Word: The Ukraine crisis

Stephen Cohen, Nation - The new cold war orthodoxy rests almost entirely on fallacious opinions. Five of those fallacies are particularly important today:

—Fallacy No. 1: Ever since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has treated post-Communist Russia generously as a desired friend and partner, making every effort to help it become a democratic, prosperous member of the Western system of international security. Unwilling or unable, Russia rejected this American altruism, emphatically under Putin.

Fact: Beginning in the 1990s, again with the Clinton administration, every American president and congress has treated post-Soviet Russia as a defeated nation with inferior legitimate rights at home and abroad. This triumphalist, winner-take-all approach has been spearheaded by the expansion of NATO—accompanied by non-reciprocal negotiations and now missile defense—into Russia's traditional zones of national security, while in reality excluding it from Europe's security system. Early on, Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Georgia, were the ultimate goals. As an influential Washington Post columnist explained in 2004, "The West wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe's march to the east.… The great prize is Ukraine."

—Fallacy No. 2: There exists a nation called "Ukraine" and a "Ukrainian people" who yearn to escape centuries of Russian influence and to join the West.

Fact: As every informed person knows, Ukraine is a country long divided by ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic and political differences—particularly its western and eastern regions, but not only. When the current crisis began in 2013, Ukraine had one state, but it was not a single people or a united nation. Some of these divisions were made worse after 1991 by corrupt elite, but most of them had developed over centuries...

—Fallacy No. 5: The only way out of the crisis is for Putin to end his "aggression" and call off his agents in southeastern Ukraine.

Fact: The underlying causes of the crisis are Ukraine's own internal divisions, not primarily Putin's actions. The primary factor escalating the crisis since May has been Kiev's "anti-terrorist" military campaign against its own citizens, now mainly in the Donbass cities of Luhansk and Donetsk. Putin influences and no doubt aids the Donbass "self-defenders." Considering the pressure on him in Moscow, he is likely to continue to do so, perhaps even more, but he does not control them. If Kiev's assault ends, Putin probably can compel the rebels to negotiate. But only the Obama administration can compel Kiev to stop, and it has not done so.

In short, twenty years of US policy have led to this fateful American-Russian confrontation. Putin may have contributed to it along the way, but his role during his fourteen years in power has been almost entirely reactive—indeed, a complaint frequently lodged against him by hawks in Moscow.

... In politics as in history, there are always alternatives. At least three outcomes of the Ukrainian crisis are conceivable:

—The civil war escalates and widens, drawing in Russian and possibly NATO military forces. This would be the worst outcome: a kind of latter-day Cuban missile crisis.

—Today's de facto partitioning of Ukraine becomes institutionalized in the form of two Ukrainian states—one allied with the West, the other with Russia—co-existing between cold war and cold peace. This would not be the best outcome, but nor would it be the worst.

—The best outcome would be the preservation of a united Ukraine with one state. This will require good-faith negotiations between representatives of all of Ukraine's regions, including leaders of the rebellious southeast, probably under the auspices of Washington, Moscow and the European Union, as Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrow, have proposed for months.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's human tragedy continues to grow. Already (by August) thousands of innocent people have been killed or wounded, according to a UN representative, and nearly a million others turned into fleeing refugees. It is a needless tragedy because rational people on all sides know the general terms of peace negotiations:

—Ukraine must become a federal or sufficiently decentralized state in order to permit its diverse regions to elect their own officials, live in accord with their local cultures, and have a say in taxation and budgetary issues, as is the case in many federal states from Canada to Germany. Such constitutional provisions will need to be ratified by a referendum or a constitutional assembly, accompanied or followed by parliamentary and presidential elections. (The rushed presidential election in May was a mistake, effectively depriving nearly a quarter of the country of its own candidates and thus a real vote.)

—Ukraine must not be aligned with any military alliance, including NATO. (Nor must any of the other former Soviet republics now being courted by NATO.)

—Ukraine must be governed in ways that enable it to maintain or develop economic relations both with Russia and the West. Otherwise, it will never be politically independent or economically prosperous.

—If these principles are adopted, they should be guaranteed, along with Ukraine's present territorial integrity, by Russia and the West, perhaps in a UN Security Council resolution.

But such negotiations cannot even begin until Kiev's military assault on eastern Ukraine ends. Russia, Germany and France have repeatedly called for a cease-fire, but the "anti-terrorist operation" can end only where it began—in Kiev and Washington.

Alas, there is no such leadership here in Washington. President Obama has vanished as a statesman in the Ukrainian crisis. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks publicly more like a secretary of war than as our top diplomat. The Senate is preparing even more warfare legislation. The establishment media relies uncritically on Kiev's propaganda and cheer leads for its policies. Unlike the devastation wrought in Gaza, American television rarely, if ever, shows Kiev's destruction of Luhansk, Donetsk or other Ukrainian cities, thereby arousing no public qualms or questions.

Stephen F. Cohen is Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent books, now in paperback, are Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War; and The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin.