Russia vs Ukraine war – who is really responsible?

Thursday/Friday blog

As our Western media continues to portray the Russia/Ukraine conflct as a clear case of good (plucky democratic Ukrainians) vs evil (Putin’s Orc army), I’m deeply troubled by what I see as misreporting.

First, let me make it clear – I am not condoning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But Putin has made it very clear for at least the last 15 years that he saw Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO as an existential threat to Russia and warned, “not an inch eastwards”.

The West arrogantly ignored Putin’s warnings. That was dumb.

At a NATO conference in April 2008, where Putin was invited to address NATO leaders, he warned that inviting Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, and thus parking NATO troops and missiles directly on Russia’s borders, would be seen as an existential threat to Russia’s security.

For years, Putin has repeated his warnings that he would not allow Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, to join NATO. In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO would be unacceptable – the first minute of this 3-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat

Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining NATO and on NATO troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.

The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.

Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.

“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of NATO’s open door,” Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”

There seem to have been at least two disastrous misjudgements which led to the current war:

• The West thought Putin was bluffing. But Putin wasn’t bluffing. Putin doesn’t do bluffing. After all, he has had three successful mini-wars in the last few years – the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia in which Russia routed the Georgian military; the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea without a shot being fired and the Russian invasion (sorry, I meant “peace-keeping force”) during the Armenia and Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
• It would seem that Putin believed the Ukraine invasion would be just another of Russia’s quick mini-wars – charge into Ukraine with 169,000 troops, take the main cities, depose the West-friendly government and install a Russian glove-puppet regime. But Putin got that one horribly wrong and so now we have a real mess on our hands.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that NATO – due to its arrogance, short-sightedness and catastrophic misjudgement of Putin’s character – possibly bears just as much responsibility for the Ukraine mess as Putin’s nationalist aggression and overestimation of Russia’s military power compared to Ukraine’s.

Though, apart from one article by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, I haven’t seen such a balanced view expressed anywhere else in the Western mainstream media. In fact, the background to the war seems to have been forgotten as all the Western mainstream media only pumps out the ‘good versus evil’ propaganda..