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Commentators routinely say we know nothing. In truth, we know a lot—about the role of NATO, the fear of “escalation,” and Putin’s likely successor.

The ramifications of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted rebellion against the Russian military are still playing out and won’t be fully known for many weeks and possibly many months. However, the rebellion underscores or illuminates three key points of longstanding historical significance:

• First, Putin’s war on Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO, NATO expansion, or phantom NATO threats to Russia.

• Second, fears that Putin might “escalate” the conflict if the West somehow “provokes” him by fully arming Ukraine are misplaced and misguided.

• Third, we can see the type of leader who might succeed Putin. The successor most likely will be an autocrat who is hostile to the West; but he also will be someone the West can tolerate or live with—provided Ukraine wins and Russia loses the war.

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First, Putin’s war on Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO, NATO expansion, or phantom NATO threats to Russia.

Many prominent observers have bought into this lie and it remains widely touted; but it was always a ruse used by Putin to try and legitimize his illegal and unprovoked war on Ukraine. Now, Prigozhin himself admits as much.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine were not going to attack Russia with NATO,” Prigozhin admits in a video uploaded to Telegram Friday, June 23. “The war was needed for a bunch of scumbags to triumph and show how strong of an army they are.”

Prigozhin, reports the New York Times,

described his country’s invasion of Ukraine as a “racket” perpetrated by a corrupt elite chasing money and glory without concern for Russian lives. He also challenged the Kremlin’s claim that Kyiv had been on the verge of attacking Russian-backed separatist territory in Ukraine’s east when Russia invaded.

“The war wasn’t needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” Mr. Prigozhin said, referring to Mr. Putin’s initial justifications for the war. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory.”

Second, fears that Putin might “escalate” the conflict if the West somehow “provokes” him by fully arming Ukraine are misguided and misplaced.

As we observed back in February, the Biden administration’s fear of “escalation” never made any sense. Russia has no real ability to “escalate,” militarily, and our objective ought to be to bring the war to a swift and decisive conclusion.

The real danger is a long, costly and drawn-out war or stalemate caused by American self-deterrence and our continued refusal to provide Ukraine with long-range precision weaponry, such as the the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), and F-16 fighter jets.

This point has been underscored by Putin’s response to Prigozhin’s armed rebellion. As Michael McFaul points out:

Putin talked tough in his national address [June 24]. He sounded like someone preparing for a big fight. But when faced with the difficult decision of trying to stop Wagner mercenaries with major force, he backed down. In this game of chicken, we swerved off the road. He didn’t escalate. He didn’t need a face-saving off-ramp to declare victory.

When facing the possibility of really losing to Wagner mercenaries coming into Moscow, he instead capitulated. Rather than doubling down with overwhelming force to crush the mutiny, Putin accepted humiliation instead.

He was the rat trapped in the corner that so many Putinologists have told us to fear. But he didn’t lash out and go crazy. He didn’t take the riskier path of fighting a civil war. He negotiated…

The lesson for the war in Ukraine is clear. Putin is more likely to negotiate and end his war if he is losing on the battlefield, not when there is a stalemate.

Those who have argued that Ukraine must not attack Crimea for fear of triggering escalation must now reevaluate that hypothesis. The sooner Putin fears he is losing the war, the faster he will negotiate.

Third, we can see the type of leader who might succeed Putin. The successor most likely will be an autocrat who is hostile to the West; but he also will be someone the West can tolerate or live with—provided Ukraine wins and Russia loses the war.

No one has any illusions that a liberal reformer will emerge from the sewer of Russian politics. For the most part, the liberals have all fled the country. Russia, moreover, has no real liberal political tradition or history.

Even prominent dissident Alexei Navalny is a committed Russian nationalist, albeit, as Stephen Kotkin points out, “one who also says out loud that the war was a terrible idea and is hurting Russia.”

Navalny and Prigozhin, in fact, are two different types of nationalists who could could conceivably succeed Putin.

“…An authoritarian Russian nationalist who recognizes the war is a mistake and, whether fully intentionally or not, effectively ends the war, or at least the current active phase of it—that’s the one kind of person who could threaten [and succeed] Putin,” Kotkin explains.

