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A Russian political scientist on Russia, Ukraine and Putin’s motives

Brian Leiter

Tatiana Stanovaya is a Russian political scientist and analyst, based in France, who writes widely in English-language publications.  Reader Boris Dagaev (who contributed several interesting comments to an earlier thread) calls my attention to Stanovaya's analysis shared on Telegram (which is popular in Russia, but not widely used elsewhere).  This is a good counterweight to the narrative (popular in U.S. media) that Putin is a simly a "madman" in thrall to a crazy ideology:

Since there is much speculation about why and when exactly Putin decided to go to war, it is important to trace how we got to the point of no return.

There were six key stages:
 
1️⃣ The honeymoon. May – October 2019. This period took place in the first few months after Vladimir Zelensky’s election. The Kremlin had high hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough over the Donbass conflict because of Zelensky's background and his commitment to establishing peace at any cost. However, after a successful prisoner exchange in September, their high hopes rapidly evaporated. The Normandy summit in Paris in December 2019 was the final nail in the coffin of any viable “peace settlement”, as understood by Moscow.

2️⃣ Disappointment. November 2019 – Autumn 2020. Over the next year, in Moscow's eyes, Zelensky went from being their last hope to a hell-hound, worse even than Poroshenko (which they had previously thought impossible). Moscow realised two things, providing the rationale for the current war. Firstly, it became clear for Russia that a full-fledged dialogue with Zelensky or any other Ukrainian leader would be doomed to fail. Secondly, even the full implementation of the Minsk agreements, a fantasy scenario, wouldn’t stop Ukraine sliding into NATO – NATO was already inside Ukraine. By the end of 2020, the situation was judged critical. At this point, Putin began to seriously look for an urgent solution to the Ukrainian “problem”.

3️⃣ Military planning. Late 2020 – early 2021. Contrary to all rumours, leaks and analyses, practical discussions about how to take over Ukraine began in late 2020, continuing in the lead up to the April 2021 crisis (the first "build up" at the Ukrainian border). At this point, Putin was already working on implementation plans for a possible troop deployment. He might have ordered the assault much earlier, if it were not for Biden.

4️⃣ Postponement. April 2021 – November 2021. If Zelensky was Putin's last hope in Ukraine, Biden became his last hope in the West. Putin ordered a “pull back” from the Ukrainian border (not far) and decided to give the West one last chance to seriously consider Russia’s concerns. Putin had a strong desire to give the new US administration a try. But already in autumn, it was clear that the “spirit of Geneva” was fading.

5️⃣ Ultimatum. November 2021 – January 2022. In November, at the famous expanded Foreign Ministry board meeting, Putin demanded serious negotiations with the West about security guarantees. The hope placed in Biden was diminishing with each passing week. Putin made a clear decision then: to get a written response from the West to his demands – a negative response would mean the end of the diplomatic approach. There was little hope to begin with, but Putin wanted a written answer as a justification for the war.

6️⃣ War. Late January 2022 – present day. The end of January, when Russia received Washington's written response, can be counted as the beginning of the military operation. Precisely then, Putin began final preparations for the war and rejected all alternative paths. By this time, almost nothing could have influenced his decision.
 
The next stages are being written now. Putin will try to force Zelensky to accept Russia’s terms by laying siege to Ukraine's cities while refraining from storming them. Even if the original “blitzkrieg” failed, little has changed for Putin, who believes that a strategic goal has been achieved – Ukraine has ceased to exist in its previous form. However, signing peace agreements isn’t the most difficult part – that will come afterwards. To what extent will each side be ready to fulfill its commitments in a timely and complete manner? Is Russia ready to withdraw troops before Ukraine’s constitution has been changed? Can Zelensky even carry out constitutional amendments without meeting resistance from Ukrainian elites and society? All we can say for now is that time is working against Russia.

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28 responses to “A Russian political scientist on Russia, Ukraine and Putin’s motives”

  1. Matt

    "…one last chance to seriously consider Russia’s concerns."

    What were "Russia's concerns"? Who is "Russia" in this account? (This is actual a serious weakness of many "realist" approaches – treating states as black boxes, when this is pretty straight-forwardly not born out. Regime type matters quite a bit for how states act!) In any case, any account of this situation starting where this one does is plainly inadequate. And, starting in 2014 also doesn't work. No, we don't need to start with the Kievsy Rus, or even with Lenin, as Putin sometimes suggests, but we do need to look at the "Orange Revolution" (and the various other "color revolutions") in 2004 and around then. What happened then? Putin, and people close to him, had a major freak-out about the idea of a popular revolt. If you watched Russian media at the time (as I did), this was clear. It was obvious that the danger, as seen by Putin (and those close to him) wasn't NATO, or "the west", but rather, the idea of popular revolt against a corrupt elite. This fear has been closely connected with support of right-wing and anti-democratic parties and activities since then (with Trump, Brexit, etc.) But importantly, the idea was that it was essential to prevent the development of democratic, independent countries in the former Soviet Union, not because this presented a risk to "Russia" in any plausible sense, but because it represented a risk _to Putin_ and his circle. Now, of course, if you see that a democratic Ukraine (or Georgia) that is independent and has an improving standard of living is a threat _to Putin_ (because Russians might think that they might want that, too!) that is indeed helpful for understanding his motives and actions. It's good to see that. But that's very different from seeing this as a threat _to Russia_, as is suggested here.

