Why Putin has such a hard time accepting Ukrainian sovereignty

MCP

International
International Member

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Vladimir Putin at a concert in March 2021 marking the seventh anniversary of its annexation of Crimea. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Image

Ukraine is again looking warily over its eastern border as Russia threatens its territorial integrity.

In recent weeks, a buildup of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border has rattled Western leaders fearful of an incursion similar to, or perhaps even more wide-ranging than, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Then, on Dec. 17, 2021, Vladimir Putin demanded that no former Soviet states, such as Ukraine, be added to NATO – the Western alliance that Ukraine has long expressed a desire to join – and that NATO cease all military cooperation in Eastern Europe.

Such rhetoric harks back to the Cold War, when global politics revolved around an ideological struggle between a communist Eastern Bloc and a capitalist West. It also serves Russia’s ideological and political goal of asserting its position as a global power.

As scholars of the politics and culture of Ukraine and Russia, we know that underpinning Putin’s goal is Russia’s historical view of Ukraine as a part of its greater empire, which at one time ranged from present-day Poland to the Russian Far East. Understanding this helps explain Putin’s actions, and how he leans into this view of Ukraine to advance his agenda.

The view from Russia

Ukraine today comprises 44 million people and is the second-largest nation by area in Europe.

But for centuries, within the Russian Empire, Ukraine was known as “Malorossiya” or “Little Russia.”

The use of this term strengthened the idea that Ukraine was a junior member of the empire. And it was backed by czarist policies dating from the 18th century that suppressed the use of the Ukrainian language and culture. The intention of these policies was to establish a dominant Russia and later strip Ukraine of an identity as an independent, sovereign nation.

A similar ploy has been used to downplay Ukrainian independence in the 21st century. In 2008 Putin’s then-spokesman, Vladislav Surkov, claimed that “Ukraine is not a state.”

Putin himself recently wrote an article claiming Russians and Ukrainians are “one people – a single whole.” This concept of a single people derives from the history of “Kyivan Rus” – the medieval federation that included parts of modern-day Ukraine and Russia and had as its center present day Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

In recent years, commemorations in Russia of Kyivan Rus’ history have increased in prominence and scale.

In 2016, a 52-foot statue of Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, considered a saintly ruler by Ukrainians and Russians alike, was unveiled in Moscow. The statue caused consternation among Ukrainians. Placing a mammoth depiction of Vladimir in the center of Moscow signaled, to some, Russia’s attempt to own Ukraine’s history.

The fact that it came just two years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of the eastern Ukrainian Donbass region didn’t help.


Ukraine’s Russian citizens

The Donbass and Crimea are both home to large numbers of ethnic Russians and people who primarily speak Russian.

In the years leading up to Russia’s military actions, Putin and his allies often invoked the concept of the “Russian World” or “Russkiy Mir” – the idea that Russian civilization extends to everywhere that ethnic Russians live.

The ideology also asserts that no matter where Russians are in the world, the Russian state has a right and an obligation to protect and defend them.

Ukraine – both in 2014 and with Putin’s seemingly increasingly belligerent stance now – provides the perfect landscape for this concept. And Russia has allegedly been promoting “Russian World” ideology through the arming of pro-Russian separatists in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014.

Viewing Ukraine as a country split between pro-Moscow ethnic Russians and pro-Western Ukrainians, however, is a gross oversimplification.

Ethnic tensions?

Ukraine’s ethnic makeup today – with an especially large minority of Russians living in the east – reflects the country’s absorption into the Soviet Union from 1922.

Ethnic Ukrainians lived across the country before it was incorporated into the Soviet Union. In 1932-33, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin orchestrated a famine that killed some 4 million Ukrainians in the eastern regions. The famine, known as “Holodomor,” made it possible for ethnic Russians to move into the territory of Ukraine.

These new residents drove Stalin’s industrialization campaign. To this day, the Donbass remains the heart of Ukraine’s industrial economy.

When Ukrainians voted for independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, all of its 24 “oblasts,” or regions – including Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea – supported independence. The large minority of ethnic Russians – 17.3% of the population at Ukraine’s last census in 2001 – were included as Ukrainian citizens in an independent state. For the most part, they too voted for independence.

For most of the first two decades after independence, ethnic Russians have lived peacefully with Ukrainians and the country’s other ethnic minorities.

