Causes behind the Ukraine war

A lot has already been written and said about the causes behind the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I am putting this down mostly to organize my own thoughts, and to warn about trying to find and focus on a single cause for the war. Usually when someone wants to boil it down to a single cause, they do it to promote something else, such as a theory or a Youtube video. Reality rarely is this simple, and often I find that the causes behind something are arranged as a self-reinforcing network of causes that point in the same direction, rather than a single all-important cause. I think this is also the case for this war. Lets go through the causes that I see lying behind it.

Russian nationalism

As I've argued earlier, there is a strong strain of revanchist and expansionist Russian nationalism that has become quite dominant in Russian society. This is nothing new, Russia has long been called a "prison of nations" where territories and nations have been subjugated and brutally annihilated. This did not stop during the communist days, but was at its height with Stalin who was a fervent Russian nationalist even though he was from Georgia himself. This included Ukraine, which Russian rulers have attempted to assimilate into a Russian identity and eradicate the Ukrainian national identity for over a hundred years.

Putin has reportedly always been an opponent of Ukraine independence:

"Mikhail Zygar (2016) reveals that Putin has always been obsessed and frustrated with Ukraine. Zygar (2016, 85) writes that Putin was obsessed with Ukraine from the first day of his presidency saying, ‘We must do something, or we’ll lose it’ (Zygar (2016, 258). When somebody mentions Ukraine in front of Putin, ‘he flies into a fury; the words at the end of his sentences are replaced by Russian expletives. For him, everything the Ukrainian government does is a crime’ (Zygar 2016, 4)." (source)

Just after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Putin wrote about the 1954 decision to add Crimea to Ukraine: "Back then, it was impossible to imagine that Ukraine and Russia may split up and become two separate states" (source). On the occasion of the 2022 invasion, he called modern Ukraine “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine” and a mistake (source).

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, not always a clear critic of Russian imperialism, recently stated his opposition to it quite clearly:

"There are several important things happening to Russia that need to be understood: First, jealousy of Ukraine and its possible successes is an innate feature of post-Soviet power in Russia; it was also characteristic of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But since the beginning of Putin’s rule, and especially after the Orange Revolution that began in 2004, hatred of Ukraine’s European choice, and the desire to turn it into a failed state, have become a lasting obsession not only for Putin but also for all politicians of his generation.

 

Control over Ukraine is the most important article of faith for all Russians with imperial views, from officials to ordinary people. In their opinion, Russia combined with a subordinate Ukraine amounts to a “reborn U.S.S.R. and empire.” Without Ukraine, in this view, Russia is just a country with no chance of world domination. Everything that Ukraine acquires is something taken away from Russia." (source)

Oil and gas

A highly trending (at time of speaking) youtube video makes a breathless monocausal argument for the oil and gas angle for the Ukraine conflict (“this is a war over resources”), with some far fetched claims about how oil prices cause various Russian invasions. However, the basic underlying facts are sound. Russia is a country very dependent on the export of oil and gas:

"By 2020, overseas trade made up 46% of Russia’s GDP, World Bank figures show. Oil and gas still provided more than half its exports, with metals accounting for 11%, chemicals about 8% and food products 7%." (source)

So the export these materials combine to about 72% of exports. What is worse, exports of oil and gas alone make up 39% of the federal budget. But it gets worse. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

“Trade accounts for 29 percent of Russian GDP, but Russia imports about 60 percent of its total consumption and pays for imports with earnings from exports, which are overwhelmingly dominated by oil and gas.” 

By adding up all the indirect contributions of oil to GDP, the “overall figure is now up to 67—70 percent” of GDP that comes from oil and gas (source). Even if they are off by half, that is a truly staggering number. Who are Russia's customers? Nearly all the pipelines go to Europe, and Russia is Europe's biggest source of oil and gas. The only big competitor is Norway, but Norway alone is not capable of producing enough volume to seriously threaten Russia's dominance in oil and gas.

Enter Ukraine. The last two decades, vast amounts of hydrocarbons have been found under the surface in Ukraine, mainly located in the Donbas region, and mainly gas, which is the hardest for the Europeans to source from other suppliers.

“As of late 2019, known Ukrainian reserves amounted to 1.09 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, second only to Norway’s known resources of 1.53 trillion cubic meters.” (source)

As luck would have it, a large pipeline network already goes from Russia to Europe through Ukraine. So all Ukraine needed to do is pump up the oil and gas. Shell signed a contract to extract gas from the Yuzivska  gas fields in the Donbas in 2013, one year before the 2014 invasion. They abandoned the drilling in 2015 because of the ongoing war. One competitor had been eliminated.

Food

Ukraine is a food producing powerhouse:

Ukraine produces 18% of the world’s sunflower seed, safflower or cottonseed oil exports; 13% of corn production; 12% of global barley exports; and 8% of wheat and meslin. (source)

While the income from the sale of food may appear small compared to oil and gas, it does buy considerable leverage:

Between them, Ukraine and Russia account for 70% of Egypt and Turkey’s wheat supply. While Ukraine is a major exporter to Asia, Russia provide a large percentage of the wheat demands for sub-Saharan Africa. (source)

Together, Russia and Ukraine would "account for almost 30% of global wheat trade ... Russia, along with its ally Belarus, is also a major exporter of the fertilizers needed to plant a wide range of crops.".

Taking control of Ukraine, which is somewhat inaccurately described as the "breadbasket of Europe" as the EU produces four times as much wheat, would dramatically increase Russia's leverage over food markets, and access to food is a vital political and economic weapon that Russia could use to gain influence. They are already using the threat of famine in the third world to pressure western nations, making the problem worse by mining ports and bombing grain facilities (source).

Political competition

Putin's regime is fake democracy, and it repeats daily through its state media daily how flawed western democracies are. Russians are not stupid, they know their democracy is fake. The point the regime wants to drive home is not that it is genuine or not corrupt, this would not work, but rather that all democracies are fake, all regimes are corrupt, and all held principles are hypocritical. Its aim is not to rouse the population to action, but to drive it to apathy.

