Putin has said that he sent troops to Ukraine to “denazify” it and to “liberate” its people from its democratically elected government. Apologists for Putin’s “special operation” say that Putin had to act because he felt encircled by NATO.
Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder is an authority of fascism and totalitarianism. He appeared on Democracy Now, where he explained that Russian claims about feeling threatened by expansion of NATO were bogus. He says that the nations that joined NATO did so because they wanted to. Putin is waging war against Ukraine, he says, to destroy the Ukrainian state.
Why would he want to destroy the Ukrainian state? Because it is free and democratic and (before the invasion) prosperous.
Why are Ukrainians fiercely resisting the Russian invasion? Apparently they no longer want to be controlled by Putin, contrary to his claim that he was “liberating” them.
The Soviet satellite nations chose to join NATO of their own free will. Ukrainians are now resisting Putin’s war of their own free will.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They hate us for our freedoms!
I’ve seen this movie before. The remake isn’t any better.
I read a piece this morning that pointed out that the Ukraine has a highly educated population and there are many programming engineers in the Ukraine that work on projects for companies like Google, Apple, et al.
This prosperity ALL came about after the Ukraine was free of Russia back in the 1990s, as an independent democratic country.
Putin’s brutal invasion of the Ukraine is putting a huge hurt on Silicone Valley’s ability to complete projects and support products they already have out. Putin’s war is creating a serious shortage or programmers for companies in western democracies, and thousands of these techs are now trapped in the Ukraine in urban bomb shelters.
I agreed more with the other guy who spoke first on the Dem Now show. Did you hear him?
>
No, what was his name?
Andrew Cockburn author of “Power, Profit, and the American War Machine”.
Timothy Snyder says at the end of the interview that the Cuban Missile crisis gives him hope because Russia & the US cut a deal and the US agreed to pull it’s missiles out of Turkey. I’m not sure what Snyder’s point is here. Seems like a contradiction of his view that this isn’t about security.
ArtsSmart
Why do you see a contradiction in the deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis
Pulling missiles out of Turkey gave Khrushchev a way to save face against the hardliners. Humiliating Putin with no way out should work real good.
Joel-If Putin didn’t invade for security reasons, why would he cut a security deal when his objective is to destroy Ukrainian democracy?
ArtsSmart
Because it is not a security deal!!!! Nobody is ever sending Troops across Russian borders!!!! It is a means of saving face. As was the US pulling Nukes out of Turkey . The deal allowed both Kennedy and Khrushchev to walk back from the brink and placate hard liners.
The reality is, it does matter if thousands of ICBMs are launched from 90 miles off shore or 9000 miles away. Use your 15 minutes well .
You should be very concerned what happens if things start going really bad for him in Ukraine and thus at home.
The Russian Army unlike in China , refused to fire on the Russian people in 91 toppling the Soviet Union. Even in China it took a change in Military Units and a whole lot of propaganda about dead troops , fed to those troops to get Chinese troops to move on the people in Tienanmen Square.
We should worry about who has command and control of Putin’s nukes.
Correction ,does it matter.
It’s Stephen F. Cohen. He’s a prominent Russian studies scholar and outspoken critic of US/NATO’s role in Eastern Europe. In 2014, he said Russia may concede on any cultural issues but they will not back down militarily.
FYI, he passed away two years ago. But I believe he was quite right about the magnitude of conflict.
What a bunch of total horseshit.
Feel free to agree or disagree. This is much more complicated than people think. I don’t expect a consensus.
It would be completely naive for anyone to think that the CIA did not play a role in the Maidan Revolution. But that is irrelevant to the fact that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of a number of fundamental international laws and contrary to the will of the Ukrainian people and to as morally objectionable as it gets. Right now, he is dropping bombs on grandmothers and children.
For a long, long time, the United States worked covertly to put repressive dictators in place–the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein are classic examples. How did those engineered coups work out? In the case of Ukraine, the U.S. supported a popular uprising that led to the formation of a democratic state. BIG DIFFERENCE. Sanity, at last.
