How Vladimir Putin Brought the West Together

 At Der Speigel, "United By Danger":

The Ukraine war is uniting the West – politically, militarily, morally. But what will the world's democracies do with this newfound unity? Can they succeed in preventing further escalation?

The small Romanian town of Câmpia Turzii doesn't look like the kind of place where global political developments take place. The bed of gravel in front of the town hall is waiting for new asphalt, the "Asia” market next door has lost its "i," and the hotel on the outskirts of town bears the simple name A3. The town’s biggest attraction stands at the city limits. Once you pass the last single-family homes, you suddenly find yourself in front of a mounted aircraft. A blue, Soviet-produced MiG-21 fighter jet juts into the sky like a signpost.

Câmpia Turzii has been home to an air base for almost 70 years. During the Cold War, Warsaw Pact pilots took off and landed here. These days, though, NATO troops are stationed behind the metal gate.

People waited for precisely that for more than 50 years, says Laura Ștefan, a Romanian who works for the Expert Forum, which promotes trans-Atlantic relations. "The Americans were the salvation," she says. "When the first U.S. soldiers moved in, people greeted them with flowers."

NATO, the West – synonymous for many with freedom and prosperity back when Romania joined NATO in 2004.

Today, the country that has for so long stood in the shadow of European history is a front-line state. "We border Ukraine," Ștefan says. "If it came to an invasion of Romania, that would be the end. For many of us, but also for Putin. But I don’t think an invasion of Romania is likely. Still, we have to be prepared for anything.”

Slowly, we're running out of comparisons for grasping the magnitude of what is currently happening. Just a week ago, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine brought to mind events like Saddam Hussein’s 1990 attack on Kuwait – a large scale and ultimately devastating military operation, but also one whose impact at first seemed limited to the region.

In the meantime, however, an open and brutal war is raging, and Putin’s threat of using nuclear weapons is evoking the darkest moments in human history: the fateful chain of events that triggered World War I in 1914 and the unleashing of World War II through the invasion of Poland on the orders of a single, megalomaniacal dictator.

.. Few spoke seriously during the Kuwait crisis about the possibility of an imminent third world war. Today, many are using that expression, from the German Green Party politician Jürgen Trittin to the British-American presidential adviser Fiona Hill, who says the global conflict began long ago – with the assassination attempts by Russian agents in the West, for example.

The same West that for so long seemed powerless in the face of Putin’s provocations has now been united by his attack on Ukraine in a way that neither the Kremlin nor Western politicians could have foreseen...

More.

 

Gas Prices in Los Angeles

On Twitter earlier today:

Now this would be accurate price for Los Angeles: pic.twitter.com/Jo34sNPtM7

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) March 6, 2022

Is the Russian Air Force Actually Incapable of Complex Air Operations?

At Instapundit, "'One of the greatest surprises from the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the inability of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) fighter and fighter-bomber fleets to establish air superiority, or to deploy significant combat power in support of the under-performing Russian ground forces. On the first day of the invasion, an anticipated series of large-scale Russian air operations in the aftermath of initial cruise- and ballistic-missile strikes did not materialise'."

Biden Gets Boost in Public Approval After State of the Union Address

From Marist, "NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll: Bounce for Biden Following State of the Union, March 2022":

Biden Enjoys Boost in His Job Approval Ratings Following the State of the Union... A Majority Approve of Biden’s Handling of Conflict in Ukraine... Overwhelming Support Exists for Economic Sanctions.

Following a State of the Union address which underscored President Joe Biden’s commitment to promoting democracy across the world, the president enjoys a bounce in his handling of the crisis in Ukraine. His standing among the American people has also improved on the issues of the economy and the coronavirus pandemic. While Biden’s bounce is predominantly among his Democratic base, he also enjoys moderate gains among independents. Of note, rare, bipartisan consensus exists on the issue of sanctions levied against Russia. Most Americans, regardless of party, support these sanctions, and nearly seven in ten favor them even if it means higher energy prices domestically.

RTWT.