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    One can imagine Putin, as a wannabe dictator, was alarmed by "popular revolts" in the early 2000s, but that doesn't negate the point Stanovaya's analysis. I am continually surprised that people here can't see why Russia would be worried by having Ukraine join NATO.

    Russia's concerns=the concern of Russia's ruling elite, as it does in every other country. The realist thesis that the form of domestic governance doesn't make much difference to behavior on the international stage is supported by a lot of evidence, and not only the conduct of the U.S. in the international arena.

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  3. David Wallace

    "The realist thesis that the form of domestic governance doesn't make much difference to behavior on the international stage is supported by a lot of evidence, and not only the conduct of the U.S. in the international arena."

    Is that the realist thesis? I thought Mearshimer's view was that *hegemonic* powers absolutely do take actions based on their ideology and not just their survival interests, and that the overreach that results is one of the reasons hegemonies have a shelf life. This is from his 2019 paper on the rise and fall of the liberal international order:

    "In unipolarity, an international order can take one of two forms—agnostic or ideological—depending on the political ideology of the leading state. The key issue is whether the unipole has a universalistic ideology, one that assumes that its core values and its political system should be exported to other countries. If the unipole makes this assumption, the world order will be ideological. The sole pole, in other words, will try to spread its ideology far and wide and remake the world in its own image."

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  4. Brian Leiter

    This represented, I take it, a change in his views from earlier on–it's reflected in his most recent book The Grand Delusion which argues, pretty implausibly I think, that the war of aggression against Iraq arose from Bush's ambition to spread liberal democracy. Of course, his well-known book on The Israel Lobby with Steven Walt also represented a break from the usual realist view that domestic politics don't much matter. But I will let others who follow the IR literature weigh in with corrections!

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  5. Johnny Eh McDonald

    The realist thesis is the opposite of a black box: you get a straightforward analysis in terms of material interests, power preservation, and power expansion in any and all possible scenarios – and irrespective of regime type. Moreover, one can see – easily, in the American case – the spread of political ideology in terms of power expansion: the ideology in question being "liberal" politics, international human rights law, and the international legal order it imposed upon the world after WWII.

    As a corollary, what neither the Western media nor Mearsheimer ACTUALLY talk about are the additional real reasons why Russia and China see eye-to-eye on this, and why India didn't vote against Russia. All three countries (now) consciously reject uti possidetis juris and significant parts (if not all) of international law as an illegitimate Western imperialist edifice.

    Yes, India sides with the West because it rightly doesn't want Chinese hegemony, including in its own neck of the woods. But Modi, the military (and the INC if they get back into power, given the new realities on the ground) aren't going to be told by international lawyers or courts what counts as Indian territory vis-a-vis Kashmir, Lipulekh, the Aksai Chin, or Arunachal Pradesh.

    Same with China and its disputed land claims. Same with Russia (Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, etc.). Most of indigenous South America, and much of Africa may come to side with team China-Russia for this reason, too. (Parts of Pacific East Asia do as well, but that concern is completely outweighed by their rational fear of Chinese domination.)

    Given Russia's status and power, the invasion of Ukraine may come to be construed as the first/largest major shot across the bow of the Western/American-imposed imperialist international legal order since the October 1962 war in Asia. Winning, for Russia, isn't just about keeping Ukraine out of NATO. It's also in showing the whole world the West's weakness in being able to uphold its international legal norms and order.

    American Democrats will just blame Trump for this. No educated person in the rest of the world, of course, will believe them.

    Reply
  6. LFC

    In his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, with a subsequent edition), Mearsheimer's view is that states (and great powers in particular) want to maximize their share of relative power, because that's the best way to survive in an "anarchic" international system (meaning in the lingo of IR theory a system without a world body that can enforce its edicts the way a domestic government can, i.e., without a world govt). Mearsheimer acknowledges in "Tragedy" that ideology and domestic "regime type" occasionally influence how a great power acts (e.g., the case of Nazi Germany), but basically he does "black box" states by bracketing or ignoring ideology and regime type, arguing that all great powers behave pretty much the same way as "calculated" (not mindless) aggressors. This way of treating the matter is considered a standard kind of "realist" approach; the so-called neoclassical realists try to bring domestic politics and ideology back in, but Mearsheimer, at least in "Tragedy," definitely did not take that approach.

