Posts
Ukraine and Russia
Our educational system is admittedly horrible to the extent
that we rank something like 26 or 46 in industrialized countries, but it has
never been so clear as recently as the Corporate media here has indoctrinated
even those with whom we are familiar and among those who have already had their
"consciousness raised."
Recently we had asked what the point was to repeatedly point to
hypocrisy and veniality in our "capitalist" system as it seems so
obvious to all except those who WILL NOT SEE, and the reply was to "raise
consciousness." This seemed
worthwhile to me and, certainly, healthy debate on a subject is worthwhile, but
it is often necessary to repeat the basic axiom of intellectual discourse: You are entitled to your own opinions, but
not your own facts. One does not simply
construct facts to support ones conclusions (in sane circles, at any
rate).
A basic problem of discussion recently is the ignorance of
even the enlightened as to some basic facts of Eurasian history, especially as
relates to Russian and Ukraine today, let alone the past 900 years or so. It is best to start small, so we confine
ourselves to the past six months or so here, other than to point out that
Russia has always been surrounded by its enemies, and we have been increasing
that fact, while the United States enjoys a position with two Oceans separating
it from any enemies (except Mexico for a short period of time and its own
south, perhaps even today).
We will now cease the introduction with one more fact: the
Tartars, for whom we pretended great sympathy are descendents of Genghis Khan
who had invaded. Today, on the whole,
they are quite happy to be included in the Russian Federation, whether it fits
our own biases or not.
And finally, what does it say when someone who simply points
out facts is considered a "Putin Apologist"? For one thing, Putin is not in the habit of
apologizing, For another, all it can
possible mean in sane circles is that the facts support an interpretation not
shared by our corporate media.
Here is an interview with perhaps the only sane commentator
that has appeared on any media to discuss the situation:
THURSDAY,
APRIL 17, 2014
"We Are Not Beginning a New Cold War, We are Well into It": Stephen Cohen on Russia-Ukraine Crisis
As negotiations over
the crisis in Ukraine begin in Geneva, tension is rising in the Ukrainian east
after security forces killed three pro-Russian protesters, wounded 13 and took
63 captive in the city of Mariupol. Ukrainian officials said the pro-Russian
separatists had attempted to storm a military base. The killings came just
after the unraveling of a Ukrainian operation to retake government buildings from
pro-Russian separatists. Earlier today, Russian President Vladimir Putin
accused the authorities in Kiev of plunging the country into an
"abyss" and refused to rule out sending forces into Ukraine.
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen
has announced a series of steps to reinforce its presence in eastern Europe.
"We will have more planes in the air, more ships on the water and more
readiness on the land," Rasmussen said. We are joined by Stephen Cohen,
professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and
Princeton University. "We are not at the beginning of a new Cold War, we
are well into it," Cohen says, "which alerts us to the fact 'hot war'
is imaginable now. It’s unlikely, but it’s conceivable — and if it’s
conceivable, something has to be done about it."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush
transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As negotiations over the crisis in Ukraine begin in
Geneva, tension is rising in eastern Ukraine after security forces killed three
pro-Russian separatists, wounded 13 and took 63 captive in the city of
Mariupol. Ukrainian officials said the pro-Russians had attempted to storm a
military base. The fighting comes just after the collapse of a Ukrainian
operation to retake government buildings in several eastern towns. On
Wednesday, pro-Russian separatists took control of some of their armored
vehicles, and crowds surrounded another column, forcing the troops to hand over
the pins from their rifles and retreat. Earlier today, Russian President
Vladimir Putin accused the authorities in Kiev of plunging the country into an
"abyss."
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] People in eastern Ukraine have started to arm
themselves. And instead of realizing that something bad is going on in the
Ukrainian state and making any attempts to start a dialogue, the authorities
have started to threaten with force even more and unleash tanks and aviation on
civilian populations. This is another grave crime of the current Kiev
authorities. I hope it will be possible to realize which hole and which abyss
the current authorities are moving towards and dragging the whole country with
them. And in this regard, I think the start of today’s talks in Geneva is very
important. I think it is very important today to think about how to get out of
this situation, to offer people a real—not ostentatious, but real—dialogue.
AMY GOODMAN: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking on Russian
television earlier today. On Wednesday, NATO Secretary
General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced a series of steps to reinforce its
forces in eastern Europe because of the Ukraine crisis.
