Sadly, by agreeing with two thirds of the statement - "NATO expansion, CIA-backed colour revolutions, Russia a based Christian civilisation" - I confess to being one of those 'midwits with an IQ of 105 whose brain has been melted by social media'.
Although I did happen to visit Kiev shortly after the Maidan (to watch England away) and spent all night drinking with the Azov volunteers in an undergound bar off the square. They were committed, hardcore, articulate and unashamed white-nationalists with (to me) an unfathomably deep hatred of Jews.
The evening ended with a blood spattered bare knuckle fight to submission in the stairwell between two feuding volunteers while all the other punters in the bar had to sit in silence.
That, combined with being robbed and beaten by the police there has somewhat tempered my willingness to lustily 'Slava' the old 'Ukraini'.
Equally, perhaps the lies and failures - the shame - of Iraq war disaster has permanently altered my generations ability to conceive of wars as good and evil any more. Particularly when 'freedom and democracy' is used as a rallying cry.
That said, I respect anyone willing to fight and die for their own land. Naturally. But I remain unpersuaded that the uprising was spontaneous, legal, or 'popular'.
I am even less convinced it has anything at all to do with Britain.
Without wanting to turn that internet meme into an essay, I suspect there is a fourth group that slots in somewhere (or maybe it's just No. 3). This group consists of people who concede that such things as NATO expansion and CIA-backed colour revolutions etc. didn't help, yet those factors still don't add up to 'So Russia was quite within its rights to invade Ukraine'. Like many things in life, two opposing views can be right, it's just a matter of getting them into reasonable proportion.
I sometimes think back to the time when I lived in the Basque Country and two young local ETA activists shot a PP politician from the same village in the head. He had a wife and a daughter. Could I understand why some Basques didn't want Madrid to have even the smallest influence over how the Basque Country was run? Yes. Enough to shoot their neighbour in the head? No.
Wow, you must have been keen to travel to Kiev to watch an England under-21's match! Such devotion makes me want to shake your hand!
Many years ago, while cycling back to Leicester from Wales I passed a sign that said 'Coventry City's Training Ground'. So I cycled into the enclosure and sure enough, there was Gordon Strachan taking a session with about 20 players. The problem was, I didn't really recognise any of the players so I started to wonder if this were the reserves or youth team. I later mentioned all this to my friend who said, 'You didn't recognise any of them? Yep, that would be Coventry's first team'.
They don't talk about the Belgian soul because there are two separate Belgian souls - a Flemish and a Walloon one. Now that Catholicism is a much less meaningful tie, the only things they have in common are the King, beer and waffles.
Wasn't going to chime in about Belgium, but since it's become a theme on thread: A few days ago I came across the story of the The Crazy Killers of Brabant. Really shocking violence even by American standards. I've had to revise my opinion of quaint little Belgium, which is still on my bucket list but I'll avoid supermarkets.
I often think about the Metacontrarian or Midwit point when thinking about conflicts. It is sometimes hard to differentiate freedom fighters from terrorists.
But quite often one side is the league of evil, comically villainous figures opposed to almost all principles an outsider observer might have. In African wars you often get the corrupt national army v the pile of skulls and looting side. Some terrorist groups especially in the 1970s and Russia in the 19th century just really liked murder and have weak plans or justification for their attacks.
Lots of people support obviously evil sides because of conspiracy theories rather than any rational argumen, though most pro-Russia or Pro-Iran sentiment seems to be anti-western contrarianism.
Great piece. I’m sure the comments will soon swarm with ‘but but but genocide/Nazis/Crimea/Nuland’. Important not to lose sight of the fact that these are fringe positions in the West.
Nothing here about any possible reasonable solution to the conflict which takes the respective interests of Ukraine and Russia into account. Just endless killing in what is utterly futile for Ukraine as a much smaller nation. Enthusiasm over continuation of this situation seems insane.
