Don’t be fooled by last Thursday’s conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden, with its promise of further negotiations in January. When one party is bent on war, this kind of diplomatic activity often continues until just hours before hostilities begin. We should not be deluded: Putin is bent on war against Ukraine.
What is coming is the opposite of a surprise attack — though no doubt when it happens Biden will insist that, like the omicron variant, no one could have anticipated it. Back in July, Putin published a lengthy essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he argued tendentiously that Ukrainian independence was an unsustainable historical anomaly. This made it perfectly clear that he was contemplating a takeover of the country along the lines of Nazi Germany’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria. Even before Putin’s essay appeared, Russia had deployed around 100,000 troops close to Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders.
The news these days reminds me unpleasantly of the English historian A.J.P. Taylor’s “Origins of the Second World War,” which — in prose that simmered with his trademark irony — traced the diplomatic steps that led from appeasement to war in 1938 and 1939.
Repeatedly this year, the Russian president has warned of “red lines” with respect to Russia’s security, the crossing of which would elicit an “asymmetric response.” On Nov. 30, for example, he declared that “if some kind of strike systems appear on the territory of Ukraine … we will have to then create something similar in relation to those who threaten us.”
On Dec. 17, Russia issued a virtual ultimatum to the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — the keystone of European security since its founding in 1949 — by publishing two draft security agreements, one a bilateral U.S.-Russia treaty and the other a multilateral NATO-Russia agreement. The documents made six key demands:
1. NATO must not accept new members, including Ukraine.
2. The U.S. and NATO must not deploy short- or intermediate-range missiles within range of Russian territory.
3. The U.S. must not station nuclear weapons abroad.
4. NATO must not deploy forces or arms to member states that joined after the so-called Founding Act of May 1997. This includes all former Warsaw Pact states such as Poland as well as the formerly Soviet Baltic states.
5. NATO must not conduct military exercises above the brigade level (3,000 to 5,000 troops) and within an agreed-upon buffer zone.
6. The U.S. must agree not to cooperate militarily with post-Soviet countries.
True, some of Russia’s demands amounted to resuscitating defunct security arrangements that NATO and Russia signed in the past. A ban on short- or intermediate-range missile deployments, for example, would be akin to reviving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which collapsed in 2019 following U.S. claims of Russian violations.
An agreement not to deploy NATO forces to former Warsaw Pact member states would reinstate the 25-year-old Founding Act, which NATO partially froze after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. NATO still does not permanently station troops in Eastern Europe because it never formally abrogated the Founding Act. Russia’s proposed limits on military exercises similarly recall the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which Moscow suspended in 2007.
However, since 2017 the alliance has “rotated” approximately 1,100 troops apiece into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland under its policy of Enhanced Forward Presence. (The term “rotation” was used at Germany’s insistence to avoid explicitly violating the NATO-Russia Founding Act.) Ending rotation would be a significant concession to Moscow.
The Russian demands also include several obvious non-starters. NATO is highly unlikely to revoke its promise, made in 2008, of eventual membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Even if Biden wanted to accede to Russia’s demand that the U.S. end military cooperation with Ukraine, Congress would almost certainly not let him, and could legislate military aid on its own. Finally, Russia’s demand that the U.S. not station nuclear weapons abroad would overturn a founding principle of NATO — nuclear sharing between member states.
Taken together, the Russian demands imply nothing less than a “new Yalta” that would effectively concede to Russia a sphere of influence extending across the former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe, much like the original Yalta Agreement of 1945, as well as eroding the security of former Warsaw Pact countries. Such demands would be worth discussing only if Russia offered something major in return — for example, a withdrawal of all its forces from Ukrainian territory. But Putin has no intention of making concessions. He is preparing a casus belli.
On Dec. 23, Putin held his usual marathon year-end press conference. He explained that even if Russia’s “red line” security guarantees were met on paper, Russia still could not trust the U.S. assurances because he had been “lied to, blatantly” over NATO expansion. For the U.S. to have offensive strike weapons on “Russia’s doorstep,” he said, was like Russia having such weapons in Canada or Mexico. Asked by a journalist if Russia was angry, he quoted the 19th-century tsarist foreign minister Prince Gorchakov: “Russia is not angry, it is concentrating” — as in “concentrating its forces.”