The Atlantic: Schools' Masking Policy Has Imposed a Serious, Possibly Permanent, Developmental Delay on Many Students

At AoSHQ, "The Atlantic published an article admitting the obvious: The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from."

Angela Stent, Putin's World

At Amazon, Angela Stent, Putin's World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.

Russian Helicopter Gunship Shot Down Over Kyiv Oblast Province of Ukraine (VIDEO)

 At Business Insider, "Ukraine shares footage that appears to show a Russian helicopter gunship shot down in flames with a Stinger portable air-defense system, say reports":

Footage appears to show the moment a Russian gunship helicopter was shot down by a man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS) in the Kyiv Oblast province of Ukraine.

In the video, a helicopter immediately bursts into flames and crashes to the ground after being targeted by a weapon. The footage was shared on Twitter by the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine on Saturday morning. "This is how the Russian occupiers are dying," the ministry said in the caption. "This time in a helicopter!"

It was also circulated on Facebook by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine...

Up to eight paratroopers, in addition to its two-person crew, can conduct fire with small arms through the openings in the side windows of these helicopters. Mil Mi-24 Hind gunships have been in use since 1970.

The helicopter appears to have been shot down by an FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS, according to the military and civil aviation website The Aviationist. These man-portable air-defense systems developed in the US can operate as an infrared homing surface-to-air missile.

Several nations have said they are providing Stinger missiles to the Ukrainian forces amid the Russian invasion, including Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the U.S. ...

 

U.S. Working With Poland to Send More Fighter Jets to Ukraine (VIDEO)

I was thinking about this as I was writing my earlier entry on establishing a "no-fly zone" over Ukaine. My thought's were more American F-16s than Russian MIGs, but hey, it's like a new cold war, right? 

At WSJ, "U.S., Poland Look at Providing Soviet-Era Aircraft to Ukraine":

The U.S. is exploring a deal in which Poland would send Soviet-era aircraft to Ukraine in return for American F-16 jet fighters, U.S. officials said Saturday, in the latest bid to help Ukraine respond to Russia’s invasion.

The deal would require White House approval and congressional action, U.S. officials said.

The disclosure of a possible deal followed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s impassioned plea to Capitol Hill for assistance in obtaining more lethal military aid, especially Russian-made jet fighters that Ukrainian pilots can fly. Mr. Zelensky also supported a proposal to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil, in a video call Saturday morning with members of Congress.

There were more than 200 House and Senate members on the call, said people who participated. Mr. Zelensky spoke for about 25 minutes before taking questions.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) asked Mr. Zelensky what one thing he needed most, according to two people on the call. The Ukrainian president replied with the need for jet fighters. He also brought up instituting a no-fly zone over Ukraine, but said, through a translator, “if you can’t do that, at least get me planes,” according to a person on the call.

Eastern European allies are in possession of Russian military jets that potentially could be transferred to Ukraine. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said that the U.S. should help make possible the transfer of the aircraft. “We must eliminate every obstacle to providing every measure of support to Ukraine to include finding a way for the United States to compensate our Eastern European partners who wish to donate their Soviet-style aircraft to Ukraine,” he said in a statement.

Another lawmaker said in an interview that Congress could direct funds in a pending spending bill to replenish the stockpiles of European allies.

Mr. Zelensky said that the jets were more important than the Stinger antiaircraft missiles that the U.S. has greenlighted.

A U.S. defense official said other allied nations are seeking to provide Ukraine with Russian aircraft. The U.S. military would backfill with American aircraft...

 Keep reading.

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Thank you so much for doing your Amazon purchases through my associates links. If I can make $20.00 a month I can buy a book! (In other words, I don't do this for a living, lol.) 

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Ukraine's Nuclear Power Fleet the Prize in Russia's Escalating Energy War

 At the Sydney Morning Herald:

Russia’s strategy of seizing control of Ukraine’s power generation by attacking its fleet of nuclear reactors has prompted global fears of a Chernobyl-style nuclear catastrophe.

