The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: A Crisis of Context
To be properly anti-war, one must not only condemn acts of war, but also the acts that lead to the acts of war. The media has condemned Putin’s invasion, but it has forgotten what led us here.
My friend and I were watching some of the news coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine during the start of the war, seeing the awful destruction, the desperation of refugees and the bravery of those who stayed to fight. The biggest question we both had, fairly distraught and frustrated by the scene, was why? Why would they do this?
In the flurry of reporting since the start of the crisis, the media has been extremely good in covering the who, what, when and where of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But in the rapid pace of the 24-hour news cycle, they have been remarkably poor at explaining the why.
In doing so, they have effectively condemned the act of war, but failed to examine the 20 years of US and NATO actions which have created the conditions for war. This is important because these causal narratives shape how the Western world responds to this crisis. As calls for escalation — no-fly-zones, increased arms flow or direct intervention — increase, this failure to understand how Western powers have already escalated the conflict pushes us closer to full-blown global war.
In what follows, I will try to pick apart some of the frankly glib attempts of popular news media outlets at explaining why and show how these have in turn bound the terms of discussion about the Russian invasion. In contrast to this, I will present a more historically considered analysis of Russia’s motivations.
Unlike much of the media coverage a lot of the sources I draw on will deal with the situation pre-invasion. I argue this produces a more rounded perspective on a nuanced situation.
I think this is worthwhile because any comprehensively anti-war stance must not only condemn acts of war, but also those actions which lead to acts of war. The media has done very well to condemn Putin’s act of war, but in focussing on this, has ignored what led to this act of war. This has protected US and NATO actions, which are long term contributors to the 8-year state of conflict in Ukraine, from strong scrutiny.
The Invasion in the Media
To understand what’s missing in popular explanations of war, we first need to outline what’s actually being said. In mainstream analysis, there are three causal narratives for the war: war of provocation, of ideology, or of personality.
Provocation (or rather lack thereof) explanations dominate most of the straight up and down news reporting, whilst the latter two are more common in analytical pieces. A typical news story will either call it an ‘unprovoked invasion’, or present a short part of the Russian argument that it is a response to NATO expansion, with understandable cynicism toward Russian media and officials.
On a more nuanced level, ideology explanations pit the insurgence as motivated by an ideological struggle between democracy and autocracy. Stan Grant’s particularly esoteric analysis for the ABC generally casts this as an ideological battle. He argues that Putin’s war is one of identity. He means to recapture the greatness of ‘the Russian people’ as a historical nation, who exist in conflict with sovereign borders. This ‘war of identity’ is one the West does not know how to fight because it is supposed to be a place beyond ideology .
It’s an interesting and probably very useful analysis within its niche. But it is a very small niche, which takes for granted the background events which pushed Putin to want revenge, and focuses on analysing just Putin’s point of view. As a result, its focus is bound to that typically dovish manner. More importantly, it is a very niche take for one of the foremost foreign affairs journalists in the country which would be valuable if Grant or the organisation he writes for had taken the time to adequately explain the complex history of the conflict he is taking niche academic dives into. They have not.
Others who have dealt with this as an ideological conflict view it as a battle between enlightened Western liberalism and hardcore Russian nationalist-imperialism. Some argue Putin is threatened by democracy itself, particularly by any success Ukraine has in fostering it so close to Putin’s door. Whilst it is true that Ukrainians are fighting for their democracy and their freedom, casting this as an imperial war assumes almost comedic levels of Russian stupidity, considering the predictable Western destruction of their economy and is an ultimately reductive frame of reasoning .
Whilst understanding Putin’s personal motivations is important… the reality is that a lot of this is impersonal.
This brings us to the final and probably most dominant explanation: personality. Blame the villain of the story. The invasion was the act of the bald Machiavellian monster, who occupies the Kremlin, and looks and talks like the child of Dr Evil and Hans Gruber.
It works because it is to some extent true. Again, the immediate responsibility for the invasion falls on Putin. He is clearly a callous man. His general disregard for the lives of his own people seems only outweighed by his current, very specific, disregard for the lives of Ukrainians.
The broad body of analytical work I have found has some form of personal analysis of Putin, of his motives and his thinking. Almost all analysis of the invasion focuses on him, often with lexical priority. It is Putin’s war. Many try to break down his personal motivations for the war: Some painting him as a Stalin-like figure, some a would-be emperor, and some an ideologue who hates or fears the West.
Whilst understanding his personal motivations is important, the extent to which analysis of one man’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs has whitewashed coverage is staggering. It is easy to view the war as the whim of a mad dictator. But as Ronald Suny, an expert in Russian relations argues, “Putin has usually acted as a realist, unsentimentally and amorally taking stock of the power dynamics among states”.
