Russia, Ukraine, and the American News Media
and a solution for the problem
For weeks now the American news media have been telling us, almost in one voice, that the Russians and their president Vladimir Putin are going to attack Ukraine.
Max Boot, over at the Washington Post, believes the US should stop the Russians because Putin “wants to resurrect the Soviet empire.” His evidence for that assertion includes CCCP throwback uniforms for the Russian national hockey team, Russia’s aid to the Kazakhstan government in putting down violent protests, and a sentence from a speech Putin gave in 2005, in which he lamented the break-up of the USSR.
It’s strange, though. If Putin wanted to put the USSR back together again, why didn’t he start to do so in 2005? He could have started with Kazakhstan. At that time, it had a large ethnic Russian minority, a tiny military, and the Central Asian Steppe, which is flat as a pancake -- a hundred Russian tanks could have easily conquered it in two days. Also, why didn’t he conquer Georgia in 2008, when he had the chance? And what is he waiting for in Ukraine? Why didn’t he send in the bombers before the Ukrainians received Stinger missiles from the US?
The left-wing media and politicians are more realistic than neocons like Max Boot. They know that Putin is not trying to put the Soviet Union back together again, and that he has no plans to “take” Ukraine. They only say things like that because they know it will cause a knee-jerk reaction from people like Max Boot. The lefties hate Putin and the Russians for the same reason they hate Ted Cruz, or Dinesh D’Souza, or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. They hate his defense of Christianity.
It wasn’t always like that. The left-wing media folks used to love Putin when they thought of him as a former Soviet KGB agent. In the first decade of this millennium, the New York Times rarely published an angry word about him. Our left-wing politicians loved the Russians too. In 2012 at a G-8 conference, US President Barack Obama reassured then-Russian President Medvedev that the US would be able to accommodate his wishes after he--Obama--was reelected.
All of that changed in 2013. Obama, left-wing politicians, the left-wing media--all turned against Putin. What happened? First, Putin announced that Russia would be the defender of embattled Christians worldwide. He even sent troops to Syria to demonstrate his commitment. (Some of these Russians were later killed in airstrikes ordered by President Trump.) Second, the Russian Duma passed the “Anti-Gay Propaganda” bill, which was signed into law by Putin. The law is not anti-gay, as the media often say; it does not criminalize homosexuality. Rather it only forbids teaching about it in schools in a positive way. In fact, compared to other former Soviet republics, especially the Central Asian ones, Russia is downright friendly to gays. In other words, because Putin is not going to allow Drag Queen Reading Hour in Russian elementary schools, he is now the left’s second-most hated man in the world, second only to Donald Trump.
The politicians and writers on the right don’t know this, though. They rely on the mainstream media to interpret the outside world for them, thus, making themselves suckers for propaganda.
Consider, for example, US Republican senators. Recently, fifty-five senators, including Ted Cruz, the sponsor of the bill, voted for a proposal to demand a boycott of the Russian Nord Stream 2 Pipeline to punish the Russians. All except one Republican senator voted for the bill.
Likewise, a number of columnists on the right have been demanding serious action be taken against Putin and Russia. A shining example is Rich Lowry, editor of the formerly prestigious magazine National Review, who has penned some ridiculous anti-Putin columns.
In an article dated February 4, 2022, Lowry wrote with hostile irony, “Vladimir Putin is so afraid of NATO that he has no choice but to menace neighboring countries and occasionally invade them.” The use of the word afraid gives the article the ring of a college freshman essay. Imagine someone writing, “The US was afraid of al Qaeda, so it attacked Iraq.” Leaving word choice aside, though, Lowry doesn’t tell us which countries Putin menaced or invaded; apparently, he’s assuming these are well-known facts that don’t need explaining.