This strategy is not unique to Russia, but is prevalent in the far-right, as the writer Amanda Marcotte has pointed out:

"This precedes Trump, but he's made it worse: The GOP tactic is not to claim to be good guys, but to claim everyone is equally bad, and to breed cynicism and paranoia. Notably, this is also how Putin controls the Russian public." (source)

Leftist writer Paul Mason concludes that 

“Putin’s attack on Ukraine is driven by the need to delegitimise any form of democracy in a country whose language, religion and culture is adjacent to that of Russia” (source)

Moreover, Russia is a economically a kleptocracy, where a class of extremely wealthy political rentiers extract value from low-complexity industry such as raw materials and metallurgy. The Ukrainian sociologst Volodymyr Ishchenko, calling these rentiers "political capitalists", wrote:

The discussion of the role of the West in paving the way for the Russian invasion is typically focused on NATO’s threatening stance toward Russia. But taking the phenomenon of political capitalism into account, we can see the class conflict behind Western expansion, and why Western integration of Russia without the latter’s fundamental transformation could never have worked. There was no way to integrate post-Soviet political capitalists into Western-led institutions that explicitly sought to eliminate them as a class by depriving them of their main competitive advantage: selective benefits bestowed by the post-Soviet states. The so-called “anti-corruption” agenda has been a vital, if not the most important, part of Western institutions’ vision for the post-Soviet space, widely shared by the pro-Western middle class in the region. For political capitalists, the success of that agenda would mean their political and economic end. (source)

The political trajectory started by the Maidan revolution set Ukraine on a collision course with the rentier class, many of whom had economic interests in Ukraine, or feared direct competition from it. 

Redirecting internal dissent

This is the argument that regime security was a much bigger motivation for the invasions than national security. Many articles have been written pushing this idea. Cambridge University professor Aleksandar Matovski argues that both invasions coincided with mass discontent in Russia:

“to the extent you can capture the threat of mass rebellion with opinion and protest trends, late 2021 looked the worst in Putin’s entire tenure. In 2021, ~20% of Russians openly declared they would join protests with political or economic demands, per Levada data. The rate of labor protest was the highest recorded during Putin’s tenure - despite the pandemic and the much greater repression. At the same time, popular revolts have pushed neighboring dictatorships in Belarus and Kazakhstan to the brink of collapse – and Russian pollsters detected signs that these events might motivate Russians to rise up in protest too. Trust in Putin dipped below 30% for the first time, suggesting that his approval (which remained high) was “hollowing out” and that he was starting to lose the confidence even of core supporters. Also, the share of Russians who declared they wanted to retire after the end of his term in 2024 was about to surpass those wanting him to stay. Last time that happened was in 2013– and it was reversed by the Crimea annexation. The invasion of Ukraine is achieving the same now.” (source)

He concludes:

“It does not matter where NATO’s border is; the Putin regime will still have an incentive to stage conflicts to demobilize opposition in Russia” (source)

Another two British professors, experts on Russia, wrote along the same lines:

“That the benefits in Russia’s cost-benefit calculations are evident only to its president presents a problem both for understanding the current situation and predicting Putin’s next move. To solve this puzzle, it’s helpful to take the Ukraine crisis out of the realm of foreign policy and put it into the world in which Putin spends most of his time: that of Russian domestic politics. Viewed in that light, the war represents a continuation of Putin’s efforts to govern by presenting Russia as threatened by external forces bent on its destruction, and himself as the only leader who can successfully oppose them.” (source)

Navalny sees it the same way:

" the Russian elite over the past 23 years has learned rules that have never failed: War is not that expensive, it solves all domestic political problems, it raises public approval sky-high, it does not particularly harm the economy, and — most importantly — winners face no accountability. Sooner or later, one of the constantly changing Western leaders will come to us to negotiate." (source)

 

The Russian military industry

Besides oil and gas, there is one industry in which Russia actually produces technologically advanced products for export - weapons. Its military industry is both a pride and a substantial income and it is also necessary for Russia's rapid re-armament effort:

Russia’s arms export revenues of 15 billion U.S. dollars are dwarfed by its export of fuel and energy products that amounted to 134.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2016, according to the UN Comtrade database. Since 2014, export of agricultural products and foodstuffs have surpassed Russia’s arms export; for 2016 this line amounted to 17 billion U.S. dollars. Still, arms account for approximately 70% of Russia’s export of machinery and equipment. It is also an important source for complementary revenues without which defence industrial marginal costs would be higher. (source)

When the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Ukraine was left with about 30 percent of the Soviet military industry. This is a huge chunk of the its military industry, but it got worse:

“There are, however, parts and services that Russia currently imports only from Ukraine. Russia’s military depends on Motor Sich in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia for helicopter engines and on the Russian company Antonov’s plant in Kyiv for transport planes. Most importantly, the Russian army relies on the Southern Machine Building Plant Association, known as Yuzhmash, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, which designs, manufactures, and services rockets and missiles.

Some of the most important ties between the two countries’ military industries relate to Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. More than half of the components of Russia’s ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles come from Ukraine. Ukrainian specialists carry out regular inspections of Russia’s strategic missiles to certify them for service as well as supplying essential missile components including targeting and control systems for the RS-20 Voyevoda missile (known by NATO as the SS-18 Satan).” (source)

It was not just manufacture, but also many of the famous military design bureaus were in Ukraine.

“The technologies of Ukrainian companies made it possible to produce 12 of the 20 most powerful missile technologies of the Cold War, including the unparalleled “Satan” (developed by the design bureau “Southern” Dnipro)" (source) 

The shipyards in Mykolaiv built some of Russia’s most iconic vessels, including Russia’s only aircraft carrier and the now famous Black Fleet flagship Moskva that was recently sunk. In 2012, Ukraine was at its peak as an independent weapons exporter, and became the world’s 4th largest. At the start of the conflict in 2014, Ukraine was the world’s 8th largest arms exporter (source).