    I have not read the 2019 paper from which David Wallace quotes. It appears that at least in the case of unipolarity, Mearsheimer sees a role for ideology that he doesn't (or didn't) see in multipolarity. That could reconcile the 2019 paper w/ Tragedy, where, as I recall, he talks about different sorts of multipolar orders but not much about unipolarity at all. On the other hand, Mearsheimer could have just changed his views on some things. But I'm inclined to guess that this emphasis on ideology may be restricted, in M's view, to the special case of unipolarity (I'd have to read the 2019 paper and The Grand Delusion, which I haven't).

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  7. LFC

    I disagree with a lot of this.

    The fact that there are disputes over some specific territories and boundaries (e.g., Kashmir, South China Sea) and that India and China don't necessarily want to be told by intl tribunals what they can do in these respects does _not_ translate into a wholesale rejection of international law and uti possidetis. Most countries are fine with that most of the time. Nor do most countries seem to view intl law as a "Western imposed" imperialist product.

    Second, China is constantly talking about how sovereignty is a sacrosanct principle. Putin's utter disregard for Ukraine's sovereignty, as it is understood and recognized by almost every other country (including China and India), cannot please China very much.

    Most countries like the "Western-imposed" intl legal order because it isn't actually Western imposed. Of course decolonization and "self-determination" led to the creation of many new formally independent and sovereign states, and that fit right in with the norms of intl law. So Putin may want to show the weakness of intl law etc, but most countries, whether Western or not, are not going to buy it. They like the norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity as currently understood, for obvious reasons.

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  8. Roger Albin

    "The next stages are being written now. Putin will try to force Zelensky to accept Russia’s terms by laying siege to Ukraine's cities while refraining from storming them. Even if the original “blitzkrieg” failed, little has changed for Putin, who believes that a strategic goal has been achieved – Ukraine has ceased to exist in its previous form. However, signing peace agreements isn’t the most difficult part – that will come afterwards. To what extent will each side be ready to fulfill its commitments in a timely and complete manner? Is Russia ready to withdraw troops before Ukraine’s constitution has been changed? Can Zelensky even carry out constitutional amendments without meeting resistance from Ukrainian elites and society? All we can say for now is that time is working against Russia."

    This is a rather optimistic view of what Putin is likely to achieve and Stonavaya's timeline is potentially misleading in the sense that it reconstructs Putin's reasoning as an apparently considered and rational process while ignoring other relevant and contingent events. It's not an accident that this invasion is occurring after the biggest drop in the population of Russia (remarkably reported by the Russian state equivalent of the Census Bureau) since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Attributable to COVID mortality considerably in excess of our own relatively poor (as compared with Canada, a reasonable analogue) performance. Vaccine uptake in Russia was/is terrible with the mainstay of vaccination being the inferior and much touted domestic vaccine. A failure for Putin and the low vaccine uptake is evidence of public disenchantment with the Russian state, facts that Putin undoubtedly knows. Nor is it an accident that this invasion occurred after considerable unrest in Belarus and Kazakhstan, jeopardizing the cordon sanitaire of clients he is trying to maintain. It's not unusual for autocratic regimes experiencing erosion of domestic legitimacy and general insecurity to pursue aggressive foreign policies. Think Argentina and the Falkland invasion, the Greek dictatorship's attempt to occupy Cyprus, and Mussolini's effort to conquer Greece.

    As for achieving "strategic" goals, Putin may keep NATO out of Ukraine, but NATO was never a military threat. He likely prefers having a wasteland on his border to moderately prosperous and moderately democratic neighbors (check the difference in per capita GDP and life expectancy between Poland and Russia) but at what cost? He's shown that his military is hardly the robust force that many feared. What is likely to be a quagmire will result in the degradation of his forces that will take years to rectify. Russia's only likely economic option is to become a client of China, which will likely stabilize or further worsen de-industrialization. Russia will have same relationship to China that late 19th century Argentina had to Britain. Russian population decline and population aging will only accelerate. Russian birthrates, already low, will likely fall further and immigration to Russia from the former Soviet central Asian republics will dwindle. Anyway you look at it, this is a tremendous strategic blunder.

