A new book by a prominent American author argues that the US provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. Catalogue it under “fiction”.
Since the late 1940s, a clique of influential Americans has hijacked their country’s foreign policy to settle personal and family grudges, using Ukraine as a weapon. The result, as avoidable as it was predictable, has been the disaster of Russia’s invasion.
That is the argument put forward by Stephen Kinzer in “Boiling Point: How America brought war to Ukraine”.He opens with the disastrous clandestine operations that started in 1949, aimed at supporting the underground anti-communist resistance in Ukraine and other countries. They were the work of Frank Wisner, a CIA boss traumatised by witnessing the communist seizure of power in Romania. Other villains include Zbigniew Brzezinski (the son of a Polish diplomat), Madelaine Albright (daughter of a Czechoslovak one) and Victoria Nuland, who has family roots in Moldova and (by marriage) Lithuania. Like the others, Kinzer argues, “she imbibed anti-Russian passion with her mother’s milk”.
These sentiments fuelled what Kinzer calls “the inter-agency” – a self-selecting, powerful group of US government officials, fixated on using their country’s foreign policy as a “cudgel” against the Kremlin. They stirred up nationalist resistance to Soviet rule and after 1991 expanded Nato. This betrayed assurances given to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, and ignored repeated protests from the Kremlin. The insistence that Ukraine could, should and would join the alliance was the last straw. Not only did Western grandstanding provoke the Russian invasion, it also sabotaged a possible peace deal: talks in Istanbul in April 2022 were on the “edge of success”, but western pressure made the Ukrainians walk away.
The immediate victims of this 75-year-long east-west proxy war are the Ukrainians, but the “cycle of fear, hatred, and conflict” unleashed by American meddling makes everyone the loser, he concludes. Ukraine could have given linguistic and cultural autonomy, Quebec-style, to its Russian-oriented eastern regions, and found a workable, balanced relationship with Moscow, as Finland and Austria did during the cold war. But the Americans would not allow it.
The book, published this week, is topical, readable — and wrong. The central, personalised contention rests on prejudice. Should Jewish Americans be disqualified from foreign policy too? Or those with Irish, African or Asian roots?
The facts are cherry-picked. Nato’s post-1991 expansion, for example, was negotiated with the Kremlin, not imposed on it. Concessions to Russia included no military deployments or bases in the new member states and no military plans to defend them: a kind of “Nato-lite”. Vladimir Putin praised the Rome Summit declaration of 2002 (still on the Kremlin website), which set up the Nato-Russian council. “We have traversed a long path from confrontation to dialogue, from confrontation to cooperation,” he said. Despite paper promises, Ukraine was nowhere near joining the alliance. All that was a good deal for Russia. And Russia broke it.
Kinzer contends that former British prime minister Boris Johnson was dispatched to Kyiv to enforce US President Joe Biden’s veto on the putative Istanbul peace deal. I checked this with Johnson: he denies it. More important than any western reservations at that time were revelations about the massacre in Russian-occupied Bucha. Kinzer does not mention them. More broadly — and oddly for a distinguished former New York Times journalist — he has not interviewed the people whose motivations and behaviour are cited in the selective secondary sources he quotes.
That leads to the biggest blind-spot: how Kinzer treats the victims of Kremlin imperialism. They should accept their fate quietly, he implies, and those who help them are reckless meddlers. The book is dedicated to “the people of Ukraine”. In the pages that follow, they, and their hopes, fears and wishes, are all but invisible.
Edward Lucas is a British writer, journalist and security specialist
Photo credit: Dmytro Tolokonov on Unsplash