OPINION: We Must End Our Betrayal of Ukraine

Twenty years ago, on Dec. 15, 2004, I wrote to Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush’s national security advisor and whose Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State were scheduled for January.  This was during the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution that pitted Putin’s proxy, Viktor Yanukovych, against Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned by Putin, in an election rigged by Russia, though Yanukovych lost the Dec. 26 rerun.

I was alarmed that, failing Putin’s subornation of Ukraine, Russia would invade Ukraine and attempt to claw back the keystone of its empire.  He would use it as the crowbar to flip the “US led international order.”  If we didn’t deter the assault, the global cascading effect would be overwhelming, and the credibility of our deterrent would be no more.

 I wrote:

The position taken, and yet also not taken, by the Administration concerning Ukraine implicates several issues: Does this Administration’s action, or inaction, vis a vis Ukraine:

(1) increase or reduce likelihood that the U.S. will be simultaneously confronted by both a resurgent, reconstituted “Russia” and Islamic terrorism?

 (2) enhance or compromise America’s credibility in implementing its stated bedrock of national security—the active promotion of democracy worldwide?

(3) facilitate or prejudice the Administration’s approach (and, critically, world perception of that approach) to global nuclear proliferation, most immediately North Korea and Iran? The last question is particularly acute since, even though upon its declaration of independence in 1991 Ukraine became the world’s third largest nuclear power, it shortly thereafter stepped out of the nuclear club.

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I did not mention China since its denuclearization at that time was already off the table.

I was prompted to write, stunned by Dr. Rice’s innocent assessment of Putin and Russia, generally.  Only months after Putin originally became president, she concluded that his changes to the Russian tax code would be more determinative of our future relations with Russia than his obliteration of Chechnya.

This followed Russia’s trashing of its official peace treaty with that nation, and after he had blown up several residential complexes in Russia in a false flag operation blamed on Chechen terrorists.

US decision makers continued to underestimate the Russian threat

Rice was not alone.  In 2003, a year before my letter, President Obama’s choice as ambassador to Russia assured us that by the end of the 1990’s Russia had disappeared as a threat to the US. In February 2004 and again in April 2005, Putin declared the fall of the USSR as a “tragedy on an enormous scale.”

What did that portend?

Just months later and shortly before my own letter to Rice, Fiona Hill later to be President Trump’s “Russia expert” exhorted us in a head snapping NYTimes Op-ed to “Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him.” Fortunately, but too late, all three have largely changed their views about both Russia and Putin.

The coffin air of Lubyanka is simply beyond us. We never heard the cymbal crash when Russia under Yeltsin appointed itself as the proud, non-repentant legatee of a heinous empire, succeeding to its assets but rejecting any admission, apology, or responsibility. President Clinton went as far as to compare Yeltsin to Abraham Lincoln. Was there - ever - any parallel to the national contrition that post Nazi Germany had expressed? Not only did Moscow never condemn its monstrous history - Russia celebrates it.

Where was our visceral horror when Putin showed his muscle memory even before his presidency, celebrating the USSR as the quintessential terror state, with feral, chest-beating pride.

In 1999, and probably before, Putin celebrated Stalin’s birthday and preached the nobility of his executioners. Putin never deigned to explain why they were issued rubber aprons.  He diligently probed, tested, assessed our awareness and concern - more accurately, thee felonious absence of such. Did anyone in the West raise an eyebrow when Russia adopted the music of the Soviet anthem? The Soviet star and hammer & sickle?

At the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002, massive Soviet propaganda posters were coyly displayed, glorifying the squared jawed, macho factory worker, paired with the hugely breasted female milk maid. The audience, the media, were catatonic. On 9/11, only seemingly coincidently, Putin celebrated the birthday of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka/KGB.

Was Putin’s veneration of Stalin and deification of the secret police proof that Putin was “a man Americans can trust?”

American presidents and world leaders, advised by an equally rapturous global foreign policy commentariat, elbowed each other out of the way in a stampede to kiss the ring of the former KGB colonel, some continuing their obeyance to this day:

President Clinton: “[Putin] is fully capable of . . . preserving freedom and pluralism and rule of law.”

President Bush looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing his soul had its precedent when our first ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies in 1936 swooned: “His [Stalin’s] brown eyes are exceedingly kind and gentle.  A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”

Bush said: “I was struck by how easy it is to talk to President Putin, how easy it is to speak from my heart,” followed by the accolade: “We talked like men and brothers,” in the same tone that President Roosevelt had gushed about Stalin.

Not to be left behind, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair’s was competitively obsequious: “President Putin’s leadership offers hope to Russia and the whole world.”

How did we miss the signals of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine?

On the eve of Russia’s annexation of parts of Ukraine in 2014, Soviet symbolism was even more up front and center at the Sochi Winter Olympics.  Did anyone in the West raise a word, a syllable of horror? How about, in descending order, fear, alarm, consternation, discomfort or even confusion? Anyone? Just one?

It was the very opposite.

A prominent American diplomat was enthralled that “they [the Russians] could justifiably be proud of their efforts . . . Everyone was so friendly.” Substitute 1936, Hitler, Nazi, swastika and Gestapo for these scenarios.

