The strategy of constructing a narrative of lies to justify going to war is certainly nothing new. There is a long history in the U.S. that appeared to reach its apogee with the lie that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. That false narrative was reused with various faces with chemical weapons in Syria and, currently, with nuclear weapons in Iran.
“T]ruth is invariably the first casualty of war, but,” as Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent and this generation’s most distinguished specialist on Russia, says in his soon to be published book, The Culture of the Second Cold War, “propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is exceptionally intense.” Sakwa argues that “[a]t its heart” the Second Cold War, “is the struggle to control narratives, to shape popular perceptions of reality. This is an age-old endeavour,” he says, “but in Cold War 2 the misrepresentation of situations is exacerbated by the decline of high modernist ideals of fact-based journalism and impartial scholarship.”
Sakwa cites Jacques Baud, a Swiss army colonel who served in NATO and the UN, who argues that the false narratives that result from the refusal to conduct impartial investigations into important events has shaped the foreign policy of Western countries. Sakwa adds that this has been especially so with Russia, who has become the target of a “whole ‘anti-disinformation’ industry,” leading to especially “damaging consequences on international politics.”
The art of heresthetics, or the structuring of political reality to advantageously fit your narrative, seemed to reach its perfection in the Downing Street Memo, during the Iraq war, which reported that American “intelligence and facts were being fixed” around the policy. But the art of heresthetics seems to have burgeoned during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Several lies have been told to justify and sustain the war. And several of those lies told by the West have been revealed and refuted by the West’s own words.
The Proxy War
Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has long described the war in Ukraine as an attempt by the West “to eliminate competitors by using a proxy force.” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said that “NATO, in essence, is engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy. War means war.”
But, despite Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s admission that “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” the West has consistently claimed the more noble singular role of defending Ukraine and denied that it is also fighting a proxy war in Ukraine.
But that claim was recently refuted when former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told an interviewer that “We’re waging a proxy war, but we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job.”
It’s Not About NATO
A key feature of the West’s narrative about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that it was unprovoked. That was the title of Biden’s first address on the war, “Remarks by President Biden on Russia’s Unprovoked and Unjustified Attack on Ukraine,” and the word “unprovoked” has been attached to the word “war” every time since.
A key element of that narrative is the insistence that NATO’s eastward expansion to Ukraine and Russia’s borders had nothing to do with Putin’s decision to go to war.
But that narrative was refuted by non other than then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg who, in his opening remarks to the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs on September 7, 2023, said that in 2021, prior to the war, Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.” Stoltenberg then went on, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO… We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” The Secretary General of NATO then closed his remarks with the conclusion that “when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”
Stoltenberg is not the only official to refute this lie. David Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team in the Belarus and Istanbul talks, confirmed that an assurance that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. According to Arakhamia, “They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, himself, refuted the lie when, On March 27, 2022, he told an interviewer that the promise not to join NATO “was the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation,” adding that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”
Putin Won’t Negotiate
Another constant refrain invoked to justify the continuation of the war is that Putin is not serious about negotiating.
But that has never been true. While each of Putin’s partners in negotiating the Minsk Accords, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, have admitted that the agreement was a deception designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution, Putin was not acting in bad faith and “believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements.”
Putin remained committed to the Minsk Accords right up until the eve of the war. Putin continued to speak with the French and German brokers of the Minsk Accords in the days right before the war. On February 12, he complained to French President Emmanuel Macron of the West’s failure to prompt Kiev to implement the agreements. The next day he told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that he believed a solution within the Minsk agreements was still possible but that Germany and France had to pressure Ukraine.
In December 2021, Putin presented the U.S. and NATO with a proposal on security guarantees that demanded no NATO expansion to Ukraine, indicating a readiness to negotiate only weeks before the war.
Just weeks after the war, Putin was still prepared to negotiate. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine reached a tentative agreement in Istanbul. And again, it is Ukrainian officials who refute the Western lie that Putin is not sincere about negotiating. Oleksiy Arestovych, a former Advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine, said the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia could “completely” have worked and said that at the end of the Istanbul talks, the Ukrainian delegation “opened the champagne bottle.” David Arakhamia said that Putin was “prepared to end the war if we… committed that we would not join NATO.” And Oleksandr Chalyi, the former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of Ukraine’s negotiating team in Istanbul, said that Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.”
Even Zelensky once acknowledged publicly, in March 2022, that the discussions had been “deeply worked out.”
There Was No NATO Promise to Break
Putin has consistently accused the West of breaking its promise that NATO would not expand east of Germany. In 2007, he complained, “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
The West has just as consistently accused Putin of melodrama and historical revisionism. A 2014 NATO report claimed, “No such pledge was made, and no evidence to back up Russia’s claims has ever been produced.”
