American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The Ukrainian people — all of the Ukrainian people — need catharsis and reconciliation before healing. When they can begin, in the face of ongoing war with Russia, is the question put to Ukraine scholar Nicolai Petro, whose new book is, “The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution.” Kelley Vlahos and Daniel Larison talk with Petro about the history, the competing identities, and the institutional barriers within Ukraine that have made the East-West conflict what it is today. Dan and Kelley also discuss Russia’s decision to ditch nuclear talks and how the one nuclear treaty left between Washington and Moscow could be on its way out forever.

The bipartisan consensus in the Beltway on the United States being    the ‘indispensable’ world power is usually attributed to the neocons who have been the driving force of the US foreign and security policy in successive administrations since the 1970s.

The op-end in the Washington Post on Saturday titled Time is not on Ukraine’s side, coauthored by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in George W. Bush presidency and Defence Secretary Robert Gates (who served under both Bush and Barack Obama), highlights this paradigm.

This article looks at the development of Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian Studies as academic disciplines in the English-speaking world, and considers how the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 affected their approaches, conceptual horizons, and reception within the former Soviet space.

Written mostly before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the book The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution is an illuminating read for anyone wishing to know how we arrived at the existential crossroads that threatens WWIII. This is the book for those hungry for an historical understanding of Ukraine’s seething internal conflict—western hypernationalism versus eastern cultural diversity —that made Ukraine vulnerable to a geopolitical power struggle, a pawn in the cruel hands of both Russia and the United States.

Author Nicolai Petro served as former President H.W. Bush’s State Department Assistant Policy Advisor on the Soviet Union and a temporary attaché in Moscow. He now teaches at the University of Rhode Island, a professor of comparative international politics, peace studies and non-violence.

One wonders – as did the American diplomat George F. Kennan, the father of the Cold War containment doctrine who warned against NATO expansion in 1998 – whether the advancement of NATO eastward has increased the security of European states or made them more vulnerable.

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has gone through several rounds of enlargement so that every non-Soviet former member of the Warsaw Pact and even some former Soviet republics are now part of the Alliance. Russia has long been claiming that it sees NATO expansion as a security threat, but this claim has recently attracted more scrutiny, for it was a key part of the justification presented by the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukraine.

Given the record so far and the continued limits on Russian manpower, armor and ammunition, however, there is no realistic chance that a Russian breakthrough could lead to the capture of Kyiv. It is not even remotely likely that Russia could capture Kharkiv, while Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson to the left bank of the Dnieper River makes an offensive against the Ukrainian Black Sea ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa virtually impossible.

Whipping up public sentiments in Russia against Putin is a core American objective in the war.

Any of the three most likely scenarios are fraught with difficulties absent a successful negotiated settlement.

 

During his 40 years in the political science department at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer has not avoided controversy. His article and subsequent book about the Israel lobby, for example, written with Harvard University’s Stephen Walt, caused a stir in 2006 and 2007. More recently, at the beginning of March 2022, the New Yorker ran a headline that read: “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine.” We asked Prof. Mearsheimer to explain that and talked to him about being a realist, his military service, and his time in academia.

The neocons in the Beltway have bitten more than what they could chew. Their last card will be to push for a direct US military intervention in the Ukraine war under the banner of a “coalition of the willing.”

 

Col. Macgregor talks about the current on-the-ground situation in Ukraine which sees signs of Russia shifting front-line firepower away from Bakhmut.

Angela Merkel’s interview to Zeit Magazine confirms for the rest of world that EU strategic autonomy always was a lie. She admits that her advocacy of the 2014 Minsk ceasefire was a deception. It was an attempt to give Kiev time to strengthen its military — and was successful in that regard, Merkel said.  “[Ukraine] used this time to get [militarily] stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today”.

The EU posits itself as a strategic player; a political power in its own right; a market colossus; a monopsony with the power to impose its will over whomsoever trades with it.  Simply put: the EU insists (and believes) that it possesses meaningful political agency.  But it has no political or military power per se (it being a US vassal).  Rather, its influence derives from its economic breadth — and that has been wasted through self-harm.

Recently there has been much talk about the ‘decolonization’ of Ukraine. This is often understood as ridding the Ukrainian public sphere and the education system of Russian culture and language. The more radical decolonizers, also to be found in the West, would like to see the Russian Federation disintegrate into multiple smaller states—to finish the process of the collapse of imperial Russia that began in 1917 and was not completed in 1991, with the dissolution of the ussr. In the university context, it may also mean ‘decolonizing’ the thinking of the social sciences and humanities, whose approach to the whole post-Soviet region is seen as having been penetrated and distorted by a long-term form of Russian cultural imperialism.

By the end of the calendar year, the U.S. will have provided $13 billion in direct budgetary support for Ukraine’s government to avoid shortfalls and outright bankruptcy, and President Joe Biden has promised to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

So, BlackRock gets paid by U.S. taxpayers via the Ukrainian government to devise a plan that ensures the success of their future investments in Ukraine, made from money gained by making American housing unaffordable.

Scholar Nicolai Petro discusses the overlooked influence of Ukraine’s far-right nationalist movement and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent admission that the Minsk Accords — the international formula for ending the post-2014 Donbas civil war — “was an attempt to give Ukraine time” to prepare for a conflict with Russia, rather than make peace. Petro is the author of the new book, “The Tragedy of Ukraine.”  Petro is Professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, and author of the new book: The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution. He is a member of the board of ACURA.

President’s Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a classic case of preventative war decision-making. The public record shows that Putin went to war to prevent Ukraine becoming such a powerful NATO bridgehead on Russia’s borders that Kyiv would seek to forcibly regain control of Crimea and the Donbass. Putin foresaw a future war not just with Ukraine but with NATO and the assessed the risks to Russia of an immediate conflict were lower than the medium and long-term threat. The danger of Ukraine becoming a nuclear-armed state also had an important bearing on his final decision for war, as did his perception of the ultra-nationalist Kyiv government as an implacably  ‘anti-Russia’ regime.

Geoffrey Roberts is an Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His latest book is Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale University Press, 2022).

This first episode of the series Trending Globally features Lyle Goldstein, a visiting Professor at the Watson Institute. He’s an expert on the effects of great power conflict, and the theories that explain them.

Professor Goldstein has been following the war in Ukraine closely through both Western and Russian media. He recently published a paper with Watson’s Costs of War Project looking at how, while there are no obvious paths out of this war, there are at least paths we should know to avoid. Host Dan Richards and Professor Goldstein explore the poor assumptions and misunderstandings that drive many ideas in this conflict, as well as what a better path forward might look like.

The Ukraine crisis has more or less reinforced the nearly global view that the world is better served with multipolarity and multilateralism.