REPEAT a false narrative often enough and it becomes the narrative of the self-proclaimed righteous, or something like that. Applied to the Russo-Ukrainian war it goes something like this: ‘Putin’s War’ (nobody else’s) started in 2014 with Russia’s invasion of Crimea, after which the war criminal Putin was appeased by a cowardly West (bring in Hitler, the MSM say) which emboldened him to wage an unprovoked invasion of the rest of Ukraine in 2022 only for the plucky Ukrainians, led by ‘Churchillian hero’ Zelensky to stop him and in so doing defend freedom and democracy of the entire West. Any negotiated ceasefires, conversely, are pointless because Putin will break them, 25 at last count, because he is not interested in ending the war given he wants to invade the rest of Europe and, as Zelensky claimed in his Oval Office spat, the US too. As such, Ukraine, which not so long ago was branded by the West as a centre of Nazism now must be financially and militarily supported for ‘as long as it takes’, to deter further ‘Russian aggression’. And anyone who challenges this narrative is a Putin patsy.
If a school pupil submitted this cliché overdose as an answer to a question on the causes of the current Russo-Ukrainian war he would struggle to pick up a single mark. Yet it’s the central plank of the European ‘coalition of willing’ that formed in London on March 2 to universal praise from the MSM and the war party, whose representatives paraded ad nauseam across the airwaves with the same script – Zelensky’s a hero, Trump and Vance are bullies, we stand with Ukraine, and Russia is evil; and woe betide anyone who disagrees.
Such MSM derangement, of course, is not uncommon, lest we forget the lynch mobs ready to swoop on anyone questioning the hysteria accompanying the passing of the ‘People’s Princess’, or the WMD fairy tale fed to us by the original coalition of the willing, or the covid scientism. Today at least alternative media can challenge official narratives with its own, in this case helped by the revelations of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio who exposed Zelensky’s disingenuous negotiating. And when Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most ardent Russophobes and leading supporters of Ukraine in Washington, calls on Zelensky to ‘resign or change’, something must be truly amiss.
What of an alternative narrative? Crucially, the official line of the European elites has turned the cause of the conflict on its head with the claim that the war can end only if Ukrainian security needs are guaranteed, whereas in truth the war started and has continued because Russian security concerns were ignored. Russia’s actions, therefore, were never about territory but about security and as such, the war will end only when these security concerns are addressed. As former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it, ‘the West must understand that to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign state’ as strategically it is indispensable to Russia’s security. Consequently, to have Nato military bases there is no more acceptable to Moscow than Soviet nuclear missile sites were to the US in Cuba in 1962. Or as the architect of Containment policy George Kennan stated in 1997, expansion of Nato ‘would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold War era.’ These were not Russian or Putin patsies, but distinguished statesmen who understood the dangers of Soviet imperialism yet at the same time respected Russian interests. Even Churchill, who is wheeled out by every scoundrel when it suits, expressed understanding in his Iron Curtain speech of 1946, for ‘the Russian need to be secure on her Western frontiers’.
Yet despite repeated assurances from Western leaders to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that Nato would not encroach ‘one inch eastward’ and that they understood the need for Russian security, the exact opposite happened. Over the next 20 years all the former Soviet bloc including former Soviet republics, were fully signed up to Nato while by 2014 ever louder Western voices were calling for the incorporation in Nato of Georgia, located in the former Soviet heartland, and Ukraine. Were this to have happened, Russian would have been effectively encircled in the Black Sea with its access to international waters severely restricted. The West’s subsequent involvement in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was the last straw for Moscow. These then were the provocations, noted the celebrated liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs, that led to Russia’s so-called aggression for which until then, argues Professor John Mearsheimer, there was no evidence. The Leftist professor Noam Chomsky concurred, adding presciently in an interview in 2015 that Ukraine’s ambition to join Nato ‘would be quite unacceptable to any Russian leader’, which rather than protect Ukraine would threaten it with major war. Noam Chomsky: Über die Vorgeschichte des Ukraine-Krieges/ On the Background of the Ukraine War.
But once Ukraine’s new pro-EU president, Petro Poroshenko, who allied himself with various ultra-nationalist groups, began to marginalise the millions of indigenous Russian-speaking Ukrainians, predominantly in the east of the country, conflict became inevitable, leading to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, all-out war between separatists in the Donbas and Ukraine’s government and ultimately Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Although mutual blame was levelled at the failure of subsequent ceasefires, the so-called Minsk and Minsk II agreements, Zelensky, elected to office in 2019 to end the civil war in the Donbas, admitted to German news outfit Der Spiegel that he had sabotaged the agreements for their bias towards Russia while Angela Merkel, one of their architects, told the German newspaper Die Zeit that the Minsk Protocol was intended merely to buy Ukraine time to carry on the fight. Peace talks in Istanbul in February 2023 faced a similar fate as the Ukrainians withdrew from them, emboldened by Russia’s stalled offensive as well as encouraged by British prime minister Boris Johnson, who advised on the dangers of surrendering to Russian demands, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda.
It raises the question, therefore, why Western political elites have hitched themselves to such a questionable narrative. To quote another saying, ‘patriotism is the last refuge of leaders who are so unpopular in their own countries that they need a lifeline to save their skins’ or something like that, especially now that Donald Trump has exploded their entire liberal-left world view. The cancelling of elections across Europe, for example in Romania and Britain, and threatening to ban opposition parties is simply not enough to achieve this. In Poland, Donald Tusk’s coalition is struggling against a resurgent populist right. In the UK, both Labour and the Tories are floundering in the polls behind Reform UK, compelling their leaders, Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer, to ‘cling to each other like shipwreck survivors’, as Quentin Letts memorably put it. In France, Emanuel Macron sees a glimmer of hope for his collapsing presidency in evocative Cold War rhetoric that has apparently ushered in a ‘New Era’.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has taken political spin to a new level, which even cursory analysis exposes. Yet the West’s rump elites, who have made undermining their nations a matter of policy, now collectively scramble for the Churchillian mantle in search of a collective Falklands moment. They will be wise, however, to recall Churchill’s indifference towards Eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference and that General Galtieri also had a Falklands moment. Wisdom, one suspects, is not their principal virtue.