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  9. Peaceful IR Realist

    Although the so-called neorealist theories, such as Mearsheimer's Offensive Realism, typically ignore so-called domestic-level variables (e.g., regime type, leader's personality), any sensible neorealist would recognize that domestic level variables do affect state behavior in real world-situations. In this respect, the neorealists are similar to microeconomists. Any sensible microeconomist would recognize that humans are not rational actors in the way that microeconomic theory posits; the microeconomist makes the rational-actor assumption because the model that is based on this assumption generates useful predictions about human behavior. The neorealist theories are often superior to competing explanations because they generate better predictions about state behavior. Thus, many commentators on this blog believe that Putin's objectives in Ukraine are shaped by his ideology. A realist would say that the Russian Empire cared about Ukraine, the Soviet communists (new ideology) cared about Ukraine, and the Ivan Illich-reading Putin (again, new ideology) cares about Ukraine. They all care about Ukraine because control over Ukraine is vital to Russia's security. Thus, the realist would say, even if you got Putin to read John Locke and become a liberal, he'd still care about Ukraine, because a John Locke-reading Putin would still care about Russia's security. Now, to fully understand why any of these successive Russian regimes acted the way they did in a particular situation, you do have to look at things like the nature of the regime or personality of the ruler. Those are all relevant factors. But Russia's security interest is still going to be a major factor (probably the most important factor) in any accurate analysis. To the extent you see IR realists focusing on security rather than other factors when they analyze particular events, they are probably doing so because (a) security usually is the most important factor driving a state's behavior on the international stage, so it is good practice to start out with the working assumption that state leaders may be responding to their states' security interests, especially since anyone who is honest with themselves must recognize that they don't actually know what Putin is thinking, regardless of how many times they've read Ivan Illich or one of Putin's speeches; and (b) non-realist analysts routinely ignore security considerations in their analyses, leading to explanations that are misleading and useless, and thus justifying any overcorrection the realists might commit by slightly overemphasizing security over other factors.

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  10. LFC

    Whether control over territory X is vital or seems vital (in a subjective sense) to state Y's security is almost always, I think, context-dependent.

    I heard the last ten minutes of a radio interview today with the historian M.E. Sarotte, who was summarizing her argument (in her book on this subject) that NATO expansion in the '90s was done in a way that antagonized Russia, whereas it might have been done, if political pressures in the US (and other things) had been different etc., in a different way (through the 'Partnership for Peace', say).

    If that path had been taken, maybe whoever ended up in power in Russia would not have seen "control over Ukraine" as "vital to Russia's security." It depends on judgments about others' motives and intentions. Mearsheimer's 'offensive realism' assumes that states fear each other and can never be certain about each others' intentions, so have to assume the worst. That's not always the case. Britain today can be certain that France is not going to invade it, for example. Canada can be certain that the U.S. is not going to invade it.

    There is nothing 'objective' about Ukraine that makes it vital to Russia's security. What makes it vital to Russia's security is a subjective assessment or fear that Ukraine might be used to launch an attack on Russia (if not a land invasion a la Napoleon and Hitler, then some other kind of attack). And that kind of subjective assessment or fear can only claim to have some, however tenuous, grounding in 'reality' if the international context is such that it contributes to a feeling of insecurity. Change the context and you might change the feeling of insecurity. If the Partnership for Peace had gone somewhere, maybe the context would be different. Maybe not, hard to know.

    In short, I'd suggest that "security considerations" are, for the most part, not objective, ahistorical factors rooted in immutable things like geography. They are subjective judgments rooted in particular worldviews that are in turn shaped partly by particular historical sequences of events. Control over Ukraine may not always be vital to Russia's security. If Russia (meaning any Russian leader) would judge it to be vital now, that's a product of a particular history and set of fears. It's not something that will necessarily be the case for all time.

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  11. Johnny Eh McDonald

    LFC

    Your disagreement is mostly in terms of your own seeming normative preferences and characterization of history. It's completely belied by the facts, though.

    China's explicit policy vis-a-vis its own borders AND uti possidetis juris itself, has been stated repeatedly since Mao first did so in 1949. The government's express view remains firm: the borders were created by the British, over which it had no say. The idea that it is bound to respect them due to norms of which it also had no say is imperialism. It sees both the borders and the norms as illegitimate tools of control.

    Don't take my word for it, go read what Mao said, what China told India up to 1962 (why they went to war over it and why they have skirmishes now), and what the PRC leadership has repeatedly insisted since. China does talk in terms of sovereignty, but on its own terms, e.g., being able to determine its own laws and to shape its own borders with its neighbours without being bound by international legal norms or the existing lines on the map while doing so.

    India fundamentally disagreed with that approach. It no longer does.

    Go read about what the Russian government has publicly stated since 1990 about how Ukraine's borders were determined and delineated and what it thinks about their legitimacy.

    "Most countries like the "Western-imposed" intl legal order because it isn't actually Western imposed…They like the norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity as currently understood, for obvious reasons".

