David Kotz: Global power and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

The June 29 guest column by Allen Davis and Tom Weiner correctly pointed out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was indeed provoked by the American government’s policy of expanding NATO to the Russian border [“Stop double standard: Tell truth about Ukraine,”]. However, to that point must be added that the provocation did not justify an invasion of Ukraine, which inevitably brought widespread death and destruction.

Since the 1990s, the American government sought to draw all of the countries to Russia’s west into NATO, despite warnings from many commentators that it would eventually lead to war. Ukraine has a 1,426-mile-long border with Russia and at its closest point is only 523 miles from Moscow. NATO is an anti-Russian alliance, yet Russia’s many requests to negotiate about Ukraine’s relation to NATO were rejected by the United States.

Contrary to a claim in the guest column, there is no evidence that our government had a covert role in overthrowing the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2015. That coup took place on Feb. 22, 2015, when two heavily armed far right groups, Svoboda and Right Sektor, which had a history of violent antisemitism and hostility to ethnic Russians, led an armed mob that chased the president out of Ukraine. However, our government immediately saw an opportunity to reverse Ukraine’s long-standing policy of neutrality and get it into NATO. The United States immediately endorsed the illegal seizure of power, and even participated in choosing the officials of the new Ukrainian government. The post-coup Ukrainian government abolished the long-standing status of Russian as an official language in regions with a majority of Russian-speakers.

Big powers such as the United States and Russia do not have the right to dominate their neighbors, but unfortunately that is the usual behavior of powerful capitalist states. Avoiding wars requires diplomacy to find compromises between such big powers. As Americans we can strive to push our government to pursue diplomatic compromises in places where big power interests are in conflict, instead of the unjustified aim of asserting American domination of the global system.

David Kotz

Northampton

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