But that changed in 2010 when Viktor Yanukovych, a politician from Donetsk, became Ukraine’s president. Though he did not state outright that he preferred a pro-Russian future for Ukraine, many of his policies marked a move away from the pro-European policies of his predecessors and played into Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine.

Ukraine was on track to sign an association agreement with the European Union in 2013. Instead, Yanukovych decided to join an economic union with Russia. This set off mass protests around the country that resulted in Yanukovych’s being ousted. Putin then annexed Crimea on the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians living on that peninsula.

Meanwhile, pro-Russian separatists took over multiple cities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the hope that Russia would have a similar interest in protecting Russians in eastern Ukraine.

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A pro-Ukrainian volunteer soldier watches for pro-Russian separatists. Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

But ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east did not automatically support the separatists or want to be part of Russia. Since 2014, some 1.5 million people have left the Donbass to live in other parts of Ukraine. Meanwhile, at least a million people have left for Russia.

Many of those who remain in the territories occupied by separatists are now being offered a fast track to Russian citizenship. This policy allows Putin to increase pro-Russian sentiment in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s strengthening identity

While Putin claims that ethnic Russians living in Ukraine are part of the Russian World, in reality, ethnicity is not a predictor of political affiliation in Ukraine. In other words, being an ethnic Russian or a Russian speaker does not indicate that one sees oneself as part of the Russian World. Rather, across Ukraine, there has been an increase in sentiment of a strong, unified Ukrainian identity since 1991. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Ukrainians support entrance into NATO.

Most Ukrainians see their future as a sovereign country that is part of Europe. But this directly contradicts Putin’s goals of expanding the Russian World. They are conflicting visions that help explain why Ukraine remains a flashpoint.
 

MCP

International
International Member

Invading Ukraine may never have been Putin’s aim – the threat alone could advance Russia’s goals

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An invasion is not the only way the crisis in Ukraine can play out.

A diplomatic solution may yet provide an off-ramp for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose placement of tens of thousands of troops along Russia’s border with its smaller neighbor kicked off the current crisis.

Indeed, the leaders of Russia and Ukraine have throughout the weeks-long crisis accused the U.S. and U.K. of stirring panic with talk of an imminent invasion.

Invasion may never have been the point. One interpretation is that President Putin mobilized his soldiers and sailors primarily to force a dialogue with the West over what the spheres of influence and interest in Eastern Europe should be.

As a scholar who has spent his entire career studying Russian history, I see the current crisis in a broader context. If you zoom out from the events of the past few weeks, it is possible to see this dangerous standoff as part of the continuing fallout from the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Some 30 years on, the architecture of what is supposed to be the “new world order” is still being built.

Russia is a regional power in decline and feels insecure. If countries were able to experience emotions, Russia’s dominant feeling would be, I believe, humiliation. It feels it is a victim of Western expansion and wants a restoration of its lost influence.

This weakened but still ambitious regional power faces a global one, the United States, that is similarly fearful of losing its sway around the world in the face of a recent military retreat from Afghanistan and the economic threat of China. That standoff – between two hegemons, one regional, the other global – leaves Ukraine as the pawn in the middle.

Preserving ‘strategic depth’

What is going on in Ukraine fits with a military concept called “strategic depth.” This refers to the territory between a country and what it perceives to be hostile enemies.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had extensive strategic depth. The Warsaw Pact provided an alliance of pro-Soviet states in Eastern Europe that constituted a barrier between the Soviets and the West.

But from 1991, NATO expanded eastward until it enveloped most of those formerly Warsaw Pact countries. Poland, Romania and Bulgaria all became NATO members, as did the three former Soviet Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

And then came the Bucharest conference in April 2008. The NATO heads of states at that meeting “welcomed” the aspirations displayed by Ukraine and Georgia and said it would hold the door open to future membership for both countries, though it pointedly did not invite Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance.

When, a few months after that conference, Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili attempted to take back the rebellious pro-Russian region South Ossetia, Russia sent in its troops – a clear signal that no further expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union would be tolerated. Discussion subsided for the next 13 years.

Russia’s strategic depth had by that time already shrunk considerably since the early 1990s. Putin now seems to fear it will be further eroded.

Indeed, U.S. rockets have been placed in Poland and Romania. NATO member Turkey has sold its powerful Bayraktar drones – which pounded Armenia into defeat during a short war in restive Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 – to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the United States carries out war games in the Baltic States, and its troops are now heading to Eastern Europe.

