In 2014, when he was an attaché at the US embassy in Moscow, Alexander Vindman began making weekly trips to the border with Ukraine. The Kremlin was denying to the world that its forces were helping separatists seize regions of eastern Ukraine. Vindman was sure they were lying.
One day he came across a military convoy, bristling with heavy weapons, heading for the frontier. He drove behind. A security service car tried to force him off the road. But Vindman got the smoking gun: photographs of Russian forces entering Ukraine.
The American response to this proof of Russian chicanery, was, he recalls, one of crisis management rather than a recognition of looming disaster. There were no sanctions placed on Russia, no delivery of arms for the Ukrainians to defend themselves.
In fact, writes Vindman, who was born in Ukraine to a Jewish family, “from the Ukrainian perspective all the Americans ever did was take weapons away from them”. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States helped negotiate the transfer to Russia of Cold War nuclear weapons positioned in Ukraine (and Belarus and Kazakhstan). Washington’s prime concern was that they should not fall into the hands of a possible rogue state.
The US never considered, Vindman reflects, that Ukraine might best retain the missiles, heavy bombers and warheads as a hedge against Russian attacks. He contends that policymakers failed to see Ukraine as a separate entity as distinct from Russia “as Ireland is from England and Portugal from Spain”. This was signalled as far back as 1991, in president George HW Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech, in which he warned Ukrainians against suicidal nationalism.
As an independent country, on which Moscow had imposed its will for 300 years, Ukraine managed “to land neither in the East nor the West”. It was an unloved buffer state, with oligarchs and Russia-style corruption, and divisions between pro-Russia and western aligned populations. The other newly independent countries in Europe could join Nato, but not Ukraine.
For most of the first two decades after 1991, US presidents behaved as if grounds for optimism existed about a democratic post-imperial Russia. It saw the Kremlin as a stable, responsible player, not threatening its neighbours. Dick Cheney was a lone voice constantly challenging the priority given to Kremlin interests in the post-Soviet space.
The soft response to the Russia-provoked war on Georgia in 2008 exposed the fundamental flaw in the American “Russia-first” policy: an inability to make hard decisions in the face of Russian exceptionalism. This crisis management strategy continued even after the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and the seizure of Crimea and the start of the Ukraine border war.
The theme of Vindman’s unsparing critique of US policy is one of lost opportunities that could have prevented today’s war. In his opinion, the short-term problem-solving approach taken over the last 30 years cost the United States a strong relationship with a strategically critical and pro-western Ukraine which could have deterred Russian aggression.
There are so many what-ifs in history. What if Ukraine had been admitted to Nato in 2002, when Russian president, Vladimir Putin, declared that he would not see “anything controversial or hostile” in Ukraine making its own choices to secure its security? What if Nato had embraced Russia itself, as Boris Yeltsin favoured as far back as the 1990s? What if the US had not provoked Russia by placing ballistic missile defence systems in Poland and Romania after 9/11?
Vindman acknowledges that Washington was distracted by its military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. He might have made more of the corrosive effect on American diplomacy of waging war without United Nations authorisation. Putin could say to the West: who are you to lecture us when you show contempt for international rules?
It is also evident that the eventual emergence of a democratic, western-leaning and law-based Ukraine was an existential threat to the neighbouring authoritarian dictatorship. Underlying Putin’s belligerence against Ukraine was a deep fear of a Maidan in Red Square.
A veteran of the Iraq War, decorated for physical courage, Vindman was the Russia expert in the National Security Council during the first Trump presidency in 2018. He showed moral courage when he testified to Congress that Donald Trump had tried to bully Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy into investigating Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. It cost him his job.
While US military help for Ukraine has always been “a day late and a dollar short”, the Trump doctrine, he says, takes American missteps to “an entirely different level”. That’s Vindman’s diplomatic way of saying it is now an unmitigated disaster.
Conor O’Clery is a former Moscow Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of Moscow, December 25, 1991, the Last Day of the Soviet Union
