We Never Provoked Putin Into Attacking Ukraine: Here’s The Truth

After decades of Cold War and a quarter-century of glaring Kremlin brutality at home and abroad, you’d think intelligent people would shy from any arguments that abet Russia – would at least show skepticism. Instead, one sees blatant threads of Ruski propaganda proliferate and take hold, most especially arguments against the US helping Ukraine. From the far left and the likes of Cornel West to the far-right and bleeding to center-right, one hears the same rusty repetitive talking points, long since rebutted but still trotted out like catechisms. All used against US support of Ukraine. This column will address the most persistent, providing context and history and easy utility, so right-minded folk can quickly refute the Putin propaganda parrotists when needed.

Many will argue that it’s a pointless endeavor, that such unthinking puppets gain motive not from facts or reason but from a sense of tribal belonging. Nevertheless, as fellow citizens they deserve to be confronted with the truth at every turn, rather than be snootily dismissed as know-nothings – that way lies division and strife in our midst. And hands Putin a victory. The most patient, systematic, good-faith exponent of the meticulous rebuttal approach is a Republican activist dedicated to addressing other Republicans on these matters, one Randy Mott, lawyer, businessman and former infantry officer, erudite and highly informed, with 14.5k followers on twitter. I urge you to follow him. Here is a twitter thread of his, itemizing the list of false canards one by one – such as the supposed cost for US taxpayers of aiding Ukraine, the supposed problem of consuming Nato’s ammunition, the purported billions of kickbacks to US beneficiaries, and other nonsense.

This column will take a more ample explanatory approach – more than the twitter format allows Mr.Mott. I have covered the Russo-sphere for three decades in countless articles and two books; history and context are the strong suits on offer here. Let’s deal with the most prominent fable, that Nato provoked Russia by encircling its borders. This is the kind of dross peddled by RFK Jr., Tucker Carlson et al. Utter tommyrot. In reality, Nato did nothing while Putin invaded Georgia, Crimea, Donbas. This is all you need to cite. We could end the column here, so self-evident is the falsehood that the blame lies with Nato provocation. But for deep context, you can go further, all the way back to the post-Soviet uprisings in Chechnya. When, in 1999 – 2000 Putin bombed Grozny to rubble, the capital of Chechnya, the West did nothing. Ballistic missiles were used. We are talking 50,000 killed, probably 100,000. But that was an uprising within Russia, you could argue. Not if you ask the Chechens: they wanted out and they were killed en masse for it, grandmas, kids, families. The poor folk, the ones who couldn’t leave. Nato and Clinton did nothing. What provocation?

And what about Syria 15 years later, nowhere near Russia’s borders? Putin used exactly the same tactics as in Chechnya, carpet bombing cities, while his client Assad used chemical weapons on his own civilians. Obama primed Nato for retaliation, then backed down in the last minute. What provocation? In 2022, when Erdogan shot down a Russian warplane operating in Syria but circling over Turkey’s border, he asked for Nato support and got none. What provocation? When Russian forces operating in Ukraine shot down civilian flight MH17 with Buk missiles in 2014, Nato did nothing. And the endless assassinations, poisonings, mysterious deaths over the years. Yet Putin’s apologists act as if, without Nato provocation, Putin would be a saintly swami.

The ultra-pro-American former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, now imprisoned in his own country and dying of poisoning, was constantly abandoned by the West to suffer Moscow’s predations because he was too ‘provocative’, too provocatively anti-Kremlin. Saakashvili was supposedly a personal friend of G.W. Bush, so the US President declared. In 2004, Bush came to Tbilisi and danced a jig in the main square. But when Russian tanks invaded Georgia in 2008, Russia suffered zero sanctions from Bush. Then came Crimea, Donbas, Syria and much else. Where was Nato? What provocation? Enough of the hogwash about Nato or American provocation causing (and therefore justifying) Kremlin aggression against neighbors. If anything, Nato has been provocatively passive in the face of Putin’s repeated provocations.

The truth is that Washington has never wanted Russia to fail, in case it fell apart. Go all the way back to the elder Bush and his famous 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech where he advocated against the collapse of the Soviet Union, in particular the desire of Ukraine to secede. In his memoirs later he wrote that he’d wanted Moscow to remain “an effectively working central structure” and was most worried about “political disintegration” and the West being “drawn into any (internal) conflicts”. Instead, not only did the Soviets break up but the Russian federation threatened to follow suit, and no wonder. Nationalities as disparate as the Chechens, Bashkirs, Tatars, and Siberians were ready to go. But Washington was against it. Bill Clinton watched passively as Putin savaged the separatist Chechens, flattened Grozny. Clinton’s emissary to the Kremlin, his ‘Russia Czar’, Strobe Talbott, could have spent time visiting provincial capitals but dealt only with Moscow and encouraged centralism. This has been the policy of Washington and Nato for decades – keep the Soviets, then Russia, intact. And not just for fear of multiple civil wars and loose nukes spilling out, but also because centralized control by Moscow made it easier for Western oil companies and investment banks to exploit Russia’s far-flung raw materials through one central authority. So enough about how the West is against Russia, wants to destroy it or isolate it or harm it.

The fact is that in 2022, when Russian tanks invaded all the way to near Kyiv, the Biden administration was deeply reluctant to engage with the situation in Ukraine, having just pulled out of Afghanistan after a decade. It took many months of sustained outrage in the media before the White House okayed military supplies to Ukraine. They’re still inadequate, still too little and too slow. Actually, it turns out that the Biden White House has conducted secret negotiations with Moscow for some months to help save Russia because they believe the US needs ‘a strong Russia’. Here is a link to a recent bombshell article in the English-language Amsterdam-based Moscow Times citing a top US diplomat (who remains anonymous) involved in the negotiations. So, let us have no more nonsense about all the devious dark reasons why the US and Nato support Ukraine. They never wanted to. And let’s have no more tolerance by commentators for the whinings of Western appeasers about how it’s our fault that we provoked Putin into becoming a Stalinesque monster, one of history’s bloodiest.