Western commentators often make the mistake of thinking that Putin’s goal is to resurrect the Soviet Union, recalling his notorious comment in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” To judge by the ruthless way his government has gone after Memorial — an organization dedicated to preserving the evidence of the Soviet system’s crimes and commemorating its millions of victims — Putin does indeed owe some residual fealty to the baleful shade of Stalin. Last week, a Moscow court shut Memorial down on the specious ground that it had failed to acknowledge publicly that it was a foreign agent.
“Memorial creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” declared state prosecutor Alexei Zhafyarov before the court’s verdict. “It makes us repent for the Soviet past, instead of remembering glorious history … probably because someone is paying for it.”
It is not hard to imagine Zhafyarov having a walk-on role in “The Master and Margarita,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s unforgettable magical-realist depiction of the Stalin era. And yet it is not Stalin’s Soviet Union for which Putin hankers. It is the rising Russian Empire of Peter the Great. He made this quite clear in a fascinating interview with Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, in 2019. “A towering bronze statue of the visionary tsar looms over his ceremonial desk in the cabinet room,” noted Barber. Peter I was Putin’s “favorite leader.” “He will live,” declared the Russian president, “as long as his cause is alive.”
To understand what exactly Putin meant by this, you need to travel back three centuries, to the time of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The dominant military power of northern Europe in those days was not Russia but Sweden, then under the leadership of that most extraordinary of Scandinavian warriors, Charles XII. The Great Northern War pitted Charles against Frederick IV, the king of Denmark and Norway; Augustus the Strong, who was simultaneously elector of Saxony, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania; and the Muscovite tsar, Peter I. By 1709, the Swede had defeated both Frederick and Augustus. But he met his match in Tsar Peter.
At the Battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709), Peter the Great won the most important victory of his reign. Because of Russian scorched-earth tactics, the Swedish army had been forced to abandon its advance on Moscow and instead marched south to establish winter quarters. The location Charles XII picked, the town of Poltava, is around 200 miles east of Kyiv. Today it lies in eastern Ukraine, not far from the contested areas around Luhansk and Donetsk, which are controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Well, that’s a terrible article to read before bed.
Journalists living in a fantasy.
remember when michael bloomberg ran for president… that was fucking hilarious
Not a bad article.
I’m not a fan of forced historical narratives to create context, but I think the author gets his predictions and framing of current events right.
6 comments
**War is coming — a not-so-great northern war.**
Don’t be fooled by last Thursday’s conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden, with its promise of further negotiations in January. When one party is bent on war, this kind of diplomatic activity often continues until just hours before hostilities begin. We should not be deluded: Putin is bent on war against Ukraine.
What is coming is the opposite of a surprise attack — though no doubt when it happens Biden will insist that, like the omicron variant, no one could have anticipated it. Back in July, Putin published a lengthy essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he argued tendentiously that Ukrainian independence was an unsustainable historical anomaly. This made it perfectly clear that he was contemplating a takeover of the country along the lines of Nazi Germany’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria. Even before Putin’s essay appeared, Russia had deployed around 100,000 troops close to Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders.
The news these days reminds me unpleasantly of the English historian A.J.P. Taylor’s “Origins of the Second World War,” which — in prose that simmered with his trademark irony — traced the diplomatic steps that led from appeasement to war in 1938 and 1939.
Repeatedly this year, the Russian president has warned of “red lines” with respect to Russia’s security, the crossing of which would elicit an “asymmetric response.” On Nov. 30, for example, he declared that “if some kind of strike systems appear on the territory of Ukraine … we will have to then create something similar in relation to those who threaten us.”
On Dec. 17, Russia issued a virtual ultimatum to the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — the keystone of European security since its founding in 1949 — by publishing two draft security agreements, one a bilateral U.S.-Russia treaty and the other a multilateral NATO-Russia agreement. The documents made six key demands:
1. NATO must not accept new members, including Ukraine.
2. The U.S. and NATO must not deploy short- or intermediate-range missiles within range of Russian territory.
3. The U.S. must not station nuclear weapons abroad.
4. NATO must not deploy forces or arms to member states that joined after the so-called Founding Act of May 1997. This includes all former Warsaw Pact states such as Poland as well as the formerly Soviet Baltic states.
5. NATO must not conduct military exercises above the brigade level (3,000 to 5,000 troops) and within an agreed-upon buffer zone.
6. The U.S. must agree not to cooperate militarily with post-Soviet countries.
True, some of Russia’s demands amounted to resuscitating defunct security arrangements that NATO and Russia signed in the past. A ban on short- or intermediate-range missile deployments, for example, would be akin to reviving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which collapsed in 2019 following U.S. claims of Russian violations.
