While I can understand the NATO component of Russia's interests in the way you describe it here, there are some historical oddities that leave me sort of ambivalent to it ultimately:
1) NATO expansion had been, at pretty much every point, done with at least some minimum level of consultation with Russia. To the point that Putin had reportedly claimed that he was told Russia might one day join NATO themselves. He reportedly even asked to do so, but wanted to skip all the actual steps required for it.
2) Russia threatened Ukraine with existential oblivion over the EU trade deal that ultimately resulted in the Maidan protests. I know you said Putin sees these EU-aligned moves as all part of the same set of threats, but I also think it starts to get hard to rationally calculate which of them are going to provoke the Bear into murderous conquest when something like a trade deal incites threats of existential oblivion. Under this kind of calculus, ANY overtures by Ukraine toward the EU would be indistinguishable as a causality, so why focus on NATO when it was the EU trade deal that Russia has in actual reality threatened Ukraine? NATO membership by Ukraine was pretty much dead as a domestic and practical matter for the forseeable future, especially after Russia invaded Crimea. It was not especially popular domestically, at least not enough to make actual material progress toward, and was impractical on NATO's side since you can't join NATO when you're actively in conflict (plus a few other problems like corruption, etc).
3) Russia has already had NATO members on it's border. States that it has an actual history of military intervention in (Baltics, etc). I get the cultural reasons you've outlined here might make Ukraine special, but ultimately all this seems to boil down to is "Russia is a failed Empire and is embarrassed about that fact, and has a case of insecurity regarding how that makes it look both domestically and internationally, so they tried to take some of it back to prove to everyone they could still exert power". Under that understanding, if it weren't NATO it would have been something else, like an EU trade deal. In fact, I'm at this point pretty convinced that Putin made his decision to conquer all of Ukraine in 2014, and was just biding his time and taking what he could until building up the strength to go for the whole. Maidan proved to Putin that Ukraine would not stay peacefully under Russia's influence, so it had to be pacified.
1) These "consultations" were indeed minimal, in that they were more like informing Russia than asking for its permission. Putin was only (briefly) willing to join NATO as "an equal partner," which the United States would never have allowed. Where the intensity of Russia's public resistance to NATO varied, it varied with a) Russia's leverage to push back, since it was much weaker in the 90s and early 2000s and unable to resist much; b) the hostility of US-Russian relations, since there was a thaw in the relationship after 9/11 when Putin saw an opportunity to collaborate on counterterrorism, and c) how far NATO was expanding, since each further round of expansion pushed deeper into Russia's buffer and was seen as increasingly threatening.
2) Do you have a source for Russia threatening Ukraine with "existential oblivion" over the EU trade deal? Or did they merely threaten tariffs on Ukraine? And I agree that NATO membership for Ukraine was practically unlikely, but that doesn't mean there was no momentum or that the threat was dead. Ukraine amended its constitution to explicitly seek NATO membership in 2019, for example, and was trying to reform to become eligible. Some details on that momentum here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#Presidency_of_Volodymyr_Zelenskyy_(from_2019). Putin could have perceived the U.S. unwillingness to offer a moratorium as validating his concerns that we were serious about it.
3) I agree with you that Russia is an embarrassed wannabee empire that lashes out with violence in hopes people will take it more seriously. I don't think it follows that invading Ukraine was always inevitable, nor that NATO expansion played no role in implanting that insecurity. US intelligence sources reported that Putin himself did not finalize the decision to invade until days before he invasion began. https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/russia-putin-ukraine-invasion-us-intelligence/ . And Putin’s prewar buildup was longer than one would expect if he never hoped to negotiate. If he were always set on invading, and there was nothing the West could have offered to prevent it, why would he spend four months gradually amassing his forces, telegraphing his intent to let Ukraine prepare? Such a visible and dramatic buildup makes more sense if it was to heighten his negotiating leverage, and a moratorium on NATO expansion was the core thing he publicly requested in those negotiations.
re #2) ""We don't want to use any kind of blackmail. This is a question for the Ukrainian people," said Glazyev. "But legally, signing this agreement about association with EU, the Ukrainian government violates the treaty on strategic partnership and friendship with Russia." When this happened, he said, Russia could no longer guarantee Ukraine's status as a state and could possibly intervene if pro-Russian regions of the country appealed directly to Moscow."
This was not Putin himself making this statement, but Kremlin aide Sergei Glazyev, so of course there's a question of just how much this was a direct threat, but a mob-style "hey, we don't want to tell you what to do but, uh, if you do this we'll have to un-country you" threat from a Kremlin aide that urned out to basically predict exactly what Russia did afterward seems...important.
A moratorium on NATO expansion may have helped for a time, but I'm also not certain how much Putin would have been inclined to bank on such a promise. The Russian state (ie Putin) is paranoid. In that sense, yes, I understand that all of these factors reinforce their paranoia, but it also means to me that they will never truly accept any promises either. How do you truly reassure a paranoid actor that also has an aggressive motive to interpret your actions as threats (revanchist empire lust)?
Regarding your concern that Russia was likely to eventually invade regardless of what happened, do keep in mind that they did restrain themselves from invading in 2014, even though it would have been much easier back then, since there was more support for Russia, and the Ukrainian army back then was basically a joke as they felt comfortable relying on Russian support. This implies to me that the Russian government wasn’t necessarily set on conquest from day one and only came to that decision after eight years. Weather there change in policy was because they felt that Ukraine was likely to join NATO in the future or some other reason like Putin‘s declining popularity is anybody’s guess but it does provide evidence for the idea that it was possible to get them not to invade.
They probably refrained from intervening in 2014 because they thought that they could subjugate Ukraine with the Minsk Agreements while still maintaining relatively good ties with the West. By 2022, that specific Russian strategy had failed.