I’d like the war to end, and imagine it will end with Russia taking the Donbas and Crimea certainly. The proposal that Ukraine give up the whole southeast of the country would unfortunately leave them vulnerable to further attacks
They will always be vulnerable to further attacks from their much larger neighbor. Probably the only hope for them is to concede the Russian speaking and ethnic portions of the country and moderate their intense nationalism in pursuit of a modus vivendi similar to that followed by Finland vis a vis the Soviet Union. I don't think the Russians have any interest in trying to occupy Western Ukraine which would likely simply be an ongoing guerilla war. Admittedly, after all the sacrifices that have been made, the necessary concessions for peace would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is better than fighting on until there is no one left.
They nevertheless survived after defeating the Soviet attempts and their policy was successful in preventing the whole country from being swallowed up.
“Anne Applebaum has written that democracy wins when citizens feel a deep sense of belonging to their own language, literature and history. The opposite is also true: regions without nationalism tend to be corrupt, anarchic, full of rent-a-mobs and mercenaries…”
So please explain to me why liberal internationalists like Anne Applebaum believe that the English, French, Germans and Americans should feel ashamed of their language, literature and history.
Could the liberal internationalist position towards its “home countries and cultures” be anarchic and corrupt, if not outright colonialist?
I'd be interested in what you know about 2014 and the extent it was orchestrated by Obama via Victoria Nuland. Also to what extent Ukraine had to resist Russia to provide cash for well-connected grifters e.g. Hunter Biden.
I think pretty much everyone in Europe supports Ukraine over the Russian mafia regime, but some of us wonder whether it is wise and a good use of money to fund a distant war when we can't even find a warship to defend our national interests.
with regard to 2014 I don’t doubt the Americans had an interest, although what role they played I can’t say. I also don’t doubt there was widespread popular grassroots support for removing the president and ridding the country of Moscow influence.
Obama was pretty weak in his support, failing to provide lethal weapons - recall how he mocked Romney for warning about Russian aggression - while Trump provided weapons, including javelin missiles.
It’s possible to hold the position that Russia is a brutal country (with a high culture that only emerged in the 1820s) that because of Orthodoxy never adopted the important Western intellectual movement of Scholasticism (and the Enlightenment it eventually spawned) and individual human rights AND Ukraine is a poor and corrupt country that is often being used by the rest of Europe and the US without concern for the Ukrainian people.
"The first half of the 20th century in Ukraine was hell on earth, a period of pogroms and massacres, many carried out by Ukrainian militias, against not just Jews but also Poles and Germans too. If the country was a hotbed of anti-Semitism in this period, this was due not just to its position in the ‘bloodlands’ between competing empires but a quasi-feudal system characterised by ethnic niches: the Poles as landlords, the Ukrainians their peasants, and Jews as middle-men and rent collectors, a set-up almost guaranteed to fuel toxic hatred."
Given the horrifying state of apocalyptic conflict between regimes in Russia and Germany in the 20th Century, I find it astonishing and all the more tragic that Bismarck originally planned an alliance between the two nations!
Then Kaiser Wilhelm came to power, fired Bismarck and had a real sentimentality for pan-Germanism that evidently did NOT include the Slavic Russians. I doubt the alliance could have lasted due to the rivalry between Austria and Russia for power in the Balkans (which ultimately led to The First World War) but it is interesting to speculate how the world would look today had a Germano-Russian alliance fought in a "Great War" of some sort.
Another fun factoid, the Bismarckian alliance with Russia was primarily conceived out of fear of France of all places!
Quote: ". . . the blame for those deaths lies squarely with the country, and the man, who launched the war . . .
Some would say the blame lies with those American statesmen who, despite numerous warnings, chose to try to push NATO forces right up to Russia's borders, no doubt with intentions of launching a color revolution.
In support of this contention I asked Gemini for a list of statesmen who warned against this expansion of NATO. Here is what I got:
"Various high-profile statesmen, diplomats, and defense officials have historically warned that NATO's eastward expansion, particularly toward Ukraine, would provoke Russia and destabilize European security.
