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Roberts, A-Response To JM-The Economist - 20220323
Roberts, A-Response To JM-The Economist - 20220323
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/23/sir-adam-roberts-rebuffs-the-view-that-
the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
Professor Mearsheimer does not let Vladimir Putin off the hook
entirely: “There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the crisis and
is responsible for how it is being waged,” he writes. But Professor
Mearsheimer’s central argument is that the crisis began at NATO’s
Bucharest summit in April 2008, when President George W. Bush,
along with the other NATO member states, ostensibly committed the
alliance to the future membership of Ukraine and Georgia. The Russian
leadership was deeply opposed to the prospect of NATO extending its
reach so close to the heartland of Russia.
Alongside these proximate causes there are three other factors that help
to explain the current crisis in Ukraine. The most important, and the
most neglected, is that the break-up of empires is often messy and
traumatic. Often foreign military intervention of some kind follows.
The end of European colonial empires, and the collapse of the Soviet
and Yugoslav empires in the 1990s, forced new or re-constituted states
to make fateful decisions. Is citizenship based on ethnicity or simply
residence? Should kin living outside the state have a right to
citizenship? What frontiers does the state have? What friends and
allies? What constitution? What language? Such questions have been at
the heart of most of the political crises and armed conflicts of the past
100 years or more. The dozens of UN peacekeeping missions
established since 1945 have all had the task of addressing post-colonial
and post-imperial crises.
Both Georgia and Ukraine faced many if not all of these quandaries in
the 1990s—and faced them long before the question of NATO
membership arose. From the very beginning of their new existence the
status of Russian minorities in Georgia and Ukraine was particularly
difficult. In Georgia two breakaway republics provided a basis, or at
least a pretext, for Russian intervention on occasion. In Ukraine, too,
defending the rights of its two Russian-supported breakaway republics
was the ostensible reason for Russian military interventions there. And
in these pro-Russian republics there were forced expulsions, of
Georgians and Ukrainians respectively, leading to calls that they should
be enabled to return to their homes.