On Friday, AEDT, Russian troops seized the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe after a middle-of-the-night attack that set it on fire. Firefighters extinguished the blaze, and no radiation was released, UN and Ukrainian officials said...

The attack triggered global alarm and fear of a catastrophe that could dwarf the world’s worst nuclear disaster, at Ukraine’s Chernobyl in 1986. In an emotional nighttime speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.” ...

More.

 

NATO Rejects No-Fly Zone for Ukraine

If Twitter's global commentariat's any measure, practically the entire world's population wants the U.S. military to join the fight in Ukraine. Turns out it's a moral imperative, ironically, since for the last 21 years, the U.S. has been demonized for its nation-building wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to say nothing of the reaction to the assassination of Osama bin Laden among the 2 billion Muslims worldwide. 

The truth is there is no other country that can destroy Russia and liberate Ukraine. No country with the economic, financial, and military might. Every head of state knows this. People get on the wrong side of the American hegemon at their peril. Even China is hedging its bets now after seeing how fast the U.S. and members of the Western led-international community took down Russia's entire financial system.

It's a breathtaking display of U.S. power. We may not be the the international superpower we once were, but for now, there's no one near ready to take our spot. 

At the video, Vladimir Putin warns the Western allies against creating a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine.

And at the Los Angeles Times, "NATO rejects Ukraine’s plea for no-fly zone after Russia seizes nuclear plant, uses cluster bombs":

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces pressed their offensive against key Ukrainian cities Friday in a heavy bombing and shelling campaign that has led to a ballooning humanitarian disaster, spurred a growing exodus of people and raised fears of a wider calamity after Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant was set ablaze. A chorus of international condemnation and outrage followed Moscow’s capture of the nuclear complex, amid indications Russian forces would continue to go after such facilities.

And in Ukraine’s south, Russian troops besieged the city of Mykolaiv in an apparent march toward Odessa, Ukraine’s most important city on the Black Sea.

In urgent meetings of U.S. and European leaders at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the alliance’s commander confirmed Russia was attacking Ukrainians with cluster bombs, a munition outlawed by more than 120 countries. But NATO also rejected Ukraine’s pleas to establish a no-fly zone over the battered country.

“Unfortunately, tragically, horrifically, this may not be over soon,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, emerging grim-faced from the meetings.

Blinken said a no-fly zone would require employing NATO aircraft over Ukraine in potential conflict with Russian fighter jets and lead to “a full-fledged war in Europe.”

The Biden administration, which has joined most of Europe in enacting severe economic sanctions on Russia, said it was examining a ban on Russian oil exports, although support for that is muted because it would raise gas prices in the U.S. and Europe.

Pentagon officials expressed alarm over Russia’s violent takeover of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in the southeastern city of Enerhodar and said it remains unclear how Moscow plans to use the facility. At a minimum, the Russians could cut off the electricity that the plant supplies to much of Ukraine, a senior official said.

“Using combat power to try to take a nuclear power plant over ... it just underscores the recklessness of this Russian invasion,” the official said, briefing reporters in Washington on condition of anonymity.

Authorities said Friday morning that local firefighters had extinguished the fire at the plant and that there had been no release of radioactive material. Even with Russian forces in control, officials said, the local staff continues to operate the plant and is inspecting it for damage.

None of the site’s six reactors — only one of which was in use, at about 60% capacity — was damaged, said Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva. Initial reports Friday had mistakenly indicated there was a fire inside one of the reactors.

But the strike on the plant, which sparked immediate fears of a Chernobyl-like disaster, with radioactive clouds drifting over the rest of Europe, demonstrated anew the war’s potential for terrifying effects far outside Ukraine’s borders. Norway’s leader called the shelling of Zaporizhzhia “in line with madness.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned in an emergency session of the Security Council that Russia could make use of any of Ukraine’s other nuclear facilities as pawns in the war.

Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear plant operator, said three Ukrainian soldiers were killed and two were injured in the strike.

In an emotional video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed for a stop to the shelling of Zaporizhzhia and for a Western-enforced no-fly zone over the country to forestall any other strikes on sensitive infrastructure. Ukraine is home to four nuclear power plants.