As the 2014 invasion began, Ukraine stopped selling weapons technology to Russia. The weapons and dual-use technology sanctions levied on Russia by the western nations made it difficult for Russia to find substitutes, and it had to make its own, which substantially delayed many projects.

"Allegedly, 400 Russian defence companies were dependent on supplies from Ukraine for more than 3,000 parts, components and final products for more than 200 different arms systems, including engines for helicopters, aircraft and surface ships." (source)

Take for instance navy gas turbines. After the 2014 invasion, Russia struggled to complete its latest naval vessels:

“Prior to the current tensions, Ukraine was Russia’s primary producer of marine gas turbines … Reportedly, two Project 22350 frigates, the Admiral Golovko and Admiral Isakov, are sitting with no propulsion plants. ... New ships lying idle are a strategic hindrance to the Russian Navy” (source)

Eventually Russia managed to produce new engines domestically. But the problems cascaded throughout their military industry, and Russia's military industry is on the clock:

"However, a shared weak point in many of these export products is that they are in fact modernised versions of Soviet systems and equipment, and the need to replace them with new generation systems is rapidly getting more pressing." (source)

If Russia had succeeded in taking control of Ukraine in 2014, they would have not only removed a competitor in the military market, but also consolidated and secured vital supply chains to their own military industry.

The NATO bogeyman

While I do not buy the argument about NATO causing the war by offering a lukewarm invite to Ukraine, NATO did have a role to play. Once Putin started the 2014 invasion, the die was cast. The attempt failed, and made an enemy out of Ukraine. NATO supported Ukraine in its resistance to the invasion and attempt destabilization of their country, selling it weapons and offering its army training. Support for NATO membership was soaring and Russian popularity was plummeting. Every year that passed Ukraine became a more capable and well-armed opponent. From the Russian perspective, Putin was on the clock, and the time to get Ukraine back under Russian control was running out.

Two years before the war broke out, Zelenskyy advisor Oleksiy Arestovych spelled out the perspective from the Ukrainian side, and almost prophetically predicted the 2022 invasion two years before it happened:

If Ukraine wants to join NATO, "it will probably lead to a massive military operation by Russia against Ukraine. Because they're going to have to destroy us in terms of infrastructure and turn everything into devastation territory so that they [NATO] don't want us... They have to do it before we join NATO, so NATO won't be interested in us. They wouldn't be interested because of the devastation. With a 99.9% probability, the price for our entry into NATO is a major war with Russia. And if we don't join NATO, it's gonna be a Russian takeover in 10 to 12 years. And that's our current crossroads." (source)

Then he was asked: which course would then be better? He responded, "Of course, a big war with Russia, and joining NATO on the basis of victory over Russia." He then outlined the strategy that Russia would follow, and it matched almost perfectly with what happened.  

But I also kind of agree with the argument that Russia feared the EU more than NATO:

“It's worth remembering that Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine was sparked by a trade treaty, not by a near- or even mid-term threat of NATO expansion. And no, the EU is not a back door to NATO. If anything, the NATO is a back door to the EU, which is much, much harder to join. …

The expansion of EU influence puts insurmountable pressure on the Russian political economy to move from a rent-based, patronal model of wealth creation and power relations, to a system of institutionalized competition. Having satellite states that are governed in the same patronalist mode as Russia gives Moscow geo-economic breathing space, adding years or decades to the system's viability.” (source)

This argument also ties in neatly with the other arguments above about political competition and internal dissent. NATO is the bogey-man in Russia - it was after all created to contain the threat from the USSR, which Russians still identify with - and so it is at the same time a military competitor or threat, and a useful external enemy to stifle internal dissent. The one does not rule out the other.

In conclusion

In my view, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fueled ultimately by its internal politics and goals. As long as Russia has thousands of nuclear missiles, there simply can be no threats to Russian national security from other states. All its threats are internal, and its fears should be viewed as regime security, not national security. Russia is one of the few remaining powers in the world today that has not abandoned the colonial model of the world. What it is doing is very much in line with its own historical precedent and with how colonial powers acted in the past. Colonial conquest in the past for the European powers were not just about conquering wealth, but also internal prestige of the regimes, redirecting away from dissent, and having an escape valve for troublesome elements at home.

The Russian regime is building up an image of itself as a strongman regime, and such a regime needs a powerful military, and it needs enemies that it can protects its people from. Given its history as the USSR, the only enemy that could give it sufficient legitimacy in the long run would be NATO. An unending conflict in a small breakaway republic simply does not rally the population sufficiently to offset the unrest the conflict itself generates in terms of dead soldiers, a lesson learned after Chechnya. In order to maintain a military capable of matching NATO, it needs a larger domestic production, and much of that capability was lost with the USSR as it lost its satellite states. To pay for it all, it also needs to maintain its dominance within oil and gas exports, and to a lesser extent food exports, all of which were threatened by the rise of an independent Ukraine. To top it off, Ukraine also offered the vision of an alternative Slavic identity with genuine democracy and a break with patronage economics.

If I am right in this analysis, then negotiations will lead nowhere until all alternatives have been completely exhausted. When leading Russian politicians explicitly say they want Ukraine to stop existing as an independent nation - believe them. The war will continue until the Russian regime believes its regime is threatened more by the continuation of the war through its costs than by ending it and suffer the failure of its internal propaganda. Even Ukraine's capitulation would not end the conflict, it would merely move it elsewhere as the Russian regime needs to maintain the external enemy to silence the internal enemy.

Mearsheimer has become a Russia apologist

Image from his homepage

(NOTE: The original post is starting to become somewhat outdated and tame. All the juiciest stuff is actually in the postscript sections below.)