In the same way that the U.S. reacts to any signs of Russian or Chinese military presence in Latin America, so too is Moscow keen to keep its strategic depth. Putin does not want a neighboring state falling under the military influence of what he sees as unfriendly nations. He wants a buffer.

Avoiding rash moves

Putin tends to be cautious and realistic in foreign policy. He is not as erratic as sometimes portrayed in the West. He knows that he isn’t playing a strong hand.

Russia’s defense budget, as he is well aware, is roughly 8% that of the U.S.‘s alone, never mind NATO as a whole, which spends almost 20 times what Russia spends on defense.

Economically, Russia is a declining power. Its GDP is about half of that of the state of California. A petrostate dependent on exports of gas and oil, Russia is suffering from the sanctions the West imposed after Russia’s precipitous seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Russians also know what it means to bogged down in a ground war as they were in Afghanistan for 10 years and as they are currently in the Donbass, in the eastern Ukraine. A full invasion would be a catastrophe for Russia.

The view of some in the West that Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Union is, I believe, a fantasy that a realist like Putin has himself rejected. Yes, in 2005 Putin commented that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century” and “a genuine tragedy” – a sentiment he shares with a majority of Russians. But pundits in the West are less eager to reference Putin’s other pronouncement that “He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.”

Governments have been proved wrong recently when it comes to Putin’s desire to station troops in neighboring countries. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Kazakhstan that inviting Russian troops in to quell unrest would lead to a lasting presence only to see those troops march back to Russia days later.

On the other hand, when it comes to Ukraine, the Russian president has in the past made rash moves. If he had hoped for a pro-Russian or neutral Ukraine, his precipitous seizure of Crimea and support for separatists in Donbass after the Maidan revolution of 2014 produced a more anti-Russian, nationalist Ukraine and inclined Ukrainians to throw their lot in with NATO and the West.

A road map out of crisis?

Russia and Ukraine, working with European partners, tried to lay out a new structure for Russian-Ukrainian relations during the 2015 discussions over the Minsk II protocols, which were agreed to by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany but never fully implemented. The breakaway Ukrainian regions bordering Russia were to be autonomous under a federal relationship with Kyiv. To Moscow, at least, Minsk II would have also provided assurances that Ukraine remain out of NATO. In June 2021 U.S. President Joe Biden and Putin “agreed to pursue diplomacy related to the Minsk agreement.”

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Ukraine’s Donbass region.

But the protocol never came into effect – Ukraine and Russia never agreed on what was being agreed to.

The current threat of invasion could be Putin’s attempt to refocus minds around such an agreement and force parties back to a dialogue. Indeed, French President Emmanuel Macron recently described Minsk II as the “only path on which peace can be built.”

But if forcing a return to Minsk II, or something similar, was Putin’s intention, doing so by threatening invasion is a risky game. With nationalist feelings growing in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky might not be able to agree to Minsk II and remain in power. Similarly, in the U.S. any concessions to Russia by Biden is already being characterized as appeasement. In both states foreign policy is hostage to domestic politics.

Putin himself is facing hardliners back home. The Russian parliament has already given permission to recognize the independence of Ukraine’s separatist regions. And compared with some of the most rabid politicians and pundits jockeying for space on Russian media, Putin comes across as serious, sober and competent.

Mixed in with these domestic political dynamics is the ever-present struggle of two hegemons – one regional, one global – trying to reassert influence at a time of perceived decline. In so doing, they appear, to me at least, to be talking across each other.
 

MCP

International
International Member
Germany Deserves a Big Share of the Blame for the Ukraine Disaster


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Frank-Walter Steinmeier with John Kerry in March 2015.

Nobody is talking about the blame that must be shouldered by the German government for the crisis and humanitarian disaster in Ukraine.

Sure Russia is guilty of a huge war crime in invading Ukraine. Surely too, the US must be blamed for creating the situation which led Russia and its autocratic leader Vladimir Putin to decide it had to invade to prevent Ukraine from being pulled into the US orbit with the goal that it would ultimately become a base for US offensive weapons — even nuclear weapons — on Russia’s border — something the US would never allow to happen anywhere in its self-proclaimed “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But Germany, the largest country in NATO after the US, is almost as guilty for this current war in Europe as is the United States.