    Most developing countries are ruled by small elite classes who are financially, militarily, and otherwise propped up by Western governments. So, yes, their ruling classes – whose kids are sent for Western educations, and who are represented in their governments and university faculties – have tended to CLAIM to support, and to parrot the language of, international law because it has served their interest in maintaining their status. Some even really do like their borders as they currently are. (They also have tended to talk about international human rights, but predominantly just the identity politics stuff. Not the stuff that would threaten their rule or wealth.)

    Regardless, that has little to do with what their populations believe, or what the elites/rules themselves will necessarily claim to believe, let alone do, going forward. Regarding the latter, that will depend upon how the tide turns and how they envision themselves faring in a world with a Chinese hegemon. LOOK AND SEE at how those narratives have already dramatically changed over the last few years in places like Malaysia, Turkey, West Africa, and elsewhere. Discourses now framed in part in terms of liberation from US Dollar hegemony, from Western corporations' property rights in their primary resources, from Western elite values being used to restructure their societies, etc. Such views come from both existing rulers and new pseudo-outsider leaders in "democratized" regimes like Malaysia. (It is very trendy for Western academics to sympathize with the Global South's opposition to the neoliberal aspects of international law. Those same scholars are nevertheless either completely tone deaf or oblivious to the extent to which that only scratches the surface of the opposition.)

    Even amongst the existing ruling classes of the Global South who don't speak thus (at least no don't openly), the West's weakness is a signal about which side to support for their medium to long-term interests. Signing up to Team China is thus a gamble about improving your country's lot, betting which side is going to win the world in this long-brewing new cold war, while potentially undermining your (own elite status and power in your) own country BY betting on a side that steers the world away from the international legal status quo. One clear incentive is that doing so can secure investments to significantly improve your country's infrastructures (as one sees China doing in Africa and Central Asia with One Belt One Road), which the Western countries who set up factories or mines in their countries never bothered to do.

    Let's save a discussion about the difference between reductionist approaches vs. black-boxing for another day.

    Reply
  12. Matt

    "One can imagine Putin, as a wannabe dictator, was alarmed by "popular revolts" in the early 2000s,…"

    Putin hasn't been a "wannabe dictator" since, at least, the massive vote fraud in the elections in 2002, and the destruction of alternative political systems in the country – he's been an actual dictator. And, it's not necessary to "imagine" that he and those in power were "alarmed" by the "color revolutions" – it was obvious and explicit from their own actions and statements. What I am constantly surprised with here is that people who _don't_ and who _have not_ followed the region for some time assume that a general theory of international relation is enough to explain the situation. (This is so for Mearsheimer, who made a number of mistakes in his discussions of Russia that make it much less valuable – and has done so for a long time, going back to when he argued Ukraine should have kept Soviet nuclear weapons, despite the fact that they almost certainly could not have used them. If you don't think specific knowledge of a place is important to understand world events, you'll often get things wrong – including how to understand the events!) When you know the history here, Putin's actions – which seem extremely odd otherwise – appear, if not exactly "rational", understandable. Otherwise we have only a vague notion of "interests" that are never really explained.

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  13. David Mathers

    Two problems with the Putin is a rationally promoting Russian *security* by invading Ukraine, and simply miscalculated how bad the Western blowback would be, one of which I'm fairly sure about, the other less so:

    A) The goal of preventing Ukraine from joining NATO had already been achieved by the operation in the Donbass in 2014, and the occupation of Crimea. It is part of NATO's rules that no country can join that doesn't control all of it's own territory. (At least according to the Wash Post here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/22/natos-membership-rules-invite-conflict-benefit-putin/) Moreover, that rule is very likely to be followed in this case, because to do otherwise risks dragging NATO into direct fighting with Russia.

    B) What exactly is NATO going to be able to do to Russia through control of Ukraine that it couldn't do anyway? Sure, it'd make it easier for NATO to launch a land invasion of Russia. But the idea that they would do that is basically insane, given that Russia is a nuclear power with thousands of nukes. The other thing that can do is position missiles in the Ukraine. But if they want to position missiles close to Moscow and St. Petersburg, they can already used the Baltics for that. Not to mention that it's unclear to me how important being able to hit with nukes very slightly faster is in a strategic situation where both sides basically have a guaranteed second strike capability via things like submarines, and that's been stably the case since the mid-60s. What else exactly does the US/NATO gain in terms of ability to threaten Russia militarily

    I'm a bit hesistant about B) because John Mearsheimer doesn't seem to buy it, and he obviously knows far more about this sort of balance of power IR stuff than me, a failed analytic philosopher of mind. But I'm pretty sure about A).

    Further there are plausible alternative reasons for the invasion. Country's seek power as an end in itself in my view, not just security from attack. Losing a large country from its sphere of influence would certainly reduce the *power* of the Russian state, even if it would not make it significantly more vulnerable to military attack.