I’ve been frustrated since the start of the Ukraine conflict by people who for some reason think we should be listening to Chicago professor John Mearsheimer on this conflict. I am not an expert on international relations, so I will not comment on his theories in this area or whether they have been or could have been useful in predicting or preventing the conflict. I will, however, speak on his comments on moral culpability and agency, which is more in my area of expertise.

In case you are unaware, this is a guy who, after the war is well under way with all its atrocities, goes on Chinese state TV to blame NATO for starting the war, ranting about western "mainstream media" getting it all wrong, and, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, still insist that Russia did not aim to conquer all of Ukraine. In short, when it comes to this conflict, Mearsheimer is consistently blaming the US/NATO/"the West", denying the agency of any other countries, and making excuses for Russia.

So what is he saying?

In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.” This is a position he has repeated steadfastly since. He recently said this to the New Yorker:

“NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.” (source)

He restated the same again more recently in this manner:

"the West foolishly made Ukraine give up its nuclear weapons then the West foolishly led Ukraine to poke the Russian bear in the eye with NATO expansion causing this crisis and then once the crisis broke out the West pushed Ukraine to double down and the West itself doubled down and the end result is Ukraine is getting wrecked" (source)

There is a lot to unpack here. First, let us start with Russia itself.

Russia

Mearsheimer wrote to the New Yorker:

“I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. .. we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive"

He repeats this assertion in several other places. But this is a brazen example of “westsplaining” a conflict, as politicians in Eastern Europe have been warning against the revival of Russian nationalism and Putin in particular for decades by now. So the "we" that Mearsheimer keeps talking about is a very narrow, US-centric perspective focusing solely on the US government.

And it is wrong. Russia has been aggressive towards its neighbours constantly since the breakup of the USSR. Russia levelled Grozny with the ground in 1999, and created its first "frozen conflict" in Transnistria in 1991, the template for many later conflicts it created, including the one in the Donbas since 2014. Mearsheimer has an obsession with the NATO summit in 2008, where he claims NATO was making an opening to Ukraine and Georgia, putting much of the blame what happened later on this particular event and Putin's warning about NATO expansion at this summit. However, another interesting part of Putin's speech there is where he stats to formulate his denial of Ukraine as a nation, calling it a creation of the Soviet Union with pieces taken from its neighbours. He returned to this topic several times later, such as in his statement just after the Crimea invasion in 2014:

After the revolution, the Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. (source)

After his declaration of war with Ukraine in 2022, he called it “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine.” 

Putin has had his aims on Ukraine for a while. In 2004, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin by the Russian secret service. According to former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, Russia had been trying to seize parts of Ukraine since 2011, and was trying to get its other neighbours to help partition it (source).

In short, Russia has been aggressive for a while, has long been questioning the legitimacy of Ukraine as a nation, and its neighbours were already alarmed.

Mearsheimer claims that Russia is motivated only by the NATO expansion or other encroachments into its sphere of influence: “If you look at his february 24th speech justifying why Russian invade Ukraine it is all about NATO expansion” (his emphasis). But this is a flat out lie by someone who clearly should be able to read such a document and see that it is not all about NATO, but goes into great lengths to talk about why Ukraine does not deserve to be its own nation and the breakup of the Soviet Union was a mistake. The full text of his insane speech is worth reading in full.

NATO expanded because Russias neighbours insisted on joining - they were afraid of a resurgent and expansionist nationalism in Russia. And to understand how stupid the idea of NATO "encirclement" is, you just have to look at a world map.

Mearsheimer has been consistently wrong about both Russia and Putin. In 2015, he said this:

“the idea that he bears any resemblance to Adolf Hitler is laughable in the extreme, it is hard to believe that serious people make that argument. The idea that he is bent on creating a Great Russia - I think if he could do it, he would do it, [but] he can’t, Russia is a declining great power and as I said before if they were to try to create a Greater Russia by invading Ukraine … it will lead to no end of trouble. I think Putin is much too smart for that. … I think he is very strategic” (source)

Now lets move on to Ukraine.

Ukraine

Mearsheimer keeps coming back to the idea that Russia's invasion in 2014 was caused by a US-backed "coup" in Ukraine. It seems Putin and Mearsheimer share a common view of popular revolts in minor countries as being only the puppet instruments of the great powers, and refusing on principle to entertain the idea a popular will existing independent of the CIA. This is of course only natural for someone who rose to power through the KGB and who uses Russian intelligence services to incite unrest in countries around the world. It may seem a bit more strange to come from someone who backs Bernie Sanders, but there it is, and I am not alone in noticing this oddity and being outraged by it. However, the entirety of his proof for this assertion is a leaked phone conversation with US state employee, Victoria Nuland, where she discusses who would be the best future president if the current Russia-backend president was toppled. However, it turned out that her preferred man did not in fact get the job, as the Ukrainians wanted someone else - so much for US influence! And smearing the entire revolution as a CIA coup based solely on this call is extremely thin to put it mildly. But it does match exactly with how Putin sees it.

This view extends to minor country governments as well. Mearsheimer explicitly rejects the very idea that Ukraine could have any agency of its own, and in his eyes they are merely a puppet of the US. In fact, in his eyes, only the great powers have agency, or can have agency, and if they try to have their own agency, they will be crushed. And this appears to be some kind of natural law that we should simply accept. He argues that the "United States does not believe that countries in the Western Hemisphere have a right to have their own foreign policy” through its "Monroe doctrine", and that Russia and China sees its spheres of influence the same way. I hope to make a separate post about the "Monroe doctrine" later. I will just note for now that the Monroe doctrine is not an actual existing doctrine and this view of the world is extreme - and I see no reason that reasonable people should buy into it.

Mearsheimer also buys into the idea that Russia is genuinely worried about fascists in Ukraine. Fact: In Ukraine, fascists got 2.5% of the votes in the most recent election, or 1.6% of registered voters. By comparison, the Le Pen fascists in France got 29.5% of registered voters. In the past, both Ukraine and Russia had substantial fascist movements, and their history is fascinating, but today actual, real fascists are not a substantial political influence in Ukraine.