Germany was only reunified without any difficulty after 45 years of being split in two following World War II, because of a deal struck by the US with Russia in 1990 at which US Secretary of State James Baker stated that NATO would not be expanded “one inch ” eastward past the reunified German border.

Now it is widely known that despite having a powerful economy, Germany remains something of a lackey of the US in its foreign policy. Nonetheless, on this key important issue of expanding NATO, the country has always had considerable potential power. This is because NATO’s own rules require that any new member of the alliance must be approved by all existing members of the organization. That is, to put it bluntly, if Germany were to have said, at some point, that no new members would be given Germany’s approval for admission to NATO, then no new members could have joined, or even entertained the idea of joining.

That would have included — and could still include — Ukraine, which the US since at least the Obama administration’s second term, has been encouraged to think that it might someday be able to come under the protection of NATO, with its Article 5 provision requiring all members to come to the aid militarily of any member attacked by a non-member state.

It is precisely that desire by Ukraine, together with US insistence on the false “right” of Ukraine to determine its own international relationships, that led to Russia’s launching this war. Sure Ukraine can pursue its own foreign policies, but it has no “right” to join NATO. That organization’s member states must as one agree to admit another member. NATO is an exclusive club, not an anyone-can-join book club.

Of all the NATO member states, Germany is the one that should be standing firmly behind that solemn promise by Secretary Baker and then-President George H. W. Bush not to move NATO’s boundary any closer (his actual words were “Not one inch closer”), to Russia than the eastern border of the country.

It was a kind of founding promise of the birth of a reunified Germany.

Instead, Germany is supinely responding to the bloody war in Ukraine that its own cowardly acquiescence to US anti-Russia actions has allowed happen by announcing plans to significantly boost its arms spending (mostly by buying advanced military weapons from US arms makers).

German behavior towards the violation of US promises made to Russia regarding NATO following German reunification is particularly ironic and tragic given that at the time of German reunification in 1991, when the issue of whether the newly unified Germany should be a part of NATO, either by simply adding East Germany to NATO under the existing German Federal Republic (West German) membership or with a new membership for the new nation of Germany, a poll showed only 20 percent of Germans wanted the country to be in NATO at all.

Indeed, the very existence of NATO after the 1991 deal was being widely questioned even by some mainstream foreign affairs experts in the United States. An artifact of the Cold War that began in the late 1940s, NATO was founded on April 4, 1949 (the day I was born!)) as a bulwark against Communist expansion in Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90, and the liberation of formerly captive nations of the Warsaw Bloc in those years, plus the friendly relations that quickly developed in the early 1990s between the US and Russia, NATO should have been dissolved.

Instead, President Clinton, elected in 1992, chose quickly after assuming office to begin encouraging its expansion, as well as using the alliance outside of its own boundaries as an extension of US empire, as in the bombings of Serbia and Kosovo, and intervention in the Bosnian civil war. By the time of the Bush Administration in 2001, NATO was operating as a multinational military force outside of the UN in Afghanistan, which is about as far from the North Atlantic as on can get, at least in the northern hemisphere.

And so here we are, with Russia defending what it considers its own regional security with a military assault on Ukraine, and the US being urged to make things worse by shipping lethal weapons to Ukraine’s military and even more insanely, to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine or parts of Ukraine — an action that could quickly lead to US and Russian planes shooting each other down, and potentially very rapidly to a nuclear war between the two nations with that have most of the world’s nuclear arsenal between them. Fortunately, the Biden administration has resisted such nuclear brinksmanship.

The US could end this conflict quickly by simply announcing that it will honor the promise made to General Secretary Gorbachev 32 years ago, and will not ever admit Ukraine into NATO, nor seek to put US troops, weapons or nuclear arms in Ukraine.

But if the US won’t do the right thing to stop the bloodshed, Germany should have the integrity and self-confidence to do it: Just announce that the German government wants to honor the promise made that allowed for the smooth reunification of the country that a half-century earlier created such death and destruction across the whole European continent and that it vows never to approve another NATO member state.

If the German government won’t make this promise, the German people should demand it.

