neighbours, but also its allies, as Russian troops are forced to pull back from other commitments as their military is bogged down in Ukraine.
For example, in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a Post-Soviet conflict between the countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan where Russia previously acted as a mediator, Russian troops failed to uphold their peacekeeping role, and a peace agreement that was supposed to freeze the conflict ended up collapsing.
As a result of Russia’s Ukraine obsession, Armenia and Azerbaijan ended up looking towards new powers for aid, with Armenia moving towards the West and its neighbour Iran, and Azerbaijan focusing on its neighbour Turkey, undermining Russia’s sway in the Post-Soviet space.
The end result of the conflict was that the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh ended up being blockaded, bombed and then annexed by Azerbaijan, with its population (most of which were Armenians who had voted for independence from Azerbaijan) forced to accept Azerbaijani citizenship or leave to exile in Armenia.
Within weeks almost the entire population had chosen exile, an entire region turned into a ghost town, showing just how much of a joke Russia’s “peacekeeping” mission really was.
So each of the international powers involved in the Ukraine conflict have made miscalculations and convinced themselves of lies:
NATO countries convinced themselves that they never pledged to restrain expansionism, and they wrongly predicted that the Russians would not eventually put their foot down and use force if they felt they could not prevent this expansion through diplomacy.
And the Russians convinced themselves that this NATO expansionism was all by coercion, that if they used force local populations wouldn’t resist, that the peacekeeping monopoly could be preserved. These misunderstandings have led us to the conflict we know today.
But not all sins are created equal, the irresponsibility of NATO powers in expanding their operations after the Cold War rather than winding them down is a major contributing factor to current Ukraine conflict, but it was the Russian leadership that made the final decision to cross the point of no return, based on the wrong assumption that forcing Ukraine out of NATO would make Russia safer and more secure, this strategising is rooted in the era of conventional warfare, from the past century and the centuries before it.
In that period creating buffer territories between you and your rivals was a powerful strategy. Russia’s experience of being invaded time and time again, by foreign armies like the Allies and Central Powers of the First World War and the Axis Powers of the Second, has led them to try and close vulnerabilities in their borders by expanding them to more defendable territory, it’s why the USSR locked down the whole Eastern Bloc in the first place, to make sure they had the most uninvadable country imaginable, a kind of safety in distance, Russia’s attempts to annex Eastern Ukraine show a continuation of this doctrine in the modern day.
But modern weapons have fundamentally changed this dynamic, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Warheads mean that entire cities or even countries can be destroyed without a single soldier having to set foot in enemy territory, for territories that possess these weapons the conventional war era is over, Russia doesn’t need power blocs or puppet states, because even if they were surrounded on all sides, they would still have the capability to deploy over almost 6000 nuclear weapons, with that kind of firepower any sort of missile defence can be overwhelmed.
And the NATO alliance holds this power in return, it doesn’t matter if Russia holds Donbas, whether they reach the Dnipro, or even the NATO border, Russia’s cities could be wiped out today, tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade.
This isn’t a point we’re making as some kind of threat towards Russia, we’re making it to show that the fundamental premise of Russia’s mentality is wrong, a return to the spheres of influence and power blocs of the First Cold War doesn’t make anyone safer, nuclear capability makes nations safe by itself, because it makes any would be invader pause for thought, and then take their hands off of the trigger.
These sorts of misconceptions and false narratives are what you get when you keep yourself in a bubble, when you have a rigid worldview open to no challengers and try to drown out alternatives in a wave of useless noise, it seems like now more than ever we could all do with having a bit more of an open, analytical mind, and the first step in doing that is learning to tell the difference between attempts at serious journalism, and attempts at pandering to one faction or another.
But that’s something we can talk about more next time, in the next episode of this series on the Ukraine conflict, for now I hope we’ve shed some light on the mindset on the other side of the world, just remember, explanation and justification aren’t the same thing.
Next time we’ll discuss in detail the role of far-right, Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist groups in the Ukraine conflict, those on the Pro-Ukrainian side, the Pro-Russian side, the international groups attempting to gain from the fighting, and the propaganda trying to distract from this problem, until then we have to put this series to rest again, but we’ll be back, you can be sure of that. Thank you for reading MEGA.