In the midst of last month’s soaring temperatures, BBC Radio 4’s early evening news programme carried a salutary reminiscence from Allan Little. He was in France during the long hot summer of 2003.
“The dazzling light
bounced off the pale bleached walls of the Paris boulevards, and the air rose
from sticky molten tarmac in visible thermal currents. The mercury pushed above
40 degrees Celsius every day for a week. By the end of July, A&E doctors
were screaming for help. The elderly were dying, they said, while many health
professionals were on annual leave. The Health Minister said it simply wasn’t
true, refused to recall staff, and like everyone else, went on holiday. The old
and infirm can withstand punishing temperatures during the day, if there is
some relief at night, when the body can recuperate during a good night’s sleep.
But in early August there were three consecutive nights when the temperature
didn’t fall below 26 degrees. It was catastrophic. We saw people stretchered
into crowded hospitals, packed in ice, from shoulder to thigh. Refrigerated
marquees were erected to store bodies because the undertakers couldn’t cope.
Many remained unclaimed for weeks because younger relatives were still on
holiday. Finally the government declared a public health crisis. Too late. On
the day the plan came into force, the weather broke. The temperature plummeted,
and Paris breathed again. And when they did the sums, they found that more than
12,000 French citizens had been killed by the heat.”
Clearly, this doesn’t show
French politicians to their best advantage; though unlike their US and British
counterparts of the time, at least their hands weren’t caked in the blood of
untold tens of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi civilians. Be that as it may
however, it’s useful to be reminded of Allan Little’s reporting flair. He was
one of the few western correspondents who took a more than superficial interest
in Moscow’s reaction to the Kosovo crisis in the spring and summer of 1999.
“The Russian role… was
absolutely vital to the ending of the war. I think by the end of April the NATO
allies understood the importance of getting the Russians on board. They completely disregarded Russian
objections at the UN Security Council… [emphasis added]”[1]
No biggie, but NATO’s
humanitarian killing spree was therefore illegal, in contravention of its own
Atlantic Charter and international law. Acceptance of Kosovo independence
claims in 2008 also trampled on the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, enshrining the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of European states. Returning though to
Little’s analysis:
“…they disregarded
Russian objections at Rambouillet, but by the end of April they realised that they
couldn’t do it really without the Russians. They invited the Russians back in.
The Russians opened up a new diplomatic channel and a secret back channel which
we talked about in our programme. The result was that the signal went
unambiguously to Milosevic that he couldn’t expect Russia to come to his aid
and it was because of that signal, I believe, that Milosevic ended the war.
“What was most
interesting to me was the nature of the deal that was done in Moscow between
Yeltsin’s people, the political leadership, and the military. I don’t know the
answer to that but there was clearly a deal at the end of May. Yeltsin in some
way bought off the military. They were very unhappy with what was happening in
Kosovo, public opinion was extremely unhappy, it’s clear that Yeltsin felt very
threatened and challenged both by the rising tide of public anger and by the
strength that this gave the military, and he did something to strike a deal
with the Russian military. The price that the Russian military paid was to send
the signal to Milosevic that they weren’t going to come to his aid. What the
military got in exchange is not clear. There is all sorts of speculation in
Moscow but it is only that as far as I know.”
The nuts and bolts of
Yeltsin’s relationship with his top brass, as the bombing intensified and the
range of targets widened, is potentially a fascinating topic for discussion.
However the purpose of this article is rather to highlight the anger generated by
NATO’s unprovoked murder rampage in Russia as a whole. Polling revealed that it
was opposed by 94% of the population.[2] In November last year, onetime US diplomat and GOP Senate foreign policy advisor Jim
Jatras tweeted an excellent summary of the situation:
“I remember Russians
telling me afterwards, “You know, we never believed all that Soviet propaganda
about ‘aggressive NATO’ because we knew what liars communists are. But then you
attacked Serbia and we saw that everything we thought was lies about you was
all true.””[3]
It’s quite likely this
reflected the thinking of Boris Nikolayevich himself. Evidence that in the early days of
his presidency he was little if at all exercised about NATO comes from former senior UK
emissary Charles Crawford:
“In 1993 Russia’s
President Yeltsin met Poland’s President Lech Wałesa in Warsaw during a visit
to mark the final withdrawal of Russian forces from (formerly Warsaw Pact) Poland.
Yeltsin was asked point-blank by Wałesa whether Poland could join NATO. He
replied to the effect that as a free nation in a now undivided Europe, Poland
could do what it liked. Yeltsin also issued a communiqué expressing
‘understanding’ for Poland’s NATO ambitions.
