By Scott Anderson
This is a melodramatic picture and yet it's true. It's not that Russia will swarm over Europe the minute it takes over the eastern oblasts it claims as the meme suggests, but in a very real sense it will have defeated Europe and will be able to influence the direction of European politics into the future. In the long term it will cause Europe to rearm far beyond merely defensive capability and that historically leads to war.
Russian propaganda is widespread and its half-truths and lies are just believable enough that many people are taken in. Let's look at the most common lies:
1. "NATO promised not to expand."
False. This claim is derived from the German Unification Treaty after the Berlin Wall fell, when NATO promised not to introduce non-German NATO soldiers or nuclear weapons into the former East Germany (DDR). NATO has kept to the letter and spirit of that treaty, and the former DDR has ONLY German soldiers and no nuclear weapons. The treaty took place early on, when both Poland and Ukraine were still within the Soviet orbit, and frankly Gorbachev was faced with either a negotiated unification of Germany or a de facto unification without Russian input at all. It is true that Schultz and some of the actors discussed the role of NATO, and proposals were thrown back and forth, but no such ideas were codified simply because Gorbachev wasn't in a position to bargain, and at that time it seemed irrelevant. Discussions during treaty negotiations do not constitute "promises." Promises are codified in treaties.
The second part of this silliness is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a defensive alliance set up after the Second World War in response to a Soviet Union with expansionist tendencies and the largest land army in the world. NATO is based on collective security - if one country within the alliance is attacked by the Russians, all other members of NATO will come to their defense. It is NOT an offensive organization and there is no language in it that can be taken as offensive.
In the post-soviet world when Russia was no threat and NATO was struggling for meaning, it became a loosely cohesive group of nations that tried to stop the Balkan revolutions, but its raison d'être and ethos has always been defensive. Countries join NATO for one reason and one reason only: they want protection from Russian expansionism. NATO didn't come knocking on Poland's door; it was Poland that asked for protection against Russia. Finland and Sweden have no plans to sack Moscow; they asked to join NATO for one reason: protection against an expansionist Russia.
2. "Ukraine is full of Nazis."
Given that Ukraine is led by a Jewish leader whose grandfather fought the Nazis, this should be silly on its face, but there are historical reasons why this claim seems to carry some water. Ukraine, like Poland, Germany and much of eastern Europe (including Russia) has a dark history when it comes to the treatment of Jews. Like most of eastern Europe (including Poland and other Soviet satellite states), its society was quite antisemitic and elements within Ukraine helped the Nazis with the final solution, including the wartime iteration of the Azov battalion. When the Germans first invaded the Soviet Union, they were welcomed by the Ukrainians as deliverers from Stalinist communism. This was a few short years after the intentional famines of Ukraine, remembered today by Ukrainians as the Holodomor, in which millions of Ukrainians died. It is these facts that Russia relies on when it spreads its claim that Ukraine is "Nazi."
Ukraine is not Nazi. Having just come back from a trip there, I not only didn't see even the slightest inclination toward national socialism, but the academics and soldiers I talked to gaveme quizzical looks when I asked, wondering what the hell I was talking about. Like Germany and Poland, Ukraine long ago built monuments to the Jewish people massacred during that dark time (I have pictures of one outside Kharkiv in the east), and synagogues are common there. The Azov battalion participated in those crimes, and the name survives to describe today's special forces, but using this to claim Nazihood is like invoking the German Wehrmacht to claim that today's Bundeswehr must be Nazi. Ukraine is not Nazi, not even a little bit. Indeed, the government structure of present day Russia is much closer to that of national socialism than is the democratically elected government of Ukraine.
3. “The eastern oblasts claimed by Russia are ethnically Russian and speak Russian and therefore really want to join Russia.”