    Maybe I'm just missing something, given that I am non-expert here. I want to emphasize that that is not just rhetorical, I genuinely do think there's a fair chance I am wrong here!

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  14. Nick

    It is not clear who these points are directed to. I'm not sure anyone, let alone an IR scholar, would deny the things you say about security considerations being dependent on history and context. You can make the same point about money–it is not objective, ahistorical, or independent of collective (interpretations of) intentions. But no one is claiming that it is. The idea is not that security considerations (or money) are features of the natural world that a physicist could discover laws for. It is that they and some other social phenomena display regularities that can be at least partially understood/explained through finding the right framework of abstractions. If you observed to Mearsheimer that Britain/France and US/Canada need not worry about invasions from one another in the near-term future, he would agree with you and then recount the geopolitical history of how that came to be the case. In fact, I have heard him mention this very example of US/Canada as an illustration of his framework. The US was not always the undisputed hegemon of the entire western hemisphere. The history of how it came to be, and what it continues to do to maintain that status, is the type of thing a person like Mearsheimer spends much of their day thinking and writing about. Their views are not ahistorical.

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  15. Peaceful IR Realist

    What might have happened is far weaker evidence about how the world works than what did happen. What did happen is this: after the USSR collapsed, the United States – Russia's chief geostrategic rival for half a century – welcomed former Soviet republics, including former Soviet republics that share a land border with Russia, into a military alliance that excluded Russia. Even if the United States had only the purest intentions, which is doubtful, Russia should not be expected to count on our benevolent intentions because intentions can always change; ask the Iranians whether American intentions remained the same after they signed the nuclear agreement with Obama. Although Britain, France, Canada and the U.S. are allies, the alliance does not eliminate the basic mistrust all countries have toward other countries, as you can see from the fact that the U.S. government spies on its own allies, and America's allies spy on the U.S. There is indeed something "objective about Ukraine that makes it vital to Russia's national security": its geographical proximity to Russia. Geography is extremely important in international relations. That is why Poland is more willing to send MiGs to Ukraine than the United States is: Poland is more willing to take the risks involved in fighting Russia because Russian aggression in Eastern Europe is a greater threat to Poland than it is to the United States, and that is a consequence of geography. It may be a "subjective judgment" that Russia would be more vulnerable if Ukraine were part of NATO and United States troops and missiles were stationed in Ukraine, but the vast majority of Russian leaders would reach that judgment regardless of ideology, class, personality, etc., so whether these facts are properly characterized as "objective" or "subjective" for theoretical purposes is unimportant. There is room for disagreement about what any country's vital security interests really are, and a country's vital security interests can change over time, but the status of a country that shares a large land border with your country is almost always going to be a vital security interest for your country, as it is in the case of Russia and Ukraine.

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  16. Brian Leiter

    Having lived in a country and watched its TV is also not a substitute for knowledge of international relations and how states behave. Putin's actions do not look odd from a realist perspective, even if they can be rendered intelligible other ways. The Russian political scientist's account we started with makes Putin's actions fully intelligible as well, and her perspective is basically a realist one. Indeed, her account makes Putin a lot more intelligble than most of the alternatives in the U.S. media, including the Snyder "Ilyin made him do it" theory.

    If Mearsheimer has made a mistake, based on lacking country-specific knowledge, in the current case, it would be good to identify it. I do not understand the vague reference to an earlier claim about Ukraine and nuclear weapons: if Matt or someone else has links, please add them. I am friendly with John, and find his perspective illuminating, even though I think the Grand Delusion is pretty implausible and "unrealist." I'm sure he's been wrong about other things, but it would be good to hear the details.

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  17. LFC

    Nick,
    My comment was directed to 'Peaceful IR Realist' but since you offered a reply, I'll briefly reply in my turn.

    Mearsheimer does concern himself w history — in a certain way, to be sure — but he does. You're right on that specific pt. So let my try to clarify briefly what I was trying to say.

    1) Peaceful IR Realist suggested that "control of Ukraine is vital to Russia's security" irrespective of who's in power in Russia or their ideology, or, afaict, much of anything else. In a way that is treating "security considerations" as, not a "natural" phenomenon, but as being as close to a "natural" phenomenon as a social phenomenon can be. That was the intended point of my remark about a-historicality. Maybe I chose the wrong word.

    2) US/Canada etc.: The point I was trying to make here has to do with judging others' intentions. Contra your explanation, Canada does not fear US invasion today *not* so much, or not solely, bc the U.S. has achieved regional hegemony, but because Canada has reached the (rational) conclusion that the govt of the US does not *intend* to attack it. The sources of that intent cd be many: maybe it's the fact thery're both democracies, maybe it's the fact that they don't see each other as a mil. threat (but that's tautological), maybe it's that they accept certain norms about territorial integrity (at least most of the time), maybe it's partly that the US, having achieved regional hegemony, doesn't "need" to conquer Canada.

