Blaming the Victim

Bashing Ukraine on Crimea deflects criticism of Russia

Anatol Lieven believes that the biggest problem in Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is that Ukrainians want their country back.

Yes, the Russian army invasion has forced millions from their homes; the occupiers have kidnapped tens of thousands of children and spirited them to Russia; Russian soldiers have systematically raped women and girls; and missiles and bombs launched from Russian bases have leveled scores of peaceful Ukrainian cities and towns.

The core problem, however, the issue preventing a peaceful end to the war, is not Putin’s desire to reconquer a country the Soviet Union once ruled but that Ukraine has made “the reconquest of Crimea a nonnegotiable goal of its war effort,” writes the Quincy Institute scholar this week in Foreign Policy.

Photo by Konstantin Dyadyun on Unsplash

Crimea, he says, has become Ukraine’s “Frankenstein’s Monster.”  He argues that even as Ukraine prepares an offensive that could cut the land bridge between Crimea and Russia, there are now “clear differences” among Ukrainian officials because “the Ukrainian government has helped foster a general public mood that Crimea must be recovered at all costs.” He agrees that the majority of Ukrainians support liberating Crimea, but argues this sentiment has been manipulated by a “public atmosphere greatly reinforced by state control of television.”

He cites an anonymous Ukrainian confiding that although he thinks Ukraine should allow the Russian annexation of Crimea to stand “the problem is that it has become almost impossible to say this in public without losing your job and perhaps worse.” If the Ukrainian offensive this spring includes efforts to free Crimea, Lieven warns, it could risk nuclear war.

Ukrainians did not take kindly to Lieven’s analysis. Kyiv School of Economics President Tymofiy Mylovanov skewered Leiven in a Twitter thread. “Anatol is uninformed, confused, and uses a self-defeating narrative,” he wrote. Mylovanov had the facts to back up his harsh words.

Lieven is a prolific scholar. He argued repeatedly before the war that Western policies were to blame if Putin invaded. When Putin did invade, Lieven condemned it. His writings, however, focus almost exclusively on the role of the US and NATO in provoking Putin and the divisions within Ukraine.

This is the core problem. It may be that Ukraine cannot militarily retake Crimea. It may be that gloomy defense assessments are correct that neither side can achieve a decisive military victory. But one-sided analyses that ignore, excuse or defend Russian war crimes and shift the blame for the war from the aggressor to the defenders do not help resolve the conflict. This is not diplomacy but deception.

More objective assessments would include the views of those like retired Gen. Ben Hodges who conclude that Ukraine should and can retake Crimea. “It would be a huge mistake for the country to enter into peace talks with Russia now,” Hodges argues. Or those of former diplomat William Courtney who says with fellow RAND analyst Scott Savitz in an oped this month that “Ukraine does not, however, need to drive occupying forces out of Crimea to render it less hospitable to Russia’s purposes. Combinations of modern technologies could enable Ukraine to blockade and barrage Russian operations.” That is, Lieven’s prediction about Crimea could be as wrong as his prediction in January 2022 that “A new war between Ukraine and Russia could end only in Ukrainian military defeat, and perhaps in the loss of much larger territories.”

Lieven is part of a developing current on the fringes of U.S. national security analysis that is using Putin’s war to promote a larger agenda. I wrote an analysis last month for the on-line magazine, Persuasion, that outlined this fusion of anti-war left activists with Libertarians and MAGA movement activists.

They have found common cause in efforts to promote cuts in military budgets and a new “restraint” foreign policy. While these efforts are reasonable, even needed, they see the war in Ukraine as a distraction from their goals and want it to end. This left-libertarian-MAGA current has a blind spot for Russia, deflecting and distracting from its aggression with a myopic focus on Ukraine and the sins of the West. I wrote:

Since Russia shows no willingness to stop its invasion, the left restraint movement wants the United States to force Ukraine to end the war by declaring an immediate cease-fire, promising Ukrainian neutrality and agreeing to Russian occupation of parts of the country, particularly Crimea. The right of Ukrainians to determine their own strategy and their own future must be subordinated, in this view, to the need to end the war.

Leiven has become a major advocate for this point of view. He concludes his piece with a clever charade, pretending that U.S. ultimatums would actually help extract Ukrainian President Zelensky from a problem of his own making. “Only intense public pressure from Washington could allow Zelensky to agree to a territorial compromise—even if Zelensky himself felt compelled to respond to the pressure in public with bitter protest.”

Rather that undercutting a beleaguered Ukraine, Lieven and his colleagues should turn their analysis to Putin. They could discuss how the deep divisions in Russia over the war disclosed by recent leaked classified documents could be exploited to press for peace. They might examine why a shortages of troops and tanks has forced Putin to cancel many of the Victory Day parades this May and how that “hints at the grim reality behind Moscow’s upbeat propaganda portrayals of his faltering Ukraine invasion,” as Atlantic Council expert Peter Dickinson does this week.

If the critics of Ukraine and the West truly want a diplomatic settlement, they could propose sticks and carrots that could convince Putin to end his barbaric war. Then, at least, they would be focusing on the true cause of the war and its continuation.

The problem is not Ukraine’s position on Crimea, or Ukraine’s “state media” or Ukraine’s “unrealistic” desire to free its occupied people. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “If Russia stops fighting and leaves Ukraine, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.”

There is only one monster we need to defeat. And it was created in Moscow, not Kyiv.