This successor, he adds, would “recognize the separate existence of a Ukrainian nation and state”—not because he is a “good guy” or a liberal reformer, but simply because he bows to the political and military reality brought about by a war that his predecessor, Putin, and not he, foolishly started.

The bottom line: the role, or lack thereof, of NATO expansion in the run-up to the war; the significance, or lack thereof, of military “escalation” in the prosecution of the war; and the type of Russian ruler who succeeds Putin after the war—these three issues have all been brought into stark relief as a result of Prigozhin’s aborted rebellion against the Russian military.

Stay tuned. The best (or at least the most intriguing) is yet to come.

Feature photo credit: Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (L) and Wagner Group mercenary head Yevgeny Prigozhin (R), courtesy of the Toronto Star.

The United States and NATO have the moral and military means to force Russia to stand down in the Black Sea. What they seem to lack is the will.

Russia’s threat to withdraw from its grain deal with Ukraine underscores Russian criminality and Western weakness. But the West is weak-willed; it is not militarily weak.

In fact, quite the opposite: the United States and NATO possess overwhelming military superiority and could quickly destroy the Russian military in Ukraine if they chose to do so.

Western Inaction. This is not to argue for a preemptive Western military strike on, say, Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet. Instead, it is to argue for a more forceful and assertive Western posture vis-à-vis Russia and the flow of Ukrainian grain to the rest of the world.

The fact is: the West occupies the moral high ground. Russia’s threat to block Ukrainian grain exports serves no military purpose.

However, it does serve to jeopardize the survival and well-being of millions of people worldwide—especially the poor and impoverished in less developed nations that struggle to overcome poverty and malnutrition.

Russian War Crimes. This latest Russian threat, moreover, cannot be divorced from ongoing Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure and residential neighborhoods in Ukraine. These attacks are quite literally criminal. They, too, serve no military purpose. They are war crimes and crimes against humanity.

For this reason, the West ought to be far more insistent than it has been about safeguarding the right of Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea ports of Chornomorsk, Odesa, and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi to the rest of the world.

This means not simply protesting against Russian threats, but declaring, unequivocally, that the United States and NATO will ensure that Ukrainian grain exports continue unmolested; and that any Russian ship that tries to stop or interfere with this crucial humanitarian mission will be destroyed.

As the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board observes:

Denouncing Mr. Putin isn’t likely to change his mind about the grain initiative.

If he insists on a food blockade, the best response is for the U.S. to organize a coalition of the willing to escort grain shipments from Odessa and through the Black Sea.

It needn’t be a NATO operation, though the U.S. would have to lead it.

Wartime Ironies. One of the ironies of this war has been that Russia is economically and militarily weak, but brazen and aggressive. The West, by contrast, is economically and militarily strong, but timid and tentative. Consequently, the West too often has yielded the initiative to Russia.

This has been a big mistake. It is long past time for the United States and NATO to recognize that they have the whip hand, both morally and militarily, vis-à-vis Russia and to act accordingly.

A good place to start would be in the Black Sea: by ensuring that Ukrainian grain shipments to the rest of the world continue unabated without Russian interference.

Feature photo credit: TheWorldofMaps.com.

Prominent commentators on both the Left and the Right have created a false narrative that blames America and NATO, at least in part, for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They’re wrong.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has been nothing but transparent about his objectives in Ukraine and Eastern Europe—what he seeks and why he seeks it. Frighteningly, Putin seeks the dissolution of Ukraine and other sovereign countries and their incorporation into a more expansive Russian empire.

Yet, prominent commentators—including, for instance, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty—insist on ignoring, or at least downplaying, what Putin actually says, so that they can blame America and the West, at least in part, for Russian imperialism.

NATO Expansion. Their main charge is that by expanding NATO eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Western Europe threatened legitimate Russian security interests and thereby “inflame[d] the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russia…”

That last quote is from George Kennan in 1997, and both Friedman and Dougherty cite Kennan as prophetic. “The mystery,” writes Friedman, “was why the U.S. …would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak.”

Because of NATO expansion, writes Dougherty, Putin’s attack on Ukraine was “not just predictable, but predicted… Putin, [consequently], has shifted his strategy of trying to deter NATO and Ukraine to one of compulsion.”