As someone whose paternal grandfather was brought as a child by his parents to the US from Germany to escape war and ended up earning a Silver Star while driving an ambulance on the French front for the US Army during WWI, and who myself spent a year as a Schuler in a Gymnasium in Darmstadt, a German city that was destroyed by a British firebombing attack in World War II and saw vividly the kind of destruction and slaughter that war causes, I say to the German people:

Komm meine deutschen Freunde, gib dem Frieden eine Chance! Die Zeit ist jetzt!
 

MCP

International
International Member

Putin’s Criminal Invasion of Ukraine Highlights Some Ugly Truths About U.S. and NATO
The fact that Putin is trying to justify the unjustifiable in Ukraine does not mean we must ignore the U.S. actions that fuel his narrative.

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A Ukrainian military vehicle speeds by on a main road near Sytnyaky, Ukraine, on March 3, 2022


There are no excuses or justifications for what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine. His brutal invasion is a bald-faced act of aggression, replete with war crimes, and is rightly being condemned as such by large numbers of people and nations across the globe. The targeting of civilian populations and infrastructure is a heinous act that belongs in the annals of major nation state crimes alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.


Many governments of the world have denounced Putin’s actions. But when it comes to the U.S. and its NATO allies, these condemnations demand greater scrutiny. While many statements from Western leaders may be accurate regarding the nature of Russia’s actions, the U.S. and other NATO nations are in a dubious position to take a moralistic stance in condemning Russia. That they do so with zero recognition of their own hypocrisy, provocative actions, and history of unbridled militarism — particularly in the case of the U.S. — is deeply problematic. From the beginning of this crisis, Putin has exploited the militarism and past bombing campaigns of the U.S. and NATO to frame his own warped justification for his murderous campaign in Ukraine. But the fact that Putin is trying to justify the unjustifiable does not mean that we must ignore the U.S. actions that fuel his narrative.

In recent days, U.S. and NATO officials have highlighted Russia’s use of banned weapons, including cluster munitions, and have said their use constitutes violations of international law. This is indisputably true. What goes virtually unmentioned in much of the reporting on this topic is that the U.S., like both Russia and Ukraine, refuses to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The U.S. has repeatedly used cluster bombs, going back to the war in Vietnam and the “secret” bombings of Cambodia. In the modern era, both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used them. President Barack Obama used cluster bombs in a 2009 attack in Yemen that killed some 55 people, the majority of them women and children. Despite the ban, which was finalized in 2008 and went into effect in 2010, the U.S. continued to sell cluster bombs to nations like Saudi Arabia, which regularly used them in its attacks in Yemen. In 2017, President Donald Trump reversed an internal U.S. policy aimed at limiting the use of certain types of cluster munitions, a move which a Human Rights Watch expert warned “could embolden others to use cluster munitions that have caused so much human suffering.” None of this exonerates Russia for its unconscionable use of cluster bombs against civilians, but these facts are clearly relevant when assessing the credibility of the U.S.

It is much easier to express outrage at the actions and crimes of a foreign autocrat than it is to come to terms with the conduct of your own government. This is why the images of masses of Russians protesting in the streets is a more powerful repudiation of Putin’s war than the rhetoric from U.S. politicians on cable news or the statements from NATO officials.
It is also true that the laws of war and international law should apply not only to the declared bad guys of the moment or to parties that unilaterally attack other nations, but also to every nation — including our own. Putin has framed his aggression against Ukraine in part as a response to NATO expansion, and he and other Russian officials have in recent weeks invoked the 1999 Kosovo war as precedent for Russia’s current actions in Ukraine.

Moscow’s argument is that the U.S. and NATO, under the “pretext” of “humanitarian intervention,” and with no United Nations authorization, unilaterally bombed Serbia for more than two months in 1999 followed by a ground incursion into Kosovo. In February, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested, in remarks at the U.N., that the U.S. had set a precedent with the Kosovo war and that this negated the value of Western critiques of Russia’s plans to attack Ukraine. “I have to recall these facts, because some Western colleagues prefer to forget them,” Putin said in his February 24 speech. “When we mentioned the [Kosovo war], they prefer to avoid speaking about international law.”

Although many of Putin’s comparisons are nonsense and — even when they are cogent — do nothing to justify his own current murderous campaign, there are relevant insights we can extract from reviewing some of NATO’s actions in Kosovo. The most direct analogy in recent U.S. military history to Putin’s large-scale ground invasion of Ukraine is obviously the Iraq War. Yet it’s important to examine the Kosovo air war because it highlights military tactics that the U.S. and NATO now rightly condemn Russia for using. Like Iraq, it also illustrates the entrenched double standard that permeates the consistently hypocritical U.S. response to the actions of its enemies.

