Four Western Provocations That Led to U.S.-Russia Crisis Today

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Four Western Provocations That Led to U.S.-Russia Crisis Today
The one-sided indictments of Moscow’s behavior invariably ignore numerous missteps that took place, beginning with President Clinton.
By Ted Galen Carpenter
December 21, 2021

U.S. and NATO officials, as well as most of the Western news media, contend that Russia is to blame for the current ugly confrontation. They highlight four Kremlin actions that severely spiked East-?West tensions. The first episode, according to that version of history, occurred in 2008 when Russian forces invaded Georgia and advanced to the outskirts of the capital, Tbilisi. A second, even more serious offense, took place in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed that strategic peninsula after holding a bogus referendum. The third incident followed just months later when Russia orchestrated a separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and then sent in troops to assist the rebellion. During the years that followed, Vladimir Putin’s government exacerbated the emerging cold war by interfering in the internal political affairs of numerous Western countries, especially the United States.

Those allegations contain some truth, but all of them conveniently omit crucial context. For example, the 2008 invasion of Georgia occurred only after the Georgian military fired on Russian peacekeeping troops that had been in the secessionist region of South Ossetia since the early 1990s. Even a European Union investigation concluded that Georgian forces had initiated the fighting. The conflict also occurred in large part because President George W. Bush encouraged Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to believe that the United States and NATO would support his country if it became embroiled in a conflict with Russia.

Putin’s seizure of Crimea was indeed a blatant violation of international law, but it occurred only after the United States and key EU allies had shamelessly assisted demonstrators to overthrow Ukraine’s elected pro-?Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych. That thinly disguised coup triggered Russian fears that Ukraine was about to become a forward staging area for NATO military power. Among other worries, the Kremlin suspected that it would lose access to its crucial naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimea peninsula and watch that facility become a hostile NATO base.

The one-?sided, self-?serving indictments of Russia’s behavior invariably ignore the numerous Western provocations that took place long before Moscow engaged in disruptive measures. Indeed, the deterioration of the West’s relations with post-?communist Russia began during Bill Clinton’s administration. . . .

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