George Kennan. Kennan, of course, is the American diplomat who wisely and brilliantly devised the Western strategy of containment at the onset of the Cold War. But while he is rightly credited for that achievement, he was not infallible.

Anne Applebaum points out that “Kennan was wrong about a lot of things… [He] was somebody who saw the world through Russian eyes,” not the eyes of Europeans threatened by Soviet communism and Russian imperialism.

Thus even at the onset of the Cold War, in 1948, as the Soviets were installing puppet governments in Eastern Europe and threatening Western Europe, Kennan opposed the creation of NATO.

“He believed its creation would solidify the [European] continent’s division and put an end to the possibility of reunifying Germany and Europe,” explains Christopher Layne in a 2012 piece in the The National Interest.

Russian Aggression. In truth, as Applebaum observes, and as is plainly obvious, NATO expansion decades later was not the cause of Russian aggression.

Instead, Russian aggression precipitated an intense desire by the East Europeans to join NATO—just as it had precipitated a desire by the West Europeans to create NATO in the first place back in the late 1940s after World War II.

The East Europeans, like the West Europeans decades earlier, feared Russia, and for good reason. Thus they sought the protective umbrella of NATO.

Friedman, then, is factually and historically wrong: NATO expansion was not caused by an American desire to “push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak.” NATO expansion was caused by the East European’s desire to push back when Russia became belligerent and threatening well after the Cold War ended in 1999 and 2004.

Hungary, Poland the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the alliance in 2004.

False History. Dougherty, meanwhile, presents a falsified version of more recent history in which, he argues, Putin tried to constructively and peaceably engage Ukraine only to be stymied by a NATO hellbent on expanding eastward.

But of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO and never has been remotely close to becoming a member of NATO. (Although in recent years, because of naked Russian aggression and Russian imperialism, Ukraine’s desire to join NATO has intensified, just as it did for the East Europeans in the late 1990’s and early aughts.)

Dougherty also ignores Putin’s own quite explicit desire to subsume Ukraine and make it an indissoluble part of Russia.

“Ukraine,” Putin said, “is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space… Modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia, more specifically the Bolshevik, communist Russia.”

In other words, Ukraine as a free, sovereign, and independent state is an historical fiction that must be erased.

As David French points out: “Vladimir Putin’s core problem with Ukraine is not with its western alliances, [or its potential membership in NATO], but with its independent existence.”

Ukraine is Not Russia. In truth, although Ukraine and Russia share deep historic roots, they are two distinct countries.

“Ukrainian identity politics and nationalism have been irritants in Russia since the feudal czarist times that predated the Russian Revolution,” observes the New York Times. 

Ukraine, moreover, voted resoundingly, in a 1991 democratic referendum, to leave the Soviet Union.

How resoundingly? Well, 83 percent of Donbass residents in Eastern Ukraine bordering Russia voted for Ukrainian independence, as did 54 percent of the residents in Crimea, reports former Ukrainian official Oleksandr Danylyuk in Politico.

Today, according to a February 2022 CNN poll, two-thirds of Ukrainians reject the notion that Ukrainians and Russians are one people.

“No region of Ukraine, and no age group,” reports CNN, “has a majority where respondents say Russians and Ukrainians are one people.

Even in eastern Ukraine, which borders Russia and is partially controlled by Russian-backed separatists, fewer than half (45%) of respondents said they agree that Russians and Ukrainians are one people – a score much lower than in Russia.

More to the point:

Ukrainians overwhelmingly feel Russia and Ukraine should be two separate countries, with 85% saying so, 9% saying they should be one country, and 6% responding that they did not know.

The bottom line: Ukraine is not Russia, and NATO expansion eastward clearly and obviously did not cause Putin to invade Ukraine.

The truth is quite the opposite: Ukraine and Russia are two distinct countries with different national aspirations. And, to the extent Ukraine is looking to the West and to NATO for protection, it is because of persistent Russian threats and aggression.

In short, America and NATO are not the problem; America and NATO are the solution to the problem, which is Russian imperialism. That’s how the Ukrainians and East Europeans see it; and about that, there can be no honest debate—Friedman and Dougherty to the contrary notwithstanding.

Feature photo credit: the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (L) and National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty (R), courtesy of a Charlie Rose YouTube video screenshot and a Breaking Points YouTube video screenshot, respectively.