Causality, Moral Responsibility, and the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War

The causal explanations are not justifications, but they do overlap. In the West the NATO-Russia Ukraine war is usually referred to as ‘Putin’s war’ or ‘Russia’s war’ against Ukraine. Accompanying texts often aver that Putin seeks to recreate the Soviet empire and even conquer Europe. This is clearly part of a massive attempt in the West to escape any moral responsibility for the catastrophe now unfolding in Ukraine. All causality is attributed to ‘Putin’ and ‘Putin’s Russia’, so all moral responsibility can be laid on him and, if necessary, all Russia.

The facts are that the main cause of the war is NATO’s plan to expand to Ukraine and the efforts undertaken over the last two-three decades by NATO, the EU, and Western governments, especially the U.S. government to achieve that goal. Russia reacted – in some instances overreacted – but it was the West that was the proactive driver of events and the conflict. If there had been no NATO or no NATO expansion, then there would have been no Ukrainian Maidan putsch, no Kiev attack on Donbass, no Russian annexation of Crimea, and no NATO-Russia Ukrainian war. I have detailed the complex causal chain of events here numerous times and will not repeat it here. Suffice it here to offer a simple analogy.

Imagine you are in a restaurant (the international system), and your friends and others tell you that the guy sitting in the corner table is named Russ, and Russ does not like it when people sit at the tables (eastern Europe) that surround his table (Russia) because in the past drunkards (Western powers) have started fights with him, trying to take chairs from his table or to unseat Russ outright from his table. A very few people even say that Russ is aggressive, likes to fight, actually wants to have all the tables for himself, and plans to kick everyone else out of the restaurant. They tell you that if one tries to sit at any of those tables situated around his table, Russ will try to kick you out of your chair and force you to return to your original table.

Rather than keeping his distance, however, one visitor to the restaurant named Nate — who is well-informed about Russ’s troubled history with neighboring tables — begins to move in the course of a few hours from one table to another, nearing and then sitting at one of the tables next to Russ’s table (color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine). As Nate does this, Russ gets up and warns him to stop and not to sit at any table next to his corner table (Putin’s offer to negotiate a new European security architecture and call for NATO to abandon expansion to Ukraine). Then Nate gets up and sits at the table next to Russ’s table (Western-backed Maidan putsch and arms Kiev for eight years). Russ tells Nate to leave that table and return to one of the tables more dstant from his or he will ‘clean your clock’. Nate refuses to move, and Russ cleans Nate’s clock (Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion).

You, having observed all this as one of the erstwhile restaurant-goers at the time, are asked to describe what happened by someone who just entered the restaurant post-clock-cleaning, and you, late for an appointment, hurriedly relate the course of events, saying simply that Nate sat down at the table next to Russ and Russ got up and beat him (Western version of events). Your interlocutor says that Russ is ‘evil’, and that Nate is good (Western public). As you walk out, you blurt out that things were more complicated, and your interlocutor says you are a friend of Russ and no less evil than him.

This is precisely what has happened with regard to Russia, NATO, the West, and Western discourse.

In order to cover up the complex causality and moral responsibility shared by the West and Russia for the ‘clock cleaning’, the West has been adamant that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked.” The alleged lack of provocation is then used to support the view that if Putin is not rolled back in Ukraine, he will invade all the other former Soviet republics, and soon we will be fighting Russian forces on the Vistula, Elbe, Rhine, Thames, and Potomac.

But we know Putin has no intention of restoring the USSR or invading Europe, because Russia made no effort to seize all of the former Soviet republic of Georgia in the 2008 Georgia-Ossetian/Russian war, even though Russian troops were facing a vastly inferior military force and Russian troops were as close as 60 miles from the Georgian capitol, Tbilisi. Similarly, in 2014 Putin could easily have mounted an invasion in Ukraine of the kind he did last year and limited his goal to the extremely low hanging fruit of seizing and annexing all of Donetsk and Luhansk as he did in Crimea, but he did not attempt to do this. In other words, when he had the chance – before NATO had eight years to harden Kiev’s military – Putin did not try to take the Donbass regions no less all of Ukraine just as he did not try to take all Georgia in 2008.

In annexing Crimea and recognizing the independence of Georgia’s breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetiya, Putin tried to protect Russia’s Black Sea Fleet naval base in Sevastopol and ethnic Russians on Crimea and remove an instability threat near Russia’s North Caucasus border, then a conduit for jihadi terrorists. In the case of Donbass, he instead signed on to apeace process that recognized Ukraine’s territorial integrity (sans Crimea) and stipulated limited autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk to negotiated between Donbass rebels and the Kiev Maidan regime—the latter of which refused to follow through and negotiate with their fellow Ukrainians. Instead, Kiev continued to carry out its ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against Donbass, and the rest is rather contemporary ‘history.’