Sure, one can accept your points that NATO provoked Russia with its expansion, just like Britain provoked Nazi Germany in 1939 by giving a guarantee to Poland and just like Serbia provoked Austria-Hungary in the runup to World War I by significantly expanding and closely aligning itself with Russia.
But there's also another factor that I want you to consider here: Specifically severe Russian underpopulation. As a result of its 20th century demographic disasters, and then massive secessions, Russia's current population is only around 150 million. It could have been 500+ million instead:
When you're unwilling to reconcile yourself to history's fate for your country, you could seek to undo it as much as you could, in this case through military expansion. Russia tried peacefully reintegrating Ukraine into Eurasian economic and political structures until 2014, but that strategy ultimately ended up failing. Then it tried Minsk, but that also ended up failing.
This is why Anatoly Karlin initially supported the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine even though he also acknowledged that the NATO justifications that Russia offered for it were mostly bogus, especially in the ICBM age. Rather, he supported it because he viewed it as a desperate, last-ditch effort to quickly boost Russia's population so that Russia would avoid being doomed to irrelevance. He believed that only with a massive population boost could Russia have any chance, even an extremely remote one, of competing with the US, EU, China, and India in the 21st century.
I mostly agree with your post, but I would like to push back on a few of your pro Ukrainian points. You write favourably of the ideal that give me liberty or give me death, but I would argue that at least in so far as a government is concerned, the life of the people genuinely is more important than their freedom. Before the invasion, the Ukrainian government made a number of policy choices, that obviously increased the likelihood of a Russian invasion. Obviously, Russia should not have invaded them regardless, but it is entirely possible for both governments to be in the wrong and causing mass slaughter of its own. People is hardly justified by the government‘s track record so far given that it has not meaningfully done economically much better since the revolution in 2014, when a democratically elected president was overthrown by a violent mob.
Many people of my acquaintance argue that Russia would have invaded them regardless, but this appears obviously false to me. For example, if they had continued with a foreign policy in 2013, it appears pretty obvious that Russia would have left them well enough alone. Also, realistically, that’s probably not the only foreign policy they could have gotten away with, but they didn’t need to go full in on joining NATO and provoking Russia. To add to that, a lot of their offensive have taken place at suspicious times, almost as if the government was deliberately trying to sabotage any P stocks. It was genuinely very bad of the Ukrainian government to get so many people killed through their policy decisions, and Russia’s evil does not absolve them in any way.
Regarding the claims that Ukraine is overly sympathetic to neo-Nazis, I mostly think this is rounding error in terms of the broad policy implications and should be ignored, but the claims do have a lot of basis. A lot of the ministers in the post revolution, government had extremely antisemitic views and the people continue to revere individuals who collaborated with Hitler. Many far right people have been involved in the military, and while you could argue that this is merely due to military necessity, it’s not as of these people active before the war. And while you could reasonably argue that most of these only display tolerance of the far right and did not involve much government policy, the government has in fact crack down on the Russian language in extremely disturbing ways. Again to be clear while I think it’s pretty bad that the government banned Russian language newspapers, I think this is pretty unimportant compare to achieving peace in Ukraine. Just mentioning this because you criticised the narrative of them as far right. Also, while I would agree that they are a democracy, Ukraine has a long history of corruption and oligarchy, so they are at best a dysfunctional democracy, although things would obviously still be worse under Russia.
This is too both-sidesy and unduly critical of Ukraine imo. At their core, Ukraine just wanted to be free, and Russia just wanted to dominate Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine made policy choices that were, in hindsight, reckless or foolish - but as other comments here show, that is debatable even with the benefit of hindsight. And more importantly, reckless or foolish decisions made with the best of intentions are categorically different than what Russia has done, which is intentionally kill millions of people in a naked effort to aggrandize power. One got people killed indirectly, accidentally, and defensively - the other chose to pull the trigger offensively. None of Ukraine's policy choices strip Russia of full responsibility for that decision. To say "Russia's evil does not absolve them in any way" gets it backwards - Russia's evil is what scared Ukraine into running for NATO's protection.
All of the stuff about economic outcomes, antisemitism, corruption, and censoring Russian language newspapers is whataboutism IMO. There are lots of middle-income countries with problems like that and that doesn't get them invaded. "The life of the people genuinely is more important than their freedom" is a fair argument against conscription, but not of seeking to preserve one's democracy from foreign domination.
>As an aside…Putin justified this invasion with a narrative that Ukraine has always basically been a part of Russia, not a truly independent nation. I think this is wrong. But if our goal is to refute and resist that narrative, it seems counterproductive to elevate the nuclear weapons Ukraine inherited from what is now Russia as a symbol of its independence. Weren’t these nukes actually a symbol of Ukraine’s one-time dependence on Russian technology and military might?
Could you expand on this footnote at all? I don't think recognizing that Ukraine was once dependent on Russia supports Putin's view at all. I think you are conflating similar concepts like nation and state. It's entirely possible that "Ukraine" was historically dependent on Russia (or even part of Russia) without accepting Putin's argument at all.
Putin's argument is that "Ukrainian" is not a different ethnicity than "Russian". It's similar (in his view) to arguing that "North Korean" or "East German" is an ethnicity or independent nation. With this framework, "Ukraine" is similar to North Korea or East Germany in that it is a political division created by external powers. In his case, he credits Poland, the Habsburgs, Germany and other European powers with creating a "west Russia" and an artificial national identity to go with it.
If you don't agree with that, then recognizing that Ukraine inherited things from it's time integrated with Russia doesn't contradict your view at all. For example, everyone would recognize that a lot of Indian infrastructure comes from centuries of British rule. But that doesn't mean that "Indian" is really just a subculture of British and that Winston Churchill and Gandhi shared a common background.