“Years later as UK
Ambassador to Warsaw I asked Lech Wałesa about this momentous meeting and
Yeltsin’s apparently affable acceptance of Poland’s NATO aspirations. Had the
Russian President been, perhaps, over-infused with Polish vodka? Wałesa said no:
Yeltsin had genuinely not been bothered, one way or the other.”[4]
But that was then. Kosovo represented a seismic shift. Not
that there weren’t signs of disillusionment well before it hit the headlines. In a June 1997 article entitled ‘Adversaries or Allies?’, Irina Zhinkina
of Moscow’s Institute for US and Canadian Studies asked:
“How is it that the new
Russia, which has cast off its former ideology, remembered God, sworn loyalty
to the new ideals of democracy and fallen into the embrace of its recent
‘probable adversaries’ is not accepted by western civilisation? What else must
it do?”[5]
March 1999 though was the watershed moment. By throwing its weight around in the Balkans,
NATO demonstrated it was precisely a law
unto itself.
“NATO has proved that
more or less it can do what it wants, where it wants, indeed when it wants.”[6]
This again provides necessary context for a claim made recently by Chinese Defence Ministry
spokesperson Wu Qian:
“NATO is a war machine,
a military tool in furtherance of US hegemony, and a systemic threat to world
peace and stability.”[7]
Yet influential figures
like former US State Dept mandarin Mike McFaul affect incredulity at the idea that Putin is genuinely concerned about NATO at all. Referring to the
Kremlin leader’s rhetoric in February of this year, Obama’s Moscow ambassador
would have us believe there was some tremendous significance in the fact that
“In [his] 7000-word speech,
the first 4628 he doesn’t mention NATO once”.[8]
As if the way a speech
is structured has any bearing on the importance of a particular theme (and no
matter that once Putin got on to Ukraine NATO membership, he described it as
being “like a knife to Russia’s throat”). In addition, McFaul has a mantra
which he repeats ad nauseam:
“NATO is not a threat to
Russia!”
That might have some
kind of quasi legitimacy if Washington and Moscow agreed on what is and what is
not Russia. Since the re-unification of Crimea in 2014 however, they don’t. In
the words of distinguished IR specialist Prof John Mearsheimer:
“It’s really quite
remarkable, when you listen to people in the Administration speak, and when you
read editorials in the Washington Post, words like this are spoken: “This has
absolutely nothing to do with NATO expansion”. I don’t know how anybody can say
that. The Russians have been saying since April 2008, that this is all about NATO expansion, that NATO
expansion into Ukraine is an existential threat to them.”[9]
In a helpful 2020 interview, Britain’s former ambassador
to Moscow Sir Roderic Lyne (who always tended to be quite critical of the
Kremlin) covered similar ground:
“And then we arrive to
the 2008 Bucharest summit of NATO, which was a massive mistake on the Western
side trying to push Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. It was stupid on every level
at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of
doing it […] The final compromise communiqué, to me, is one of the most stupid
documents in modern diplomacy. The paragraph in the Bucharest communiqué about
Georgia and Ukraine should be framed and put on the wall of every Western
diplomat as an example of what not to do. It combines the worst of both worlds:
it upsets the Georgians and the Ukrainians by not giving them a Membership
Action Programme and it upsets the Russians by saying someday these guys are
going to join NATO.”[10]
“But Americans simply
refuse to believe that. [Mearsheimer again.] And instead what they have done, is
they have created a story, that it’s not American policy, it’s not NATO
expansion that’s driving this train. Instead it’s Vladimir Putin, and it’s that
Vladimir Putin is either bent on recreating the Soviet Union, or he’s
interested in creating a Greater Russia. But whichever one of those two
outcomes you take, he is ultimately an expansionist. He is on the march. And
thank God we expanded NATO, because if we hadn’t expanded NATO he’d probably be
in Berlin by now, if not Paris. This is the basic argument. But of course we
had to invent the story after the crisis broke out, so that we weren’t blamed
for what happened. We had to blame the Russians, so we created this story.”[11]
Compounding everything over the past several years has been Ukraine’s disdainful attitude to the 2014-15 Minsk agreements; directly analogous to Britain’s contempt for the Northern Ireland Protocol in fact. Both governments were insisting the texts were unworkable before the ink had even dried. Kiev simply decided to use these agreements as an opportunity to carry out a slow-motion pogrom against the civilian population of Donetsk, with US/UK connivance.
What follows is a
transcript of part of a CER (Centre for European Reform) podcast dated 13-07-2022.
Rosie Giorgi: “Charles Crawford in
the UK asked:
“How far if at all do
you think Russia can reasonably feel humiliated or cheated as such, by the new
security and economic arrangements that emerged in Europe following the end of
the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union?””