This is a reasonable proposition for people in the western world to believe because we've been inundated by racial, class, and gender divisionism for decades. It has become second nature for our media to analyze "the Black community" or "the Latino vote," as if people who share a single racial or ethnic characteristic all act in lemminglike concert. It is of course nonsense and becoming more nonsensical by the day, as the recent US election should have explained to us. Ethnicity is even less relevant in the contested borderlands of the Russian empire.
The eastern oblasts do have both ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians, but until the invasion started no one cared. As one Russian-speaker of Russian ethnicity told a colleague of mine over there, "we didn't ever consider our loyalties before, but that all changed the day the bombs started to fall. That day we became Ukrainians." The Russians made the mistake of committing war crimes on a massive scale, and to this day continue to indiscriminately bomb the people they claim to be liberating in the eastern oblasts. For example, while I was in Kramatorsk they were actively and randomly shelling the city, and they vapourized the InTourist hotel I stayed at in Zaporizhzhia with a 1.5 tonne glide bomb a week after I left. These are not the acts of liberators, and the Russians are not treated as liberators by Ukrainians of any ethnicity.
The choice for people in the eastern oblasts is not based on ethnicity or language, it is based on socioeconomic choices. Eastern Ukrainians look west at a Poland that almost overnight transformed from stifling post-soviet bureaucracy into a first world powerhouse once they restructured their bureaucracy and became a member of the EU. with a functioning democracy and a freedom that seems almost surreal in the shadow of former Soviet oppression. And then Ukrainians look east, at a strongman running an oligarchic thugocracy balanced between economic and demographic collapse. Their choice is not a hard one, and the blue and yellow colours of their flag fly on every street-corner, and out of windows, on car antennae, and pretty much everywhere. They are Ukrainians, and when civilians run from combat it is toward the west, not toward Russia.
The real reason Putin is afraid of the west is not military; it is because he doesn't want Russians to look over the border and see Ukraine become another Poland, rich beyond the dreams of the average Russian and free to choose their own government.
Ukraine may be a young country, but the war has ironically created two dynamics: a profound patriotism and an awakened social consciousness. The Ukrainians are proud. They were invaded by a former superpower, well beyond any territorial claims Putin has made on certain eastern oblasts. Against all odds the Ukrainians counterattacked - long before any American or European leaders started helping - and single-handedly pushed the Russians back almost to the border of Russia. They continue to outfight the Russians on the battlefield, increasingly with their own fabricated weapons, and the only reason the Russians are ever-so-slowly winning is because they are sacrificing a generation to grind down the Ukrainians by attrition. The horrendous death toll of almost 1600 Russian casualties per day is entirely the fault of the current Russian regime, and ultimately the leadership of that regime.
The war has also awakened a consciousness about being Ukrainian and what that means. As above, the vast majority of people want to move toward the western world. The young are a driving force behind this gravitation, and most of the home-grown cottage industry in support of the war (trench candles, camo nets etc.) are undertaken by cells of late teens and young adults, all of whom are fiercely Ukrainian.
When I interviewed one such group, I asked if many people wanted to live under Russian control and they said what many others had said: only some of the very old, who remember the safe communist drudgery of the Soviet Union and believe that living under Russia will mean a return to it. But other than this small group, there is a solidarity of purpose toward a common goal, and it's centered on a core of nationhood. First, throw the Russians out, and second join the west. This is manifest everywhere...the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag is everywhere, even on small packages of rubber gloves eastern restaurants habitually pass out for messy meals. Kids' colouring menus in restaurants are war scenes, showing Ukrainian armour blowing up Russian armour, "fathers" of Ukraine are on the wall in every pub, and even toilet paper with Putin's face on it are all part of the patriotic surge.