Prominent U.S. Statesmen and Diplomats:
George Kennan: The architect of the Cold War "containment" strategy described NATO expansion in 1997 as a "fateful error" that would inflame Russian nationalistic tendencies and restore a Cold War atmosphere.
William Perry: President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense (1994–1997) nearly resigned over the decision to expand NATO, fearing it would alienate Russia and derail post-Cold War cooperation.
William J. Burns: The current CIA Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia warned in a 2008 memo (later declassified) that "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite".
Jack Matlock: The last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union testified to the Senate in 1997 that expansion was a "misguided" policy that would move Russia away from democracy.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The late U.S. Senator warned that expansion was an ill-conceived project that risked unpredictable consequences.
Robert McNamara & James Schlesinger: Former Defense Secretaries who publicly aired concerns that enlargement would decrease Allied security.
International Leaders:
Angela Merkel (Germany) & Nicolas Sarkozy (France): Both leaders famously blocked the 2008 Bucharest Summit's move to provide Ukraine and Georgia with a "Membership Action Plan" (MAP), fearing it would be seen as a "declaration of war" by Vladimir Putin.
Malcolm Fraser & Paul Keating: Two former Australian Prime Ministers who cautioned that pushing NATO to Russia's borders would lead to future conflict.
Recent and Ongoing Opposition
As of 2024–2025, several NATO member states continue to show reluctance or opposition to immediate Ukrainian membership to avoid direct escalation with Russia:
United States & Germany: Frequently cited as "slow-walking" invitations to join to prevent being drawn into a direct war.
Hungary & Slovakia: Under leaders like Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico, these nations have explicitly opposed Ukraine’s accession to NATO.
Other Reluctant Members: Countries including Belgium, Slovenia, and Spain have reportedly expressed reservations about an immediate invitation.
American statesman might have played a role in the tragedy, but responsibility lies with those who pulled the trigger.
I disagree about the Nato thing. Were we to deny Poland or Lithuania our protection because of the bear's wounded pride? Even if the US was wary about expansion, and its politicians understood about Russia's ill-feeling, Britain and France would have pushed for it and that might be the situation we end up with now, with the US being semi-detached from Nato. To be honest, I think some sort of confrontation between an independent Russia and the West was always highly likely.
Surely we aren’t dividing the combatants into good guys and bad guys? Following the sequence of events is more useful: a Russophile is elected in Ukraine, his opponents don’t like it and say the election was rigged (which it would have been, whoever had been declared the winner, because it’s a corrupt country, like most countries in the world); there is a violent coup; the new government is hostile to Russia; Russia takes over Crimea, at the mouth of a strategic waterway; NATO trains and equips the previously tiny Ukrainian army, in order to take back Crimea; Putin sees what is happening and invades Ukraine, in particular grabbing the shore along the Sea of Azov and so denying Ukraine control of the Kirch Strait, through which much river traffic flows to and from Russia. It’s all about the straits these days…
Although obviously your sympathies are broadly where they should be, I don't think it should be beyond the pale to argue that this situation didn't need to come about. Of course, the Russians made their own choices. But if, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West had treated Russia like a repentant sinner rather than as a vanquished enemy - if there had been a decisive effort to integrate, or reintegrate it into European civilisation - I think we might have avoided this new Cold - and now in Ukraine Hot - War. That's not to excuse what the Russians have done, but only to suggest that thirty years ago a brighter future was possible, and everyone - the Russians, the Europeans, the Americans - made the wrong decisions.
One thing I've thought repeatedly over the last few years, as territorial and ethnic disputes have flared up again into wars, is - what a pity it is that there's no internationally agreed way of triggering a peaceful referendum on secession! While the post-World War I insistence on self-determination did have some very bleak unintended consequences later on, it's nevertheless the case that a couple of border disputes around that time were peacefully sorted out by plebiscites: for instance, in 1917, the province of Narva voted to be part of the newly autonomous province of Estonia rather than to remain within the governorate of St Petersburg in Russia, and accordingly became part of the independent Republic of Estonia a year later. Similarly, the location of the Danish-German border was determined by referendum in 1920. The borders still follow the lines determined by those referenda. If such referenda could have been held in Crimea and the Russian-populated east of Ukraine, a lot of blood might never have been shed. And after all, diversity not being a strength, the resulting, smaller, more homogeneous Ukraine might well have been more orderly and more governable - as well, incidentally, as more decisively European.