He consistently accepts Russian side of the conflict as a matter-of-fact and borne out of defensive calculations, while casting doubt on the motivations of western powers. Another example of this is him assuming Minsk-2 would have solved the Ukraine crisis and putting the blame for its failure on Ukraine and the US. There is absolutely no doubt (outside of Russian propaganda circles) that the first Minsk agreement failed because Russia and its fake “separatists” flat out broke it, and launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine. The second agreement did not actually resolve any issues, and Russia, despite being a signatory and having a hand in crafting the agreement, said it was “not a party to the Minsk agreements" and flatly lied about Russian troops being present in the country in contravention with the agreement. Where many other commentators have at least in part blamed Russia for the collapse of Minsk-2 for refusing to negotiate with Ukraine and refusing to acknowledge that they are a part in the conflict with troops in Ukraine, Mearsheimer puts all the blame on not implementing the agreement on the Ukrainian side, blaming the far right (who, remember, got 2.5% of the vote) and of course the US for making it impossible for the Ukrainian government to “solve” the issue by implementing the agreement. In fact, he believes (contrary to all facts), that Russia wanted to implement Minsk-2 - and contrary to all evidence still holds on to his belief that Russia does not want to occupy Ukraine.

Mearsheimer is excusing Russian’s atrocities in Ukraine by blaming the US for “arming civilians”, which is another flat out lie for which he provides no proof. Just nine days before the 2022 invasion, Mearsheimer lamented the "russophobia" in the West and asserted that Putin would be too smart to invade, as well as declaring that Putin was "winning" by threatening war. Then said:

"I believe that Putin and Lavrov are first-class strategists, they really understand the essence of international politics. They understand how international politics works, and they do in my opinion a terrific job of playing Russia's hand." (source)

That statement really did not age well.

He is predicting what Putin wants and what his plans are based on his own theory of geopolitics, turning Putin into a mechanical vessel of geopolitical interests, as if the man himself has no ambitions, no ideology, no views on the world separate from those: “If there had been no decision to move NATO eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine.” But there is no proof of this, and indeed, if that was the case, then Russia would make that its demand in the negotiations before the war. But they demanded the impossible - NATO out of Eastern Europe - instead.  And in the negotiations, neutrality was but one demand of many, which included regime change to hand-picked authoritarian kleptocrats that Russia prefers. Finally, let us not forget that when Russia first invaded in 2014, Ukraine did have neutrality in its constitution! So let us bury the idea that putting neutrality in its constitution would have prevented an attack once and for all.

"Realism"

Mearsheimer claims to be an "offensive realist" about international relations. I will try to step carefully in this part, since as I've noted, I am no expert on this field. However, I will note something very odd. The bedrock of the realism school of international relations in general is the idea of state actors acting out of rational self-interest. This is as opposed to viewing international relations as being driven by internal, ideological reasons. It is an important argument to be had, because if the realist school is correct, then we can better understand the other party because their reasons are real, objective and largely independent of the actual person in charge. It then becomes more important to understand the relations between states than whatever is going on inside them.

“Great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in size,” Mearsheimer argued to the Atlantic in 2012. And he argues that democracy is irrelevant to war and peace:

"Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as much as non-democracies do." (source)

I will not attempt to argue that realism in international relations is wrong, although I deeply believe it is. As Robert Horvath put it:

"John Mearsheimer ... has made a career out of reducing the complexity of global politics to the aggression of self-interested powers. In the process, he studiously ignores their internal politics. One obvious advantage of this approach is that it considerably reduces the amount of research and knowledge that is required to dispense authoritative judgments about the conduct of any particular country." (source, absolutely worth reading in full)

But what I find most interesting here is that Mearsheimer seems to have totally abandoned this rationality aspect of realism in respect to Russia. He argues now that an existential threat is whatever Putin says it is. Perhaps this is because Putin's behaviour is increasingly irrational. As Robert Horvath argued a year after the 2014 invasion:

"The problem with this interpretation is that Putin's recent conduct was anything but rational. Far from protecting Russia's security, Putin has immeasurably weakened it. By attacking Ukraine, he has made an enemy of a kindred people, guaranteeing its Western destiny." (source)

It is actually quite striking how anti-rational his actions have been:

"In Ukraine, only a small minority supported NATO accession a decade ago; today, after years of Russian-instigated conflict and territorial losses, a clear majority does. Traditionally, the alternative favored by NATO opponents has been “Finlandization,” in which smaller states agree to a neutral role in great-power politics in exchange for guarantees of sovereignty and internal noninterference. Thanks to Putin’s actions, this option is now evaporating” (source)

Since it has become clear that Russia is aggressively trying to interfere even in neutral countries, formerly neutral Finland and Sweden are now rapidly seeking NATO membership.

It is especially odd that Mearsheimer wants to take Putin's word on anything when Putin and his regime is known above all for their incessant lying and denying even the most obvious realities. But again it seems Mearsheimer's theoretical blinders are preventing him from seeing what is obvious to almost everyone else, having written an entire book to defend the strange idea that dictatorship do not lie more than democracies, indeed maybe less.

In conclusion

So where does this leave us?

The most immediate issue I have with his view is how US centric it is, and how they only see western governments as having any agency, while other governments and people merely react and are reduced to automatons living out the rules of realist theory. This view is also shared by many on the far left who only see western government actions as causes while non-western governments and people merely passively react to those actions. In the context of Ukraine, they focus on the expansion into Eastern Europe and opening the possibility of Ukraine gaining membership as the only action worth paying attention to, while the opinions and policies of Russia and Ukraine themselves are ignored or explained away as merely passive reactions to western actions. In this view, Ukraine did not seek NATO membership for its own safety, but was seduced into NATO by the west, and Russia did not aggressively seek to expand its rule over its neighbors, but only reacted to NATO getting closer to its borders.