Yet, even a quick check on the internet shows that, compared to the US, the Russians have rarely let their military men step outside their borders. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Russia has sent troops into Transnistria (in defense of the ethnic-Russian minority, 1990-92), Georgia (during the Civil War, aiding Abkhazians and Ossetians, 1991-3), Tajikistan (along with Uzbekistan military to end the civil war, 1992-3), Georgia (2008), Ukraine (Crimea only, 2014), Syria (2015-17), and Kazakhstan (2022). That’s it. In the case of Georgia, Russian troops were sent in defense of the ethnic Ossetian and Abkhazian minority populations, who felt threatened by the Georgian government. In 2015, after promising to defend Christians in the Middle East, Putin sent fighter planes and ground forces to aid the government of Bashar Assad in Syria’s civil war. Assad was seen by Syria’s Christian population as their defender against the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the al-Nusra Front (al Qaeda), and the Army of Conquest -- all armies of Islamic extremists. Russian intervention turned the tide of the war and helped Syrian government troops retake most of the area that had been held by the Islamist forces. In the case of Kazakhstan in January this year, the elected government of that country asked for Russian help in putting down a violent insurrection in Almaty, the country’s largest city. Russian troops were joined by military forces from Armenia, Belarus, and Tajikistan in helping the Kazakh government quell the unrest, and they came and left within 9 days.
By comparison, over the same time period, the US military has been hyperactive. The US military was actively involved in Iraq (Operation Desert Storm, 1991), Somalia (Black Hawk Down, 1993), Bosnia (mainly air power, 1993-95), Haiti (to reinstall President Aristide, 1994-95), Macedonia (200 US troops, 1994), Kuwait (Operation Vigilant Warrior, 1994), Bosnia (bombing of Serbian troops following a false flag incident in Sarajevo, 1995), Kuwait (Operation Desert Strike, 1996), Bosnia (SFOR, 1996), Thailand (550 US personnel to evacuate Americans from Cambodia, 1997), Iraq (Operation Desert Fox, 1998), Kenya (following the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by Islamic extremists, 1998-9), Afghanistan (President Clinton ordered Cruise missile attacks, 1998), East Timor (1999-2001), Serbia (major bombing campaign against Serbia in support of Albanian separatists in Kosovo, 1999), Yemen (following attack on USS Cole, 2000), Afghanistan (war from 2001 to 2021), Iraq (war from 2003 to 2011), Liberia (35 US marines, 2003), Georgia (US forces sent to help with “counterterrorist capabilities,” 2003), Georgia, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Eritrea (war on terror, 2004), Lebanon (US marines help evacuate US citizens, 2006), Libya (Operation Odyssey Dawn, bombing of Libyan army forces, which eventually led to overthrow of Qaddafi regime by Islamic extremists, 2011), Jordan (150 troops, 2012), Turkey (400 troops, 2012), Chad (50 troops, 2012), Somalia and Libya (Navy SEAL raids, 2013), Uganda (US troops sent to search for Joseph Kony, 2014), Iraq (air strikes against ISIL, 2014), Syria (US aircraft bomb various targets, 2014-2020), Syria (Shayrat missile strike, 2017), Iraq (airstrikes and 4000 US troops mobilized in response to attack on US embassy, 2020), Iraq (US airstrikes, 2021), Somalia (US airstrikes, 2021), and Afghanistan (during withdrawal, 6000 troops sent to Karzai Airport, 2021).
Most of these actions can be justified, and none of the countries invaded or attacked by US forces are neighbors, so Lowry is probably okay with all of it. But what if a NATO country like Turkey invades its neighbors, as it has Syria and Iraq to attack Kurds? Is Lowry in favor of some kind of action against Turkey?
So what about Ukraine? In 2013 and 2014, there were the so-called Euro Maidan Protests in Kyiv, which ousted elected president Viktor Yanukovych. About half of the people in Ukraine wanted to join the European Union, about half did not. Yanukovych did not. The ethnic Russians living in Ukraine did not. Post-revolution revisionism says the protests were about the corruption of Yanukovych, although it is hard to believe that he was the only dirty politician in a country which Ernst and Young in 2012 called one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. There was also a strong anti-Russian (and possibly anti-Semitic) element in the protests. At the Maidan demonstrations neo-Nazi groups hurled firebombs at police. In Odessa it was reported they chased some pro-regime demonstrators into a Trade Union Building and subsequently set it on fire, burning to death the forty ethnic Russians trapped inside. A similar incident happened later in the city of Mariupol. After the former incident, reporters claimed to see graffiti honoring the Galician SS, the ethnic-Ukrainian SS units that supported the Nazis in World War II. How much of this reporting is true is difficult to say. Ukrainians and their supporters claim the Russians in Odessa initiated the violence.