Early in the war, I saw a meme suggesting likely outcomes for the Ukrainian War, from Decisive Russian Victory (Ukraine cut in half; Russia occupying territory up to the Dnieper) to Russian Victory (landlocked Ukraine with Russia taking over the northern Black Sea coast, Odessa and Ukrainian Bessarabia) to Pyrrhic Russian Victory (basically the current situation with Russia controlling the four south-eastern oblasts) to Pyrrhic Ukrainian Victory (Russia still holds Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but Ukraine regains Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) to Ukrainian Victory (Ukraine restores its Day 1 borders; i.e., Russia controls only the part of Donetsk and Luhansk that it occupied in 2014) to Decisive Ukrainian Victory (Ukraine recaptures Donetsk and Luhansk). The most powerful thing about those scenarios was what was left unspoken, but visible on the maps: even in the event of a Decisive Ukrainian Victory, Crimea was still Russian.
I just can't really see how it wouldn't 100 different cans of worms. It's obvious that if we were starting from scratch the Kurds would have their own state, for instance, but dare we allow that to happen.
I'm not sure about what we could have done different tbh. I still think it was right to let in the A8 countries into Nato, if that's what they desired. I'm not sure what else we could have to help a country that was sort of collapsing socially.
"I just can't really see how it wouldn't [open] 100 different cans of worms."
I guess it depends on what the rules are! I would propose:
1) an ethnic minority which occupies a defined, contiguous territory of one state, adjacent to another state in which it constitutes the majority, should be able to trigger a referendum to join that state (that's to say, the people of Donetsk and Luhansk should have been able to vote on whether to join Russia, but the people of suburban Bradford should not be able to vote on whether to join Bangladesh).
2) an ethnic minority which is stateless and has a longstanding presence on a particular territory (e.g., the Catalans or the Kurds) should be able to trigger a referendum for independence.
3) If a bid for independence or for joining a neighbouring state is rejected, the referendum can't be repeated for a fixed period of time (say, ten years).
As for your other points, I think the Americans / the West probably could have sponsored a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq twenty years ago, when Iraq was basically a non-functioning state. Full assurances would have to have been given to the Turks that it would be confined to that region and that no claim on the Kurdish areas of Turkey (or any other state) would be supported. Actually, I think a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq would have gone some way to neutralising Kurdish nationalism within Turkey; after all, the Kurds who really wanted to live in an independent Kurdistan could move to Erbil.
We'll never know, but I think less shock therapy and a slower, more controlled transition from Communism to a market economy would have created a much more stable and less hostile Russia. I think we were right to let the Eastern Europeans into NATO (what else were they going to want, after all?), but as I said once before, I also think that historic Western civilisation stretches from the Algarve to Vladivostok, and that in the end, the Russians ought to be with us.
"Russia a based Christian civilisation." I would hope anyone with an IQ of 105 would investigate Putin and find out he was ex KGB so unlikely to be a Christian.
A well articulated piece.
Sadly, by agreeing with two thirds of the statement - "NATO expansion, CIA-backed colour revolutions, Russia a based Christian civilisation" - I confess to being one of those 'midwits with an IQ of 105 whose brain has been melted by social media'.
Although I did happen to visit Kiev shortly after the Maidan (to watch England away) and spent all night drinking with the Azov volunteers in an undergound bar off the square. They were committed, hardcore, articulate and unashamed white-nationalists with (to me) an unfathomably deep hatred of Jews.
The evening ended with a blood spattered bare knuckle fight to submission in the stairwell between two feuding volunteers while all the other punters in the bar had to sit in silence.
That, combined with being robbed and beaten by the police there has somewhat tempered my willingness to lustily 'Slava' the old 'Ukraini'.
