The Great Illusion:
How Ukraine Misreads the American Playbook

In Ukraine, there’s this perennial gripe about how Americans have never really understood the Russian psyche, especially when it comes to the mindset of the folks at the top. One administration after another keeps expecting Russian attitudes and values to be a mirror image of American ones. If the U.S. has “hawks and doves,” then of course Russia must have them too. If Americans expect to see an independent opposition emerge, then Russia should sprout one, as if by some miracle, even under a totalitarian regime. The whole idea of what totalitarianism actually means—complete, unyielding control—has always been beyond the grasp of both American intellectuals and ordinary folks. The concept of an all-powerful state facilitated by secret police just doesn’t compute for most people over here.

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But Ukrainians are guilty of the same wishful thinking. Even though they’re better informed and less constrained in their views of other nations, they still fall into the trap of seeing the U.S. as some kind of anti-Russia, the moral superhero in the geopolitical comic book. They expect Uncle Sam to be out there, championing “democracy for all.” The reality, the aloof pragmatism of U.S. elites is something they’re still struggling to wrap their heads around, nearly three years into a bloody war that’s reduced cities to rubble and scarred a generation.

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Just before Russia decided to roll into Ukraine in early 2022, I had a conversation with a bigwig from the Reagan administration. The guy’s perspective was a masterclass in how removed the American establishment’s view is from any real concern for democracy and the rule of law in places that desperately need it. His main beef with Putin wasn’t his heinous crimes—both at home and abroad—but his refusal to play ball with the West in reining in China.

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So, when I hear Ukrainians griping about the U.S. “failing” again to understand Russia or being “duped” yet again, as Biden’s administration drip-feeds them military assistance while watching the Kremlin bomb their cities, I just want to hand them a book. It was published in London back in 1982 and lays out why the West has been partnering with the Russian secret police regime since the early 1920s—trading with it, shipping over tech, letting it annex half of Europe post-WWII, and swooping in to save it every time it teetered on the edge of collapse. The book’s called Pacifists Against Peace, written by Vladimir Bukovsky, a guy who spent 12 years in Soviet prison for daring to speak out against the regime’s human rights abuses and general butchery.

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Read that book, and it will become obvious why “stability” has always been the linchpin of U.S. policy towards Russia. It’s the same “stability” that led Bush Sr. to tell Ukraine to stick with the USSR back in 1990, dispatching Secretary of State Baker to Kyiv to sweet-talk the Ukrainians into staying on board.

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It’s the same “stability” that muzzled Reagan in his final years in government, keeping him silent about Gorbachev’s brutal crackdowns in Baku, Alma-Ata, and Vilnius. It’s the same “stability” that had Obama doing zilch when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, setting the stage for the current genocidal war against Ukraine. And it’s the same “stability” that made the Brits so reluctant to investigate Litvinenko’s murder and Berezovsky’s so-called suicide while rolling out the red carpet for the son of a KGB agent in Parliament.

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And this is exactly why Western elites aren’t exactly losing sleep over the fact that Navalny’s “opposition” campaigns might be getting a little help from the Russian secret services. They’re more than happy to welcome his widow, even though she’s on record quoting her favorite supremacist character from a racist Russian flick, prioritizing Russian issues over Ukraine’s actual bloodbath, and doubling down on the laughable notion that the Russian people are innocent bystanders in this savage war.

 

It's not because they don’t know real opposition is impossible in a totalitarian state, but because they know it all too well. In the world where might makes right, and they’d rather deal with players who have the backing of Russia’s power structures than a handful of honest dissidents like Bukovsky and his Solidarity International. Sure, they want Putin gone and change in Russia, but the real hope is that his replacements will be guys with deep ties to the Russian state apparatus. Whether ordinary Russians end up with the rule of law or democracy isn’t even on their radar.

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First published in Soviet History Lessons magazine in September 2024.