The worst part of their criticism is that they are telling those living in the spheres of interest of authoritarian powers must resign themselves to a grimdark future of being governed by a corrupt, authoritarian puppet protected from all popular revolt by the regional power. It means that if they follow the tenet of accepting geopolitics as an inevitable reality then, if the theory is correct, they might avoid war , but their future and the future of their children is bleak indeed. This is the "Monroe doctrine" made into a universal moral tenet for the world. As Henry Nash put it:

"Problems arise, however, with Mearsheimer's realism if his description of Great Power behaviour in history becomes a prescription of how they should behave in the present. But this is exactly what Mearsheimer has done by stating unequivocally that the war in Ukraine is entirely the fault of the USA and NATO. This is as much a moral judgement as a description. (...) 

Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, and by so doing is fighting for all of the free world – for a world which is about more than just the selfish interests of Great Powers." (source, worth reading in full)

In a sense, it is a fight between those who want a world as described by offensive realism and brutal "Monroe doctrines", and those of us who want a world governed by peace, law and prosperity. By turning a descriptive theory of international relations into a normative theory of blame, Mearsheimer turns into a Russia apologist.

Postscript 23 June 2022

A week ago, Mearsheimer held a talk at at the The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Italy. In it, he repeated many of the same points he made above, and he seems completely unmoved by both counterarguments and historical events. If anything, he doubles down on his all of his statements on the war. You see, it was all due to “America’s obsession with bringing Ukraine into NATO” .

About ideas that Russia or Putin want to resurrect a greater Russia he says “there is no evidence to support it” and when talking about all the statements Putin has recently made to the contrary, he continues by saying “such opaque comments however say nothing about his reason for going to war”, which means he will continue to cherry-pick those of Putin’s statements that back his theory and ignore those who don't. This is all the more astounding because so much of Mearsheimer’s arguments on the subject is based on statements made by Putin. And where other people see Putin becoming more and more clear in his speeches about what his real motivations were all along, Mearsheimer argues “his goals have changed” since the war began.

He manages to claim that “[Putin] does not have a history of lying to other leaders” but just on the subject of Ukraine, Putin lied about the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine from 2014 to present day, including lying about it directly to Obama, and lied about not invading Ukraine, and lied about pulling back troops from the border before invading. He was called out on the lies and shamelessly kept lying, lying about the "little green men" in Ukraine for 8 years.

The most ballsy claim is that “[Putin] has never once hinted that he wants to make Ukraine part of Russia. If this behavior is part of a giant deception campaign it would be without precedent in recorded history”. Now Mearsheimer likes to make bold statements, but this is really something. I mean, it is not that hard to find precedents historically, such as Hitler in 1938. And “never once” apparently does not even include the previous statements from Putin which he just disregarded as “opaque” or “say nothing about his reason for going to war” or "have changed".

Going from ballsy to facepalm, he claims that “perhaps the best indicator that Putin is not bent on conquering and absorbing Ukraine is the military strategy Moscow employed from the start of this campaign … that would have required a classic blitzkrieg strategy aimed at quickly overrunning all of Ukraine with Ukraine with armored forces” . To most other observers of the war, that was exactly what they tried to do - and failed spectacularly at doing! However, since Putin apparently is a realist genius, failure must mean a lack of motive, not a lack of competence.

He repeats the lie that he has been called out on by many people that “nobody made the argument that [Putin] had imperial ambitions in his first 14 years in office” . He gets called out on this by his audiences and by other writers, and yet he keeps repeating it. In this talk, he was asked about this and he simply did not bother responding. He also repeats the lie about nazis in Ukraine. Why?

This is a guy who seriously thinks George W Bush was a “liberal do-gooder”. He cannot even make up his mind if western powers wanted containment of Russia before 2014 or not, switching between the two positions depending on whether he wants to argue that Putin was seen as innocent before 2014, or that the nefarious aim of the west is “to turn Ukraine into a Western bulwark on Russia’s border”. But you cannot really have it both ways.

Postscript 18 July 2022

After some internet debates on the subject, I’ve realized that Mearsheimer’s argument is deeper, and much worse, than I initially thought. The key problem lies in the disingenuous way the argument is being presented. Your first impression may be that NATO expansion is to blame and that Ukraine should have pursued a policy of neutrality that would have kept it out of NATO, and then things would have been fine. But that isn’t actually what he is arguing, and I think he is being clearer on this deeper point with more receptive audiences. What he is in fact arguing is that NATO membership, EU membership and western democracy all three form part of a three-pronged expansion into Russia’s backyard, and that Russia found all of them unacceptable:

“And here we are talking mainly about Washington’s effort to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy had three prongs. The most prominent and most important was making Ukraine part of NATO. Then there was the effort to make Ukraine part of the EU. And then there was the effort to turn Ukraine into a liberal democracy, a pro-American liberal democracy. This was the famous Orange Revolution. That was the three-pronged effort.” (source)

He is sometimes clear that Russia also feared western democracy itself in Ukraine:

"I agree with you that the Russians lived the mortal fear of a color revolution in Russia … the 2012 crisis or when the crisis broke out in 2012 it was not about NATO expansion per se it was about the EU and about a color revolution” (source)

And furthermore:

“the key to a settlement from Russia's perspective is making Ukraine a neutral state which means that Ukraine must divorce itself from the west” (source)

In fact, he does not consider neutrality to be possible within a great power’s sphere of influence. He has consistently dismissed any possibility of agency from Ukraine, saying that they only do what the US tells them to do. He argues that just like Russia,

“The United States does not believe that countries in the Western Hemisphere have a right to have their own foreign policy.” (source)

In this view, he is in complete agreement with Putin, who recently wrote:

“There is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called. And a colony has no historical prospects. If a country is not able to make sovereign decisions - it's a colony.” (source)

Mearsheimer argues in effect that the west should have told the Ukrainian people who wanted western democracy that they should forget about it and accept being a Russian colony instead.