Equally, perhaps the lies and failures - the shame - of Iraq war disaster has permanently altered my generations ability to conceive of wars as good and evil any more. Particularly when 'freedom and democracy' is used as a rallying cry.
That said, I respect anyone willing to fight and die for their own land. Naturally. But I remain unpersuaded that the uprising was spontaneous, legal, or 'popular'.
I am even less convinced it has anything at all to do with Britain.
Without wanting to turn that internet meme into an essay, I suspect there is a fourth group that slots in somewhere (or maybe it's just No. 3). This group consists of people who concede that such things as NATO expansion and CIA-backed colour revolutions etc. didn't help, yet those factors still don't add up to 'So Russia was quite within its rights to invade Ukraine'. Like many things in life, two opposing views can be right, it's just a matter of getting them into reasonable proportion.
I sometimes think back to the time when I lived in the Basque Country and two young local ETA activists shot a PP politician from the same village in the head. He had a wife and a daughter. Could I understand why some Basques didn't want Madrid to have even the smallest influence over how the Basque Country was run? Yes. Enough to shoot their neighbour in the head? No.
Incidentally, did England win?
I think we lost to Italy on penalties
Nice to see I haven't derailed the discussion.
Yes, what you describe is about my view.
It was actually England U/21's and we won 2:0
The match was in a place called Obolon in Kiev which is where the Russians were stopped 5 years later.
Wow, you must have been keen to travel to Kiev to watch an England under-21's match! Such devotion makes me want to shake your hand!
Many years ago, while cycling back to Leicester from Wales I passed a sign that said 'Coventry City's Training Ground'. So I cycled into the enclosure and sure enough, there was Gordon Strachan taking a session with about 20 players. The problem was, I didn't really recognise any of the players so I started to wonder if this were the reserves or youth team. I later mentioned all this to my friend who said, 'You didn't recognise any of them? Yep, that would be Coventry's first team'.
I wonder how many of them are dead now, or in captivity.
I have thought that as well.
"it is not the 20th century anymore and the Second World War no longer acts as a useful guide to current events." Thanks Ed, my Dad's crying now.
They don't talk about the Belgian soul because there are two separate Belgian souls - a Flemish and a Walloon one. Now that Catholicism is a much less meaningful tie, the only things they have in common are the King, beer and waffles.
the country’s continued existence is something of a mystery. (plus you have the third part Brussels, which isn’t even very European)
Kind of ironic that Brussels is both the most and the least European part!
Wasn't going to chime in about Belgium, but since it's become a theme on thread: A few days ago I came across the story of the The Crazy Killers of Brabant. Really shocking violence even by American standards. I've had to revise my opinion of quaint little Belgium, which is still on my bucket list but I'll avoid supermarkets.
I often think about the Metacontrarian or Midwit point when thinking about conflicts. It is sometimes hard to differentiate freedom fighters from terrorists.
But quite often one side is the league of evil, comically villainous figures opposed to almost all principles an outsider observer might have. In African wars you often get the corrupt national army v the pile of skulls and looting side. Some terrorist groups especially in the 1970s and Russia in the 19th century just really liked murder and have weak plans or justification for their attacks.
Lots of people support obviously evil sides because of conspiracy theories rather than any rational argumen, though most pro-Russia or Pro-Iran sentiment seems to be anti-western contrarianism.
Scott Alexander's Metacontrarian article
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
That Russian Cathedral video is the kind of thing YouTube sends my way late on Saturday nights when I'm nearing the end of my second bottle of wine.
Great piece. I’m sure the comments will soon swarm with ‘but but but genocide/Nazis/Crimea/Nuland’. Important not to lose sight of the fact that these are fringe positions in the West.
thank you!
And let's not forget that Crimea actually belongs to England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_(medieval)
Crimea is the only place to be Byzantine but not part of the Roman Empire (though it was sometimes a client).
Everyone has a bit of a claim to Crimea: Greeks, Byzantines, Goths, Saxons, Mongols, Genoese.