Slobodan Milošević had for many years imposed a system of minority rule, repression, and terror against Kosovo Albanians, which constituted 90 percent of the southern province’s population. Beginning in 1989, he began to hack away at Kosovo’s long-held autonomous status within the Yugoslav federation. The situation steadily deteriorated over the next decade as Yugoslavia disintegrated, and by 1998 the U.S. was threatening to intervene militarily to confront Milošević, accusing his forces of massacring and terrorizing Albanian civilians and plotting a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Throughout the year leading up to the NATO bombing, Milošević’s forces regularly clashed with armed insurgents from the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army. After the killing of several police officers in early 1998, Milošević’s forces launched a murderous retaliatory campaign in which they repeatedly killed civilians, including the family members of KLA guerrillas. Human rights groups also documented abuses by the KLA, including killings and kidnappings of civilians, though on a far smaller scale than those carried out by Serbian forces. This situation, combined with the general state of repression of ethnic Albanians, brought Kosovo to wider public attention and drew sharper focus from the U.S. and NATO, which stood accused, earlier in the decade, of failing to respond earlier to the mass slaughter of Bosnian Muslims.

There were also influential voices in the U.S. — including then-Sen. Joe Biden, who advocated directly targeting Serbia and Milošević since the Bosnia war — and the worsening situation in Kosovo helped them make their case. “We talk about humanitarian interests — it far exceeds the humanitarian interest,” Biden said in October 1998. “If I were president, I would just bomb him, and I mean that sincerely, and I would have the NATO allies come along.” Belgrade’s position was that it was engaged in a fight against “terrorist” KLA militants and that the U.S. and NATO were attempting to undermine the country’s sovereignty, a position supported by both Russia and China.

As the violence intensified in early 1999, and reports of Serbian police and special forces killing civilians garnered more public attention, the prospect of a U.S.-NATO war became real.

By March 1999, an estimated 460,000 residents of Kosovo had been internally displaced, forced from their homes, or fled to neighboring countries. The U.S.-NATO position was that given the mass atrocities committed by Bosnian Serb forces throughout the early 1990s in Bosnia, particularly the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, it was necessary to stop Milošević from accelerating a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the majority ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo. Multiple subsequent war crimes trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia determined the Srebrenica massacre to be an act of genocide.

NATO asserted that in order to avert a bombing campaign, Milošević would have to sign the Rambouillet Accord and agree to the deployment of as many as 30,000 NATO-led troops in Kosovo. The document, drafted by NATO and signed by representatives of the Kosovo Albanians, contained a provision that stated “NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access” not just in Kosovo but also throughout the entire Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In mid-March, international monitors pulled out of Kosovo as NATO military action grew imminent. Milošević’s forces used the opportunity to intensify their rampages through KLA strongholds, burning Albanian homes and shops. Clinton dispatched his envoy Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade to personally meet with Milošević on March 23. “We presented the ultimatum to Milosevic that if he didn’t sign the agreement, the bombing would start,” Holbrooke recalled. “And he said, ‘No.’”
Russia was the most powerful ally of Milošević and was dead set against the U.S. and NATO bombing Serbia. Clinton failed to get U.N. approval for a military operation, in part because of Russia’s repeated threats of a veto, so he sidestepped the fierce debates in both Congress and the U.N. and, on March 24, proceeded with a NATO military operation. Congress never authorized the war despite the efforts of Biden, one of the most passionate proponents of bombing Serbia. Russia, for its part, denounced the bombing as prematurely abandoning diplomacy and characterized it as a violation of the U.N. charter. From Moscow’s perspective, NATO was steadily asserting its dominance over the republics of the former Yugoslavia, which had been a socialist, nonaligned state since the end of World War II.