As Suny suggests, the reality is that a lot of this is impersonal. Since 2014, expert commentators such as John Mearsheimer and Noam Chomsky have claimed that regardless of who sits in the Kremlin we would likely have some situation in Ukraine.
Ultimately, all three of the explanations I’ve discussed — provocation, ideology, and personality — have a part to play in explaining Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, they are fundamentally limited in their ability to do so, focusing as they do on short-term factors. This myopia is typical of popular media.
What’s missing from all these perspectives is context.
I find it helps to look at the media debate as being, in general, between two camps — Hawks, and Doves. At one end, we have the imperialist Hawks, who present the invasion as an unprovoked assault by dictator Putin. At the Dovish end, the attack is a wild overreaction to the benevolent expansion of democracy and the western order.
Now the Hawk and Dove perspectives are not completely without merit. In the short term this invasion is Putin’s fault. His callous disregard for life is its preeminent cause. However, this short-term action was not, as the Hawks would have it, unprovoked. And, whilst it is a wild overreaction, NATO expansion is hardly the benevolent action the Doves would have us believe. Furthermore, this reaction was entirely predictable based on Russia’s historical responses to NATO expansion.
What’s missing from all these perspectives is context.
The Invasion in Context
To understand this, we’ll need a brief history lesson, going back to April 2008, where the final declaration at NATO’s Bucharest Summit announced an agreement that two countries bordering Russia — Georgia and Ukraine — will join NATO. This followed a decade of NATO expansion east, toward Russia, always over their objections. It is important to note that NATO’s founding doctrine was, according to its first secretary-general, ‘to keep Germany down, Russia out and the US in’, meaning in charge. As NATO expanded eastward, Russia felt it was being kept out.
Moscow then illegally invaded Georgia, who understandably thought they could stand up to Russia because the US and its allies would come to its aid. We did not. Russia maintains control of separatist regions of Georgia to this day. This act was a direct reprisal for Georgian attempts to move toward the West. Similar reprisals followed in Ukraine in 2014.
In late 2013, then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was negotiating a trade deal with the EU. Russia was not thrilled by this and countered with a corrupt, alternate deal, which was far better for Ukrainian elites. Yanukovych then rejected the EU deal, causing mass protests, to which his government overreacted, causing many deaths in subsequent clashes. Yanukovych then fled to Russia. Russia annexed Crimea and sent forces into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine to help insurgents destabilise them.
‘Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea’ is cast in the media as being an example of his track record of violent expansionism. This is true, but it sets another precedent- that Russia will violently defend itself from perceived threats. So why is it any surprise that history repeats itself 8 or even 14 years later?.
Russian aggression came because they felt Ukraine was being drawn into the West. It is not an implausible argument, nor is it one exclusive to Putin. Foreign policy experts argue that it doesn’t matter who sits in the Kremlin, no Russian leader would tolerate this. The Russian invasion did not come about because Putin feels Ukraine is ‘a part of Russia’s soul’ as Stan Grant argues, but because Ukraine is one of Russia’s core strategic interests.
…how would the US react to Mexico accepting a place in an exclusive Russo-Chinese economic and military alliance?
Russia’s fear might seem unreasonable to us in the West. There are several reasons this fear is not totally unfounded, but this isn’t really important. Whether or not Russia’s fear is justified right or wrong is not especially relevant — the important fact is that because it exists, and that Russia has been very clear that the potential consequences of NATO expansion include potential military intervention.
It is not as if the US and NATO don’t know this likely outcome is likely, either. Georgia 2008 is a perfect case study. This is part of the reason Germany and France have consistently vetoedkeep vetoing expansion of NATO to Ukraine. The message has been very clear from the mid 1990s. Not just from leading academics such as Chomsky and Mearsheimer, not just from Russia’s foreign minister and Putin, but from Biden’s own CIA director William J. Burns. Ronald Suny outlines the full scope of Burns’ concerns, and the many, many warnings about the dangers of NATO expansion in this excellent article in The Conversation.
The consequences of NATO expansion are very clear. What is not so clear is why the US continued to pursue it. This is especially odd given the relative stakes for Russia and the US in Ukraine.
It is, in essence, a reckless, ideological prodding of the sleeping bear.
Russia clearly sees Ukraine as a core part of its strategic interests. They are fearful of being shut out of European markets. They are fearful of having hostile powers on their borders. Noam Chomsky and Anatol Lieven offer a pertinent thought experiment on this topic: how would the US react to Mexico accepting a place in an exclusive Russo-Chinese economic and military alliance? Fear doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The US, on the other hand, has very little to gain from Ukraine entering NATO. The West writ large no longer sees NATO as an explicitly anti-Russian alliance. Rather than existing, as in its inception ‘to keep Germany down, Russia out and the US in [charge]’, it is now a collective security agreement protecting members but also aiming to peacefully resolve internal conflicts. The Russians clearly don’t agree, but the West sees NATO expansion as a relatively benevolent expansion of democratic values. It is, in essence, a reckless, ideological prodding of the sleeping bear.
