Biden’s mistaken Russia policy

There is a dangerous element in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy. It comes from his deeply embedded dislike of Russian president Vladimir Putin. While vice-president Biden was point man in Ukraine for President Barack Obama and thus presided over the creation of a false narrative of the events which led to the toppling of President Viktor Yanukovich. This precipitated Putin’s reaction- the seizure of Crimea and the entry of the Russian military into the southeast to help local militias fight for the autonomy of two of the Russian-speaking provinces.

In 2014 Biden, his associates and the EU argued that when the uprising against Yanukovich’s pro-Russian leanings got underway it was the government’s forces that turned violently on the pro-European demonstrators marshaled in the centrally located Maiden Square. In fact, as we now know, it wasn’t Yanukovich’s police which did the killing, it was right-wing militia whose pedigree went back to Hitler’s days. There is incontrovertible evidence that the shooting and killing were their doing.

Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia, has written a lengthy analysis in the Washington Monthly of the Nato-Ukraine imbroglio He argues that Russian complaints about Western policy, especially in Ukraine and about the expansion of Nato, are groundless. He pours scorn on the suggestion of some critics that it was the expansion of Nato up to Russia’s borders that “provoked Russia into grabbing Crimea”.

McFaul’s other point is that the famous “re-set” in 2009 offered by Obama when Dimitri Medvedev took over as president from Putin, an effort to get Russian-American relations back on the rails, showed that the Russians at that time weren’t that much bothered by the expansion of Nato. Why should they have been? The first expansion was geographically limited, far from the Ukraine’s western border, and it was some years before the Ukraine crisis.

The widely respected Russian scholar, Gordon Hahn, argued in a paper published last October, “McFaul omits two issues. First, he gravely obfuscates the causality chain, inferring that Moscow has stated that Nato expansion was a direct result of Putin’s Crimean annexation and reunification with Russia”. Wrong. Moreover, there were other reasons for Russian anger that McFaul avoids mentioning.

As Hahn points out, McFaul sets up a straw man. “No one has ever made the argument that Nato expansion was the immediate cause of Putin’s move in Crimea”. The truth is that it was only with the ouster of Yanukovich that Moscow felt it had good reason to believe that the “Maidan Revolution” would lead to Ukraine’s membership in Nato.

An even more important omission in McFaul’s article is that he does not mention that at its April 2008 summit meeting in Bucharest Nato issued a highly provocative statement that both Georgia and Ukraine would someday become Nato members. A foreign policy spokesman for the Biden Administration has recently reiterated this objective. This statement was first made by President George W. Bush and then reiterated four times by the Obama administration at various summits. The last time it was made was at the height of the Ukrainian crisis. All along Yanukovich opposed this. He wanted, he said, “a non-aligned state. We don’t want to join any military bloc”. However, he said, he was happy for Ukraine to cooperate with certain of Nato’s programs which included the use of Ukrainian aviation and material in the transportation of cargo and personnel of Nato member states.

The US is as much to blame for the state of US-Russian relations as the Kremlin, argues the William Perry, the Defence Secretary under President Bill Clinton.

For Perry the principle culprits were the expansion of Nato and the decision to send US-led Nato forces to Bosnia in 1996. “These were the first steps down the slippery slope.” Prior to that, Perry points out, “relations were going well, including four joint military exercises between Nato and Russia”.

Within the next few days, according to the White House and the Kremlin, Russia and the US will sign a 5-year extension to the historic agreement, New Start, made by Russia and America to cut their intercontinental nuclear weapons by 30 percent. The way will then be open to further cuts in strategic nuclear arms. Also it is important to re-introduce the nuclear disarmament treaties that Trump cancelled. (Whoever said that Trump was in Putin’s pocket?) The extension signing will be a moment of goodwill. This is the time for both sides to agree to a new “re-set”, this one hopefully more fair, more realistic and copper-bottomed. And one that ends using Ukraine as a bargaining chip