Who is Dominating Whom? Russia, Ukraine, and the West
by Brian D’Agostino
Let us start by noting some points of agreement and disagreement among the three panelists that you will be hearing today. I think we all agree that we need to consider a broad historical perspective from 1991—the end of the Cold War—to the beginning of the Ukraine war. And we also agree that EU, NATO and US policy are all intertwined.
What we disagree about is the motivations for Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Was it to dominate Ukraine? We're going to hear that viewpoint from Ken Fuchsman. Or was it to counteract domination of Russia by NATO and the United States? That's the view that you'll hear from Nicolas Davies and me.
With this introduction to the panel as a whole, let me now start my own presentation, which you can also follow on my PowerPoint. This story, in my telling, begins in the 1990s with Boris Yeltsin, who outsourced privatization of the Russian economy to Wall Street. This was, of course, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street shared the spoils of Russia’s economy with the Russian oligarchs at the expense of the population. So that was a kind of economic and political domination by the West that occurred at the outset of the Russian Federation.
Then, in 1999, we had the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO. Now, these countries had historical reasons to fear Russian imperialism. But the leaders of NATO could have addressed their concerns by negotiating threat reduction agreements with Russia. To undertake war preparations instead—and that is what the expansion of NATO is: war preparations—required a pretext. So, apologists for NATO expansion claimed that Russia’s interventions in Chechnya threatened its other neighbors. Note, however, that Chechnya had historically been part of Russia. By comparison, to have Hawaii secede from the United States, and have the United States intervene to prevent its secession would not imperil world order or global security. But that was the story we were told to justify the expansion of NATO.
I turn now to other provocations before 2014. Here I am following Ben Abelow’s 2022 book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. In 2001, the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty. In 2008, we had the Bucharest memorandum, where NATO said it intended to admit Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. The US then funded, armed and trained the Georgian military. The August 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia occurred four months after the Bucharest memorandum and was likely a response to US and NATO militarism.
As for Ukraine, between 1991 and 2013, the US spent five billion dollars funding anti-Russian groups in Ukraine. So, when armed Maidan insurgents occupied the Ukrainian parliament building in February 2014, forced out the democratically elected pro-Russian president, and established an unconstitutional anti-Russian government, Putin annexed Crimea. That's the backstory to the annexation of Crimea.
I turn now to Western provocations after Crimea. Between 2014 to 2001, the US spent four billion dollars in mostly military aid to Ukraine, largely to “improve interoperability with NATO.” Beginning in 2016, the US put Aegis missile launchers in Romania and Poland. Now if that's not a menacing gesture, I don't know what is. Then the Trump administration withdrew from the intermediate range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (The specter of nuclear war is hovering in the background of all of this.) The US and NATO provided lethal weapons to Ukraine, trained its armed forces, and conducted joint air and naval exercises with Ukraine.
The US and NATO also reaffirmed their intentions to admit Ukraine into NATO. In the context of the foregoing militarist policies by the West, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
To get a further handle on this big picture, and to answer conclusively the question of who is dominating whom, let us now turn to some comparative data on military spending in the period since the end of the Cold War. These data are presented in the following figure, which is taken from D’Agostino (2024).
If you just look at the data, the US and NATO have been spending about 800 billion dollars per year during the last thirty years (the blue line), while Russia is spending something on the order of about 3% of what the US and NATO spend (as seen in the orange line). So, by this metric, the West has completely and utterly dominated Russia militarily since the end of the Cold War.
I would say these data are a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of Russian imperialism, which is really a fantasy and not reality in the post-Cold War period. In 1998, the US and NATO spent $585 billion more on their militaries than Russia. By 2021, this already absurd level of overkill had increased to $873 billion. Russian nationalist dreams of world empire were simply delusional. And this was common knowledge in Washington, Brussels and Moscow. I have to say that US policymakers, in cahoots with the Western press, have been gaslighting the American public about Russian imperialism. They know absolutely well, from the military spending data, that the specter of Russian imperialism is a fantasy. They know this. They're lying and gaslighting the public. That's my view.
Of course, people disagree about this, and we'll hear a different view from Ken Fuchsman. But just to be clear, that's my view of this. There was no conceivable security rationale for the expansions of NATO in 1999 and 2004. They were entirely unprovoked. The US and NATO could have made peace with Russia at any time since the end of the Cold War, and can still make peace today.
So how will the war end? Well, no one has a crystal ball, but it's likely that European and American taxpayers will get tired of paying for the war before Russia abandons its war aim, which is apparently to prevent Ukraine from becoming an outpost of Western power on its very border.
Finally, what should we learn from this war? First, that war is obsolete. If citizens want peace, then demand that our leaders resolve conflicts through negotiations, not war. Second, that war propaganda is seductive. Don’t believe politicians and pundits who whip up indignation about a war in order to give our tax dollars to military bureaucracies and “defense” contractors. And finally, that war institutions are entrenched but depend upon public support. If citizens want peace, then demand that policymakers “move the money” from the war machine to investment in a just and sustainable future.
In the concluding section below, I will have more to say about what an end to this conflict could look like and how international security arrangements can be reformed. First, however, let’s hear from our other two panelists.