Ian Bond: “Well, thanks very
much Rosie, and thanks very much Charles. I mean, full disclosure, Charles was
my boss in the British embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, so he and I saw many
of the relevant events at that time, unrolling before our very eyes, and you
could write a book about why things turned out the way they did and whose fault
it was, and in fact, quite a few people have written such books. But here is my
less than book-length answer, which is that the narrative of humiliation is one
that Putin and those around him in the Russian leadership have chosen for
themselves. It wasn’t an inevitable outcome of western actions. In fact in
those early post-Cold War years, the West made enormous efforts to try to give
Russia a higher status internationally than its post-Soviet condition really
justified. So despite the fact that its economy was a basket case, it became a
member of the G8 group of leading industrial countries. I mean, by no stretch
of the imagination was 1990s Russia a leading industrial country, but it became
part of that group. It was invited to join the major western powers in the
so-called Contact Group, trying to bring peace to former Yugoslavia, and actually
I could say it played quite a constructive role in that. And although it wasn’t
invited to apply for NATO membership, it was given a special relationship with NATO
through the NATO-Russia Founding Act. I mean, arguably more influence than any
other third country had with NATO at the time. And it signed a partnership and
cooperation agreement with the EU which gave it various trade benefits, and it
joined the Council of Europe, the main European human rights organisation, even
though its human rights record was still quite poor. So it got quite a lot in
that early post-Cold War period. But what nobody could do, or what nobody was
prepared to do, was to give Russia the kind of sphere of influence that the
Soviet Union had had, in central and eastern Europe. And that’s because no
western country could impose the kind of limits on the foreign policies of
now-independent states in central and eastern Europe, that Russia wanted them
to impose.”
The implication here is
that all you had was a straight choice between the carving up of Europe at
Yalta in February 1945, and the Helsinki Accords of 1975. A dumbed-down
perspective surely, which doesn’t in any case take account of the coach and
horses driven through Helsinki’s picturesque townscape by recognition of Kosovo independence.
Rosie G: “And then so to ask
Charles’s follow-up question: Did let’s say key western capitals get it wrong
in terms of their perspectives, or drafting the arrangements, or in bringing
Russia into the fold, or has Russia itself been unable to adapt, or a combination
of both?”
Ian B: “Yes, so I think the
West made some mistakes at the very beginning. So when the Soviet Union broke
up at the end of 1991, the West could have done more to help democrats in
Russia, and there were a lot of them around at that time. And in particular I
would single out two areas where I think we didn’t do enough. One was in terms
of helping Russia’s democrats to reduce the role of the former KGB and its
officers, like Putin, because they were allowed to move from, you know, the
KGB, a pretty brutal organisation, into positions of influence in Russia. That
was problematic, and it became more problematic over time.”
What Ian Bond omits to
mention here is that although Putin was a
KGB officer, he resigned as soon as he heard about the August 1991 coup against
Gorbachev. On top of that, as an associate of reforming St Petersburg mayor Anatoly
Sobchak from 1990 to 1996, he had a decent claim to be one of the “democrats in
Russia” deemed worthy of western help. This finds support in deeply
unfashionable but nonetheless insightful remarks made by former BBC Moscow
correspondent Martin Sixsmith in May 2012:
“If you take the
presidential elections [of March that year] I thought there was a bit of
disingenuousness about the way they were reported in Britain… When I was
reading reports of the presidential election which he won with 56 percent or 60
whatever percent; the first line of every article, and even on the BBC which
broadly is sort of objective about these things, was “Western election
observers report that the elections were skewed towards Vladimir Putin”, and
then they report that he got 65 percent of the vote. And actually the real
story is that he got a majority which a western politician would give his right
arm for. And even if there had been no vote-rigging – there was definitely
vote-rigging, I know because I’ve spoken to people who were involved in the
electoral process – even if there hadn’t been any vote-rigging, he still would
have won a fantastic majority. Maybe not 65 percent – maybe 60, 59, 58 percent.
And that’s the story I’m afraid. You know, the story is that he won a very big
majority.”[12]
If Sixsmith is right, the Kremlin’s highest profile occupants had authentic democratic mandates from 1992 until at least 2018.
Which isn’t to suggest the system is perfect. But Russia can be considered to
be at least as democratic as South Africa, where the ANC has held power since
1994. Bond continues however…
“Secondly I think the
West could have done more to help Russia establish the rule of law, rather than
helping Russian oligarchs launder their money in the West. And that’s a process
that began really in the 1990s, and we got that quite badly wrong. But
fundamentally, we are where we are today, because of the choices that Russian
leaders have made since then. Basically you get a choice over the sort of
history that you tell yourself is your history. And Russia could have chosen to
say, and it would have been justified in some respects to say, that its people
were the heroes who had thrown off the yoke of Soviet totalitarianism after the
1991 coup, when Soviet hardliners tried to roll back the kind of democratic
reforms that were coming in in the Soviet Union. So they could have said, you
know, our people were the heroes who overthrew the Soviet dictatorship, and now
we want to become a normal European democracy, and we recognise that we have
some bridges to build with our neighbours who’ve suffered under the Soviet
dictatorship for the last fifty years. And that would have been a bit like West
Germany after the Second World War. But instead, particularly after Putin came
into power, Russia chose, or the Russian authorities chose to blame the
collapse of the USSR on the evil devious West, and then to try to reassert
control over parts of the old empire as it were.