Sure, you're completely right. I agree with your distinction between states, nations, and ethnicities; and I agree that Putin is wrong to deny the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation/ethnicity. Ukraine's inheritance of weapons or institutions from the Soviet Union does not weaken the ethnonationalist argument for Ukrainian independence.
In fact, I'd go one step further and say that even if Putin were right about his ethnic claims, it still shouldn't matter, because I don't believe in ethnonationalism or care about nation-states to begin with. There's no reason those three spheres need to align. All that matters morally is the consent of the governed, and Ukrainians clearly prefer to be independent.
My footnote is just a nod to the existence of people who disagree with us about those things. There are many ways to define nations, which are ultimately imagined communities relying on fuzzy and imperfect criteria. And one factor commonly considered in those definitions is a region's degree of political independence across history. Has B typically been an independent power center from A, or has it typically been subservient?
China claims Taiwan not only because of shared ancestry, but in part because it was subject to the rule of the Chinese empire for much of China's history. Native Hawaiians are ethnically distinct from native Americans, who are ethnically distinct from European settlers/migrants and the slaves they brought with them - but they're all part of the United States now, in part because there's been a sufficiently long period of political control (which in turn caused some assimilation, cultural creation, and shared experience/sense of community/voluntary identification with the same nation).
The idea my footnote refutes is the implication - usually unspoken, but detectable in the tone of these Ukrainian sympathizers wringing their hands about Budapest - that Ukraine once was once an independent power center - with independence from and leverage over Russia - *by virtue of its nukes.* That the only reason they have to put up with Russia's domineering bullshit today is because they were tricked into giving up something which formerly guaranteed and symbolized their independence, in exchange for hollow promises. The reality that they never had any leverage to begin with, and that what they gave up was Russia's to begin with, undercuts that argument (but NOT the other national arguments you allude to).
Thank you for the thoughtful response, especially to a comment on a footnote.
I avoided using Taiwan because it's a different situation (and more controversial). The PRC does not claim Taiwan because of ethnic identity but because they're the successor state to the China of ~1945 which controlled the island. Taiwan (at least according to some Taiwanese parties) similarly considers itself the successor state and therefore claims all of mainland China (as well as parts of nearby countries due to territorial changes approved only by the PRC). Neither disputes that Taiwan is legally part of China, they just disagree which administration is "China". I guess the only way to relate this question of successor states back to Russian/Ukraine is that Putin asserts that the current post-2014 "Ukraine" is not the same Ukraine as in 1994 and therefore the Budapest agreement is no longer valid.
I think the reason I stumbled over that entry in your list was because of "truly independent". You argue that Ukraine's 1994 government needed to pragmatically consider Russia's interests or face invasion so what does "true independence" mean? Who would bear moral responsibility for the invasion of a nuclear Ukraine by Russia (or America)? There's an implication that it would be partially the Ukrainians' fault for pursuing goals contrary to the interests of stronger countries. But why not extend that same logic to Ukraine today? I don't see much moral difference between saying 1994 Ukraine had no leverage to resist Russian demands and saying that 2025 Ukraine has "no cards" to resist Russian demands like Trump does. Ukraine sympathizers solve this apparent contradiction by exaggerating the agency of Ukraine in 1994. Self-declared realists such as Mearsheimer (or at least people that reference Mearsheimer) instead argue that 2014/2022 Ukraine should have given in to Russia's demands using the same logic you do for 1994. I'd assume that you'd say the difference is that it is fine for Russia to dictate independent Ukraine's nuclear policy(assuming it has the leverage to do so) but not fine for Russia to dictate independent Ukraine's policy towards the EU or NATO. That's a perfectly reasonable axiom, but not one I automatically assumed.
(Also I realize that you'd dispute "a nuclear Ukraine" is a fair description of 1994 Ukraine, but "a Ukraine that possesses the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and a significant portion Soviet military and scientific expertise and uses those resources to establish a usable nuclear arsenal" seems like a reasonable possibility)
Again, I wouldn't use the word "fault" in either case. All nations are doomed to navigate their geopolitical position - to play the cards they're dealt, so to speak. There are smarter and dumber ways to play them. But that's not always clear in advance, and I see that as a separate issue from moral blameworthiness. Getting invaded is almost never a country's "fault", as the invader almost always bears moral responsibility.
Nevertheless, invasion is sometimes avoidable had the defender made wiser choices. I don't think it's fine for bigger nations to bully smaller nations in 1994 or 2025; I just think that small nations are wise to strategize in a way that doesn't pick fights with the bully.
What Ukraine should do in 1994 or 2025 should in both cases be determined by a clear-eyed assessment of the best they can realistically hope to achieve. Today, I don't think Ukraine today has no ability to resist Putin! They've resisted him with some success for three years now. They do not need to give up their democracy, nor 80% of their territory, nor extensive economic connections with the West, perhaps including EU membership. Those are realistic, attainable goals, and if Russia demands they give them up, they should resist.
But they probably will need to give up Crimea and the regions they've lost, at
least informally/de facto. And they probably won't get to join NATO, and probably won't get reparations from Russia. That's not fair, but it's true, so they should not let unrealistic maximalism get in the way of the best they can realistically hope for now.
As you said in your article, some people tend to conflate culpability and causality, so I always try to make sure I understand which is being discussed. I always assume that this is because moral arguments require much less expertise to accept or dispute. If I close this tab I can open up another article that says Ukraine is on the verge of collapse and has no chance to resist total overrun by Russian forces, so "realistically should give up 80% of their territory, ties the west, etc." You and the author of that hypothetical article wouldn't necessarily have a moral disagreement, but simply an empirical disagreement about the strength of the Ukrainian military. And I simply don't have the expertise to evaluate either side of that disagreement. It's much more comfortable to stick only to "_____ is bad" usually with an analogy to a vaguely similar historical event so many layman in my position default to that.