“Only urgent action by Europe can stop the Russian troops,” said Zelensky, who fielded a flurry of worried calls from President Biden and other world leaders. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”

His comments came as Russian troops strengthened their grip on Ukraine’s south in a bid to choke off access to the Black and Azov seas and establish control over a swath of land pushing up against Moldova and NATO member Romania to the west...

Keep reading.

 

Russia's Currency Reserves Aren't Safe

Actually, nobody's reserves are safe. This round of economic and financial sanctions are perhaps the most devastating since World War Two. 

At WSJ, "If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock":

Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management and even the international role of the U.S. dollar.

“What is money?” is a question that economists have pondered for centuries, but the blocking of Russia’s central-bank reserves has revived its relevance for the world’s biggest nations—particularly China. In a world in which accumulating foreign assets is seen as risky, military and economic blocs are set to drift farther apart.

After Moscow attacked Ukraine last week, the U.S. and its allies shut off the Russian central bank’s access to most of its $630 billion of foreign reserves. Weaponizing the monetary system against a Group-of-20 country will have lasting repercussions.

The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis scared developing countries into accumulating more funds to shield their currencies from crashes, pushing official reserves from less than $2 trillion to a record $14.9 trillion in 2021, according to the International Monetary Fund. While central banks have lately sought to buy and repatriate gold, it only makes up 13% of their assets. Foreign currencies are 78%. The rest is positions at the IMF and Special Drawing Rights, or SDR—an IMF-created claim on hard currencies.

Many economists have long equated this money to savings in a piggy bank, which in turn correspond to investments made abroad in the real economy.

Recent events highlight the error in this thinking: Barring gold, these assets are someone else’s liability—someone who can just decide they are worth nothing. Last year, the IMF suspended Taliban-controlled Afghanistan’s access to funds and SDR. Sanctions on Iran have confirmed that holding reserves offshore doesn’t stop the U.S. Treasury from taking action. As New England Law Professor Christine Abely points out, the 2017 settlement with Singapore’s CSE TransTel shows that the mere use of the dollar abroad can violate sanctions on the premise that some payment clearing ultimately happens on U.S. soil.

To be sure, the West has frozen Russia’s stock of foreign exchange, but hasn’t blocked the inflow of new dollars and euros. The country’s current-account surplus is estimated at $20 billion a month due to exports of oil and gas, which the U.S. and the European Union want to keep buying. While these balances go to the private sector, officials have mobilized them. Stopping major banks like Sberbank from using dollars and excluding others from the Swift messaging system still plunges the economy into chaos, especially if foreign businesses are afraid to buy Russian energy despite the sector’s explicit exclusion from sanctions. But hard currency will probably keep gushing in through energy-focused lenders like Gazprombank, and can theoretically be used to pay for imports and buy the ruble.

Yet the entire artifice of “money“ as a universal store of value risks being eroded by the banning of key exports to Russia and boycotts of the kind corporations like Apple and Nike announced this week. If currency balances were to become worthless computer entries and didn’t guarantee buying essential stuff, Moscow would be rational to stop accumulating them and stockpile physical wealth in oil barrels, rather than sell them to the West. At the very least, more of Russia’s money will likely shift into gold and Chinese assets...

 

Russian Police Arrest St. Petersburg Babushka! (VIDEO)

In my heart of hearts, I have to believe these jackboots were getting the woman off the street before opening fire on the youthful protesters. But sadly, my brain of brains tells me they put this woman behind bars. Putin's regime is brutal. 

WATCH:

Shocking video footage shows eight officers swooping in to arrest a pensioner named as Yelena Osipova while others in the crowd shout at officers to stop.

Osipova, who is a survivor of the Nazi's Siege of Leningrad - since renamed St Petersburg - carried a sign that read: 'Soldier, drop your weapon and you will be a true hero!'

Jessica Simpson

Not my favorite photo, but I'm happy she's doing well. She had a difficult pregnancy, gained baby, and now she's back and healthy and doing well with her fashion line.