When faced with Russian assertions that NATO expansion is a direct threat, the US has responded by claiming they are pursuing a passionate dedication to national sovereignty — that Ukraine’s sovereign right to join NATO must be honoured. Apparently, US policymakers are steadfast in their principled commitment to the democratic rights of Ukrainians. This is of course a principle upon which the US has been remarkably consistent, as residents of Libya, Iraq, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Serbia-Kosovo, Egypt and Nicaragua, would readily agree.
Putting the United States’ dubious commitment to sovereignty and democracy aside, the payoff to the US from Ukraine joining NATO is completely incomparable to Russian fears. Russia sees Ukrainian neutrality as an essential component of their strategic interests. The US does not view Ukraine joining in NATO as strategically important. It is barely of ideological significance.
My purpose in providing this somewhat simplified alternative explanation is to focus the narrative of those actions which we in the West can best control. We cannot stop the Russian action of war. But as western democratic citizens we have had some say in the actions which have led to it, and we will have some say in the response to it.
What we get from this is that the US has acted with little regard for the lives of Ukrainians. As much as we might want Ukraine to decide its own fate, NATO membership is not a god-ordained right for any country. The US offered NATO membership with full knowledge of the potential violence of Russia’s response. Its reasons for doing so were purely ideological and so they now have no interest in bloodying their hands helping the Ukrainians they put at risk.
What’s in a Context?
Why should we care what the media say about the crisis?
What they say won’t stop the tragedy, it’s true, but it does help shape the Western response. In democracies such as ours, what people think matters. And the media has an enormous influence on what people think, particularly on complex, contested, foreign policy issues. The public rely entirely on the media to understand the context and lived experience of people overseas, as they have no easy access to this information otherwise. Social media is in fact amplifying this now, as the Ukrainian government works hard to win the social media propaganda war — focusing eyes on their tragedies, their heroes and their villains.
The presentation of the war this way shapes what the possible responses are to it differently to the counter-narrative I have just outlined. This shapes the Western response in a few ways. Firstly, by focusing causality on Russian actions, which Westerners have no control over, it gives very little hope for improvement. Focusing, as I have, on US and NATO actions, which we have some influence over, shows that there are genuine possibilities for resolution, and more importantly points people to where they can actually make a difference. Whilst the media call on Russians to take a probably hopeless stand to stop the invasion, Westerners have a genuine chance to influence the outcomes of this conflict. The popular media narrative helps make this possibility invisible to most.
Instead of negotiation toward a peaceful settlement, we see calls for escalation.
This is because of the second reason: it pushes the settlement agreement away from concession and negotiation, toward confrontation. It has only been whispered about in the media, but Putin has actually offered peace terms to Ukraine. They aren’t radically different from the Minsk II peace agreements which Ukraine broke, and are certainly an inoffensive starting point for negotiations. However, the dichotomised hero-villain narrative has become so strong those terms have been largely ridiculed. Any concession to Russia is considered treasonous, especially in the US.
The final way it skews the discourse is the most dangerous. Instead of negotiation and concession toward a peaceful settlement, we see calls for escalation.
Particularly in the US, led by Ukraine’s President Zelensky, there have been calls for NATO to institute a no-fly zone over Ukraine. As Noam Chomsky warns, this would unleash ‘untold violence’ — effectively seeing two nuclear powers squaring off in the air for the first time in history. The corporate (weapons company sponsored) media in the US has been especially fierce in these calls, because they are the natural conclusion to the explanation they have given for the war, combined with a US imperialist mindset. The war is evil. Putin is evil. It is the job of the benevolent policeman of the world — the US — to stamp out evil wherever it sees it. Therefore, so the argument goes, the US has a duty to help Ukraine — ‘help’ meaning, in this case, direct military intervention.
None of this is to excuse or victimise Putin. His war is reprehensible. But it is vital that we put context around these actions to understand that, whilst appalling, they are not out of the blue, or irrational, or his alone. As William Partlett notes in his piece examining Russian misinformation, it is important to distinguish explanation of the war from justification of the war, of which there cannot be any.
Nonetheless, while we must condemn Putin’s vile invasion of Ukraine, we must also consider what led us here. Any plausible anti-war stance must include both condemnation of the act of war, and of its systemic causes. To condemn one man’s villainy is not enough. We must acknowledge that the US, in pursuit of an ideological project, knowingly put the Ukrainian people in the firing line of a dictator. And it has now abandoned them.
Isaac Haynes is an editor for Statecraft Magazine. This is his first published article.
Thanks to Thomas Howroyd, Genevieve Campbell and Tom Watson for editing this piece.