I think your analysis makes a lot of sense and avoids that superficiality. Looking forward to the next part.
> We, as Americans, do not get to decide which of another state’s demonstrated interests are “legitimate.” Some security interests are socially constructed and not actually essential to the safety and wellbeing of the nation’s citizens. This is certainly true of many supposed U.S. security interests! But our opinions about how other countries should assess their interests are irrelevant to how they do.
I agree with this in the sense of "calling their actions illegitimate doesn't help us predict what they'll do next," but I don't think anyone is calling the actions illegitimate in order to predict what they'll do next! The Russian invasion is illegal and wrong in certain very important senses, and it's good to say that out loud for two reasons:
a) The more people that believe that, the stronger our collective moral disgust with morally disgusting things will be. That puts us in a proper epistemic space. (Oh, but won't our rationality be harmed by thoughts only of vengeance and terribleness?? Yeah, the average American's will, but the average American isn't in charge of negotiating. Whoever's at the table with Putin would much rather have an American public saying "we will send the Ukrainians 10 billion bombs a week if that's what it takes" than one saying "well, really Ukraine started it.")
b) Ok, wait, I think it actually does hold some predictive power—it claims that Russia will be more likely to deviate from the other interests the US thinks are illegitimate. It doesn't say necessarily that the Russians are totally irrational actors, just that their bar for violating extremely important international norms is super duper low. This puts us on alert for the Baltics, basically, which seems not misguided.
> To serve as Russia’s desired buffer zone, Russia’s neighbors needed to be militarily neutral at least. Russians have never seen NATO as militarily neutral, in part because NATO was founded to contain the Soviet Union and seen as Russia’s sworn enemy for generations.
The term "buffer" really matters here. To the point that I don't think Russia's aggression was totally a result of NATO expansion (though that certainly aggravated and accelerated it), and it would've lashed out at the buffer state sooner or later anyway. Like, this wasn't really avoidable given the generally escalatory state of the world.
> Many idealists are irritatingly unable to distinguish culpability from causality. They are so driven by a sense of right and wrong that whenever a country does something wrong, their sole instinct is to point and judge and blame and condemn, over and over, as if our sheer disapproval carried any corrective force.
[And then the big footnote about how idealism is dumb and dead in general]
We can distinguish culpability from causality while still accepting that one bears on the other. States that are culpable for declaring wars like the one in Ukraine are likely to cause more chaos and destruction in the future. Sure, Russian rhetoric might be a little silly and overblown as a fig leaf for the true motives of repelling NATO expansion. But if you lie over and over and over again to justify doing a terrible thing, you start to believe the lie. I'm not saying that Putin will necessarily be taken over by an irrational urge to reclaim the entire Russian empire. But he might be! And certainly some of his people will be and have been, and even some of our people have been. Including our President, to an extent.
I will continue to believe that even if the cause of the war is a little fuzzier than the "moral clarity" schmucks say, we should pretend it isn't. At this point, we're looking to end the war in a way that tells Russia, "Fucking stop it. Even if NATO is a little scary, just stop it." I'm sure you'll be getting into the whole "what to do next" thing in subsequent parts, but I think it's really important we keep in mind that a strong negotiating position is better than a weaker one. And a position with "moral clarity" is absolutely stronger than one that embarrassingly eviscerates our allies in the White House, on national TV. Also gonna link to a post I wrote about this because I think it makes my point more clearly, and for shameless self-promotion reasons: https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/contra-glenn-on-ukraine
I'm not sure we disagree on much, it’s just important to understand those quotes of mine in the larger context of the post. They follow a section where I made very clear that Russia is to blame, and that it's good and important for us to be loud about this. But they appear within a section affirming that NATO really did play a role in causing this conflict - which is a claim that very many people on the internet have angrily mocked and equated with Russian propaganda for years now. In that context, yes: people really are calling the interests illegitimate to dismiss a predictive theory of Russian behavior.
I didn't say we can't call Russia's *actions* illegitimate. I said we can't call its *interests* illegitimate, because all states get to define their own interests. And the role NATO did or did not play is linked with historical predictions, from 10 and 20 years ago, about what they would do next. The people who warned about this predicted they would attack Ukraine, and the people dismissing those predictions did so by saying that Russia's desire for a buffer was illegitimate: an obsolete relic of a bygone era, and incompatible with liberal values, so something we could freely ignore. They were wrong!
Second, "it would've lashed out at the buffer state sooner or later anyway" is a pretty contentious claim, that's very convenient for the people who ignored all these warnings to believe now. Yes, Putin is an evil revanchist zealot who despises the West and would love to reconstitute the Russian empire other things equal. But that doesn't mean he isn't a savvy strategist who's sensitive to tradeoffs and incremental cost/benefit analysis. Stopping NATO was one of the benefits of invasion on his mental T-chart, and a moratorium on that expansion could conceivably have tipped the scales. It's also interesting to study how and when Putin became so hardened in his views, to consider the path dependency of the overall deterioration in US/Russian relations over the past 25 years - something NATO played a key role in.
I wrote a response of sorts.
https://substack.com/@ariearie1/note/p-159193397?r=1awqmv
While I can understand the NATO component of Russia's interests in the way you describe it here, there are some historical oddities that leave me sort of ambivalent to it ultimately:
1) NATO expansion had been, at pretty much every point, done with at least some minimum level of consultation with Russia. To the point that Putin had reportedly claimed that he was told Russia might one day join NATO themselves. He reportedly even asked to do so, but wanted to skip all the actual steps required for it.
