Robert Skidelsky on the conflicting narratives surrounding the war in Ukraine

An attempt to confront the two arguments, pro- and anti-Putin and pro- and anti-Trump, directly, with the impartial spectator as the imaginary "trial" judge

Guest post by Lord Robert Skidelsky.

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A few days ago, at dinner, the discussion turned (as it sometimes does these days) to Ukraine. The debate — because it was a debate — went on for three hours. I found myself, as I often do on this topic, in a small minority. I reproduce the gist of the discussion here, because it’s very rare, in my experience, for the two sides to engage each other directly: each prefers to stick to its own version of the truth. Animated, but restrained, the argument circled round the two poles of Putin and Trump — their personalities, their motives, and, given these, the possibility of peace in Ukraine any time soon. For each of the two protagonists, there is a case for the prosecution and a case for the defence. At two points in the discussion below, I invite the judgment of Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator”.

To start with Putin. Why did he invade Ukraine? What was he hoping to get out of it? And what, if any, justification did he have for his actions?. The prosecution’s case is straightforward: Russia’s invasion was an illegal, unprovoked attack on a sovereign state, in violation of the UN Charter. Specifically, Russia broke the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, a set of assurances it had (together with other signatories) given to respect the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of Ukraine, as a quid pro quo for Ukraine returning to Russia, the nuclear weapons stockpile it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Putin, routinely depicted as a mixture of Machiavelli and Hitler, was the sole author of the war.

But, wait a minute, responds the defence. The Budapest agreement of 1994 was a memorandum of understanding, not a treaty, therefore not legally binding. And it’s absurd to claim that Ukraine surrendered its security by giving up its nuclear weapons, since their use was operationally dependent on Russia. As for Russia breaking its promise to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, wasn’t the prosecution ignoring the effect on Russia of NATO’s Bucharest declaration of 2008 that Ukraine “will become a member of NATO”? Was not the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 based on the expectation that, as a founder member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Ukraine would remain part of the Russian world?

“Rubbish”, respond the prosecutors. Russia had no right of veto on an independent state joining NATO. In any case, the Bucharest promise to Ukraine of future NATO membership was empty, since it contained no membership action plan. Putin simply used it as an excuse to set in motion his long-matured goal of recovering, bit by bit, the former territories of the Soviet Union. Had he not called the breakup of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the century”? Unable or unwilling to create in Russia itself a free economy and democratic polity, Putin took the favourite path of all dictators by conjuring up imaginary threats.

Not so, counters the defence. NATO had been set up as an anti-Russian military alliance in 1949. The promise to Ukraine of NATO membership was bound to look like a hostile move. It came with no corresponding guarantee of Russian security against NATO. As for the argument that NATO’s intentions were purely defensive, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003 suggested the contrary. NATO expansion was not, therefore, simply a threat conjured up by Putin to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Hostility to NATO enlargement, the defence continues, had been Russian foreign policy doctrine ever since 1991. Post-Communist Russian liberals like Yegor Gaidar opposed it for the pragmatic reason that by, giving Russian governments an excuse for domestic repression, it would stifle the possibility of liberal democracy at home. For the religiously and conservatively minded, “Kievan Rus” was the cradle of Russia itself: NATO expansion to Ukraine was like tearing a family apart. Add to this the strategic doctrine that Russia needed buffer states to protect it against Western invasion, a view rooted in geographic vulnerability and historical experience, and one can better appreciate the Russian accusation that the West betrayed its promise, allegedly made by US Secretary of State James Baker to Gorbachev in 1990, that, if Russia accepted German reunification, NATO would not expand “one inch” to the east.