They spoke Gothic in Crimea until the 1700s and there are still some Turkic speaking non-Ashkenazi Jews the Kalmyks.
Nothing here about any possible reasonable solution to the conflict which takes the respective interests of Ukraine and Russia into account. Just endless killing in what is utterly futile for Ukraine as a much smaller nation. Enthusiasm over continuation of this situation seems insane.
I’d like the war to end, and imagine it will end with Russia taking the Donbas and Crimea certainly. The proposal that Ukraine give up the whole southeast of the country would unfortunately leave them vulnerable to further attacks
They will always be vulnerable to further attacks from their much larger neighbor. Probably the only hope for them is to concede the Russian speaking and ethnic portions of the country and moderate their intense nationalism in pursuit of a modus vivendi similar to that followed by Finland vis a vis the Soviet Union. I don't think the Russians have any interest in trying to occupy Western Ukraine which would likely simply be an ongoing guerilla war. Admittedly, after all the sacrifices that have been made, the necessary concessions for peace would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is better than fighting on until there is no one left.
It didn't work for Finland, they gave away various Finnic areas for peace and the USSR still invaded twice.
They nevertheless survived after defeating the Soviet attempts and their policy was successful in preventing the whole country from being swallowed up.
“Anne Applebaum has written that democracy wins when citizens feel a deep sense of belonging to their own language, literature and history. The opposite is also true: regions without nationalism tend to be corrupt, anarchic, full of rent-a-mobs and mercenaries…”
So please explain to me why liberal internationalists like Anne Applebaum believe that the English, French, Germans and Americans should feel ashamed of their language, literature and history.
Could the liberal internationalist position towards its “home countries and cultures” be anarchic and corrupt, if not outright colonialist?
Do Belgians have souls?
Asking for a Congolese.
I'd be interested in what you know about 2014 and the extent it was orchestrated by Obama via Victoria Nuland. Also to what extent Ukraine had to resist Russia to provide cash for well-connected grifters e.g. Hunter Biden.
I think pretty much everyone in Europe supports Ukraine over the Russian mafia regime, but some of us wonder whether it is wise and a good use of money to fund a distant war when we can't even find a warship to defend our national interests.
with regard to 2014 I don’t doubt the Americans had an interest, although what role they played I can’t say. I also don’t doubt there was widespread popular grassroots support for removing the president and ridding the country of Moscow influence.
Obama was pretty weak in his support, failing to provide lethal weapons - recall how he mocked Romney for warning about Russian aggression - while Trump provided weapons, including javelin missiles.
I read a story about Victoria Nuland selecting members of the Ukrainian cabinet. If true, that does not suggest weak American involvement.
It’s possible to hold the position that Russia is a brutal country (with a high culture that only emerged in the 1820s) that because of Orthodoxy never adopted the important Western intellectual movement of Scholasticism (and the Enlightenment it eventually spawned) and individual human rights AND Ukraine is a poor and corrupt country that is often being used by the rest of Europe and the US without concern for the Ukrainian people.
"The first half of the 20th century in Ukraine was hell on earth, a period of pogroms and massacres, many carried out by Ukrainian militias, against not just Jews but also Poles and Germans too. If the country was a hotbed of anti-Semitism in this period, this was due not just to its position in the ‘bloodlands’ between competing empires but a quasi-feudal system characterised by ethnic niches: the Poles as landlords, the Ukrainians their peasants, and Jews as middle-men and rent collectors, a set-up almost guaranteed to fuel toxic hatred."
Given the horrifying state of apocalyptic conflict between regimes in Russia and Germany in the 20th Century, I find it astonishing and all the more tragic that Bismarck originally planned an alliance between the two nations!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_the_Three_Emperors
Then Kaiser Wilhelm came to power, fired Bismarck and had a real sentimentality for pan-Germanism that evidently did NOT include the Slavic Russians. I doubt the alliance could have lasted due to the rivalry between Austria and Russia for power in the Balkans (which ultimately led to The First World War) but it is interesting to speculate how the world would look today had a Germano-Russian alliance fought in a "Great War" of some sort.