2) Russia threatened Ukraine with existential oblivion over the EU trade deal that ultimately resulted in the Maidan protests. I know you said Putin sees these EU-aligned moves as all part of the same set of threats, but I also think it starts to get hard to rationally calculate which of them are going to provoke the Bear into murderous conquest when something like a trade deal incites threats of existential oblivion. Under this kind of calculus, ANY overtures by Ukraine toward the EU would be indistinguishable as a causality, so why focus on NATO when it was the EU trade deal that Russia has in actual reality threatened Ukraine? NATO membership by Ukraine was pretty much dead as a domestic and practical matter for the forseeable future, especially after Russia invaded Crimea. It was not especially popular domestically, at least not enough to make actual material progress toward, and was impractical on NATO's side since you can't join NATO when you're actively in conflict (plus a few other problems like corruption, etc).
3) Russia has already had NATO members on it's border. States that it has an actual history of military intervention in (Baltics, etc). I get the cultural reasons you've outlined here might make Ukraine special, but ultimately all this seems to boil down to is "Russia is a failed Empire and is embarrassed about that fact, and has a case of insecurity regarding how that makes it look both domestically and internationally, so they tried to take some of it back to prove to everyone they could still exert power". Under that understanding, if it weren't NATO it would have been something else, like an EU trade deal. In fact, I'm at this point pretty convinced that Putin made his decision to conquer all of Ukraine in 2014, and was just biding his time and taking what he could until building up the strength to go for the whole. Maidan proved to Putin that Ukraine would not stay peacefully under Russia's influence, so it had to be pacified.
Some fair points here, I'll respond in order:
1) These "consultations" were indeed minimal, in that they were more like informing Russia than asking for its permission. Putin was only (briefly) willing to join NATO as "an equal partner," which the United States would never have allowed. Where the intensity of Russia's public resistance to NATO varied, it varied with a) Russia's leverage to push back, since it was much weaker in the 90s and early 2000s and unable to resist much; b) the hostility of US-Russian relations, since there was a thaw in the relationship after 9/11 when Putin saw an opportunity to collaborate on counterterrorism, and c) how far NATO was expanding, since each further round of expansion pushed deeper into Russia's buffer and was seen as increasingly threatening.
2) Do you have a source for Russia threatening Ukraine with "existential oblivion" over the EU trade deal? Or did they merely threaten tariffs on Ukraine? And I agree that NATO membership for Ukraine was practically unlikely, but that doesn't mean there was no momentum or that the threat was dead. Ukraine amended its constitution to explicitly seek NATO membership in 2019, for example, and was trying to reform to become eligible. Some details on that momentum here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#Presidency_of_Volodymyr_Zelenskyy_(from_2019). Putin could have perceived the U.S. unwillingness to offer a moratorium as validating his concerns that we were serious about it.
3) I agree with you that Russia is an embarrassed wannabee empire that lashes out with violence in hopes people will take it more seriously. I don't think it follows that invading Ukraine was always inevitable, nor that NATO expansion played no role in implanting that insecurity. US intelligence sources reported that Putin himself did not finalize the decision to invade until days before he invasion began. https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/russia-putin-ukraine-invasion-us-intelligence/ . And Putin’s prewar buildup was longer than one would expect if he never hoped to negotiate. If he were always set on invading, and there was nothing the West could have offered to prevent it, why would he spend four months gradually amassing his forces, telegraphing his intent to let Ukraine prepare? Such a visible and dramatic buildup makes more sense if it was to heighten his negotiating leverage, and a moratorium on NATO expansion was the core thing he publicly requested in those negotiations.
re #2) ""We don't want to use any kind of blackmail. This is a question for the Ukrainian people," said Glazyev. "But legally, signing this agreement about association with EU, the Ukrainian government violates the treaty on strategic partnership and friendship with Russia." When this happened, he said, Russia could no longer guarantee Ukraine's status as a state and could possibly intervene if pro-Russian regions of the country appealed directly to Moscow."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/22/ukraine-european-union-trade-russia
This was not Putin himself making this statement, but Kremlin aide Sergei Glazyev, so of course there's a question of just how much this was a direct threat, but a mob-style "hey, we don't want to tell you what to do but, uh, if you do this we'll have to un-country you" threat from a Kremlin aide that urned out to basically predict exactly what Russia did afterward seems...important.
A moratorium on NATO expansion may have helped for a time, but I'm also not certain how much Putin would have been inclined to bank on such a promise. The Russian state (ie Putin) is paranoid. In that sense, yes, I understand that all of these factors reinforce their paranoia, but it also means to me that they will never truly accept any promises either. How do you truly reassure a paranoid actor that also has an aggressive motive to interpret your actions as threats (revanchist empire lust)?
Regarding your concern that Russia was likely to eventually invade regardless of what happened, do keep in mind that they did restrain themselves from invading in 2014, even though it would have been much easier back then, since there was more support for Russia, and the Ukrainian army back then was basically a joke as they felt comfortable relying on Russian support. This implies to me that the Russian government wasn’t necessarily set on conquest from day one and only came to that decision after eight years. Weather there change in policy was because they felt that Ukraine was likely to join NATO in the future or some other reason like Putin‘s declining popularity is anybody’s guess but it does provide evidence for the idea that it was possible to get them not to invade.
They probably refrained from intervening in 2014 because they thought that they could subjugate Ukraine with the Minsk Agreements while still maintaining relatively good ties with the West. By 2022, that specific Russian strategy had failed.
> Putin could have perceived the U.S. unwillingness to offer a moratorium as validating his concerns that we were serious about it.