At the end of the bombing, Russian forces entered Kosovo ahead of NATO and briefly took control of a key airport resulting in a showdown between NATO and Russia, which some analysts feared could have severe consequences. Putin, who at the time was head of Russia’s national security council, has actually claimed he had a role in the incident. While it was ultimately resolved peacefully, at one point during the standoff a British general refused to implement the orders of U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme allied commander, to block the runway. Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson reportedly told Clark, “I am not going to start Third World War for you.” The U.S. ultimately established a large military base in the Balkans, Camp Bondsteel, and led the effort to make Kosovo, at the time a Serbian province, an independent state. To Russia, this campaign constituted an act of aggression by NATO, in circumvention of the U.N., that carved up the territory of a Russian ally in Europe and resulted in a new U.S.-NATO military base in Europe.

“High U.S. officials confirm that it was primarily the bombing of Russian ally Serbia — without even informing them in advance — that reversed Russian efforts to work together with the U.S. somehow to construct a post-Cold War European security order,” said Noam Chomsky in a recent interview. This “reversal accelerated with the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Libya after Russia agreed not to veto a UN Security Council Resolution that NATO at once violated.”

None of this history lends an iota of legitimacy to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. What it does offer, however, is an opportunity for the citizens of the U.S. and NATO countries to review the history of their own forces and to examine the ways in which our conduct damages our moral standing and ultimately gives propagandistic fodder to leaders like Putin.

The fact that Milošević was a murderous gangster who orchestrated mass deportations, atrocities, and widespread killings of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo does not justify NATO’s repeated use of cluster bombs, including on a crowded marketplace and hospital in the city of Niš, killing more than a dozen people. Human Rights Watch determined NATO killed between 90 to 150 civilians in cluster bomb attacks. Nor does it exonerate Clark, the NATO supreme allied commander, for ordering the deliberate missile attack on Radio Television Serbia that killed 16 media workers in April 1999, an act which Amnesty International labeled a war crime. It does not excuse the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy (which killed three journalists), or any of the other U.S.-NATO attacks that killed civilians.

The U.S. and its allies also sought, at times, to cover up or justify incidents in which they killed civilians. In one attack, NATO struck a civilian passenger train on a bridge, killing 10 people. It later released a videotape that was played at three times the speed, making it appear as though the strike was a split-second decision and a tragic mistake. But moments after the strike, NATO fired another missile at the train. In another incident, NATO bombed a convoy of Albanian refugees fleeing Serb forces on April 14, 1999. Some 73 civilians, including 16 children, were killed in the attack, which was carried out by an American F-16. After initially suggesting that Serbian forces had killed the refugees, NATO was forced — when international journalists traveled to the scene — to admit responsibility for the strike. NATO then expressed “deep regret” for what it labeled a mistake, though NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea also asserted that “sometimes one has to risk the lives of the few to save the lives of the many.” A month later, NATO bombed another convoy of Kosovo Albanian refugees in a similar strike.

The overwhelming majority of Kosovo Albanians who were killed by Serbian forces perished after the NATO bombing began. Milošević unleashed both conventional and special units as well as vicious paramilitaries in a “systematic and deliberately organized” mass killing and forced displacement operation. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo concluded, “The NATO air campaign did not provoke the attacks on the civilian Kosovar population but the bombing created an environment that made such an operation feasible.” More than 8,600 Albanian civilians were killed or disappeared between 1998-2000, according to human rights groups; more than 2,000 Serb, Roma, and other non-Albanian civilians died or went missing during the same period.

“Within nine weeks of the beginning of the air strikes, nearly 860,000 Kosovo Albanians fled or were expelled,” according to a report from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. They did so amid a campaign of terror, rape, and pillaging by both official and paramilitary forces. “The NATO strikes were accompanied by escalating violence on the ground and a large refugee outflow that included organized expulsions,” according to the UNHCR. “The sequence of violence and displacement underlined the importance of the Western powers in the events that produced the refugee emergency.” After the war, when NATO occupied Kosovo, some 200,000 Serbs, Roma, and other minorities fled their homes, the UNHCR found.

These facts do not justify a single thing Milošević and his forces did, and Milošević deserved his indictment for war crimes. International prosecutors charged that Milošević “planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in a deliberate and widespread or systematic campaign of terror and violence directed at Kosovo Albanian civilians.” The vast majority of the charges against Milošević were for killings and other crimes against Albanians that occurred after the start of the NATO bombing. In 2001, after being ousted from power amid his attempts to overturn an election he lost, Milošević was arrested by Serbian special forces in the middle of the night and extradited to The Hague to face trial for his role in mass killings and other atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. He died in jail before his trial ended. The crimes of despots, dictators, and thugs — including vile criminals like Milošević — do not give the U.S. and NATO permission to kill civilians. Nor do they grant authority to the U.S. to bomb other nations for 78 days, particularly when Congress has explicitly declined to authorize the action. The crimes of declared enemies also do not erase the culpability of the U.S. and its personnel for war crimes.

