On 2 June, the Committee for Academic Freedom held a debate in King’s College London on the question: “Ukraine — was Russia’s invasion provoked by Western foreign policy”. This was almost the first discussion of its sort to have taken place in a UK university — an extraordinary fact, considering the importance of the issue. Still more extraordinary is the fact that this long hush has been due not to any political pressure or legal ban but to a simple determination on the part of all concerned to avoid the topic. It’s a striking example of what sociologist Steven Lukes called “agenda power”: the power to settle questions in advance by putting them off the table.
Taking part in the debate were four distinguished Russia and Ukraine watchers: Tony Brenton, Lawence Freedman, Robert Skidelsky and John Lough. The chair was Director of Chatham House Bronwen Maddox.
Edward Skidelsky
Tony Brenton
Sir Tony Brenton was British Ambassador to Russia 2004-2008.
Thanks everyone for coming to discuss a subject that’s been pretty much taboo here over the last three years: what do the Russians actually think about what’s going on?
It is striking that I have friends, journalists and professors, who have almost been cancelled for suggesting that they might write an article or a book exploring this question. So I’m delighted to be able to try and persuade you that there are very good reasons for believing that Russians were provoked into doing what they are doing.
Let me start with a quibble, however. By “provoked”, I do not mean that Western action was the sole cause of the Russian assault on Ukraine. What I’m saying — I’m sure you’re all Aristotelian philosophers — is that it was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. I’m not defending the Russians. They’ve done crazy, brutal things. But they wouldn’t have done those things had it not been for Western actions.
As I go through, you will see that I’m focusing on the Russian point of view, because the question of whether the Russians were provoked finally comes down to what was going on in Russian heads — in particular, of course, one Russian head, which is that of President Putin.
There are a couple of other points I need you to understand. One is the deep importance of Ukraine for Russia. Ukraine, Slavic sister, united with Russia for about as long as Scotland has been with England, in a relationship as vexed as any relationship between a municipal imperial power and one of its colonies. Think England and Ireland, with all the undertones and complications of that sort of relationship.
The second point I would make is about Russia itself. Over the period we’re discussing, and indeed still to some extent, there has been a deep cleavage in Russian politics between the liberals, reformers, democrats — the people we encouraged when communism originally collapsed — and the conservative nationalists, authoritarian on the whole, and very hostile to the West. The interplay between those two groups has been a big part of the Russian approach to this. And part of my thesis is that, in the end, we’ve given dominance in Russian politics to the wrong guys — to the nationalists, to the Putinites.
I’m now going to run swiftly through the history of the key factor pushing Russia the wrong way on all of this, which is the Western determination to expand NATO. At the end of the Cold War, you have two surviving alliance systems, NATO on the one hand, the Warsaw Pact on the other, both of them saying: “we’re defensive, all we’ve done for the last thirty years is deter the other side”. But each is regarded by the population of the other side as the deep enemy — as the people who are out to get us
You then get to the end of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact disappears, as no one wants to be a subject of Russia. NATO survives, but there’s quite a lot of expectation around that it too will go. The Cold War is over. We’re talking about “Europe whole and free”, all that sort of stuff. It’s a historic relic which will vanish. And it kind of feels like that for a while. And then the question of NATO expansion arises — first of all in a negative way. As the Cold War ends, and East Germany joins up with West Germany, the question arises: can we include East Germany in NATO? And obviously the answer to that is: yes, there’s no great cost to that.
But what are we willing to offer Russia in return? And what Jim Baker, the US Secretary of State at the time, offers is: “not one inch”. NATO will take in East Germany, but will not go one inch beyond that. The negotiators do not put that commitment into the final agreement (Gorbachev is almost exclusively obsessed with getting crucial Western financial support), but they give the assurance in public. Kohl repeats it, Thatcher repeats it, Wörner, who is at that time Secretary General of NATO repeats it. It is generally accepted by the Russians that that is a commitment by the West, even if not written down.
But as history moves forward the West says: of course we never meant it, of course we can expand NATO if we choose. The Russians come away feeling betrayed. At regular moments thereafter, you find Russians saying: you promised, and you broke your promise. That was the moment when trust began to evaporate between the two sides, as the result of a Western action.
That’s the initial play, and then it all goes quiet for a bit. The Soviet Union is collapsing. NATO looks marginalised. The Warsaw Pact collapses. The subject of expansion only rises again under middle period Clinton, when the Poles and the Hungarians and the Czechs, now relieved of the Russian yoke, say: we want to join NATO. We want protection from the Russians. Clinton’s initial reaction is caution, because he knows that this will be a red rag to the Russian bull. He looks for a way to avoid it, introducing a thing called Partnership for Peace as a kind of waiting room for NATO membership. And he talks regularly to Yeltsin — he and Yeltsin were quite close buddies — and Yeltsin is saying: don’t do it, this is the way to really inflame my security sector. They will hate you.
Clinton for a while survives on that, but then he does very badly in the 1994 midterms, partly because in Chicago there are lots of Polish-heritage voters who firmly back letting Poland into NATO. So Clinton switches. He says: “okay, we’re going to let them in”. There’s then a huge row. Yeltsin, having been delighted by Partnership for Peace, is utterly abject at the torrent of political excrement which is about to fall on his head. Clinton pushes forward in negotiations. He produces a thing called the Founding Act, which essentially says: our borders move 500 miles closer to Moscow, we absorb all of Russia’s former allies, and then we give Yeltsin this piece of paper as compensation. Meanwhile, Yeltsin is making heartfelt speeches about what, after all those hopes of a “Europe whole and free” is now going to be, at best, a “cold peace”.
This is the moment that a real chill enters the relationship between Russia and the West. A friend of mine, Dmitri Trenin, one of the most moderate Russian securocrats, says to me: “you do this and the Russian security sector will never trust you again”. The Russian security sector matters. It’s the dominant bit of the Russian government.
Anyway, we go ahead. And a man called George Kennan, the great Russian expert, the man who devised the policy of containment way back at the beginning of the Cold War, who knows Russia backwards, looks on in horror. I’m going to give you short quotation here, because it’s so good, it gets it absolutely right:
Bluntly stated … expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking …
He was absolutely right on every count. Nevertheless, the process by now had started. The first enlargement took place in 1999, which unfortunately was also the year of the Kosovo War. The Kosovo War was illegal, it was an attack on an ally of Russia, and it was an aggressive war on NATO’s part. So the Russians turn around and say: I thought you said that NATO was defensive. What is going on here? Gaidar, the leading Russian reformer, says: If you only knew the disaster you are now inflicting on Russia. You are making it impossible for those of us who care about Russian liberalism and democracy to achieve that result.
So, the first enlargement happens, leaving a very bad feeling and a lot of damage. One of the consequences is that Yeltsin, choosing his successor, looks for a man who, in addition to protecting him and his cronies from prosecution in retirement — think Nixon/Ford — will stand up for Russia in a way he, Yeltsin, was never able to. The search is described as being for “Russia’s Pinochet”, someone ready among other things to stand up to the West. Vladimir Putin emerges from, in effect, nowhere to become President of Russia. So part of the consequence of NATO enlargement is that we now have Putin to deal with.
Putin arrives. He sets about taking care of Russia. He makes it clear that he is absolutely averse to NATO enlargement. In the beginning, actually, he wants to go soft — he wants to make friends with the Americans. He talks politely about enlargement, but once it becomes clear that he cannot establish a decent relationship with Americans, he then goes hard.
The second round of enlargement takes place in 2004. I actually had just arrived in Russia as Ambassador in that year. One of the things I was put down to do — all NATO ambassadors were doing it — was to go round the country, meeting ordinary Russians, explaining to them that NATO was a defensive alliance and that of course we were not planning to attack Russia. And at one of these meetings, in Ekaterinburg, I said all of that, gave all the arguments. Out of the audience a veteran, ramrod straight, got up and shouted, pochemu nam vryosh, why are you lying to us? — with the evident support of all the other people in the room. That brought home to me how strongly ordinary Russians felt about this issue.
Our attention now turns to Ukraine — the country, it will be recalled, closest to Russia’s heart. At this point Ukrainian politics is basically push and shove between Western and Russian oriented factions, with plenty of outside interference by both sides. There’s a revolution in 2004 which puts the anti-Russian Viktor Yushchenko in power, and at that point Ukraine begins talking quietly to NATO about joining. Yushchenko disappears in 2010, and is replaced by pro-Russian Yanukovych. Discussion of NATO membership goes underground. But before that, there’s a NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, which by some completely mad process includes in its conclusions: Ukraine will become a member of NATO.
At this point, all sorts of things happen. Bill Burns, who is US ambassador in Moscow at the time, warns his bosses in Washington (his report turns up on Wikileaks which is why I can quote it):
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
He couldn’t have spoken a truer word.
The Russians have regularly and forcefully told us that NATO expansion is simply not acceptable
In 2014, you have Ukraine’s “Maidan Revolution”. Yanukovich is out. The pro-Western faction is in. Russia reacts with predictable (indeed predicted) anger, seizing Crimea and fostering a secessionist war in Eastern Ukraine. We impose sanctions and NATO entry is actually written into the Ukrainian constitution. Things go quiet again, and then, during Covid, Putin goes off and broods on it, sees Russia’s closest comrade seeking an alliance with the enemy, comes back from his Covid-induced break, and says: “I’m not going to let this happen. This is contrary to what all Russian history is about.” He masses his troops and presents a set of demands to the West, central to which is that Ukraine shall not join NATO. We brush them aside. Russia invades.
Just to summarise then, the Russians have regularly and forcefully told us that NATO expansion is simply not acceptable. At the disastrous 2008 Bucharest Summit, which decided Ukraine “will” join NATO, Putin told Bush (in precisely these words) “The emergence of a powerful military bloc on our borders will be seen as a direct threat to Russian security.” That is as close as you can get in diplomat-speak to saying it would be a casus belli. Bush ignored him, as we have ignored similar warnings all the way through. And Ukraine is now paying the price.
Lawrence Freedman
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Russia is waging an aggressive war against Ukraine. It is not acting in self-defence because Ukraine did not attack Russia. There may be reasons why Vladimir Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and it may be interesting to explore these reasons. But — to be clear — they are not justifications. There can be no justifications for an aggressive war of this sort.
In the West we normally consider the “Just War” tradition when assessing justifications made for the use of armed force. In this tradition there is an important distinction between cause and conduct, why and how. A just cause (jus ad bello) meant that a war must be undertaken by a lawful authority with good intent, to right a serious wrong, and be undertaken with a reasonable prospect of success and then only after exhausting peaceful alternatives and using proportionate means. Just conduct (jus in bello) required not making matters worse, using force proportionate to the wrong to be righted and sparing non-combatants. So a war needs special justification and then should be fought as humanely as possible.
On almost every one of these tests the Russian aggression fails.
Let me emphasise here that the question of how a war should be fought is bound up with if it should be fought at all. I won’t labour this point now but it is important to note that, even though the Russian government might have kidded itself that this would be a walkover, it is still stuck in a hopeless campaign after well over three years of fighting against a supposedly much weaker country. Moscow’s lack of understanding of Ukraine’s determined and resilient national identity is another indicator of Russia’s moral as well as military failure. It had no idea of the mess it was getting into and the tragedy it was inflicting upon itself as well as on Ukraine.
For there to be a case for this war it must reside in an intention to right a serious wrong. This is where we get into questions of whether or not it was provoked or triggered by Western actions.
Before examining these questions we must make another distinction. We may discover, like a psychiatrist dealing with paranoia, that our patient harbours deep and dark thoughts about NATO as well as about Ukraine, and that these have generated a sense of profound insecurity. Sometimes, of course, the paranoid are right to be worried. But if we discover that there was no reason for them to worry, then although we may have an explanation for the consequent criminality — they did this terrible thing because they were deranged — we have no justification. If the Russian government had not fallen prey to its own insecurities and considered the situation more carefully it would have held fire.
We must also be careful because Putin and his propagandists have given a variety of reasons for the invasion at different times. In some accounts NATO enlargement looms large but in most — and in particular in Putin’s famous essay of July 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” — NATO is mentioned only once, as exercising control over the Ukrainian government, as if it had no agency. But the purpose of this tendentious history is to demonstrate that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent state, that it is an artificial creation with an illegitimate government, and should therefore return to its proper home. That I believe is Putin’s core motive.
When Russians speak now about the “root causes” that must be addressed if the conflict is to be resolved they tend to be referring to two issues. First NATO’s enlargement and second the position of Russian speakers inside of Ukraine. This second issue was used to create the pretext for the invasion but if that was the purpose then the first destination would not have been Kyiv. Most Russian speaking Ukrainians that I know have turned to only speaking Ukrainian.
On NATO expansion we must deal with the falsehood that there was once a firm promise handed by Western leaders to Gorbachev as the Cold War came to an end that NATO would not expand. The issue certainly was discussed, largely in the context of German reunification, and before the Soviet Union fell apart, which of course concluded with an agreement that Germany could reunify inside of NATO. You can find comments from German Foreign Minister Genscher about the possibility of no NATO expansion, but also more authoritative comments from his boss, Chancellor Helmut Kohl vetoing the idea. There was never a treaty commitment.
In 1997, NATO and Russia signed what was described as the “Founding Act” to govern their future relationships. This set up the “NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council” to serve as a venue for consultations, cooperation and consensus building. The two sides insisted that they did not see each other as enemies, and also promised to refrain “from the threat or use of force against each other as well as against any other state, its sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence”. So there was no promise not to enlarge but there was a promise not to use force. The essential principle was that sovereign states could choose their own security arrangements and that this could include membership of NATO.
The important point about enlargement was that it was demand-led, not supply-led. Former members of the Soviet bloc were actively campaigning to be allowed into NATO. We don’t know the counter-factual of what would have happened if NATO and the EU had not expanded to meet this demand but it is hard to believe that keeping so many states outside of established support structures would have been more stable and mutually beneficial. Asked now, it is hard to imagine that many regret being in NATO or have failed to note that the only countries attacked by Russia have not been in the alliance.
Because of the lengthy time horizon for joining the EU, membership of NATO was an attractive, quicker, option. But these countries also had their own memories of betrayal — from not only at Munich in 1938 but also at the Yalta conference of February 1945 which is when they were consigned to the Soviet sphere.
In the discussion prior to the full-scale invasion, NATO offered to go back to the 1997 Founding Act, which since 2014 had fallen into disrepair, promise non-aggression and that no offensive weapons would get too close. None of that was of interest to Moscow which wanted NATO to rewind.
Of course one consequence of the invasion is that NATO has expanded further — into Sweden and Finland. Another big win for the special military operation.
The possibility of Ukrainian and Georgian membership of NATO was discussed at Bucharest in 2008, when there was a sloppy compromise which did not rule out future membership but took no steps to make it possible. Since then it has not seriously been on the table. Even if there had been no war, Ukraine would still not be a member.
What Putin finds objectionable is not Ukraine’s friendships but its agency — its right to make its own decisions
So why Putin’s paranoia? I think it goes back to the Orange Revolution of 2004, when popular protest forced a rerun of the presidential election which was widely assumed to be rigged (and which saw the pro-Western candidate poisoned). After that, he was keen for Ukraine to be brought back into the Russian sphere. In 2013, he became alarmed that Victor Yanukovich, as pro-Russian a president in Ukraine as he was likely to get, was intending to sign an association agreement with the EU — with the EU not NATO — and he put Ukraine under extraordinary economic coercion to get the government to change its mind. When this succeeded in November 2013 there was outrage from many Ukrainians, leading to the “Revolution in Dignity”, Yanukovich running away, and events unfolding as we have seen.
What Putin finds objectionable is not Ukraine’s friendships but its agency — its right to make its own decisions and chart its own course. He was especially alarmed that it might turn into a western democracy, for this might have been contagious and infected Russia.
The creation of the pretext for the invasion followed the pattern of 2014, with an attempt to suggest that Russia was responding to a desperate request for help from a beleaguered population. The choreography involved a decision to recognise the independence of the enclaves on 21 February, followed by a contrived incident to demonstrate the danger from Ukraine, and then a request for help from the “Luhansk People’s Republic” and “Donetsk People’s Republic” to which Putin responded positively on night of 23 February, leading to invasion early next morning.
There are no honourable motives justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine. It was a terrible choice made for bad reasons. Whatever the faults of Western policy it did not goad Putin into invading a sovereign country, occupying its land, bombing its cities, plundering its assets, murdering its people, abducting its children. Putin does not deserve our legitimation let alone our apologies, He deserves only condemnation and a determination to make sure that this reckless, shameful, and unwarranted invasion is defeated.
Part two comes tomorrow …