Both stories are complicated by events in Ukraine itself. The Russians claim that Ukraine was deliberately prised from their “sphere” by the Americans. The key event here was the Maidan uprising in 2014, as a result of which an anti-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, was installed in Kyiv. The Russians have maintained that this uprising was a coup, orchestrated and financed by the CIA, against the democratically elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. They cite as evidence the leaked conversation in Kyiv during the uprising between US Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, and Ambassador Pyatt in which the two Americans plot the membership of a post-Yanukovych government. The nationalist turn in Kyiv set in motion a programme of de-Russianising Ukraine, started by declaring Ukrainian the sole state language. The post-Maidan commemoration of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who welcomed the German invasion of Russia in 1941 as a chance to establish an independent Ukraine, helps explain Putin’s otherwise mysterious invasion goal of “denazifying” Ukraine.

The prosecution will have none of this. The Maidan uprising was a popular revolt against a corrupt oligarchic regime Putin simply used it as an excuse to annex Crimea and stoke up separatist revolts in Donetsk and Luhansk.

So we have the two views of Putin and Putinism: on the prosecution side, the claim is that Putin’s object was to destroy Ukraine as an independent state, using a whole lot of fabrications to justify his illegal invasion; the defence case is that he was genuinely provoked to action by the effort of Americans and Western Europeans to incorporate Ukraine into the political West, as well as by the Ukrainian nationalist oppression of the Russian minorities.

What is Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” to make of this? He or she is faced with two seemingly irreconcilable stories. Each side dubs the other side the aggressor; each depicts its own position as defensive, and each can adduce evidence on its behalf. I know of no way of demonstrating that one narrative is “truer” than the other. We are what our stories make us. But what action one takes in response to others’ stories is a different matter. One can react either prudently or imprudently, sympathetically or contemptuously.

The West’s imprudence was greatest in the years leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the sense that, basking in its Cold War victory, it was tone deaf to Russian historical memory, and its feeling of humiliation and insecurity. Both George Kennan, author of the Cold War doctrine of “containment”, and Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, warned against NATO’s eastward enlargement. These were counsels of present prudence to guard against future vengeance. The Kyiv government under Poroshenko and later Zelensky also behaved imprudently, by provoking the Russian bear in the apparent belief that the West would be able and willing to deter the Russians from military intervention.

However, prudence is not enough for durable peace: it may mean nothing more than looking for a better moment to strike. A more permanent accord requires paying attention to the other’s story. This at least makes a conversation possible. The political West has treated the Russian story either as a pack of lies invented by Putin or, at best, as a retrograde view of international relations involving obsolete ideas like empires, client states, and buffers. By insisting that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked”, the official West was showing itself heedless of the provocation it was causing.

On the other side, Russian policy was also highly imprudent. Putin started his war with inadequate forces for victory, and oblivious to further consequences. Begun to stop the further enlargement of NATO, it led to Sweden and Finland, two long-standing neutral states, joining NATO to protect themselves against Russia. And it is hard even for a sympathetic spectator to judge the invasion itself sympathetically. The provocation Putin complained of was never sufficient to warrant breaching Article 51 of the UN Charter. Whatever its genuine security concerns, Russia was never in danger of imminent attack either from Ukraine or NATO, nor were the Russian minorities on Ukraine threatened with genocide. And there is little to be said for the way the Russians have actually conducted their “special operation”.

In short, the impartial spectator might conclude that the Ukraine war was a conflict between two legitimate views: Ukraine’s claim to self-determination versus Russia’s claim to a security buffer. Superior statesmanship on both sides would have sought a modus vivendi between the two. This statesmanship was not forthcoming. Joint acceptance of responsibility for the tragedy, says the impartial spectator, is a necessary prerequisite for ending the conflict.

This brings us to Donald Trump. President Trump has had a dreadful press from the mainstream western media for his efforts to end the war. He is not given credit for trying; rather, he is routinely lumped together with Putin and other dictators as a destroyer of the “rules-based international order”.

The chief prosecution charge centres on his refusal to accept Russia’s culpability for starting the war. This has fatally compromised the hitherto united NATO support for Ukraine in resisting the Russian assault. Trump has shown himself willing to force on Ukraine peace terms that would, in effect, destroy its independence. In trying for a deal with Russia “over the heads” of both Volodymir Zelensky and NATO’s European leaders he has driven a wedge between the American and European flanks of NATO. Ukraine — and Europe — can no longer rely on the United States to underwrite their defence against Russian attacks.