To be fair, Russia insisted on a permanent moratorium, not a temporary one. Russia refused to accept a temporary moratorium on NATO expansion.
Sure, one can accept your points that NATO provoked Russia with its expansion, just like Britain provoked Nazi Germany in 1939 by giving a guarantee to Poland and just like Serbia provoked Austria-Hungary in the runup to World War I by significantly expanding and closely aligning itself with Russia.
But there's also another factor that I want you to consider here: Specifically severe Russian underpopulation. As a result of its 20th century demographic disasters, and then massive secessions, Russia's current population is only around 150 million. It could have been 500+ million instead:
https://akarlin.com/500-million-russians/
When you're unwilling to reconcile yourself to history's fate for your country, you could seek to undo it as much as you could, in this case through military expansion. Russia tried peacefully reintegrating Ukraine into Eurasian economic and political structures until 2014, but that strategy ultimately ended up failing. Then it tried Minsk, but that also ended up failing.
This is why Anatoly Karlin initially supported the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine even though he also acknowledged that the NATO justifications that Russia offered for it were mostly bogus, especially in the ICBM age. Rather, he supported it because he viewed it as a desperate, last-ditch effort to quickly boost Russia's population so that Russia would avoid being doomed to irrelevance. He believed that only with a massive population boost could Russia have any chance, even an extremely remote one, of competing with the US, EU, China, and India in the 21st century.
I mostly agree with your post, but I would like to push back on a few of your pro Ukrainian points. You write favourably of the ideal that give me liberty or give me death, but I would argue that at least in so far as a government is concerned, the life of the people genuinely is more important than their freedom. Before the invasion, the Ukrainian government made a number of policy choices, that obviously increased the likelihood of a Russian invasion. Obviously, Russia should not have invaded them regardless, but it is entirely possible for both governments to be in the wrong and causing mass slaughter of its own. People is hardly justified by the government‘s track record so far given that it has not meaningfully done economically much better since the revolution in 2014, when a democratically elected president was overthrown by a violent mob.
Many people of my acquaintance argue that Russia would have invaded them regardless, but this appears obviously false to me. For example, if they had continued with a foreign policy in 2013, it appears pretty obvious that Russia would have left them well enough alone. Also, realistically, that’s probably not the only foreign policy they could have gotten away with, but they didn’t need to go full in on joining NATO and provoking Russia. To add to that, a lot of their offensive have taken place at suspicious times, almost as if the government was deliberately trying to sabotage any P stocks. It was genuinely very bad of the Ukrainian government to get so many people killed through their policy decisions, and Russia’s evil does not absolve them in any way.
Regarding the claims that Ukraine is overly sympathetic to neo-Nazis, I mostly think this is rounding error in terms of the broad policy implications and should be ignored, but the claims do have a lot of basis. A lot of the ministers in the post revolution, government had extremely antisemitic views and the people continue to revere individuals who collaborated with Hitler. Many far right people have been involved in the military, and while you could argue that this is merely due to military necessity, it’s not as of these people active before the war. And while you could reasonably argue that most of these only display tolerance of the far right and did not involve much government policy, the government has in fact crack down on the Russian language in extremely disturbing ways. Again to be clear while I think it’s pretty bad that the government banned Russian language newspapers, I think this is pretty unimportant compare to achieving peace in Ukraine. Just mentioning this because you criticised the narrative of them as far right. Also, while I would agree that they are a democracy, Ukraine has a long history of corruption and oligarchy, so they are at best a dysfunctional democracy, although things would obviously still be worse under Russia.
This is too both-sidesy and unduly critical of Ukraine imo. At their core, Ukraine just wanted to be free, and Russia just wanted to dominate Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine made policy choices that were, in hindsight, reckless or foolish - but as other comments here show, that is debatable even with the benefit of hindsight. And more importantly, reckless or foolish decisions made with the best of intentions are categorically different than what Russia has done, which is intentionally kill millions of people in a naked effort to aggrandize power. One got people killed indirectly, accidentally, and defensively - the other chose to pull the trigger offensively. None of Ukraine's policy choices strip Russia of full responsibility for that decision. To say "Russia's evil does not absolve them in any way" gets it backwards - Russia's evil is what scared Ukraine into running for NATO's protection.
All of the stuff about economic outcomes, antisemitism, corruption, and censoring Russian language newspapers is whataboutism IMO. There are lots of middle-income countries with problems like that and that doesn't get them invaded. "The life of the people genuinely is more important than their freedom" is a fair argument against conscription, but not of seeking to preserve one's democracy from foreign domination.
>As an aside…Putin justified this invasion with a narrative that Ukraine has always basically been a part of Russia, not a truly independent nation. I think this is wrong. But if our goal is to refute and resist that narrative, it seems counterproductive to elevate the nuclear weapons Ukraine inherited from what is now Russia as a symbol of its independence. Weren’t these nukes actually a symbol of Ukraine’s one-time dependence on Russian technology and military might?
Could you expand on this footnote at all? I don't think recognizing that Ukraine was once dependent on Russia supports Putin's view at all. I think you are conflating similar concepts like nation and state. It's entirely possible that "Ukraine" was historically dependent on Russia (or even part of Russia) without accepting Putin's argument at all.
Putin's argument is that "Ukrainian" is not a different ethnicity than "Russian". It's similar (in his view) to arguing that "North Korean" or "East German" is an ethnicity or independent nation. With this framework, "Ukraine" is similar to North Korea or East Germany in that it is a political division created by external powers. In his case, he credits Poland, the Habsburgs, Germany and other European powers with creating a "west Russia" and an artificial national identity to go with it.