And, of course, it gets worse. You see, the reason why we should do this isn’t just for peace, but because Mearsheimer thinks the west should recruit Russia as an ally against China:

“We should be focusing laser like on China. Instead, what are we doing? We’re getting into war with a country that we should have as an ally, but instead we’ve turned into a mortal enemy.” (source)

In 2020, he said:

“if Russia wants to have influence in Ukraine it doesn't matter [...] Who cares? Strategically it doesn't matter" (source)

So we should ally with a country ruled by a ruthless dictator who has pillaged his own country, whose army loots, rapes and mass murders their way through neighbouring countries, seeks to destabilise western countries by funding extremist parties (including outright nazis), and every now and again assassinates people in our countries?

And of course when people do not agree and call out Russia for its behaviour, Mearsheimer thinks it is all due to "Russophobia", just like the Kremlin propaganda, saying “We have a Russophobia problem in this country [the USA] that is really unprecedented.”  That is, when he is not blaming the "deep state", which he coyly calls "the blob":

“both Barack Obama and Donald Trump were elected to change foreign policy, U.S. foreign policy in a fundamental way, and both of them failed because the blob defeated them at almost every turn.” (source)

It should not surprise you then that he also downplays Russia's interference in US elections, and thinks Russia was made a scapegoat:

 “They did not want to admit that it was because Hillary was a terrible candidate or Trump was an attractive candidate to a large chunk of Americans, so they blamed the Russians.” (source)

Yikes.

Postscript 20 August 2022

Someone pointed me to an article Mearsheimer wrote in 1990 in The Atlantic, where he made a larger number of predictions about the future in which the world was no longer dominated by two rival powers because of the fall of the USSR. Now that it has been 32 years since this article was written, we can use it to evaluate the predictive ability of his "offensive realism". And to be fair, he correctly predicted two things - the war in Kosovo and the return to belligerence of Russia. However, these were not exactly surprising predictions, and the amount of predictions that turned out to have been shockingly off the mark makes this article a good indication that offensive realism in general and Mearsheimer in particular are not very good at predicting anything.

So what did he predict in 1990 about what our near future would bring?

“Germany, France, Britain, and perhaps Italy will assume major-power status … a nuclear-free Europe has the distinction of being the most dangerous among the envisionable post-Cold War orders … Germany uses force against Poland, Czechoslovakia, or even Austria enter the realm of the possible … Serious tensions already exist between Hungary and Romania … Absent the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Romania and Hungary might have gone to war over this issue by now, and it might bring them to war in the future. …  The Polish-German border could be a source of trouble. Poland and Czechoslovakia have a border dispute. If the Soviets allow some of their republics to achieve independence, the Poles and the Romanians may lay claim to territory now in Soviet hands which once belonged to them.”

If the European powers with nukes (UK, Russia, and France) kept their nukes, he predicts Germany “will eventually look to nuclear weapons as the surest means of security … The small states of Eastern Europe will also have strong incentives to acquire nuclear weapons” and he concludes that a scenario in Europe “without proliferation, seems very unlikely.” What is more: “The most probable scenario in the wake of the Cold War is further nuclear proliferation in Europe. This outcome is laden with dangers, but it also might just provide the best hope for maintaining stability on the Continent.”

Although none of the European nuclear powers abandoned their nukes, no new countries sought to obtain them, and there is zero evidence or indication that it was French or British nukes that kept the European countries at peace for the last 30 years.

Further on Germany he predicts that “Germany would no doubt feel insecure without nuclear weapons” and speculates "that German thinking about the benefits of controlling Eastern Europe will change markedly once American forces are withdrawn from Central Europe”. Of course none of that did happen - in fact Germany almost demilitarized itself. He thinks “there are good reasons for being skeptical about the claim that a more powerful [EU] can provide the basis for peace in a multipolar Europe.” But it did. His own proposal for attaining lasting peace is outright insane: “the United States should encourage the limited and carefully managed proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe.”

I guess it is easy to be praised as a predictive genius if you make a lot of predictions, and then conveniently ignore all those that never came to pass.

Postscript 30 November 2022

So things got pretty wild on the Mearsheimer front. Turns out he visited Hungary's authoritarian prime minister and president both, in hour-long sessions. This is from a crazy interview he did with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker:

How was the Hungary trip?

It was actually fascinating. I learned a great deal. I was there for five days, Monday to Friday. I had a three-hour meeting with Viktor Orbán.

I’ve heard of him.

Yeah. And I had a one-hour meeting with the President of Hungary.

What did they talk about for hours? He really does not want to get into that:

I know Orbán said that the “hope for peace is named Donald Trump,” and suggested him as a mediator in terms of bringing the war to an end.

I don’t know that.

Orbán tweeted, “The #liberals have got it all wrong - that’s the bottom-line of our great conversation with Prof Mearsheimer today. We–”

Look, I don’t want to talk about Orbán. You told me that we were going to talk about Ukraine.

Moreover, Mearsheimer continues to assert, contrary to all available evidence, that Putin "was not interested in conquering those four oblasts before the war started" and that he just wanted the two Donbas oblasts "as independent republics". He even claims that Putin did not try to take Kiyv: "It doesn’t look like he was interested in conquering Kyiv. It looks like he was interested in threatening Kyiv for the purpose of coercing the government to change its policy on membership in NATO."

Then there is the whole Putin cannot by lying because politicians do not lie to each other theory, which again is completely at odds with all available evidence: "And the idea that Putin would have devised this massive deception campaign where he consistently lied about what the reason was for going to war would’ve been unprecedented in history." Chotiner follows up with:

Would Munich be an example of a leader lying?

Munich was a single case. I mean, there’s no question that Hitler lied at Munich, and one can point to one or two other instances where Hitler lied.

Maybe more than one or two.

Yeah, maybe? I mean, anyone who knows WWII history knows the nazi leadership consistently lied and treated signed treaties as having no value - just like Putin and his regime, in fact.