Her body's my favorite, that's for sure. 

Also, new Lindsey Pelas bikini photos. 

Plus, Ukrainian women. 

Outdoor Sports and Fitness

 At Amazon, Outdoor Sports.

Shelling of Ukrainian Nuclear Plant Draws Condemnation

Extremely frightening. 

I was watching the news last night just thinking of all the possibilities, the main one of which was whether a new Chernobyl was in our future. 

At WSJ, "No Radiation Leaks Reported After Russians Take Ukrainian Nuclear Plant":

KYIV, Ukraine—Russian shelling in southern Ukraine sparked a fire at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant before Russian troops took control of the area, according to local authorities and international observers, raising fears that Moscow’s increasingly indiscriminate war could cause a global environmental disaster.

The fire, extinguished Friday morning, erupted at the Zaporizhzhia power plant’s training facility, Ukraine’s emergency service said. None of the plant’s six reactors were affected and no radiation leaked, officials said. Both sides said Russian troops at the complex weren’t interfering with the plant’s Ukrainian staff.

Still, the skirmish provoked international condemnation and fanned fears of a repeat of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, which sent a vast plume of radioactive steam across Europe and rendered the region surrounding the plant uninhabitable.

Russian forces pushing from the south reached Enerhodar, where the Zaporizhzhia plant is located, on Wednesday. After surrender negotiations failed, a Russian column attacked the city on Thursday. Webcam footage showed a fireball rising behind a church in the city, a short distance from the nuclear facilities, and then two munitions, possibly illumination rounds, landed on the compound itself.

“What we understand is that this projectile is…coming from the Russian forces,” International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi told journalists on Friday. Mr. Grossi said he had offered to travel to Ukraine for talks on ensuring the protection of nuclear sites.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack an act of terror that put all of Europe at risk.

“We survived the night that could have put an end to history,” he said, reiterating his call on the West to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Russia’s government blamed the Ukrainian military for the incident, which it called “an attempt at sabotage.”

“The purpose of this was to blame Russia for what happened,” the Defense Ministry television channel Zvezda cited the ministry as saying.

The war that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched more than a week ago to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government and end its alignment with the West has run into fierce resistance. The Russian offensive has stalled around the capital, Kyiv, but forces have advanced in the northeast and south of the country and Moscow has resorted to indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighborhoods in cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol and Sumy.

On Friday, North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said members of the alliance had agreed they wouldn’t establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine to slow the fighting or send troops into the country...

 

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Historian Stephen Cohen Blames the U.S. and NATO for the Ukraine Crisis (VIDEO)

That is, he blamed the U.S. and NATO for the Ukraine crisis back in 2014. 

This guy's way better than John Mearsheimer, as he's not all theory. He knows Russia like the back of his hand. In relation to what's happening now, I can't find fault with a single thing he says. It's not the argument folks want to hear, myself included. It's just that he's practically irrefutable. Interesting as hell, in any case. 

It's very amazing how the U.S. foreign policy elites can't seem to get it. For Putin, NATO is not a defensive alliance. 

I used to criticize this guy back in the day, but almost a decade on, I admit I was not listening very closely to what he was saying. 

WATCH:

A Flourishing Democracy in Ukraine?

A flourishing Ukrainian democracy. 

That's what Vladimir Putin fears, according to Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, along with Robert Person.

(Contrast this article to John Mearsheimer's, post earlier. The two contrasting takes represents a very common axis in international relations theory: realism vs. liberalism,)

At the Journal of Democracy, "What Putin Fears Most":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has begun. Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that it’s NATO’s fault. He frequently has claimed (including again in an address to the nation as this invasion commenced) that NATO expansion—not 190,000 Russian soldiers and sailors mobilized on Ukraine’s borders—is the central driver of this crisis. Following John Mearsheimer’s provocative 2014 Foreign Affairs article arguing that “the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault,” the narrative of Russian backlash against NATO expansion has become a dominant framework for explaining—if not justifying—Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This notion has been repeated by politicians, analysts, and writers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Multiple rounds of enlargement, they argue, exacerbated Russia’s sense of insecurity as NATO forces crept closer to Russia’s borders, finally provoking Putin to lash out violently, first by invading Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014, and now a second, likely far larger, invasion of Ukraine today. By this telling, the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership points both to the cause of the conflict and its solution: take membership off the table for Ukraine, so the argument goes, and war will be prevented.