And what we are seeing right now is historically unprecedented, not some fabricated and coerced and cajoled “coalition” like the one that Shrub’s administration put together, but the nations of the world, with a few rogue exceptions, standing together to oppose brutal aggression that has as its aim imposing tyranny on an unwilling people at a horrific cost in the blood of innocents. This is precisely what the world should have done in response to Shrub’s second Iraq War. I am not a religious person, but I pray that this change will stick, that we have entered a new era, in which the kind of thinking that characterizes the likes of Putin and Kissinger is no longer acceptable, in which a mass murderer is seen for what he is, a mass murderer.
It shocks and horrifies me that people claiming to be on the American left would support what Putin is doing right now and mouth the thug’s fabricated excuses. Such people are either useful idiots or paid shills for Tsar Vlad’s murderous, criminal kleptocracy.
The two theories aren’t necessarily incompatible. Putin may be seeking to destroy Ukraine as a response to the westward expansion of NATO and the EU. And ruining Ukraine may be preferable strategically to occupying it. But what do I know.
I need Stephen Kotkin to weigh in on this.
No nation was pressured to join NATO or EU. Do you think they should be excluded if they ask to join? To protect Putin’s feelings and wounded ego?
I don’t think Ukraine was pressured to join NATO—my understanding is that Ukraine itself has pushed hard for NATO membership. It’s not clear to me that we should want Ukraine in NATO, though, given that membership comes with a security guarantee. Is Ukraine a clear strategic interest of the US, such that we would pledge to send men there to die if Ukraine is attacked? I would say probably no.
Obviously I’m not remotely an expert in this area. I’m trying to do more listening than opining on Ukraine policy.
So what would the legitimate reason be to oppose EU membership. Is Russia still a Communist State? Is the EU a military organization? And what threat did NATO or Ukraine present to Russia. Were their foriegn/ American troops in Eastern Europe or the Baltic States. Were there Nukes? The non expansion understanding was with Gorbachev as the Communist leader of the Soviet Union, when Germany reunified. The Soviet Union dissolved as did the Communist economic system in the USSR and Eastern Europe. There was no understanding with Russia . Of Course we might have been better off if Gorbachev had won instead of Yeltsin . Putin correctly blames Gorbachev for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Democracy coupled with relative prosperity was the existential threat to Putin. In the same manner that the Beatles brought down the Soviet System, perceived Western opulence vs Soviet deprivation. . Civil unrest in Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2020 and 2021 was Putin’s tipping point.
https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/ukraine-russia-leftists-tankie/?fbclid=IwAR109liT-82d5Gbo2bXe5JgttdOIOiwnkHa-MedwNueW7aSqRNcJrzxhNrY
there foriegn / jwnot their .
I don’t understand your question(s), assuming they were addressed to me.
A great piece from the Intercept, Joel. Thanks!
People who support murderous authoritarian dictators aren’t leftists. A National Socialism isn’t Socialism.
Joel,
Thank you for this excellent article. This so aptly describes someone who posts here:
“These pseudo-leftists — sometimes called “tankies,” a name deriving from an earlier generation of Western leftists who backed the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 — also defend Russia’s behavior today. Other commentators like Gilbert Achcar and Dan La Botz have explained this crowd’s origins in detail, but the key element in the tankie mindset is the simple-minded assumption that only the U.S. can be imperialist, and thus any country that opposes the U.S. must be supported. As author and human rights activist Leila Al-Shami put it several years ago, “The pro-fascist left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.”
“In the present context, the tankies either directly defend, or make excuses for, Putin and Russia, even though the government is phenomenally corrupt, a crony capitalist regime led by a thug who assassinates his political opponents. The tankies tend to be correctly critical and probing about U.S. empire but don’t apply these critical faculties to Russia. They become gullible and naïve when dealing with Russian officials and their narrative. It would be tempting simply to ignore the tankies, but we must repudiate them. If we don’t, they will continue to give the left a bad name, especially among people fighting repressive regimes, who often assume tankies speak for the rest of us and thus feel betrayed by Western leftists.”