“And I guess what I
would say, and I know Charles is a keen football fan, so I think he’ll
recognise this; but I would say that basically, the Russian leadership under
Putin has made a choice, that it is happy to be the Millwall of international
relations. So Millwall are famous… Millwall supporters are famous for their
chant: “Nobody [sic] likes us, we don’t care”, and that’s been Putin’s approach
to the rest of the world since he came to power.”
Perhaps the author
should declare an interest, as someone who taught English in the late 1990s to
at least one future employee of the Russian MFA. But there’s no shortage of sound
reasons to be sceptical of Ian B’s take, which isn’t even consistent with his
own words. Unless he believes Putin transformed Russia into a “leading
industrial nation”, its G8 membership remained an anomaly well into the twenty-first century. Yet this privileged status was at the same time almost entirely
uncontroversial. There were no serious calls for Russia to be expelled until
2014, when relations came under an intolerable strain thanks to the US/EU-backed overthrow of Victor
Yanukovych
in Kiev.
In reality, the tale of
Russia’s foreign policy in the Putin era has primarily been one of a constant
search for customers for its oil and gas. And for instance there’s also this
vignette from former head of the UK diplomatic service Lord McDonald of Salford:
“However difficult the
political relationship, it is striking how the diplomats on the spot, the
diplomats who have to work with each other every day, manage to keep their
personal relationships going. And again an anecdote, from when our last
ambassador to the United Nations in New York left, it was Karen Pierce, who is
now our ambassador in Washington. She’d been in New York a couple of years, she
left at the beginning of last year. The warmest tribute paid to Karen at the
Security Council table, was from the Russian ambassador, which might surprise the
audience.”[13]
It’s safe to assume Russia’s
envoy didn’t suddenly remember basic principles of diplomacy forgotten since
the Yeltsin era.
This was never in fact
about Russian indifference to western interests. On the contrary, it’s always
been about western scornfulness for what Russia sees as its core strategic interests.
Joe Biden himself knows this far better than most. Two years before the bombing of Serbia, there’s
footage of him giving a broad-gauge account of the damage likely to be done to
US-Russian ties by NATO expansion:
“I think the one place,
where the greatest consternation will be caused in the short term, for
admission – having nothing to do with the merit, the preparedness of the
country to come in – would be to admit the Baltic States now in terms of NATO-Russian,
US-Russian relations. And if there was ever anything that was going to tip the
balance were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and a hostile reaction – I
don’t mean military – in Russia, it would be that.”[14]
More recently, in an
address last month in Langley, Virginia to mark the CIA’s 75th anniversary,
Biden raised the issue of US exceptionalism.
“We’re the most unique
nation in the history of the world. That’s not hyperbole.”
Professor Mearsheimer dealt
with this in a podcast interview he gave in 2020.
“Our elites, and the
vast majority of the American public believes that the United States is an
exceptional country. This is this whole notion of American exceptionalism. And
when they say that we’re an exceptional country, what they mean is that we are
morally an exceptional country, we are morally good in the extreme. And if we
do something wrong-headed, it’s not because we didn’t have good intentions,
because of course we always have good intentions. But this story that we tell
ourselves bears little resemblance to reality. The United States is one of the
most ruthless great powers that’s ever walked the planet. The number of people
that we’ve killed over time is truly remarkable. All you have to do is look at
the firebombing of Japan in WWII. Most people focus on the dropping of two
nuclear weapons in August of 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the fact is
the first night we firebombed Tokyo we killed more people than we killed in
either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And we were burning Japanese cities to the ground
by the time we dropped those two nuclear weapons. Look at what we did in
Germany, involving cities like Hamburg or Dresden. Look at the bombing of North
Korea during the Korean war! Most people know hardly anything about this. There
are some estimates that we killed twenty percent of the North Korean
population. We bombed like crazy in Vietnam. We have a rich history of
overthrowing governments. And just go back to how the US was created. It’s a
story of conquest on a large scale. We murdered huge numbers of native
Americans, stole their land. What's now the South-West of the US we stole from
Mexico. I mean if you really look carefully at American history over time and
the various wars we fought, it’s not a pretty picture! But this is not what
Americans believe and it’s not what our elites believe.”[15]
Towards the end of his
speech in Langley, Biden said:
“I know that you will
continue to honor and uphold the highest traditions of the CIA and the highest
values of this nation for the next 75 years and beyond.”
The CIA “upholds the
highest values of the nation”. It’s just staggering that the POTUS can say this
with a straight face. It would be no more ridiculous if he said the same about Hunter
Biden.
