Russia Will Not Back Down, Say These Four Experts

Ukraine, the view south from Russia      Google Earth
Vladimir Putin has shown that nothing will stop him from annexing Crimea and the questions that remain are, how much further will he take this and how much further will we?

Not that he is a Russian expert, but David Brooks, who claims access to government insiders, said on the PBS "NewsHour" that he expects a serious escalation could happen and soon. (Brooks, the conservative columnist balancing the op-ed page at The New York Times also said Obama is doing a "superb" job in dealing with the crisis. That's new and different.)

But a true and lifelong Russian scholar, Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University, had earlier taken that further. On Fareed Zakaria's "GPS" show a week ago he said, "I think we're two steps from a Cuban missile crisis and three steps from war with Russia for the first time".

A week before that, we posted the following excerpts from Cohen and three other Russian experts — what might be called contrarian views in that they put forth the Russian position that saber-rattlers like John McCain and Lindsay Graham seem quite unaware of.

The foursome below have actual knowledge of Russia, the region and their history, and have tried to make Americans understand that, like any country, Russia has its own strategic and security interests. They are dismayed by Americans’ inability to see the world from any perspective other than their own. That's worth listening to.

Jack Matlock is a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union who served during the last four years before its break-up. He now publishes a blog where he has criticized “the hysterical language of some observers, bordering on the apocalyptic” that has arisen from the Ukraine imbroglio. “The view of most of the media, whether Russian or Western, seems to be that one side or the other is going to ‘win’ or ‘lose’ Ukraine. I believe that is fundamentally mistaken” as how Ukraine should be viewed.

It is not Russian interference that has created Ukrainian disunity; the Ukrainian state was assembled by outsiders: some eastern portions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, were annexed by Stalin, and the largely Russian-speaking Crimea was transferred by Nikita Khrushchev. “Since all constituent parts of the USSR were ruled from Moscow, it seemed at the time a paper transfer of no practical significance” and Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, was already controlled by Moscow, not Kiev. Matlock makes the point that, “Up to then, the Crimea had been considered an integral part of Russia since Catherine ‘the Great’ conquered it in the 18th century”. He says the U.S. has followed policies anathema to Moscow, insensitive to the fact that…

”Russia, as any other country would be, is extremely sensitive about foreign military activity adjacent to its borders. It has signaled repeatedly that it will stop at nothing to prevent NATO membership for Ukraine. (In fact, most Ukrainians do not want it.) Nevertheless, Ukrainian membership in NATO was an avowed objective of the Bush-Cheney administration and one that has not been categorically excluded by the Obama Administration.

Obama's "warning" to Putin was ill-advised. Whatever slim hope that Moscow might avoid overt military intervention in Ukraine disappeared when Obama in effect threw down a gauntlet and challenged him. This was not just a mistake of political judgment — it was a failure to understand human psychology”.

Matlock calls out the U.S. for its hypocrisy concerning violations of sovereignty, reminding us that we invaded Panama to arrest Noriega, Grenada to protect American citizens even though they had not been disturbed, Iraq on spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, and we now target people wherever we choose with drones. “For the U.S. to preach about respect for sovereignty and preservation of territorial integrity to a Russian president can seem a claim to special rights not allowed others”.

Jack Goldstone is a professor of public policy at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied how rebellion and revolutions take shape. He faults the revolutionaries in Ukraine for not “assuring all Ukrainians, especially the Russian-speaking residents of the south and east, that the new government would vigorously protect the rights and standing of Ukrainian citizens everywhere”. Ditto for not assuring Russia that agreements covering military and naval bases in Crimea would continue to be honored. They could have said that…

”The new regime wished to negotiate economic and political agreements with BOTH the EU and Russia, to be a friend to both. That would have at least taken away any provocations and provided an entry to beginning three-party (Ukraine, Russia, EU) talks to protect Ukrainian sovereignty.

Instead the new government in Kiev — with a large number of extremist Ukrainian nationalists from the west given prominent ministerial portfolios — struck down the law protecting the use of the Russian language as a second official language in the country. They failed to take any actions to anticipate the inevitable actions of Russia to protect its crucial naval base at Sevastopol (Russia’s only warm-water naval outlet to the Mediterranean and Atlantic ocean).

He, too, chastises the European Union for evaluating events in Ukraine in terms of a “victory” or “loss” rather than focusing on averting conflict.

“Let us grant that Ukraine is crucial to Russia’s security interests, and that it would be valid and reasonable for a referendum to detach the Crimea and join it to Russia (claims of Crimea being an integral part of Ukraine are historically weak). Let us even grant that Putin’s actions to this point, if a bit overzealous, are a reasonable reflection of the strategic importance of Crimea to Russia and of the oversteps of the nationalist revolutionary regime in Kiev”.

Stephen Cohen, whom we've already introduced, had just before the Ukraine-Russia flare-up stirred up controversy with an article in The Nation that took the U.S. media to task for its grossly biased coverage of Sochi in the run-up to the winter games.

”The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to U.S. national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines—particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin—is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm”.

Appearing on the PBS NewsHour shortly after, Cohen said, “What we’re watching today is the worst kind of history being made, the descent of a new Cold War divide between West and East in Europe, this time not in faraway Berlin, but right on Russia’s borders”.

The official version is that Putin is to blame; he did this. But it simply isn’t true. This began 20 years ago when Clinton began the movement of NATO toward Russia, a movement that’s continued. And even if we just go back to this November...when the protesters came into the streets in Ukraine, Putin said to Europe and Washington, why are you forcing Ukraine to choose between Russia and Europe? We’re prepared with Europe to do a kind of mini-Marshall Plan to bail Ukraine out. Let’s do it together. And that was refused by Washington and Brussels. And that refusal led to the situation today”.

America’s attitude, says Cohen, is that Russia has no claim to legitimate national interests abroad, not even a country that sits on its border. Would the U.S. say the same about its relations with Canada and Mexico? Like the others we quote, the central issue for Cohen is the provocative attempt by America and Europe to encircle Russia with NATO:

Three or four years ago, Putin made absolutely clear he had two red lines. One was in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. NATO and NATO influence couldn’t come there. The other was in Ukraine. We crossed both. You got a war in Georgia in 2008, and you have got today in Ukraine because we, the United States and Europe, crossed Putin’s red line”.

As for Russia’s ties to Ukraine? Tens of millions of Russians are married to Ukrainians. “You want to divide — put a new Iron Curtain or whatever you call it right through that biological reality? This is madness. It’s gone too far.

John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago who works on strategic issues and is found at this website, also appeared on the NewsHour and opened with, “We don’t have really good options which is why we should have never gotten into this mess to begin with”. Again we have to cease our misguided obsession with NATO.

”Since the end of the Cold War, the United states and the West Europeans have been pushing NATO further and further eastward, and this just drives the Russians crazy. It’s what precipitated, in my opinion, the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia. And I think what’s going on here is that the Russians are basically saying…that there’s no way that they’re going to tolerate a situation where the United States installs a pro-western regime in Ukraine and then eventually brings Ukraine into NATO. Putin — and the Russians more generally — have been very clear on this.

Mearsheimer is amazed that America is so obtuse on the point, that while we did not engineer the coup in Ukraine, our encouragement to the rebel forces helped topple the government and our meddling is viewed as intolerable by Putin and Russia. Yet Americans are

“shocked by what’s happened. It’s quite clear that the White House and most experts in Washington have been shocked. Ukraine is a core strategic interest and the fact that most Americans don’t understand that is amazing to me.”