The polarizing tectonic of our already split apart world is intensifying at the schism’s present epicenter – Ukraine. Both Ukraine and Russia are radicalizing, becoming more zealous, irreconcilable, exclusive, and perjorative in their rhetoric and propaganda. This will make coming to the negotiating increasingly difficult for both regimes, as their populaces having believed their governments’ words will find it difficult to tolerate a turn to peace. Ukraine and the West continue to demonize everything Russia, ratcheting Russophobia up to fascist levels. Russian cultural figures from the past and present are being banned or forced to repent for or denounce their government’s war policy. Indeed, Russian culture and Russians as individuals are again being denigrated as uncivilized, backwards, unenlightened, and culturally inferior to Westerners—all this despite the close cultural affinity of Russians and Ukrainians. Putin and his domestic political allies are increasingly compared to Hitler and Stalin, even though there is no profound ideological, cultural, or ethnonational hatred of Ukrainians or Americans contained in their speeches, policies, and official documents. In turn, Russians are blamed for the fact that Putin and Putinists are and have remained in power for so long. One needs only to recall calls from the likes of former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, and his comments arguing for collective guilt and collective punishment – for now confined to suffering under sanctions – of all Russians. Yet Russia’s just recently revised Foreign Policy Doctrine specifically states that the Western democracies are not Russia’s enemy and Moscow still seeks good relations with them.  

The Moscow Crocus City, St. Petersburg terrorist attack, and others, and the West’s response to them provide another good example of Ukro-Western dehumanization of Russia. Some in the West justified Ukrainian terrorist attacks, such as the 2 April 2023 terrorist attack in St. Petersburg, and no Western government has condemns them. They assert that such are legitimate targets; a Russian war correspondent who participated in military actions in Ukraine can be exploded in a restaurant surrounded by innocents. The other 39 victims in the Petersburg attack are excluded from the ‘rules-based international order’, apparently because they are Russian.

The visit by NATO Gen Sec Stoltenberg to Kiev weeks later and his statement that Ukraine belongs in the “Euro-Atlantic civilization”, combined with the abundance of neofascist ideology, pols, and military, can not but buttress the Russian public’s support for the war effort. This may not be incompetence on Stoltenberg’s part. It could very well be the intent to radicalize Russia and push it further into the rogue category as a way of justifying NATO’s growing role in the Ukraine war.

Whereas Ukrainian and Western discourse has passed the stage of fear and paranoia and become aggressive and racist, Russian rhetoric and propaganda – almost exclusively in the media, with government officials being more cautious – are increasingly demonizing the Ukrainian regime and its neofascist elements as not just ‘Nazis’, which at least approximates an aspect of Ukrainian reality. There is  a ‘mystification’ of this demonization of the enemy in Kiev and in Western socieites as ‘satanic’, playing on the religious orientation of Russian culture and the conservative portion of Russia’s political spectrum. Russian media is increasingly referring to the ‘Satanization’ of Ukraine and the West (e.g., https://vz.ru/opinions/2023/4/14/1207257.html?utm_campaign=vz&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=push). Ukraine’s repression of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), formerly affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow (and Kiev, 800-1100 years ago), play into this image in remarkably convenient ways for Russian demonization efforts. Russian media is not starved for images of Ukrainian neofascists and Western-influenced Ukrainian liberals beating, taunting, and screaming like little devils at OCU priests and Orthodox believers. Things have gone so far that even some Ukrainian soldiers have even posted videos condemning Zelenskiy’s support for the confiscation of OCU churches, monasteries, and shrines in response to the tragifarce. The direction this is taking Kiev was indicated when during Orthodox Easter celebration Ukrainian armed forces targeted a church during services with artillery, killing a pregnant yound woman and wounding six others. The iconography of this act could not have supported Russian discourse better: Fascist demons had slaughtered a living analogy of the perhaps the most sacred image in Russian Orthodoxy – the Bogomater’ – maternal image of divinity represented by May, the mother of God.

This kind of primordial mutual demonization coming from both sides is rising to the level of Arab-Israeli enmity. We know what this has wrought in the Middle East—decades of hatred, war, and terrorism. This is what awaits Europe and Russia should the parties continue to conduct themselves in this way. Moreover, the image of two Christian peoples hating and slaughtering each other is precisely what the secular and atheist globalists, transgenderists, transhumanists, radical leftists and ultra liberals need to develop their own propaganda for their own no less nefarious goals. But most of all, these Slavic Christian peoples would do well to remember that their hatred and murdering is exactly over that which they contend their God despairs.

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About the Author –

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.