Russia in Ukraine: A Reader Responds

Stephen Cohen last December:

On November 20, The New York Times published an editorial urging—or perhaps warning—Ukraine to resist “Moscow’s bullying” and sign an association agreement with the European Union. The editorial was in the spirit of virtually all US media coverage of Ukraine’s “strategic decision” and “civilizational choice”—its last chance for democracy and economic prosperity and the West’s best hope to stop Putin’s attempt, as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton misrepresented his Eurasian Customs Union, “to re-Sovietize the region.” All this is another example of the US media’s generally one-dimensional and ideological coverage of post-Soviet developments in Russia and other former Soviet republics since 1992. Not surprisingly, when the Ukrainian leadership announced its decision last week against signing the agreement with the European Union, US media commentators, with no factual analysis in mind and egg on their collective face, could only again rage over Putin’s “bullying.”

The New York Times declined to print my letter pointing out the lack of objective analysis in its editorial. It is posted below.

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But have the U.S. and Europe really done nothing to provoke Putin’s reactions? During these years, who, for example, expanded the West’s cold-war military organization, NATO, to Russia’s borders, and still covets Ukraine and Georgia as members; bombed or invaded three of Russia’s international partners (Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya) and now threatens a fourth (Iran); and is currently ringing Russia with missile-defense installations? And then there is the editorial’s venerable Cold War double standard: “Europe’s use of trade leverage … is constructive and reasonable”; but when Putin uses similar carrots—financial loans, discounted energy supplies, access to markets—to persuade Ukraine to join instead his fledgling Eurasian Customs Union, those are “attempts to bludgeon.”