Another fun factoid, the Bismarckian alliance with Russia was primarily conceived out of fear of France of all places!
Quote: ". . . the blame for those deaths lies squarely with the country, and the man, who launched the war . . .
Some would say the blame lies with those American statesmen who, despite numerous warnings, chose to try to push NATO forces right up to Russia's borders, no doubt with intentions of launching a color revolution.
In support of this contention I asked Gemini for a list of statesmen who warned against this expansion of NATO. Here is what I got:
"Various high-profile statesmen, diplomats, and defense officials have historically warned that NATO's eastward expansion, particularly toward Ukraine, would provoke Russia and destabilize European security.
Prominent U.S. Statesmen and Diplomats:
George Kennan: The architect of the Cold War "containment" strategy described NATO expansion in 1997 as a "fateful error" that would inflame Russian nationalistic tendencies and restore a Cold War atmosphere.
William Perry: President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense (1994–1997) nearly resigned over the decision to expand NATO, fearing it would alienate Russia and derail post-Cold War cooperation.
William J. Burns: The current CIA Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia warned in a 2008 memo (later declassified) that "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite".
Jack Matlock: The last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union testified to the Senate in 1997 that expansion was a "misguided" policy that would move Russia away from democracy.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The late U.S. Senator warned that expansion was an ill-conceived project that risked unpredictable consequences.
Robert McNamara & James Schlesinger: Former Defense Secretaries who publicly aired concerns that enlargement would decrease Allied security.
International Leaders:
Angela Merkel (Germany) & Nicolas Sarkozy (France): Both leaders famously blocked the 2008 Bucharest Summit's move to provide Ukraine and Georgia with a "Membership Action Plan" (MAP), fearing it would be seen as a "declaration of war" by Vladimir Putin.
Malcolm Fraser & Paul Keating: Two former Australian Prime Ministers who cautioned that pushing NATO to Russia's borders would lead to future conflict.
Recent and Ongoing Opposition
As of 2024–2025, several NATO member states continue to show reluctance or opposition to immediate Ukrainian membership to avoid direct escalation with Russia:
United States & Germany: Frequently cited as "slow-walking" invitations to join to prevent being drawn into a direct war.
Hungary & Slovakia: Under leaders like Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico, these nations have explicitly opposed Ukraine’s accession to NATO.
Other Reluctant Members: Countries including Belgium, Slovenia, and Spain have reportedly expressed reservations about an immediate invitation.
American statesman might have played a role in the tragedy, but responsibility lies with those who pulled the trigger.
I disagree about the Nato thing. Were we to deny Poland or Lithuania our protection because of the bear's wounded pride? Even if the US was wary about expansion, and its politicians understood about Russia's ill-feeling, Britain and France would have pushed for it and that might be the situation we end up with now, with the US being semi-detached from Nato. To be honest, I think some sort of confrontation between an independent Russia and the West was always highly likely.
Surely we aren’t dividing the combatants into good guys and bad guys? Following the sequence of events is more useful: a Russophile is elected in Ukraine, his opponents don’t like it and say the election was rigged (which it would have been, whoever had been declared the winner, because it’s a corrupt country, like most countries in the world); there is a violent coup; the new government is hostile to Russia; Russia takes over Crimea, at the mouth of a strategic waterway; NATO trains and equips the previously tiny Ukrainian army, in order to take back Crimea; Putin sees what is happening and invades Ukraine, in particular grabbing the shore along the Sea of Azov and so denying Ukraine control of the Kirch Strait, through which much river traffic flows to and from Russia. It’s all about the straits these days…
Although obviously your sympathies are broadly where they should be, I don't think it should be beyond the pale to argue that this situation didn't need to come about. Of course, the Russians made their own choices. But if, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West had treated Russia like a repentant sinner rather than as a vanquished enemy - if there had been a decisive effort to integrate, or reintegrate it into European civilisation - I think we might have avoided this new Cold - and now in Ukraine Hot - War. That's not to excuse what the Russians have done, but only to suggest that thirty years ago a brighter future was possible, and everyone - the Russians, the Europeans, the Americans - made the wrong decisions.