It is precisely the history of these actions by the U.S. and NATO that Putin has sought to weaponize in his insane attempts to justify his invasion of Ukraine. That some of these claims are rooted in fact does not absolve Putin of a single Russian atrocity. But citizens of the U.S. and other NATO nations should deeply examine whether they support the use by their own governments of some of the very tactics and weapons favored by Putin. It is also relevant that to this day there has been no accountability for the crimes committed by the U.S. in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the post-9/11 CIA torture and kidnapping program, or the killing of civilians in drone and other airstrikes in numerous countries. The U.S. has systematized a self-exoneration machine. And Russia and every nation on Earth knows it.

Since the invasion of Ukraine began, people expressing horror and outrage at Putin’s actions in Ukraine while also referencing the history of the U.S. and NATO governments have been portrayed as traitors or apologists for Russia. This is a classic tactic in the history of pro-war discourse; it has been used throughout U.S. history and was a common cudgel used to attack anti-war views in the aftermath of 9/11.

There is no contradiction between standing with the people of Ukraine and against Russia’s heinous invasion and being honest about the hypocrisy, war crimes, and militarism of the U.S. and NATO. We have an undeniable moral responsibility to prioritize holding our own government accountable for its crimes because they are being done in our names and with our tax dollars. That does not mean we should be silent in the face of the crimes of Russia or other nations, but we do bear a specific responsibility for the acts of war committed by our own nations.

Some prominent U.S. politicians and diplomats have also called for collective punishment against ordinary Russian people in order to pressure them into toppling Putin’s government, and Sen. Lindsey Graham went so far as to openly encourage Russians to assassinate Putin. While many opponents of Russia’s invasion and Putin have been clear that they do not hold Russian people responsible for the crimes of their leaders, some high-profile U.S. political figures have taken a different stance. “There are no more ‘innocent’ ‘neutral’ Russians anymore,” tweeted Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama. “Everyone has to make a choice — support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!” McFaul later deleted the tweet. Ordinary Russians will be key to any meaningful hope of ending this war and Putin’s insanity, but we can’t overlook the brutality they face from their own government. Those who are protesting inside of Russia deserve immense credit for their bravery. Sanctions aimed at billionaire Putin cronies and government officials responsible for this invasion are fundamentally different from sanctions that directly impact civilians in an effort to blackmail them into an uprising against a regime that has shown no compunction about violently repressing and at times murdering dissidents.

The global response to Putin’s war has already exposed the tragic double standard when it comes to war victims. The people of Yemen have been suffering for more than a decade under a merciless campaign of bombing initiated by Obama in 2009 that morphed into a scorched-earth campaign by U.S.-armed-and-supported Saudi Arabia, which continues to this moment. How many of the people with Ukrainian flag avatars on their Twitter profiles have spent days or weeks pleading for the world to stand up for ordinary Yemenis living under the hell of American bombs and Saudi warplanes? The same question applies in the case of the Palestinians who live under an apartheid state imposed by Israel and backed up by a sustained campaign of annihilation supported and encouraged by the U.S. How can people argue in favor of Ukrainian rights to self-defense while simultaneously stripping Palestinians of that same right?

Vladimir Putin and the Russian officials responsible for this invasion of Ukraine should face justice. Once the evidence has been gathered, every war crime should be investigated, indictments issued, and prosecutions undertaken. The obvious venue for this would be before the International Criminal Court. Yet here is an inconvenient fact: The U.S. has refused to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the ICC. In 2002, Bush signed legislation that authorizes the U.S. to literally conduct military operations in The Hague to liberate any American personnel brought to trial for war crimes. It is indefensible that the U.S. has established a precedent that powerful nations need not be held accountable for their crimes. It is a precedent that Russia knows well, exploits regularly, and will certainly use again and again.
 

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Philippines president who once called Putin his 'idol' slams him for killing civilians in Ukraine, becoming first ally of the Russian president to speak out

Bill Bostock
2 hours ago

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Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, May 23, 2017. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2017.REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
 
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