SECRETARY GENERAL ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN: We will have more planes in the air, more ships on the
water and more readiness on the land. For example, air policing aircraft will
fly more sorties over the Baltic region. Allied ships will deploy to the Baltic
Sea, the eastern Mediterranean, and elsewhere as required.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Ukraine, Stephen Cohen is with us,
professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and
Princeton University; his most recent book, Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, out now
in paperback. He recently wrote a piece for The
Nationheadlined "Cold War Again: Who is Responsible?"
Are we seeing the beginning of a new Cold War, Professor
Cohen? And what exactly is happening right now in Ukraine?
STEPHEN COHEN: Those are big questions. We are not at the beginning of
the Cold War, a new one; we are well into it—which alerts us to the fact, just
watching what you showed up there, that hot war is imaginable now, for the
first time in my lifetime, my adult lifetime, since the Cuban missile crisis,
hot war with Russia. It’s unlikely, but it’s conceivable. And if it’s
conceivable, something has to be done about it.
You did two things on your introduction which were very
important. Almost alone among American media, you actually allowed Putin to
speak for himself. He’s being filtered through the interpretation of the mass
media here, allegedly, what he said, and it’s not representative. The second
thing is, let us look just what’s happening at this moment, or at least
yesterday. The political head of NATO just
announced a major escalation of NATO forces in
Europe. He did a Churchillian riff: "We will increase our power in the
air, in the sea, on the land." Meanwhile, as negotiations today begin in
Geneva, we’re demanding that Russians de-escalate. And yet, we,NATO, are escalating as these negotiations begin.
So, if you were to say what is going on in Ukraine
today—and, unfortunately, the focus is entirely on eastern Ukraine. We don’t
have any Western media—in eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western—any
Western media in western Ukraine, the other half of the country. We’re not
clear what’s going on there. But clearly, things are getting worse and worse.
Each side has a story that totally conflicts with the other side’s story. There
seems to be no middle ground. And if there’s no middle ground in the public
discourse, in the Russian media or the American media, it’s not clear what
middle ground they can find in these negotiations, though personally, I
think—and people will say, "Oh, Cohen’s a Putin apologist"—but it
seemed to me that the proposals the Russians made a month ago for resolving the
conflict are at least a good starting point. But it’s not clear the United
States is going to accept them.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Stephen Cohen, it was just a few weeks ago when we had you on, as the crisis was
beginning to unfold in Ukraine, and a lot of what you said then turned out to
be true, which was that you feared that there would be a split in Ukraine
itself between the east and west. And obviously Crimea was just developing
then. But it seems that all of the emphasis in the coverage here is as if the
crisis started with Russian aggression, not with the earlier period of what was NATO and Europe’s involvement in Ukraine
before the deposing of the elected president.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I think you’ve emphasized the absolute flaw in at
least the American—because I don’t follow the European press that closely—the
American media and political narrative. As a historian, I would say that this
conflict began 300 years ago, but we can’t do that. As a contemporary observer,
it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an
ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor
Yanukovych, that "Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with
Russia, too." In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give
a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in
recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: "Choose, and divide
your country further"? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos,
this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is
wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise
ultimatum.
Now flash forward to just one month ago, about the time I
was with you before. Remember that the European foreign ministers—three of
them, I think—went to Kiev and negotiated with Yanukovych, who was still the
president, an agreement. Now, the Russians were present at the negotiation, but
they didn’t sign it. But they signed off on it. They said, "OK." What
did that agreement call for? Yanukovych would remain president until December—not
May, when elections are now scheduled, but December of this year. Then there
would be a presidential election. He could run in them, or not. Meanwhile,
there would be a kind of government of national accord trying to pull the
government together. And, importantly, Russia would chip in, in trying to save
the Ukrainian economy. But there would also be parliamentary elections. That
made a lot of sense. And it lasted six hours.
The next day, the street, which was now a mob—let’s—it was
no longer peaceful protesters as it had been in November. It now becomes
something else, controlled by very ultra-nationalist forces; overthrew
Yanukovych, who fled to Russia; burned up the agreement. So who initiated the
next stage of the crisis? It wasn’t Russia. They wanted that agreement of
February, a month ago, to hold. And they’re still saying, "Why don’t we go
back to it?" You can’t go back to it, though there is a report this
morning that Yanukovych, who is in exile in Russia, may fly to eastern Ukraine
today or tomorrow, which will be a whole new dimension.