4. “The CIA engineered a ‘coup’ and overthrew the legitimate government and then ‘installed’ a puppet government”
This one is truly nonsensical. This idiocy gives the CIA a mystical omnipotence, as if it can do whatever it wants regardless of reality. It is true that during the Eisenhower years the CIA was used to help revolutionaries overthrow several small Latin American communist-leaning countries and to counter the KGB in eastern Europe, but this largely stopped shortly after the Kennedy fiascos in Cuba, over a half century ago. In any event, there was no “coup” in Ukraine and the CIA had very little to do with the popular uprising that drove the corrupt Russian puppet government out of Kiev. Further, the current government of Ukraine was elected in an election subsequently certified by international bodies. Does the US and its allies in NATO want Ukraine to become westernized? Of course they do, because it offers a bulwark against Russian expansionism, but it is the people of Ukraine who are the driving force behind westernization.
Indeed, it was the Russians who spurred on the almost bloodless revolution. Back in 2013 the popular trend toward westernization was stalled by Russian orders to the puppet government of Viktor Yanukovych, whose government scuttled a planned association agreement with the EU. Popular protests erupted in Kyiv in 2014 and rapidly spread across the country, including the east. Yanukovych attempted to stop them by authoritarian measures, whereupon the protests turned to rioting, which ended with police firing on thousands of protesters across Ukraine. These acts of violence culminating in opposition politicians restoring the old 2005 constitution and Yanukovych fled the country. In May of 2014 Petro Poroshenko was elected head of the Ukrainian government as Russia was in the process of seizing Crimea, whereupon Putin began the same covert troublemaking in the eastern oblasts of Ukraine, seizing government buildings via “separatists” who wore Russian uniforms without insignia. Magically, according to Russian sources, over 2000 Russian troops somehow managed to get killed in the eastern oblasts over the next decade even though Russia had no official or claimed input to the conflict.Over the next decade Russia continued to supply weapons and soldiers to the alleged “separatists” in the eastern oblasts, while in Ukraine a corruption scandal toppled the elected government and Zelensky was elected in 2019 on an anti-corruption platform. Following covid in 2022, Putin massed almost a quarter million troops on the Ukrainian border, and in February launched a massive “special military operation,” letting fly missiles at every major Ukrainian city, followed by an attempt to reach Kiev and reinstall a pro-Russian government. This failed badly, and when the Ukrainians had pushed the Russians back, mass graves of civilians were found and documented by many outside organizations. Since then the Russians have embarked on a wasteful Stalingrad-like advance, bombing everything directly in front of them to rubble, terrorizing civilians, and creeping forward slowly into the oblasts they claim to be liberating. The CIA had little if anything to do with any of this. Russia has everything to do with it.
Epilogue
Ukrainians understand that they have a long way to go before they can join the EU like Poland did. Their institutions are still bogged down in the stifling bureaucracy left in place by the old Soviet Union, a bureaucracy that crawls with pointless and redundant sluggishness. They know that the corruption Ukraine was famous for needs to go away, and a social and institutional transformation is even now spreading across Ukraine. They understand that the post-Soviet anarchocapitalism in Ukraine needs to be reined in…they know all these things, and to the extent that they can in wartime conditions they are trying.
And not just trying; they are succeeding. It used to be that people in the east rarely spoke English, but because English is the lingua franca of western business, more and more speak it. Crime rates have fallen off a cliff since the population found a common mission in keeping the Russians away, and the corruption Ukraine has traditionally been famous for is now a dirty word,and people are prosecuted for it inside and outside government. Ukraine is a nation straining toward the west, and they welcome everything the west is doing to help them. As a group of westerners, we were always treated as friends when we visited the front. Something I will always remember is being clapped on the back by a Ukrainian soldier with tears in his eyes in a coffee shop outside of Kramatorsk who thanked us for being there. It was either our English conversation of the Canadian and British flag patches on our shoulders that must have let him know where we were from. They need our help and they know it.
Russian propaganda is laughed at in Ukraine, but it is powerful in the west and believed by far too many who take it at face value without really ever looking into it. When these folks spout Russian propaganda, they often follow it with an admonition to “do your research” as if they are privy to the truth, yet what their “research” consists of is most often some video making vague claims that don’t stand up to historical and strategic scrutiny.