But NATO was lying as now declassified documents clearly reveal. And, once again, the West’s lies are revealed by the West’s own words.
Then NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner spoke of the “firm security guarantee” that “we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory.” He “stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO.”
Then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that “We agree with” a guarantee that broadening of the NATO zone east of Germany is not acceptable. Baker told a press conference that followed his meeting with Gorbachev that NATO’s “jurisdiction would not be moved eastward.” He added that he had “indicated” to Gorbachev that “there should be no extension of NATO forces eastward.” On the same day, Baker assured Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze that “There would, of course, have to be ironclad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward.” He told both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that “If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”
In 2000, Robert Gates, who, as Deputy National Security Adviser, had told the head of the KGB that the U.S. thinks it’s a “sound proposal” that “a united Germany would be associated with NATO, but… NATO troops would move no further east than they now were,” criticized “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”
It is not only the words of American officials that reveal the Western lie. West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher pointedly told Shevardnadze, “For us, it is clear: NATO will not extend itself to the East.” In a speech in 1990, Genscher publicly declared that “an expansion of NATO territory to the East, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union, will not happen.”
The British ambassador to Russia recorded that British Prime Minister John Major assuaged Soviet worries that “the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians will join NATO,” by “assur[ing] him that nothing of the sort will happen.” The British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd similarly assured his Soviet counterpart that “there are no plans in NATO to include the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in NATO in one form or another.”
The question of this promise is at the core of the dispute in Ukraine today. And it is Western words on the historical record that make it clear that the West, and not Putin, is lying about this.
Putin is Bent on Conquering Ukraine
Conquering Ukraine has never been one of Putin’s stated goals. Putin has said that “no matter what anyone said or speculated,” when Russian troops were “stationed near Kyiv” in the first days of the war, “no political decision was made to storm the… city.” Instead, “the troops were there to push the Ukrainian side to negotiations, to try to find acceptable solutions… to the security of Russia.” Putin was trying to force Ukraine into the negotiations over NATO expansion that the U.S. refused to enter into when he presented his security proposals in December 2022.
And that is very nearly what happened. Ukraine and Moscow entered into bilateral talks in Istanbul and initialed an agreement. Putin then halted his assault and withdrew Russian forces from Kiev, rather than move further into Ukraine. It was only when the West discouraged Kiev from pursuing the Istanbul Agreement that Putin mobilized more resources.
Prior to that, Putin had committed only 120,000–190,000 troops to the military operation. Military experts point to that number, which is clearly insufficient to conquer all of Ukraine, as evidence that Putin never intended to conquer Ukraine.
Yet, the West consistently states as obvious that Putin intended to invade, conquer and “annihilate” Ukraine. But they do so without evidence. Scholar John Mearsheimer has pointed out that “there is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it part of greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th.”
And, once again, Western words belie the certainty of Western claims. Ukrainian officials who were present at the Belarus and Istanbul talks, say, not that Putin was bent on completing the conquest of Ukraine, but that Moscow was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.”
After Ukraine, Putin is Bent on Conquering Europe
American officials constantly justify the amount of lives and money that have been put into the war with the claim that the war is not just about Ukraine but about Europe, since Ukraine is the dam that is holding back Putin’s conquest of Europe.
Biden told Congress on December 6 that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there… He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.”
But there are a number of problems with this claim. The first is that it is absurd. Putin has said the war was motivated by the desire not to go to war with NATO. He explains that “It is written into Ukraine’s doctrines that it wants to take Crimea back, by force if necessary… Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member… Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbass for now. This is sovereign Russian territory. We consider this matter settled. Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this? Apparently not.” If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it is absurd that he would use the war in Ukraine as a stepping stone to war with NATO.
There is also nothing on the historical record to enter into evidence that conquering Europe has ever been among the stated goals of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And, once again, the West’s own words refute the West’s own claim.
On April 2, 2024, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith repeated the claim that NATO must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory and end this unprovoked aggression because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.”
Smith, then, immediately undercut her own confident claim with the admission that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory, and I really want to be clear about that.” The Western case, then, amounts to the need to continue the war because we are certain Putin is bent on conquering Europe though “we want to be clear” that there are no indicators that Putin is bent on conquering Europe. “I don’t want to give our friends in the Baltic states the impression,” Smith said, “that somehow war is coming to NATO territory overnight. We take it seriously, but we do not see this to be an imminent threat.”
In each of these six cases, Western lies are exposed by Western words. It is important that, though false narratives and propaganda are common during war, they have been “exceptionally intense” during the Russia-Ukraine war. It is especially important since, as Baud and Sakwa have pointed out, those false narratives have shaped the foreign policy of Western countries and have had such a damaging effect on international politics and the world.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