But the point of it is, is that Putin didn’t want—and this
is reality, this is not pro-Putin or pro-Washington, this is just a fact—Putin
did not want this crisis. He didn’t initiate it. But with Putin, once you get
something like that, you get Mr. Pushback. And that’s what you’re now seeing.
And the reality is, as even the Americans admit, he holds all the good options.
We have none. That’s not good policymaking, is it?
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to President Obama. Thursday, he was
interviewed byCBS News
by Major Garrett.
MAJOR GARRETT: Is Vladimir Putin provoking a civil war there? And will
you and Western leaders let him to get away with that?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I think that what is absolutely clear is not only have
Russians gone into Crimea and annexed it, in illegal fashion, violating the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, but what they’ve also done is
supported, at minimum, nonstate militias in southern and eastern Ukraine. And
we’ve seen some of the activity that’s been taking place there.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cohen?
STEPHEN COHEN: You left out one thing that he said which I consider to be
unwise and possibly reckless. He went on to say that Russia wouldn’t go to war
with us because our conventional weapons are superior. That is an exceedingly
provocative thing to say. And he seems to be unaware, President Obama, that
Russian military doctrine says that when confronted by overwhelming
conventional forces, we can use nuclear weapons. They mean tactical nuclear
weapons. I don’t think any informed president, his handlers, would have
permitted him to make such a statement. In fact, depending on how far you want
to take this conversation about the Obama administration, I don’t recall in my
lifetime, in confrontations with Russia, an administration—I speak now of the
president and his secretary of state—who seem in their public statements to be
so misinformed, even uninformed, both about Ukraine and Russia. For example,
when Kerry testified last week to Congress that all the unrest in Ukraine was
due to Putin’s meddling and his provocations, he denied the underlying problem
which has divided Ukraine. I mean, everybody knows that history, God, whoever’s
responsible for our destiny, created a Ukraine that may have had one state, but
wasn’t one country. It may be two, it may be three countries. But for John
Kerry to say that all this conflict in Ukraine is due to Putin simply makes a
resolution of the problem by denying the problem. Or let me ask you a question:
What in the world was the director of the American CIA doing last Sunday—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I was going to ask you about that.
STEPHEN COHEN: —in Kiev? It is mind-boggling that it was called a secret
mission, when my grandson knows that the Ukrainian intelligence services are
full of pro-Russian officers. And yet they send the head of the CIA, at this
crucial, inflamed moment, thereby—to Kiev, thereby reinforcing the Russian
narrative that everything that’s happening in Ukraine is an American
provocation. What are they thinking?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, aside from having a very educated grandson, I just
want to turn to NATO for a moment.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I told him that [inaudible]. But he got it. He got
it.
AMY GOODMAN: NATO announced a series of steps to reinforce its forces—this
isNATO in
eastern Europe—because of the Ukraine crisis. NATO’s top military commander,
Philip Breedlove, described the moves as defensive measures.
GEN. PHILIP BREEDLOVE: All the actions that we have proposed and have been
accepted today are clearly defensive in nature. And I think it’s going to be
very straightforward to see them as defensive in nature. They are designed to
assure our allies. And so, I think that, in any case, it’s always a chance that
you run that something might be misinterpreted. But we specifically designed
these measures to assure our allies only and to be clearly seen as defensive in
nature.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Professor Cohen?
STEPHEN COHEN: I’ve never known what "purely defensive weapons"
have meant—I mean, presuming they are guns that shoot in only one direction. I
mean, it’s going to have no effect. I mean, they’re talking about giving the
Ukrainians maybe some small arms, some night vision stuff, some superior
intelligence. They can’t give them intelligence information, because the
Ukrainian intelligence services, as we know from the tapes we’ve had, the
leaked tapes, and from the CIA secret
mission which was exposed to Ukraine, revealed.
The real debate going on in NATO—the real debate, because
this is a distraction—is what Rasmussen said in your earlier clip—he’s the
political head of NATO—that we’re building up, as we talk, our forces in
eastern Europe. Now, understand what’s going on here. When we took
in—"we" meaning the United States and NATO—all these countries in
eastern Europe into NATO, we did not—we agreed with the Russians we would not put
forward military installations there. We built some infrastructure—air strips,
there’s some barracks, stuff like that. But we didn’t station troops that could
march toward Russia there. Now what NATO is saying,
it is time to do that. Now, Russia already felt encircled by NATO member states on its borders. The
Baltics are on its borders. If we move the forces, NATO forces, including American troops,
to—toward Russia’s borders, where will we be then? I mean, it’s obviously going
to militarize the situation, and therefore raise the danger of war.
