The West has behaved incredibly foolishly, says leading expert on Russia and Ukraine Richard Sakwa

Two years ago today – on the first day of Russia’s invasion into Ukrainian territory – I did an online interview with a British scholar whose special expertise was the decades-long geopolitical crisis involving Russia and Ukraine, which was at that moment erupting into war. Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, and author of a book called Frontline Ukraine – Crisis in the Borderlands, which came out in 2015. Sakwa, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s top experts in this area, describes the book as a ‚substantial work which tries to analyse why Ukraine is the cockpit of the European security crisis.‘ We had scheduled the interview for Thursday afternoon, 24th February – without having any idea, of course, that on that same day Russian bombs would already be falling on military targets within Ukraine and Russian troops moving across the border. An edited version of this interview appears below.

What I most wanted to understand at that critical moment, and what I wanted Richard Sakwa to explain, was just how it was that we had got to that point. It was clear enough that the question of Ukraine’s NATO membership was at the heart of it, with the Russians claiming this was an existential threat to them and therefore ‚the reddest of red lines‘, and NATO leaders maintaining that the alliance was purely defensive and thus nothing for Russia to worry about, no matter how close it came to their border or to Moscow. Western analysts, in fact, had argued that Russia’s demand that Ukraine not join NATO was essentially a demand that Ukraine be left vulnerable to Russian attack. What Richard Sakwa explained, however, was that long before there was any question of Ukraine’s NATO membership – in fact since the early days after the end of the Cold War, years before Putin came on the scene – Russia had been asking Western leaders to help negotiate some kind of overarching security framework: a framework that would include both Russia and Ukraine, together with NATO countries, and would provide equal security guarantees for them all. If we want to understand the real roots of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, says Sakwa, we have to understand why no such inclusive security framework ever materialised – and for that, we have to go back to the end of the Cold War, when there were two competing visions of what the new international order should look like.

How far back do we have to go in order to understand the roots of this conflict?

I think that you really have to start 30 years ago, and that’s where I start now. Because I’m one of those people who have been warning against this for years – and not only warning against it, but trying to stop it. So, you know, it’s absolutely catastrophic, absolutely catastrophic. But how did we get into this position? It really does behove us all to try to understand that. So we begin 30 years ago. Very briefly, in a nutshell, I argue that at the end of the Cold War – 1989-1991 – there were two peace orders on offer: two post-Cold War peace systems, if you like. The first was the one advocated by Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin – and now, of course, joined by China, India, independent states, the non-aligned movement, and so on. So they’re not alone. And this model – let’s call it the Charter Peace System. Why? Because it’s based on the UN Charter of 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a model of ‚sovereign internationalism‘ – sovereign states coming together, as in the United Nations. The second model was ‚liberal internationalism‘, US-led. Also a good thing – there are plenty of good things in there – but it was a US-led system. It had two major branches – it had the security branch: NATO and the system of US defence alliances across the world, and of course it had the economic branch: the World Trade Organization, open free trade, and so on. So this US-led system, liberal internationalism, dominated and became liberal hegemony after the Cold War. So instead of this multi-polar Russian-Chinese model of peace order, you had one which was unipolar: expansive vision, US dominance was to be guaranteed leadership – which of course, has delivered many public goods, so I’m not trying to denigrate it. But the point is that both these systems ultimately appeal to the United Nations and its principles: they could have been reconciled. That’s what Putin tried to do, that’s what Yeltsin tried to do, and that’s what Gorbachev tried to do. But Washington insisted on its leadership, its dominance. So that’s one leg of the crisis: these two models. That’s why Putin said, even in his speech on 21st of February [three days before the invasion – ed.], that he spoke to Clinton in 2000: let Russia join NATO. Dealing with that security dilemma would have helped fuse these two systems into an indivisible model, with indivisible security. The second leg, the other big picture, is the failure of Europe to take control of its own destiny. It became enmeshed in a Euro-Atlantic system instead of a genuinely pan-Continental, Gaullist-type peace order. That’s the big context, and it’s absolutely crucial, because Putin mentions this over and over again.

So far you haven’t said anything about the civil war that’s been going on in Ukraine’s Donbas region for eight years. How does that figure into Russia’s decision to invade?

So yes, this all taken against the background, as you know, of Putin’s sense that ‚Okay, we’ve got to bring this crisis to an end.‘ In the Donbas, after the events of 2014, we’ve had permanent shelling. I’ve just been looking at United Nations figures: 81 percent of the casualties and incidents were from Ukraine bombing its own people in Donetsk, and along there. Absolutely disgraceful, and yet we have not heard the West condemning it: Ukrainian attacks on the nearly four million citizens in the Donbas, and not fulfilling the Minsk agreements. And of course, Minsk was all about returning these areas to Ukrainian sovereignty. There seemed to be no room for diplomacy. Russia, of course, in December [2022] put forward its ideas for security treaties – but there was almost no engagement with the fundamental issues on the part of the West. More than that: the condemnation of these ideas of indivisible security, as being somehow illegitimate – and insisting that NATO had to enlarge at all costs. Even though, of course, Ukraine isn’t going to be joining NATO anytime soon. That’s the background to the appalling events of these days now.

You said that Putin asked Clinton way back in 2000 about the possibility of Russia joining NATO. Wasn’t the deeper issue – regardless of whether it joined NATO or not – that Russia felt there ought to be some kind of collective security agreement – basically that Europe and Russia should be on the same level with the same security guarantees by virtue of the same agreement? Isn’t that what’s really at the bottom of this?

Yes, that’s absolutely the case. Funny you should mention it – I’ve just been looking at Zbigniew Brzezinski’s well-known book The Grand Chessboard of the mid-1990s, in which he ferociously defended NATO enlargement. Fair enough, because NATO enlargement can deliver public goods, one would say that – stopping Greece and Turkey from going to war, for a start. But he himself, interestingly enough, said that this has to take place in what you just mentioned, a larger, broader overarching security framework with Russia. That’s what Putin demanded, that’s what Yeltsin demanded. So, yes, absolutely.

You’ve mentioned the concept of ‚indivisible security‘ – the idea that my security depends on your security, and that one country’s security can’t come at the expense of another country’s security. I know that some European leaders have made the point that indivisible security for Europe has to include Russia, but this idea never seems to get anywhere. Why haven’t European leaders managed to develop any kind of overarching system that includes security relations with Russia?

Well, this gets back to the dominance of Washington and London and their ‚bloc discipline‘ of NATO. When we have these ideas put forward by Emmanuel Macron in August 2019, in his speech to diplomats, one of the best speeches of our time, when he said: ‚Look, Russia has security interests‘ – and he said it again recently: ‚We cannot build European security against Russia, it has to be with Russia‘ – he was smacked down, smacked down, by the Atlantic powers. And so we need less bloc discipline. We need ideas, we need debate, how to solve this – instead of which we have this ferocious Anglo-American closing down of debate. And, of course, Ukraine is then set up and established in its modern form as an anti-Russian project. And hence, Russia just had enough. Again, not to justify for a second the response. But we as scholars, we as academics, must understand the logic of how we got here. And there’s no excuse, because they refused to accept Russia’s concerns – even the fact that they raised a question wasn’t considered legitimate.

It seems, from a lot of the commentators I’ve heard, that the US has been opposing this all along – any kind of larger security agreement that includes Russia. What’s not clear to me is why. Why do you think it is that the US has resisted this type of security agreement for so long?

At the beginning – we’re talking about the 1990s – Russia was weak, so its views could be ignored. Even the most pro-Western Russian commentator, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, in his memoirs, he actually says how Russia was constantly excluded from discussions, for example about Nagorno-Karabakh/Transnistria issues. And he would hear about meetings and ask, ‚Why wasn’t I invited?‘ The Western powers, the US, said: ‚It’s nothing to do with you.‘ Nothing to do with you? And it’s in their neighbourhood! And then, when Russia gained strength, there was this normative question, which one can understand – that Russia would dilute the normative framework and weaken institutional cohesion. But that would pertain to the Atlantic Alliance, to NATO, and we’re talking about some framework that would operate above the Atlantic Alliance. And, the US would never give Russia a veto voice, and it had to be given one – only in certain things, which have to do with regional Eurasian Security: Central Asia, and so on. The US can do its global thing, you know, as much as it likes. Why did the US resist it? Because, of course – and I’m now quoting a huge literature – it’s that the US has to remain dominant, which means its leadership and its hegemonic ambitions. You know, it’s quite explicit, that it cannot share power. I put it in my book years ago: there can only be one tiger on the mountain, as the Chinese say.

It seems that what you’re saying touches on other countries as well – I mean countries like China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela – that have challenged US dominance in some way or other.