This argument has two flaws, one about history and one about Putin’s thinking. First, NATO expansion has not been a constant source of tension between Russia and the West, but a variable. Over the last thirty years, the salience of the issue has risen and fallen not primarily because of the waves of NATO expansion, but due instead to waves of democratic expansion in Eurasia. In a very clear pattern, Moscow’s complaints about NATO spike after democratic breakthroughs. While the tragic invasions and occupations of Georgia and Ukraine have secured Putin a de facto veto over their NATO aspirations, since the alliance would never admit a country under partial occupation by Russian forces, this fact undermines Putin’s claim that the current invasion is aimed at NATO membership. He has already blocked NATO expansion for all intents and purposes, thereby revealing that he wants something far more significant in Ukraine today: the end of democracy and the return of subjugation.

This reality highlights the second flaw: Because the primary threat to Putin and his autocratic regime is democracy, not NATO, that perceived threat would not magically disappear with a moratorium on NATO expansion. Putin would not stop seeking to undermine democracy and sovereignty in Ukraine, Georgia, or the region as whole if NATO stopped expanding. As long as citizens in free countries exercise their democratic rights to elect their own leaders and set their own course in domestic and foreign politics, Putin will keep them in his crosshairs....

The more serious cause of tensions has been a series of democratic breakthroughs and popular protests for freedom throughout the 2000s, what many refer to as the “Color Revolutions.” Putin believes that Russian national interests have been threatened by what he portrays as U.S.-supported coups. After each of them—Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, the Arab Spring in 2011, Russia in 2011–12, and Ukraine in 2013–14—Putin has pivoted to more hostile policies toward the United States, and then invoked the NATO threat as justification for doing so.

Boris Yeltsin never supported NATO expansion but acquiesced to the first round of expansion in 1997 because he believed his close ties to President Bill Clinton and the United States were not worth sacrificing over this comparatively smaller matter. Through Partnership for Peace and especially the NATO-Russia Founding Act, Clinton and his team made a considerable effort to keep US-Russian relations positive while at the same time managing NATO expansion. The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to stop ethnic cleaning in Kosovo severely tested that strategy but survived in part because Clinton gave Yeltsin and Russia a role in the negotiated solution. When the first post-communist color revolution overthrew Slobodan Milosevic a year later, Russia’s new president, Putin, deplored the act but did not overreact. At that time, he still entertained the possibility of cooperation with the West, including NATO.

However, the next round of democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, escalated U.S.-Russian tensions significantly. Putin blamed the United States directly for assisting in this democratic breakthrough and helping to install what he saw as a pro-American puppet, President Mikheil Saakashvili. Immediately after the Rose Revolution, Putin sought to undermine Georgian democracy, ultimately invading in 2008 and recognizing two Georgian regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—as independent states. U.S.-Russian relations reached a new low point in 2008.

A year after the Rose Revolution, the most consequential democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world erupted in Ukraine in 2004, the Orange Revolution. In the years prior to that momentous event, Ukraine’s foreign-policy orientation under President Leonid Kuchma was relatively balanced between east and west, but with gradually improving ties between Kyiv and Moscow. That changed when a falsified presidential election in late 2004 brought hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets, eventually sweeping away Kuchma’s—and Putin’s—handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Instead, the prodemocratic and pro-western Orange Coalition led by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko took power.

Compared to Serbia in 2000 or Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 was a much larger threat to Putin. First, the Orange Revolution occurred suddenly and in a much bigger and more strategic country on Russia’s border. The abrupt pivot to the West by Yushchenko and his allies left Putin facing the prospect that he had “lost” a country on which he placed tremendous symbolic and strategic importance.