If you don't agree with that, then recognizing that Ukraine inherited things from it's time integrated with Russia doesn't contradict your view at all. For example, everyone would recognize that a lot of Indian infrastructure comes from centuries of British rule. But that doesn't mean that "Indian" is really just a subculture of British and that Winston Churchill and Gandhi shared a common background.
Sure, you're completely right. I agree with your distinction between states, nations, and ethnicities; and I agree that Putin is wrong to deny the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation/ethnicity. Ukraine's inheritance of weapons or institutions from the Soviet Union does not weaken the ethnonationalist argument for Ukrainian independence.
In fact, I'd go one step further and say that even if Putin were right about his ethnic claims, it still shouldn't matter, because I don't believe in ethnonationalism or care about nation-states to begin with. There's no reason those three spheres need to align. All that matters morally is the consent of the governed, and Ukrainians clearly prefer to be independent.
My footnote is just a nod to the existence of people who disagree with us about those things. There are many ways to define nations, which are ultimately imagined communities relying on fuzzy and imperfect criteria. And one factor commonly considered in those definitions is a region's degree of political independence across history. Has B typically been an independent power center from A, or has it typically been subservient?
China claims Taiwan not only because of shared ancestry, but in part because it was subject to the rule of the Chinese empire for much of China's history. Native Hawaiians are ethnically distinct from native Americans, who are ethnically distinct from European settlers/migrants and the slaves they brought with them - but they're all part of the United States now, in part because there's been a sufficiently long period of political control (which in turn caused some assimilation, cultural creation, and shared experience/sense of community/voluntary identification with the same nation).
The idea my footnote refutes is the implication - usually unspoken, but detectable in the tone of these Ukrainian sympathizers wringing their hands about Budapest - that Ukraine once was once an independent power center - with independence from and leverage over Russia - *by virtue of its nukes.* That the only reason they have to put up with Russia's domineering bullshit today is because they were tricked into giving up something which formerly guaranteed and symbolized their independence, in exchange for hollow promises. The reality that they never had any leverage to begin with, and that what they gave up was Russia's to begin with, undercuts that argument (but NOT the other national arguments you allude to).
Thank you for the thoughtful response, especially to a comment on a footnote.
I avoided using Taiwan because it's a different situation (and more controversial). The PRC does not claim Taiwan because of ethnic identity but because they're the successor state to the China of ~1945 which controlled the island. Taiwan (at least according to some Taiwanese parties) similarly considers itself the successor state and therefore claims all of mainland China (as well as parts of nearby countries due to territorial changes approved only by the PRC). Neither disputes that Taiwan is legally part of China, they just disagree which administration is "China". I guess the only way to relate this question of successor states back to Russian/Ukraine is that Putin asserts that the current post-2014 "Ukraine" is not the same Ukraine as in 1994 and therefore the Budapest agreement is no longer valid.
I think the reason I stumbled over that entry in your list was because of "truly independent". You argue that Ukraine's 1994 government needed to pragmatically consider Russia's interests or face invasion so what does "true independence" mean? Who would bear moral responsibility for the invasion of a nuclear Ukraine by Russia (or America)? There's an implication that it would be partially the Ukrainians' fault for pursuing goals contrary to the interests of stronger countries. But why not extend that same logic to Ukraine today? I don't see much moral difference between saying 1994 Ukraine had no leverage to resist Russian demands and saying that 2025 Ukraine has "no cards" to resist Russian demands like Trump does. Ukraine sympathizers solve this apparent contradiction by exaggerating the agency of Ukraine in 1994. Self-declared realists such as Mearsheimer (or at least people that reference Mearsheimer) instead argue that 2014/2022 Ukraine should have given in to Russia's demands using the same logic you do for 1994. I'd assume that you'd say the difference is that it is fine for Russia to dictate independent Ukraine's nuclear policy(assuming it has the leverage to do so) but not fine for Russia to dictate independent Ukraine's policy towards the EU or NATO. That's a perfectly reasonable axiom, but not one I automatically assumed.
(Ironically Mearsheimer himself argued in 1993 that Ukraine should have kept the weapons. https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mearsheimer-Case-for-Ukrainian-Nuclear-Deterrent.pdf)
(Also I realize that you'd dispute "a nuclear Ukraine" is a fair description of 1994 Ukraine, but "a Ukraine that possesses the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and a significant portion Soviet military and scientific expertise and uses those resources to establish a usable nuclear arsenal" seems like a reasonable possibility)
Again, I wouldn't use the word "fault" in either case. All nations are doomed to navigate their geopolitical position - to play the cards they're dealt, so to speak. There are smarter and dumber ways to play them. But that's not always clear in advance, and I see that as a separate issue from moral blameworthiness. Getting invaded is almost never a country's "fault", as the invader almost always bears moral responsibility.
Nevertheless, invasion is sometimes avoidable had the defender made wiser choices. I don't think it's fine for bigger nations to bully smaller nations in 1994 or 2025; I just think that small nations are wise to strategize in a way that doesn't pick fights with the bully.
What Ukraine should do in 1994 or 2025 should in both cases be determined by a clear-eyed assessment of the best they can realistically hope to achieve. Today, I don't think Ukraine today has no ability to resist Putin! They've resisted him with some success for three years now. They do not need to give up their democracy, nor 80% of their territory, nor extensive economic connections with the West, perhaps including EU membership. Those are realistic, attainable goals, and if Russia demands they give them up, they should resist.
But they probably will need to give up Crimea and the regions they've lost, at
least informally/de facto. And they probably won't get to join NATO, and probably won't get reparations from Russia. That's not fair, but it's true, so they should not let unrealistic maximalism get in the way of the best they can realistically hope for now.
Thanks!