    Whatever the source, I'm suggesting that Canada has made a judgment that it is *certain* the U.S. will not attack it and does not intend to. That goes against what Mearsheimer says in TGPP, where he writes that states can never be certain of each others' intentions. I can find the particular page number if you want, just not taking the time to do it rt now.

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  18. Blinn Combs

    This interview, with ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor (formerly top planner for Wesley Clark while he headed the NATO forces in Kosovo) is extremely interesting, and a useful counterweight to lot of the nonsense floating out there. He gives a very frank overview of the steps leading to the conflict, the currently Russian military strategy, and how things are likely to play out. The interview portion lasts for a little less than the first hour.

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  19. LFC

    Further to Nick:

    Mearsheimer writes (TGPP, p.45, emphasis in original):
    "When a state surveys its environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive *capabilites* of potential rivals, not their intentions. As emphasized earlier, intentions are ultimately unknowable, so states worried about their survival must make worst-case assumptions about their rivals' intentions."

    What I'm saying is that intentions are not always unknowable: Canada knows that the U.S. does not intend to attack it. Now you might say: Mearsheimer is only talking about *rivals* (and great powers). And my response would be: Yes, but if Canada can know the U.S.'s intentions (which it can), then it becomes possible to imagine a world in which rival X has at least a near-certainty, if not 100 percent certainty, about rival Y's intentions, such that it need not make "worst-case assumptions" about them. In other words, the meaning of rivalry depends partly on how leaders think about it, and that in turn depends, as Wendt more or less argued more than 20 years ago, on the ideas about intl politics that decision makers carry around in their heads.

    You might say "this is all b.s. constructivism," I'm just saying that Mearsheimer's picture of great-power rivalry as a situation in which rivals make "worst-case assumptions" about their rivals' intentions is not the only possible picture. I'm no defense expert, but I might hazard the suggestion that if the U.S., for instance, were actually making worst-case assumptions about its rivals' intentions, its defense posture might look a little different. Didn't the late, legendary Andrew Marshall (I think I have the name right) spend his long career in the Pentagon worrying about, and assessing, not only capabilities but also intentions? As I say, I'm no expert on the Pentagon, but that's certainly my impression. If one were just making the worst-case assumptions about intentions all the time, would Marshall's office have been needed? Not sure, just raising the question.

    Bottom line: M's picture of intl politics is one picture. It has flaws, as all of them do. As a grand theory, it is *not* self-evidently correct, either in all of its main assumptions or in all of its particulars.

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  20. LFC

    To Peaceful IR Realist:
    I find this comment of yours (#15) more nuanced than the one I originally replied to.

    I know geography is important (I had to read Mackinder, etc.). I guess all I'm saying is: I find that a realist perspective can sometimes be very useful, I just object to the tone that occasionally some realists seem to adopt, a tone that says "this is the obviously correct explanation, period." (Or at least they seem to adopt it in certain blog comment threads.)

    Realism is not the only perspective on international relations that is defensible or that makes some sense of the world. If that were indeed the case, half the IR academics would probably be out of business (well, I'm exaggerating slightly), and "we" (whether we're employed in the academy or not) could all rip up our PhDs (or whatever degrees we happen to have) and be done with it.

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  21. Peaceful IR Realist

    I don’t understand how you can claim that any country can be certain about America’s intentions after we elected Donald Trump to be our president in 2016. Trump threatened to totally upend American foreign policy and his victory was a shocking surprise to establishment leaders across the world. Moreover, he did upend American foreign policy by launching a totally irrational trade war with China that no other president would have attempted. Another shocking surprise we recently lived through was Britain’s vote to leave the EU. Nothing is certain in international politics. I understand that iA US invasion of Canada is unlikely to happen because it would be completely insane, but Trump’s presidency shows that US politics absolutely can go off the rails and lead us to do crazy and evil things.

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  22. WT

    How then, would an IR realist determine when state actors are not making decisions on the basis of security in any given decision? It appears that the model and reality, the map and the territory, are regularly confused, not just by the critics of the realism but by the practitioners themselves.

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  23. Matt

    Here's an example with Mearsheimer: In this article, he argued that Ukraine should have kept its nuclear weapons: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/1993-06-01/case-ukrainian-nuclear-deterrent

    This has been quoted in the news a lot recently, for understandable reasons. There's a big problem, though: it's highly unlikely that Ukraine could have made any use of the weapons, even if it had kept them. For discussion, see here: https://www.icanw.org/faq_on_ukraine_and_nuclear_weapons This seems to fit with his rather loose approach to particular situations.