An agreement not to deploy NATO forces to former Warsaw Pact member states would reinstate the 25-year-old Founding Act, which NATO partially froze after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. NATO still does not permanently station troops in Eastern Europe because it never formally abrogated the Founding Act. Russia’s proposed limits on military exercises similarly recall the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which Moscow suspended in 2007.
However, since 2017 the alliance has “rotated” approximately 1,100 troops apiece into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland under its policy of Enhanced Forward Presence. (The term “rotation” was used at Germany’s insistence to avoid explicitly violating the NATO-Russia Founding Act.) Ending rotation would be a significant concession to Moscow.
The Russian demands also include several obvious non-starters. NATO is highly unlikely to revoke its promise, made in 2008, of eventual membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Even if Biden wanted to accede to Russia’s demand that the U.S. end military cooperation with Ukraine, Congress would almost certainly not let him, and could legislate military aid on its own. Finally, Russia’s demand that the U.S. not station nuclear weapons abroad would overturn a founding principle of NATO — nuclear sharing between member states.
Taken together, the Russian demands imply nothing less than a “new Yalta” that would effectively concede to Russia a sphere of influence extending across the former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe, much like the original Yalta Agreement of 1945, as well as eroding the security of former Warsaw Pact countries. Such demands would be worth discussing only if Russia offered something major in return — for example, a withdrawal of all its forces from Ukrainian territory. But Putin has no intention of making concessions. He is preparing a casus belli.
On Dec. 23, Putin held his usual marathon year-end press conference. He explained that even if Russia’s “red line” security guarantees were met on paper, Russia still could not trust the U.S. assurances because he had been “lied to, blatantly” over NATO expansion. For the U.S. to have offensive strike weapons on “Russia’s doorstep,” he said, was like Russia having such weapons in Canada or Mexico. Asked by a journalist if Russia was angry, he quoted the 19th-century tsarist foreign minister Prince Gorchakov: “Russia is not angry, it is concentrating” — as in “concentrating its forces.”
Western commentators often make the mistake of thinking that Putin’s goal is to resurrect the Soviet Union, recalling his notorious comment in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” To judge by the ruthless way his government has gone after Memorial — an organization dedicated to preserving the evidence of the Soviet system’s crimes and commemorating its millions of victims — Putin does indeed owe some residual fealty to the baleful shade of Stalin. Last week, a Moscow court shut Memorial down on the specious ground that it had failed to acknowledge publicly that it was a foreign agent.
“Memorial creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” declared state prosecutor Alexei Zhafyarov before the court’s verdict. “It makes us repent for the Soviet past, instead of remembering glorious history … probably because someone is paying for it.”
It is not hard to imagine Zhafyarov having a walk-on role in “The Master and Margarita,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s unforgettable magical-realist depiction of the Stalin era. And yet it is not Stalin’s Soviet Union for which Putin hankers. It is the rising Russian Empire of Peter the Great. He made this quite clear in a fascinating interview with Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, in 2019. “A towering bronze statue of the visionary tsar looms over his ceremonial desk in the cabinet room,” noted Barber. Peter I was Putin’s “favorite leader.” “He will live,” declared the Russian president, “as long as his cause is alive.”
To understand what exactly Putin meant by this, you need to travel back three centuries, to the time of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The dominant military power of northern Europe in those days was not Russia but Sweden, then under the leadership of that most extraordinary of Scandinavian warriors, Charles XII. The Great Northern War pitted Charles against Frederick IV, the king of Denmark and Norway; Augustus the Strong, who was simultaneously elector of Saxony, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania; and the Muscovite tsar, Peter I. By 1709, the Swede had defeated both Frederick and Augustus. But he met his match in Tsar Peter.
At the Battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709), Peter the Great won the most important victory of his reign. Because of Russian scorched-earth tactics, the Swedish army had been forced to abandon its advance on Moscow and instead marched south to establish winter quarters. The location Charles XII picked, the town of Poltava, is around 200 miles east of Kyiv. Today it lies in eastern Ukraine, not far from the contested areas around Luhansk and Donetsk, which are controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Well, that’s a terrible article to read before bed.
Journalists living in a fantasy.
remember when michael bloomberg ran for president… that was fucking hilarious
Not a bad article.
I’m not a fan of forced historical narratives to create context, but I think the author gets his predictions and framing of current events right.
Great again with 168 cm?