As you said in your article, some people tend to conflate culpability and causality, so I always try to make sure I understand which is being discussed. I always assume that this is because moral arguments require much less expertise to accept or dispute. If I close this tab I can open up another article that says Ukraine is on the verge of collapse and has no chance to resist total overrun by Russian forces, so "realistically should give up 80% of their territory, ties the west, etc." You and the author of that hypothetical article wouldn't necessarily have a moral disagreement, but simply an empirical disagreement about the strength of the Ukrainian military. And I simply don't have the expertise to evaluate either side of that disagreement. It's much more comfortable to stick only to "_____ is bad" usually with an analogy to a vaguely similar historical event so many layman in my position default to that.
I think your analysis makes a lot of sense and avoids that superficiality. Looking forward to the next part.
> We, as Americans, do not get to decide which of another state’s demonstrated interests are “legitimate.” Some security interests are socially constructed and not actually essential to the safety and wellbeing of the nation’s citizens. This is certainly true of many supposed U.S. security interests! But our opinions about how other countries should assess their interests are irrelevant to how they do.
I agree with this in the sense of "calling their actions illegitimate doesn't help us predict what they'll do next," but I don't think anyone is calling the actions illegitimate in order to predict what they'll do next! The Russian invasion is illegal and wrong in certain very important senses, and it's good to say that out loud for two reasons:
a) The more people that believe that, the stronger our collective moral disgust with morally disgusting things will be. That puts us in a proper epistemic space. (Oh, but won't our rationality be harmed by thoughts only of vengeance and terribleness?? Yeah, the average American's will, but the average American isn't in charge of negotiating. Whoever's at the table with Putin would much rather have an American public saying "we will send the Ukrainians 10 billion bombs a week if that's what it takes" than one saying "well, really Ukraine started it.")
b) Ok, wait, I think it actually does hold some predictive power—it claims that Russia will be more likely to deviate from the other interests the US thinks are illegitimate. It doesn't say necessarily that the Russians are totally irrational actors, just that their bar for violating extremely important international norms is super duper low. This puts us on alert for the Baltics, basically, which seems not misguided.
> To serve as Russia’s desired buffer zone, Russia’s neighbors needed to be militarily neutral at least. Russians have never seen NATO as militarily neutral, in part because NATO was founded to contain the Soviet Union and seen as Russia’s sworn enemy for generations.
The term "buffer" really matters here. To the point that I don't think Russia's aggression was totally a result of NATO expansion (though that certainly aggravated and accelerated it), and it would've lashed out at the buffer state sooner or later anyway. Like, this wasn't really avoidable given the generally escalatory state of the world.
> Many idealists are irritatingly unable to distinguish culpability from causality. They are so driven by a sense of right and wrong that whenever a country does something wrong, their sole instinct is to point and judge and blame and condemn, over and over, as if our sheer disapproval carried any corrective force.
[And then the big footnote about how idealism is dumb and dead in general]
We can distinguish culpability from causality while still accepting that one bears on the other. States that are culpable for declaring wars like the one in Ukraine are likely to cause more chaos and destruction in the future. Sure, Russian rhetoric might be a little silly and overblown as a fig leaf for the true motives of repelling NATO expansion. But if you lie over and over and over again to justify doing a terrible thing, you start to believe the lie. I'm not saying that Putin will necessarily be taken over by an irrational urge to reclaim the entire Russian empire. But he might be! And certainly some of his people will be and have been, and even some of our people have been. Including our President, to an extent.
I will continue to believe that even if the cause of the war is a little fuzzier than the "moral clarity" schmucks say, we should pretend it isn't. At this point, we're looking to end the war in a way that tells Russia, "Fucking stop it. Even if NATO is a little scary, just stop it." I'm sure you'll be getting into the whole "what to do next" thing in subsequent parts, but I think it's really important we keep in mind that a strong negotiating position is better than a weaker one. And a position with "moral clarity" is absolutely stronger than one that embarrassingly eviscerates our allies in the White House, on national TV. Also gonna link to a post I wrote about this because I think it makes my point more clearly, and for shameless self-promotion reasons: https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/contra-glenn-on-ukraine
I'm not sure we disagree on much, it’s just important to understand those quotes of mine in the larger context of the post. They follow a section where I made very clear that Russia is to blame, and that it's good and important for us to be loud about this. But they appear within a section affirming that NATO really did play a role in causing this conflict - which is a claim that very many people on the internet have angrily mocked and equated with Russian propaganda for years now. In that context, yes: people really are calling the interests illegitimate to dismiss a predictive theory of Russian behavior.
I didn't say we can't call Russia's *actions* illegitimate. I said we can't call its *interests* illegitimate, because all states get to define their own interests. And the role NATO did or did not play is linked with historical predictions, from 10 and 20 years ago, about what they would do next. The people who warned about this predicted they would attack Ukraine, and the people dismissing those predictions did so by saying that Russia's desire for a buffer was illegitimate: an obsolete relic of a bygone era, and incompatible with liberal values, so something we could freely ignore. They were wrong!
Second, "it would've lashed out at the buffer state sooner or later anyway" is a pretty contentious claim, that's very convenient for the people who ignored all these warnings to believe now. Yes, Putin is an evil revanchist zealot who despises the West and would love to reconstitute the Russian empire other things equal. But that doesn't mean he isn't a savvy strategist who's sensitive to tradeoffs and incremental cost/benefit analysis. Stopping NATO was one of the benefits of invasion on his mental T-chart, and a moratorium on that expansion could conceivably have tipped the scales. It's also interesting to study how and when Putin became so hardened in his views, to consider the path dependency of the overall deterioration in US/Russian relations over the past 25 years - something NATO played a key role in.