As I was writing to Rice, I did not know that she was with Putin at his dacha outside of Moscow. He walked in and introduced her to the man by his side: “Meet Viktor Yanukovych, who is running for the presidency of Ukraine.”

Putin tapped none other than Paul Manafort to install Yanukovych as his lap dog in Ukraine. Manafort was later briefly Donald Trump’s campaign manager. But it took almost a decade, only after Russian tanks slammed through the Ukrainian border, for Rice to describe her meeting with Putin.

In a March 2014, Op-ed in the Washington Post, captioned, “Will America Heed the Wake-Up Call of Ukraine?” she wrote: “Putin wanted me to get the point. ‘He’s my man, Ukraine is ours, and don’t forget it.” Putin was acting on what Nobel Peace Prize recipient Andrei Sakharov called the “Ukrainophobia characteristic of Stalin.”

Putin opening his playbook to Rice was confirmatory of a long-declared goal.  In 1997 Russia had announced that destruction of Ukraine was the linchpin for its desire to take down the US.  To that end, a Russian-Islamic alliance was key, with Iran as Russia’s key player.  The blueprint was required reading for the Russian General Staff. We dozed. In a remarkable apostasy from our strategic myopia, that same year also saw the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace write:

“Whether Russian led integration on the territory of the former USSR will pose a serious, long-term military challenge to the West depends in large part on the role that Ukraine plays or is compelled to play. Ukraine will do much to determine whether Europe and the world in the twenty-first century will be as bloody as they were in the twentieth.”

Still, we missed the portents

We were too busy bringing Russia into the G7, and otherwise saving “its statehood and international status. The US helped us not only to preserve all this, but also to elevate our status,” Russia’s former foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev wrote.

Among other disasters, it was the US, the world’s leading democracy, that hypocritically steamrolled UN admission rules and enthroned Russia’s membership on the Security Council in place of the USSR. What exactly did we think it all would mean for us?

We didn’t think at all.  We’ve been checkmated by Russia’s veto ever since.  Our strategic insanity continues to bear fruit by the day. UN’s Antonio Guterres bowing to the war criminal indicted by the very same UN for his war crimes against Ukrainian children is obscene.

In my letter I pointed Rice towards the observation of Stalin’s favorite chekist, Pavel Sudoplatov, who wrote about his experience as a proud “fighter in that war [against Ukraine], which formally ended only in January 1992, when the . . . world acknowledged President Leonid Kravchuk as the head of the legitimate government of Ukraine, a sovereign nation.” We should notice the use of “formally.”  The war ranged from kinetic, when the US reneged on aid to Ukraine after WWI, through the full gamut of genocidal horrors. It lasted for generations until the USSR’s demise in 1991.

It was a “war” when Ukraine’s NATO membership was never and could never have been the reason for it.  So much for Putin’s sycophants in Congress and elsewhere who choke with conviction that Putin’s “fear of NATO expansion to Ukraine” was the reason that Russia again invaded Ukraine.

The Stalinist tactic – accuse, blame, wave your hands and stomp your feet, over and over again - works. And so much for us droning endlessly that “Ukraine has always been a part of Russia.”  Russia’s implantation into our brains of its acid rinse of imperial history a century ago continues to pay dividends.

You would have thought that the tectonic tremors would have been a subject during Rice’s January 2005 Senate confirmation hearings. No. The hearings focused on “terrorism” to the exclusion of almost all else.  Ukraine was perfunctorily mentioned only twice.

There was no intimation whatsoever that either the Senators or Rice were aware that it was Moscow that had curated, financed and directed much of the terrorism directed against the West since the 1970s.

As we were lobbying in 1997 for Russia’s inclusion in the G7, Moscow reciprocated by diverting Ayman al-Zawahiri to Afghanistan to plan 9/11 as Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant.  Putin made sure to be the first foreign caller to breathlessly call Bush to offer condolences. Of course he did. Official Washington’s reaction was, very literally, “Gee, the Cold War is really over.”

Rice’s 2014 Op-ed also voiced the following: “The immediate concern must be to show Russia that further moves will not be tolerated and that Ukraine’s territorial integrity is sacrosanct.”

If that is such a pivotal issue, why wasn’t it a subject of her confirmation hearings in January 2005? If the sanctity of territorial integrity was important when she penned her Op-ed, in 2014, then it was also important in 2004, when Putin told her what he planned to do to it.

Her formulation - “further” moves will not be tolerated - signaled what, exactly? That Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea were acceptable? So, was Russia’s invasion of Georgia? We’re at it again, beating the drum for Ukraine to surrender territory and sacrifice its humanity.   

I concluded my letter to Dr. Rice:

“The first duty of intelligent men,” wrote George Orwell, “is to restate the obvious.” It would be felonious if the United States, under our current president, lost the Cold War that his father is credited with winning. The Cold War was “won” because the USSR imploded, its constituent republics having asserted their right to the same self-evident freedom demanded by the American colonies.