And I think it’s important to emphasize, though I regret
saying this, Russia will not back off. This is existential. Too much has
happened. Putin—and it’s not just Putin. We seem to think Putin runs the whole
of the universe. He has a political class. That political class has opinions.
Public support is running overwhelmingly in favor of Russian policy. Putin will
compromise at these negotiations, but he will not back off if confronted
militarily. He will not.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the situation in Russia,
especially the growing—some reports are that Putin’s popularity has now surged
to about 80 percent of the population, at a time when there was actually a
dissident movement that was beginning to gather strength within Russia against
the more authoritarian aspects of Russian society.
STEPHEN COHEN: Since this is Democracy
Now!, let me assert my age and my credential. Beginning in the 1970s, I
lived in Russia among the then-Soviet dissidents. They were brave people. They
were pro-democracy. They struggled. They paid the price. With the coming of
Gorbachev, who embraced many of their democratizing ideas, they were
marginalized, or they moved into the establishment as official democratizers.
This struggle has continued, even under Putin. But the result of this
confrontation, East-West confrontation—and I can’t emphasize how fundamental
and important it is—is going to set back whatever prospects remained in Russia
for further democratization or re-democratization, possibly a whole generation.
It is simply going to take all the traction these people have gotten out from
under them. And still worse, the most authoritarian forces in Russia and
Russia’s authoritarian traditions will now be reinvigorated politically in kind
of a—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And it’s all ultra-nationalist, as well, right?
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s ultra-nationalists, but it’s certainly
nationalist.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right.
STEPHEN COHEN: And, I mean, by the way, we’re a nationalist country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right.
STEPHEN COHEN: We use a different word: We call it
"patriotism." Do you remember an American president who ever ran and
said, "I’m not an American patriot"? I say I’m an American patriot.
We don’t call ourselves "nationalists." Also, we don’t have a state
in the United States; we have a government. The Europeans have states. We have
a government. But you take away the language—this is not unusual, but
there—when it surges like this, as it does in run-ups to war—and we’re in the
run-up at least to a possible war—this is what you get. That’s why I think the
policy, the American policy, has been unwise from the beginning.
AMY GOODMAN: The front page of The
New York Times: "Russia Economy Worsens Even Before Sanctions
Hit." And they’re attributing it partly to Russia’s action in Crimea.
STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah. Well, I mean, the asymmetry of all of this, right?
We say Putin’s got 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. And there may or may not
be; nobody’s exactly clear how long they’ve been there and what they’re doing,
but obviously they’re not helping the situation. But what we have are sanctions
that we may put in place against Putin’s cronies. This is—this is the threat.
This is what the White House says: "We are going to sanction his
oligarchical cronies." And presumably, on this theory, they will go to him
and say, "Look, Volodya, you’ve got to stop this, because my bank accounts
..." This is utter nonsense. First of all, he’ll just appoint new
oligarchs. Secondly, there’s a law in the Russian Duma, the Parliament, being
debated that the state will compensate anybody whose assets are frozen in the
West. Now, I don’t know if they’ll pass the law, but you could see that this
doesn’t bother the Kremlin leadership.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have one minute. The significance of the meeting
in Geneva with Ukraine, Russia, United States, European Union, and what’s going
to happen in eastern Ukraine?
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but things are
getting worse and worse. People are being killed. So, obviously, that’s bad,
and we’re moving closer toward a military confrontation. The Russians are
asking at negotiations the following. They want NATO expansion ended to its all former
Soviet republics. That means Ukraine and Georgia, period. I think we should
give them that. This has been a reckless, endangering policy. It’s time for it
to end. They want a federal Ukrainian state. That’s a debate. But Ukraine is
several countries; you can only hold it together with a federal constitution.
And they want, in the end, a stable Ukraine, and they will contribute
financially to making that possible. I don’t see any reason there, other than
the White House saving political face, why that’s not a good negotiating
position to begin with.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Stephen Cohen, we want to thank you very much for
being with us, professor of Russian studies at New York University, before
that, Princeton University, author of numerous books on Russia and the Soviet
Union. His most recent book, Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, just out
in paperback. This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, The
War and Peace Report. Stay with us.
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