    And Brian, I'm pretty sure that I've read as much, and almost certainly more, of the international relations literature as you have. (It's much closer to my areas of research, for example.) It is, at least, deeply controversial if Mearsheimer's account is very accurate in describing the action of states. My impression is that it is mostly vapid – it allows the making of vague statements that can be fit to many situations, but provides little guidance and mostly post-hoc rationalization. More detailed knowledge about particular states is needed to understand their behavior. This doesn't mean that "interests" are not important. I don't think anyone denies that! Only that Mearsheimer's account is too vague and too general to do any real work. (It reminds me of nothing more than an undergrad in an ethics class who thinks that naive egoism "really" explains all human behavior.) On my suggestion (hardly original) above, it's easy to see what the interest of the people making the decisions are. But on Mearsheimer's account, it's much harder to see what the specific interest is, or why these actions are taken. Knowing more about the political situation in the country helps answer that, but it takes us away from his approach.

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  24. Peaceful IR Realist

    I had not seen (#20) when I posted (#21), so I was not ignoring your latest comment when I posted mine. I agree that neither Offensive Realism nor any other realist theory provides the "obviously correct explanation" for any state's behavior. But I do believe the Ukraine crisis is one of those situations in which "a realist perspective can … be useful." In that regard, I do not understand Matt's claim (#23) that "Mearsheimer's account is to vague and general to do any real work." Here's what Mearsheimer said in that Foreign Affairs article from 1993: "extending NATO's security umbrella into the heart of the old Soviet Union is not wise. It is sure to enrage the Russians and cause them to act belligerently." The "real work" is the correct prediction that Mearsheimer has been making for decades.

    In response to WT's question (#22), to know whether security considerations were the decisive factor in any given decision, you have to look at the available historical records documenting how that decision was reached. Realists believe that realist theories are a reliable guide to international relations because their interpretation of the historical record is that security considerations very often are the decisive factor in major foreign policy decisions. We obviously don't have very much information about how Russian leaders reached their recent decision to invade Ukraine, but we can say that Russia's actions make sense if you assume that Russian decision making is driven by security considerations, and we can also say that none of Russia's actions give reason to believe that Putin has gone mad or is behaving in an excessively ideological way. Perhaps that is unsatisfying, but the reality is that states in international politics must make decisions in the absence of complete information about their adversaries' present or future intentions, so they are forced to rely at least in part on general theories about how states behave.

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  25. Milton

    What does the Mearsheimer crowd make of the existence of Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania, a stone's throw from St. Petersburg?

    Is there any room in the Mearsheimer analysis for the importance of securing Crimea as permanently Russia, both for the massively important (to Russia) Sevastopol port and for the potential gas reserves (both taking them, and denying them to Ukraine)? What about Putin's calculations for staying in power?

    It seems weird that its framed as like "its all about NATO expansion" vs "Putin is a madman". Is it possible that NATO expansion is one of many factors, and that it might not even be the most important factor?

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  26. Brian Leiter

    The question of Estonia et al. was discussed in the earlier thread: Russia was too weak at that time to resist their joining NATO. Equally important, there is only a small swath of land (surrounded by Russia on both sides) connecting those Baltic countries with Poland and thus the rest of NATO. In an actual ground war, Russia would closes that line of access immediately. That reduces the threat somewhat.

    Realists assume that countries act in their interests, which includes security, economic, and similar interests. I take that to mean the interests of the elites who control the government, but most IR realists are less clear on this.

    In the case of Ukraine, NATO expansion seems to be the overriding consideration, as suggested by the Russian political scientist in the post above. But of course, like all human events, there are probably multiple factors at work, including ideology. One thing I've not seen actual evidence of is that Putin is a "madman," even he is a very bad man!

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  27. Boris Dagaev

    Understandably, some readers of this blog are not completely satisfied with Stanovaya's analysis, which was written for the subscribers of her Telegram channel who are familiar with her work, and thus is limited in scope.

    To provide a wider historical perspective (starting with 2007), I've translated the first part of today's article by another Russian political scientist, Kirill Shamiev. I'm hoping it would clarify some coordinated strategic considerations and tactical moves made by Putin's regime over the past few years.

    You can find the translation here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oUHox2ooGCkk6g3GzB69aboqUUSHiJFgEDEM8_2I3Fk/edit?usp=sharing

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  28. Johnny Eh McDonald

    Ho hum.

    Meanwhile, back in the real world, the plutocratic Vegetable in Chief admitted to the world (or was instructed to tell the world) what's actually going on: that the American-dominated international legal order is being challenged directly.



    (See POTUS starting at 14:14)

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