One thing I've thought repeatedly over the last few years, as territorial and ethnic disputes have flared up again into wars, is - what a pity it is that there's no internationally agreed way of triggering a peaceful referendum on secession! While the post-World War I insistence on self-determination did have some very bleak unintended consequences later on, it's nevertheless the case that a couple of border disputes around that time were peacefully sorted out by plebiscites: for instance, in 1917, the province of Narva voted to be part of the newly autonomous province of Estonia rather than to remain within the governorate of St Petersburg in Russia, and accordingly became part of the independent Republic of Estonia a year later. Similarly, the location of the Danish-German border was determined by referendum in 1920. The borders still follow the lines determined by those referenda. If such referenda could have been held in Crimea and the Russian-populated east of Ukraine, a lot of blood might never have been shed. And after all, diversity not being a strength, the resulting, smaller, more homogeneous Ukraine might well have been more orderly and more governable - as well, incidentally, as more decisively European.
Early in the war, I saw a meme suggesting likely outcomes for the Ukrainian War, from Decisive Russian Victory (Ukraine cut in half; Russia occupying territory up to the Dnieper) to Russian Victory (landlocked Ukraine with Russia taking over the northern Black Sea coast, Odessa and Ukrainian Bessarabia) to Pyrrhic Russian Victory (basically the current situation with Russia controlling the four south-eastern oblasts) to Pyrrhic Ukrainian Victory (Russia still holds Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but Ukraine regains Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) to Ukrainian Victory (Ukraine restores its Day 1 borders; i.e., Russia controls only the part of Donetsk and Luhansk that it occupied in 2014) to Decisive Ukrainian Victory (Ukraine recaptures Donetsk and Luhansk). The most powerful thing about those scenarios was what was left unspoken, but visible on the maps: even in the event of a Decisive Ukrainian Victory, Crimea was still Russian.
I just can't really see how it wouldn't 100 different cans of worms. It's obvious that if we were starting from scratch the Kurds would have their own state, for instance, but dare we allow that to happen.
I'm not sure about what we could have done different tbh. I still think it was right to let in the A8 countries into Nato, if that's what they desired. I'm not sure what else we could have to help a country that was sort of collapsing socially.
"I just can't really see how it wouldn't [open] 100 different cans of worms."
I guess it depends on what the rules are! I would propose:
1) an ethnic minority which occupies a defined, contiguous territory of one state, adjacent to another state in which it constitutes the majority, should be able to trigger a referendum to join that state (that's to say, the people of Donetsk and Luhansk should have been able to vote on whether to join Russia, but the people of suburban Bradford should not be able to vote on whether to join Bangladesh).
2) an ethnic minority which is stateless and has a longstanding presence on a particular territory (e.g., the Catalans or the Kurds) should be able to trigger a referendum for independence.
3) If a bid for independence or for joining a neighbouring state is rejected, the referendum can't be repeated for a fixed period of time (say, ten years).
As for your other points, I think the Americans / the West probably could have sponsored a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq twenty years ago, when Iraq was basically a non-functioning state. Full assurances would have to have been given to the Turks that it would be confined to that region and that no claim on the Kurdish areas of Turkey (or any other state) would be supported. Actually, I think a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq would have gone some way to neutralising Kurdish nationalism within Turkey; after all, the Kurds who really wanted to live in an independent Kurdistan could move to Erbil.
We'll never know, but I think less shock therapy and a slower, more controlled transition from Communism to a market economy would have created a much more stable and less hostile Russia. I think we were right to let the Eastern Europeans into NATO (what else were they going to want, after all?), but as I said once before, I also think that historic Western civilisation stretches from the Algarve to Vladivostok, and that in the end, the Russians ought to be with us.
"Russia a based Christian civilisation." I would hope anyone with an IQ of 105 would investigate Putin and find out he was ex KGB so unlikely to be a Christian.