“After all, what distinguished the day before and the day after the unraveling of the USSR? It was not the disappearance of weapons of mass destruction (other than in Ukraine). It was the severance of Moscow’s control over the non-Russian nations that dissolved the Soviet Union. The keystone republic was Ukraine. “However, unlike the systematic, determined and strategic policy that the United States pursued after WWII to prevent the emergence of a militarized and militant Germany, nothing of the sort has been adopted by Washington to preserve the peace it professed to have won.

If “winning” meant dissolution of the Soviet Union, cold logic dictates that all effort be applied to prevent Russia from now steamrollering the nascent democracies of the former USSR. More fantastic scenarios can be imagined than a reversion to an even more dangerous Russia. It had already occurred once, in 1917.

“Moscow engineered the original and quintessential terrorist state. Throughout its existence, mountains of “weapons of mass destruction” were never a question. Nor was Moscow’s capability in their use ever an issue. Nor, for that matter, absent the risk of retaliation, was Moscow’s intent.

“Russia is the self-declared successor of the USSR, acceding to its global embassies and assets, usurping its seat in the United Nations, but never acknowledging, much less assuming, any of its liabilities. Without admission, repentance and atonement, as there continues through today in Germany, Moscow remains unmoved, unchanged.“In your confirmation hearings, you may be asked what must be done to ensure that, like Nazi Germany, Russia in the future never again becomes a threat to world peace and America’s security. You can respond with Lenin’s lament: “If we lose Ukraine, we lose our head.” “Ensuring that loss for Lenin’s progeny will be the redemption.”

Redemption of what?

Of an infamy. Of a century of foreign policy malpractice where we consistently betrayed Ukraine, each time with genocidal consequences for the largest country in Europe and each time solidifying Russia’s existential threat to us.

Moscow’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine after the implosion of the Tsarist Empire following WWI was key to its make-over as a “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby was adamant that “friendship and honor require that Russia’s interest must be generously protected, and that all decisions of vital importance to it, and especially those concerning its sovereignty over the territory of the former Russian Empire, be held in abeyance.”

“We dismissed Ukraine’s warnings with an ‘I’m above it all’ sniff, and threw it under the bus, reneging on our aid commitments as Russia re-invaded and occupied Ukraine.”

After more than 10 years of Ukraine’s resistance to the reimposition of Moscow’s rule, in August 1932, Stalin wrote to his satrap in Ukraine: “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine…” He massively starved Ukraine into submission through the “Holodomor.” It was part of the war identified by Sudoplatov. Raphael Lemkin, author of the UN Genocide Convention, condemned it as “classic Soviet genocide.” The survival of the Soviet Union was secured with all its consequences.

We not only suppressed the news of the genocide but stamped legitimacy and acceptance of it all by extending diplomatic recognition to the regime whose very founding was dedicated to our destruction. 

The Roosevelt Democratic administration promptly joined with the Republicans in a celebratory dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. The mostly Republican captains of American finance and industry rose to their feet and bellowed the communist Internationale anthem in homage to the genocidaire sworn to their own demise.

And it was the US that would continue feeding Moscow the capital, technology and brainpower to do so. “It’s only business.” We were soothed that Moscow would “refrain from… any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquillity, prosperity, order, or security of the whole or any part of the United States, in particular any agitation or propaganda.” Afterall, we got it in writing.

Our strategic witlessness continues.

In 1991, we railed against Ukraine’s independence, apoplectic as we were after WWI about the empire falling apart.  But when Ukraine nevertheless declared its independence and dissolution of the USSR made the US “great again,” Washington unabashedly pivoted and hypocritically proclaimed it as “one of the most stunning diplomatic achievements in history.”

Why didn’t we strive to keep it that way? Instead of “facilitating the development of a strong and stable Ukraine to act as a balance to Russian power in Eastern Europe,” as one critic wrote, we cheered making Russia “the sole nuclear and economic power to emerge from the Soviet Union [making it] a dangerous prospect for Western security. The United States … assisted in creating a regime that is a serious threat to the democratic community of states.”

We stripped Ukraine of its nuclear and then conventional arsenals, shoving Ukraine aside but promising “Ukraine’s security problem will be solved once Ukraine gives up its nuclear arsenal.” 

Moscow remains implacable, unmoved, unchanged. It remains as it has been throughout its history: murderous, predatory, imperial, undeterred.  It admits to nothing, denies everything and everyone, and demands all as its own, pre-destined entitlement. 

We also remain unchanged. We farmed out George Orwell’s “reality control” long ago to Moscow and remain ensconced in a hallucinatory cocoon.  We suffer from an institutional, cultural, political, emotional and psychological inability to identify reality. Stalin’s mind slaughter has also led us to steadily “cannibalize” ourselves, as Putin chortled already in 2018. For the third time in a century, Ukraine provides us with the opportunity to neutralize a monstrous regime, allowing us to deal with the disastrous global consequences of our foreign policy malpractice with Moscow.  Squandering our global primacy since 1991, we’ve been careening down what is now a 35-year slide into today’s strategic tarpit. Throwing Ukraine, once again, under the bus will be our last betrayal.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.