WE MUST REPUDIATE THEM.
Even if they say something that happens to be true half the time or one quarter of the time, they must be repudiated. Because there are plenty of other people on the left who tell those same truths ALL the time, instead of only telling the half the time while spewing their false narratives the other half.
Here is another very interesting interview with Masha Gessen on what the media gets wrong about Putin. He learned from the war in the former Yugoslavia the power dynamics of the US invasion and used this as his opportunity to exert Russia’s power.
I didn’t connect the Ukranian invasion with the war in the 90s in former Yugoslavia. But of course the Russians were supporting the Serbs.
Given that most nations can’t deploy troops to Ukraine in time, sanctions would probably be main options available to bystanders.
But I’d like to see sanctions be real—Ie, go after the Russian dark money that permeates the big cities in the west.
Also Russian economy is very much dependent on petroleum; cutting imports could hurt them in the long run. But that will cause big surges in petroleum prices—you’ll feel it when you gas up your car.
go after the Russian dark money that permeates the big cities in the west
The biggest intelligence failure in history is doubtless the failure to expose the fact that Donald Trump has long been a Russian asset. The biggest intelligence coup in history was Russia’s placing him in office. The truly breathtaking thing is that an enormous amount of the Trump-Putin collusion was right out in plain sight.
I hope that readers of this blog will not miss this extremely important overview:
https://newrepublic.com/article/165553/donald-trump-everything-vladimir-putin-wished-russian-asset
Diane, yet again, you were right and I was wrong. (I should know by now that when I’m in your virtual living room, I’m less a teacher and more a student.) I thought the invasion was going to be quick, and the U.S. should stay out of it to avoid escalating the violence. Nope. This is going to be like Syria, a long term human tragedy. And with the entire world, other than some Russian and American conspiracy theorists, united against Putin, the Ukrainian people deserve support — including weapons of war — and the popular sentiment that supports giving it.
Thank you, LCT.
Putin is the man who fought Chechnya by destroying it, leveling its cities. He will do the same to Ukraine. When Putin is done, the cities will be rubble.
Lest we forget:
https://newrepublic.com/article/165553/donald-trump-everything-vladimir-putin-wished-russian-asset
Vlad’s Agent Orange:
Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA)
Half the people of the United States are so freaking ignorant that they think that this guy is their hero. That his is not in prison is the biggest intelligence failure in history in more ways than one.
Putin didn’t want a democratic state with many Russian speakers and with family members back in Russia on his southern border. And he wildly miscalculated. And he is a war criminal. And he always was a cold-blooded killer and thug.
I swears, I foreswears, I swears it again: Ain’t no such things as halfway crooks. Billionaires are all out insane. Putin and Tramp are the exemplars, not the exceptions.
A good read…Timothy Snyder’s pocket-size On Tyranny: Twenty Lesson from the Twentieth Century.
Lesson 2, Defend institutions, begins:
“It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.”
If you haven’t read Snyder’s “Bloodlands,” about this exact area of the world from World War I to World War II, it is essential reading. Difficult, but essential
Thanks for the suggestion, TOW!
Russia has been trying to push back against US/NATO expansion for a long time already. But as long as the West keeps being the Yanx obedient and faithful lap dog…not a chance. How would the US react if foreign troops would encircle it – in spite of a promise it would not happen?
Nonsense. Putin knows a functioning successful democracy on his doorstep is an existential threat to his tyrannical autocracy.
When you look at the map of Russia, compared to Ukraine, it’s a laugh to assert that Putin feels “encircled.” As you say, Callisto, Putin feels threatened by the possibility of a free and prosperous democracy on his doorstep. His vanity and ego require him to reduce it to rubble.
Putin feels about democracy the way Bill Gates feels about democracy. He sees a public school or a country with elections, and thinks, like almost all billionaires and two year olds, “Mine!”