Then, of course, Mearsheimer disputes that the Russians hacked the US Democrats before the Trump election (and then quickly backtracks):

Well, I don’t know whether the Russians interfered in the election in a serious way.

We don’t know that?

This is a highly disputed issue.

I didn’t realize it was highly disputed still. That’s why I was asking.

Well, there’s the whole question of whether the Russians broke into the D.N.C. computers and gave that information to Julian Assange.

Who broke into the D.N.C.? I haven’t been following the latest on who it was.

Look, I don’t know about this issue. I mean, you wanted to talk about Ukraine. You know what I mean? I would appreciate if you’d not use any of this discussion about the D.N.C. and so forth and so on. I mean, this is not my area of expertise.

The whole interview is worth reading. Mearsheimer is clearly clutching onto every single straw that he can use to defend Putin. Why he is doing it, and what he is doing in hours long discussions with authoritarian dictators, is less clear.

Postscript 5 June 2023

Mearsheimer's insane takes on the Ukraine invasion is getting around again, this time boosted by Elon Musk, who called it "Interesting", and by fellow South African and Paypal mafia member David Sacks who wrote that "his predictions about the conflict have been highly accurate".

In this video talk, he claims that “the Russians are going to win the war … they're going to end up conquering a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory beyond what they already have” and “I think uh the Russians now have the upper hand … I think the Russians are in better shape than the Ukrainians”. He also believes, contrary to most military analysts, that Ukraine is suffering more losses than Russia: “there's no question Russians are dying but they're not dying in anywhere near as large a number as the Ukrainians are, so I think two to one is a reasonable estimate a casualty exchange ratio”. 

He also managed to claim that “the other problem is that a number of leaders have made it clear that they lied to Putin about their commitment to the Minsk agreement … Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, Poroshenko and Zelenskyy himself have all said they never had any interest in making Minsk work”. This is a curious, totally made-up lie coming from a person who wrote a book saying that state leaders generally don’t lie, and then used this book to argue Putin doesn’t lie. On the other hand, of course he thinks Putin “was deeply committed to the Minsk agreement” and then adds “Putin was left in a position where he felt he had no choice ... there was no other way to deal with the problem, so I think he with great reluctance invaded Ukraine”. Elsewhere he has recently said that the war will continue no matter who wins the US presidential election because “there's too much russophobia in the United States”.

How can anyone think this is a serious scholar? Hopefully we will soon see that these new predictions are completely without merit, just like so many of his previous predictions, and we can forget that this terrible person ever existed.

Postscript 9 September 2023

Mearsheimer shows no sign of getting any more nuanced, to the contrary, he is sliding rapidly into an alt-right echo-chamber and alternate reality, appearing on the propaganda show Grayzone accusing Hollande, Poroshenko and Angela Merkel of secretly sabotaging peace negotiations, he goes on the alt-right youtube-clone Rumble to be interviewed by Glenn Greenwald, and of course he had a 3 hour talk with far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orban and then refusing to talk about what they were talking about. To top this insanity, he then writes a long blog post on Substack titled "Bound to Lose" about how Ukraine is going to lose horribly in a way that sounds more like wishful thinking than academic analysis, and writes this gem about his pal Orban: “the only Western policymaker or establishment pundit who argued that the counteroffensive would fail was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban”

Viktor Orban hates the western establishment and wants to tear it down with his fascist friends around the globe. He is a Russian trojan horse inside NATO and the EU and has consistently been standing alone in sabotaging efforts to support Ukraine. To describe him as part of the western establishment is just complete lunacy.

The first thing to understand about Mearsheimer is that he is not approaching this from the standpoint of a disinterested observer or a theorist. He is an obsessed activist, and his long-term, stated goal is to make the US focus its military great-power rivalry on China in an alliance with Russia. Everything else he does should be viewed through this lens. He states this unequivocally at the end of his first ever blog post:

“The Ukraine war is hindering the U.S. effort to contain China, which is of paramount importance for American security since China is a peer competitor while Russia is not. Indeed, balance-of-power logic says that the United States should be allied with Russia against China and pivoting full force to East Asia.”

He has been stating this objective for a very long time, and it underlies everything. His approach is that western leaders are viewed as lying, untrustworthy and deceiving, while Putin’s statements can be accepted at face value. This is abundantly clear both in his treatment of NATO expansion and the Minsk agreements: In his view, the west lied in both cases while Putin kept to his word and told the truth. Having decided this is how it should be portrayed, he has been cherry-picking and misrepresenting facts and quotations on both cases very selectively over the years. He has been in enough debates and received enough feedback on this that he knows full well that this representation of both events is, at best, flawed; more accurately a fabrication. He never addresses these objections - he ignores them.

He argues that the US forced Russia into its invasion of Ukraine by encircling it, which he opposes, but he wants the US to fully and completely encircle China by allying with Russia against China and thus completing its existing encirclement with military allies and bases in the pacific ocean. He has written earlier: 

“We should be pivoting out of Europe to deal with China in a laser-like fashion, number one. And, number two, we should be working overtime to create friendly relations with the Russians. The Russians are part of our balancing coalition against China. If you live in a world where there are three great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—and one of those great powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger.”

Worse he says this conflict is inevitable:

"I believe that whenever you have two great powers like the United States and China and one is the dominant power and the other is the rising power and of course that would be China it is inevitable that those two countries will clash with each other and it's because of the structure of the system it's not because of anything peculiar to the United States or anything peculiar to China".

But worst of all is that he said this, not discreetly to policymakers in the US, but on Chinese state TV, actively fanning the flames of war! And while he thinks the US should give Ukraine to Russia for the sake of an alliance against Chine, he thinks the US should defend Taiwan: “I believed when I wrote that essay back in 2014, that the United States should and would defend Taiwan, and I believe that today.”

To see people embracing him as an academic or peace figure is incredibly frustrating because he is neither of these things. He is an activist war-monger who has no qualms about getting into bed with the far-right.