To Putin, the Orange Revolution undermined a core objective of his grand strategy: to establish a privileged and exclusive sphere of influence across the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union. Putin believes in spheres of influence; that as a great power, Russia has a right to veto the sovereign political decisions of its neighbors. Putin also demands exclusivity in his neighborhood: Russia can be the only great power to exercise such privilege (or even develop close ties) with these countries. This position has hardened significantly since Putin’s conciliatory position of 2002 as Russia’s influence in Ukraine has waned and Ukraine’s citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape from Moscow’s grasp. Subservience was now required. As Putin explained in a recent historical article, in his view Ukrainians and Russians “were one people” whom he is seeking to reunite, even if through coercion. For Putin, therefore, the loss of Ukraine in 2004 to the West marked a major negative turning point in U.S.-Russian relations that was far more salient than the second wave of NATO expansion that was completed the same year.

Second, those Ukrainians who rose up in defense of their freedom were, in Putin’s own assessment, Slavic brethren with close historical, religious, and cultural ties to Russia. If it could happen in Kyiv, why not in Moscow? Several years later, it almost did happen in Russia when a series of mass protests erupted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the wake of fraudulent parliamentary elections in December 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time in his decade-plus in power, ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten Putin’s grip on power. That popular uprising in Russia, occurring the same year as the Arab Spring, and then followed with Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president for a third term in 2012, marked another major negative turn in U.S.-Russian relations, ending the reset launched by Presidents Obama and Medvedev in 2009. Democratic mobilization, first the Middle East and then Russia—not NATO expansion—ended this last chapter of U.S.-Russian cooperation. There have been no new chapters of cooperation since.

But U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated ever further in 2014, again because of new democratic expansion. The next democratic mobilization to threaten Putin happened a second time in Ukraine in 2013–14. After the Orange Revolution in 2004, Putin did not invade Ukraine, but wielded other instruments of influence to help his protégé, Viktor Yanukovych, narrowly win the Ukrainian presidency six years later. Yanukovych, however, turned out not to be a loyal Kremlin servant, but tried to cultivate ties with both Russia and the West. Putin finally compelled Yanukovych to make a choice, and the Ukrainian president chose Russia in the fall of 2013 when he reneged on signing an EU association agreement in favor of membership in Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. To the surprise of everyone in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington, Yanukovych’s decision to scuttle this agreement with the EU triggered mass demonstrations in Ukraine again, bringing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets in what would become known as the Euromaidan or “Revolution of Dignity” to protest Yanukovych’s turn away from the democratic West. The street protests lasted several weeks, punctuated by the killing of dozens of peaceful protestors by Yanukovych’s government, the eventual collapse of that government and Yanukovych’s flight to Russia in February 2014, and a new pro-Western government taking power in Kyiv. Putin had “lost” Ukraine for the second time in a decade.

This time, Putin struck back with military force to punish the alleged American-backed, neo-Nazi usurpers in Kyiv. Russian armed forces seized Crimea; Moscow later annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Putin also provided money, equipment, and soldiers to back separatists in eastern Ukraine, fueling a simmering war in Donbas for eight years, in which approximately 14,000 people have been killed. After invading, not before, Putin amped up his criticisms of NATO expansion as justification for his belligerent actions.

In response to this second Ukrainian democratic revolution, Putin concluded that cooption through elections and other nonmilitary means had to be augmented with greater coercive pressure, including military intervention. Since the Revolution of Dignity, Putin has waged an unprecedented war against Ukraine using a full spectrum of military, political, informational, social, and economic weapons in an attempt to destabilize and eventually topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

 

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault

This article from John Mearsheimer is getting a lot of attention, as well as the lecture video I posted the other night. 

Prescient, you might say. (And liberalism here means "classical" liberalism grounded in philosophies of the Enlightenment, from folks like Emmanuel Kant, John Locke, etc.). It's not the American ideological "liberalism" associated with an earlier version of the Democrat Party, now a radical, extreme left party, not *liberal* at all). 

At Foreign Affairs, "The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin":

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement—which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided—and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion...