The west is attempting to goad Russia into a war it doesn’t want

Another day, another spiral in the west’s wholly confected alarm about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The latest escalation, attributed to unnamed US officials and brought to us by (among others) our supposedly cool-headed public service broadcasters, is that Russia now plans a major military advance, to include the capture and occupation of Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.

Against a background of reports claiming that 100,000 Russian troops are massed near the Ukrainian border, the US president, Joe Biden, has told reporters that he thinks Russia will “move in” on Ukraine, while not necessarily embarking on a “full-blown war”. Only 24 hours before, it was Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, telling the BBC Hardtalk interviewer, Stephen Sackur, that the west should be imposing swingeing financial sanctions on Russia before, rather than after, it invades.

In other news, as they say, the Pentagon has forecast that Russia could be planning a “false flag” operation as a prelude to invading (a la, no doubt, the notorious Tonkin incident that embroiled the US in Vietnam). Russia-led military manoeuvres in Belarus are being seen as affording potential cover for an advance into Ukraine. Meanwhile the UK has dispatched anti-tank weapons to Kiev, and the UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, hitherto a voice of relative reason amid the tumult, seems to have spent hours of his precious time penning a point-by-point riposte to Vladimir Putin’s six-month-old essay on Russia’s kinship with Ukraine.

All this is either irresponsible rubbish put about by people who should know a lot better than to risk sparking a military conflict with Russia. Or, it is part of a deliberate western plan to force Russia to choose – between outright (and rash) invasion, on the one hand, and retreat in humiliation, on the other. Either way, it is hard to exaggerate how reckless, how utterly deranged, this daily drumbeat of war emanating from western officials and “sources” really is.

It is difficult to understand, too, why the US, in particular, would be talking up the war scenario now. At a push, I might hazard that Biden is pursuing a good cop/bad cop approach to Russia, wanting serious new talks, while also having to fend off objections from his security establishment of the kind Donald Trump failed to surmount. Then there’s the easy distraction scenario, whereby an embattled president seeks a diversion for the US public from his many woes.

But it is still hard to see why a US president with extensive political experience and so many other fish to fry, would be saying or doing anything that could precipitate a war in Europe – unless everyone concerned was pretty certain, deep down, that it was not going to happen. If this is the thinking, then we all have to hope that the calculation is not wrong. Why then, though, push the argument to this point? Why on earth would Russia even be contemplating an invasion of the sort the west is so confidently talking up?

Russia knows better than most the perils of a winter war. With the shadow of the red army’s retreat from Afghanistan still looming large, the Russian public is wary of military adventures, and the Kremlin knows it. Any invasion of Ukraine would be no rerun of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine would fight, and the bloodshed could easily end Putin’s 20-plus years in power, while threatening to spill into the region as a whole. In short, there is no rationale for such a war whatever, and scant evidence that Putin or anyone in or near the Kremlin has anything of the sort in mind.

Nor has Putin given any hint that he aspires to rebuild either the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. This is neither the meaning nor the inference of his notorious remark about the Soviet collapse being the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. As Putin spelt it out subsequently, obviously as tired as anyone of the western cliches, he was referring to the domestic disorder and deprivation that the Soviet collapse meant for ordinary Russians, not neo-imperial nostalgia.

Not only this, but where Russia has been asked to intervene in the former USSR, it has generally refused. Requests for military help from central Asian republics in difficulty have either been turned down, or – as in Kazakhstan – been granted in a minimalist way, with a limited contingent of paratroops that was demonstratively withdrawn within days.

Russia made no move on Ukraine during or after the (2004-5) Orange Revolution, which brought a fiercely pro-western government to power. In 2008 Russia did not stay in Georgia any longer than it took to recover the enclaves attacked by President Saakashvili. Russia’s capture of Crimea in 2014 can be seen as a pre-emptive move to stop Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol from falling into Nato hands. Shortly afterwards, Putin remarked that Russia could have advanced all the way to Kiev, (by which he meant “could have, but chose not to”). His words, though, were mistranslated, and the disclaimer was turned into a threat – a threat that may be contributing to the west’s talk of invasion today.

As for the status of Ukraine, Russia has consistently recognised and accepted Ukraine as an independent and sovereign state. Since 2014, Moscow has consistently rejected periodic calls by some in Ukraine’s war-torn east for the Donbas to be incorporated into Russia. Putin’s July essay, widely misread in the west as evidence of Putin’s imperial ambitions, was nothing of the kind. It was rather an elegy for relations as they once were – and might yet be again.

Ben Wallace actually quotes the key passage in his riposte, only to dismiss it. “Ironically”, Wallace writes, “President Putin himself admits in his essay that things change: countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!”

Let’s note that again. One answer, says Putin, of Ukraine’s aspirations: they are to be treated “with respect”.

So why are so many so convinced that Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine – if not this month, then surely next? One reason may simply be the long history of western misunderstanding of what Putin is about. Another may be the tendency to see Russian moves as always aggressive and our own as defensive, when to Moscow the opposite is true. And a third surely reflects the west’s stubborn refusal to believe that Russia feels threatened by Nato – a vastly superior military alliance, which, Moscow fears, will sooner rather than later incorporate Ukraine.

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The risk is that both sides now see themselves as racing against time: Russia fearing that Ukraine will be fast-tracked into Nato, if it is not effectively there; the west fearing that Russia will act to pre-empt this, if necessary by force.

Last month, Russia presented the US and Nato with draft treaties that effectively set out Moscow’s wish list for European security, while making clear that Nato membership for Ukraine would represent for Russia a “red line”. Moscow’s making its red line explicit may help to explain what lies behind the current war talk. Until then it had been possible to pretend that Russia might quietly roll over in face of Nato’s further advance. This time, Russia said “Stop”.

The position now is that the west cannot allow Russia to have a veto over who joins Nato, but nor can Russia tolerate one of its last buffer zones joining what it sees as a hostile alliance. If any conflict cried out for a diplomatic fudge, this would be it. The problem is that, in effect, there was one until Russia called the west’s bluff. Now a new one must be found, and until it is, until some form of words or positioning can be found that accommodates both sides, the tensions will remain as sharp and as dangerous as they are today.