Nevertheless, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine did not need to see the writing on the wall. Like blacks in Mississippi in 1960 or Jews in Berlin in 1938, they knew they were no longer welcome. So, a separatist movement emerged in the Donbass Region in the eastern part of the country. Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians were the majority of the population in most of the towns and villages in this area. A civil war broke out, and the two sides--Ukrainian and Russian--have remained separate since 2014. Russia was not involved. Thus, it is one of the lies told by American politicians and media elite that Putin invaded eastern Ukraine.
Putin did, however, order Russian troops to take control of the Crimean Peninsula. There were understandable reasons for that. Crimea has a Russian majority population, and the Russian navy had been using the Black Sea port in Sevastopol since 1991, which it had been leasing from Ukraine. The unstable situation in Ukraine and the possibility that the new government might hand over the port to NATO were reason enough. The Crimean Peninsula is almost an island. It is connected to Ukraine by a narrow strip of land, and is only separated from Russia by less than one mile of water. If Ukraine were to join NATO, American ships and American guns would be right next door. Older Americans might remember that US President John Kennedy was willing to go to war over Soviet missiles in Cuba, which is ninety miles from the coast of Florida. Why wouldn’t Russia be concerned about Crimea, which is much closer?
In fact, to put the whole NATO-in-Ukraine thing in perspective: imagine that Russia and China had established a “defensive” alliance in North and South America. Imagine Russia inviting Mexico to join that alliance and then shipping heavy weapons there, which could be pointed at the US. Wouldn’t the US government raise objections?
This raises the question of the function of NATO. To use Lowry’s word, it looks like NATO’s purpose is to “menace” Russia. Russia has not threatened any country in Europe and unlike the old Soviet Union has no world domination philosophy. Yet, the whole premise of the “Ukraine Crisis” is that Putin is evil and must be stopped. Maybe it is NATO which is evil and should be stopped.
Rich Lowry apparently doesn’t buy that. He wrote, “Surely, what worries Putin most isn’t any military threat, but the western model of free, accountable government that puts his kleptocratic authoritarianism in a particularly bad light, especially the closer it gets to Mother Russia.” Maybe Lowry has been sleeping since 1985. Biden’s America is not Reagan’s America.
Which western model of “free, accountable government” is moving closer to Russia? In the 2020 election in the US, almost 50% of the votes were sent through the postal system, often with no means to verify their legitimacy. That gave the US election a kind of corrupt, third-world feel. Former US President Jimmy Carter used to travel the globe to supervise elections to make sure they were fair and honest. Too bad he isn’t supervising US elections now. Then, there was the attempted coup by the Democrat Party known as the “Russian Collusion” hoax. It included the fake “Steele Dossier,” accomplices in the FBI, and a supportive media—just like in third-world dictatorships. Maybe when Lowry said “free, accountable government” he was referring to the FBI breaking down doors to arrest mothers who spoke out at school board meetings, or the way the January 6 protesters have been languishing in jails for months, often without any charges brought against them. If I were Putin, I wouldn’t want those things coming into my country either.
Lowry also likes to use the word “kleptocratic” to describe Putin. Yet, we have the Clintons, who were penniless and in debt in 2001 when Bubba left office. Now they are worth over $100 million. How did that happen on Hillary’s salary? And what about Hunter Biden, who was paid over a million dollars by a Ukrainian energy company, even though had no experience in the energy industry and did not work in Ukraine?
In some ways Putin is an authoritarian and has done bad things in his country, but that does not give the US and NATO carte blanche to do evil things in return. Putin has every right to defend his country and the Russian people. Ukraine is wrong to want to use force to “take back” Donbass and Crimea. And the US is the aggressor by supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine and expanding NATO to Russia’s doorstep.
There is a peaceful solution to the Ukraine situation. It is this: Russia buys Crimea and the Donbass region from Ukraine. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators get together and agree to a new map of the region. Russia gets Crimea and Donbass, and Ukraine gets money or natural gas. In addition, Ukraine agrees not to join NATO. Everyone will be happy.
Well, not everyone. There will still be some people in America who want a war with Russia.