Yes, it’s a systemic structure. I think it’s a huge mistake. I think that Russia, China, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, etc., were very happy to work within the framework of multilateralism, sovereign internationalism – giving US leadership its due, because sometimes it’s useful, sometimes it’s important. And obviously, in all of this, anything I say, you know, it’s predicated that we want warm, close relations with our friends in the United States. So we’re not talking about a primitive anti-Americanism – we’re talking about a more complex picture, in which the United States joins the community of nations as an equal – even, you know, first amongst equals. Putin said this once: first amongst equals, because it’s the most powerful, and it has leadership duties. But we cannot accept its imperialistic or hegemonic ambitions. And don’t forget, it’s very interesting that some Ukrainian generals today have been condemning Zelensky for having mismanaged this, for having become a puppet of Washington – and that he’s simply mismanaged Ukraine’s genuine security interests, which would have been to negotiate with Moscow and say: Okay, we’re not going to join NATO. They weren’t going to join it anyway, for the next couple of decades. So let’s just accept it – instead of which, everything he said was almost psychotic – ‚We want to join NATO,‘ and worse than this: he started talking in the last couple of weeks about Ukraine becoming a nuclear power. And technically, as Putin said, it could do so. That should have been smacked down immediately. But all of this just proved to Moscow that the West was using Ukraine as this sort of anti-Moscow platform. Again, I keep saying, none of this justifies a war of this sort. But the point is, we in the peace movement have been saying for years and years that NATO has to be limited, it has to be negotiated – it has to be, as we said earlier, within a larger framework. And the failure to achieve that is going to lead to a backlash. And catastrophically, we’re witnessing the backlash today. Also what’s interesting, of course, is that among Ukrainians – I know it quite well, and the same is true of Russians, by the way – there was no war-monger attitude. This came from Washington and London – and Poland, one has to say. There should have been negotiation, some sort of de-escalation, all the way back to December. It’s clear – Putin has lost patience. And I think – and I’ve been warning this for a long time – that after Putin, it’s going to be far worse. He is remarkably risk-averse, a very conservative sort of figure. And the fact that he’s been pushed to this – again, not to justify it. But the fact that they felt their security was in such jeopardy – it was an existential threat, their back was to the wall. Missiles in Ukraine! I mean, it’s just unthinkable. I personally am at a loss to understand how foolish the West has been here, how closed in this approach – the fact that it has demonized Putin, instead of engaging with him and the Russian leadership.

It’s clear that Russia’s desire to keep Ukraine neutral is connected with the old idea of having a ‚buffer zone‘ around a country’s borders, so that a potential enemy can’t just march up to the border and attack. One of the arguments put forward by Western leaders, however, has been that Russia should not feel threatened by the presence of NATO in Ukraine – that NATO is a purely defensive alliance, and that Russia is overreacting. What do you say to this?

A sphere of security is legitimate, and I use the following example. If Ireland, next to the UK, wanted to join a hostile alliance – for example the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – and put missiles in Ireland, I think London would be pretty nifty to say that Ireland’s sovereignty is limited and that’s not allowed.

It seems to me and to a lot of people that the US really doesn’t have any ‚skin in this game‘. You know, Ukraine is far away from the US, it’s not going to be a war on their border. Would Europe be better served if the US just kind of stayed out of it, and let European countries and Russia and Ukraine work it out amongst themselves, without this influence of a major power far away?

Absolutely. That’s exactly been my argument for years. Euro-Atlanticism outlived its purpose at the end of the Cold War – instead of which, the obsessional attempt to maintain Euro-Atlantic unity has been catastrophic. It has stopped pan-Continental projects of unity, of the sort Francois Mitterrand promoted, you know, a confederation of Europe. We’ve all been talking about this, I’ve been talking about for over 30 years. It was the only way forward – again, with friendship with the United States, again, this was not anti-American. It was in their best interests to leave, and when needed we’d invite them in to help, because the United States does have responsibilities, and it’s a great power – in all senses a great power: not just a military, but also an intellectual and a cultural power, which, you know, many of us admire. But this whole Euro-Atlantic NATO system should have been dismantled, and a robust alternative put in its place.

What advice would you have for Slovakia, or for Slovak leaders and intellectuals who are addressing this issue? What do you think they should bear in mind, or pay attention to, in this situation?

So, my advice to Slovakia is – well, I’d always welcome a voice of peace and moderation, that’s all. Just keep plugging the argument to say: Look, no one is blameless in this conflict. Let’s try to have a diplomatic session, and maybe even act as the peacemaker and call for an International Conference of Bratislava as the venue.