Besotted by Putin and/or by his own role as peacemaker, Trump has failed to realise that Putin is unappeasable. History tells us that appeasement of dictators simply makes them more voracious. If Putin gets what he wants in Ukraine, he will not stop there: Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic States, and even Poland are in the firing line. A success for Putin in Ukraine will encourage China to attack Taiwan. Russia is not simply trying to recreate its defensive shield; it is intent on restoring its former world power, as witness the activities of the so-called Wagner brigades in Africa, and the covert attempts of Russian state agencies and proxies to destabilise Western politics through forms of cyber warfare. On this premise, the only prudent course is to keep Ukraine fighting, till Russia is exhausted, or Putin overthrown, whatever the cost to Ukraine. The cost — in treasure it not in lives — can be made good in the future by forcing the defeated Russian aggressor to pay reparations.

Faced with a US President who is virtually a Putin dupe, the task of the Europeans is to block American efforts to secure a peace on Russian terms. Not only must any ceasefire be patrolled by troops of NATO countries stationed in Ukraine, (the so-called (“coalition of the willing”); but permanent peace must provide Ukraine with guarantees equivalent to NATO’s own Article 5. Territorial questions are for the Ukrainians, not the Americans, to decide.

European NATO leaders no longer talk of a Ukrainian victory, rather of ratcheting up their military and economic support for Ukraine sufficiently to deprive Putin of the victory he hopes for by stringing out negotiations with Trump.

So much for the prosecution. The starting point of the defence must be that Trump is the first Western leader to have sought peace in Ukraine by talking directly to Putin. Jettisoning the doctrine of the unprovoked attack has opened the door to a dialogue: you don’t parley with a war criminal.

In starting peace talks, Trump has exposed the hollowness of Western posturing. This has amounted to keeping Ukraine in the fight at enormous cost in Ukrainian blood without supporting it sufficiently to drive out the Russian invader. Prolonging the war will not improve Ukraine’s position: indeed longer the war continues, the worse the Ukrainian position will become. Neither President Biden nor the European leaders have been willing to risk a nuclear war by giving Ukraine the powerful offensive weapons it needs (and continually asks for) to inflict serious damage on Russia itself.

Given these “facts on the ground”, a compromise peace now is the only way of quickly ending the war on reasonable terms for Ukraine itself. This is irrespective of who caused it. Trump has recognised this, but no European leaders have done so. Instead, they have done everything to sabotage the peace negotiations by, on the one hand, offering NATO “boots on the ground” to patrol any ceasefire (which they know the Russians will not accept) and, on the other, by promising Ukraine war-winning weaponry (which they will never supply, or at least supply in time to make a difference).

So what is Adam Smith’s “impartial observer” to make of these different stories about Donald Trump? The conclusion that stands out is that NATO’s European leaders — Rutte. Macron, Mertz, Starmer, et al — have no coherent alternative to Trump’s search for peace. They offer no prospect of a Ukrainian victory, only the continuation of a war likely to end in a Ukrainian defeat. They have neither the guts to take the fight directly to the Russians, nor the clarity to understand that a quick end to the fighting offers the best outcome for Ukraine itself. The Finnish analogy of 1939-40, when Finland won its true independence from Russia, even at the cost of conceding some of its territory, has escaped them and Zelensky.

Our dinner table discussion could have dug much deeper into the historical memories and mindsets of both sides. But for present purposes, it is perhaps enough to end on Trump’s repeated call to stop the killing. The prosecution sees this as an ego-driven quest for a Nobel Peace prize, at the expense of Ukraine, NATO, and the world order which the United States itself created. That the effort to secure a peace prize should be ipso facto interpreted as ignoble tells us a lot about the mindset of the Western commentariat. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Trump as blessed? Tell us another.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

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