A Nutty Conspiracy Theory
But there is zero evidence that Putin engineered these events. There is no evidence that he got Merkel and the EU to overplay their hand; no evidence that he organized the neo-Nazi militias in Lviv; no evidence that he manipulated U.S. officials to manipulate the "regime change" behind the scenes; no evidence that he ordered the Maidan militants to attack.
Is the New York Times really suggesting that Putin pulled the strings on the likes of Merkel and Nuland, secretly organized neo-Nazi brigades, and ruthlessly deployed these thugs to Kiev to provoke violence and overthrow Yanukovych, all while pretending to try to save Yanukovych's government -- all so Putin could advance some dastardly plot to conquer Europe?
The Times often makes fun of "conspiracy theorists," but the Times' narrative is something that would make even the most dedicated "conspiracy theorist" blush. Yet, the Times not only asserts this crazy conspiracy theory but calls it "incontrovertible."
Beyond the lack of evidence to support this conspiracy theory, there is no rational motive for Putin to have done what the Times claims that he did.
In the actual chronology of event, Putin was preoccupied with the Winter Olympics in Sochi when the Ukraine crisis took its turn for the worst a year ago. He was fearful that the Olympics would be marred by Chechen or other terrorism and thus was personally overseeing security.
Putin had spent some $40 billion on making the Olympics a glamorous show to introduce the new Russia to the world as a country ready to join the West. I'm told that he was very proud of Russia's position in the G-8 and felt he had built a constructive relationship with President Barack Obama by helping him resolve crises in Syria and Iran in 2013.
The last thing Putin wanted to do was provoke a crisis in Ukraine. Nor is there any intelligence that he had designs on the Baltic States, as the conspiracy theory contends.
However, when a right-wing regime seized power in a violent coup in Ukraine on Russia's border and then took provocative actions against Ukraine's ethnic Russians, Putin responded to calls from Crimea -- both from its parliament and a referendum -- to take the peninsula back into Russia.
Putin also feared that the new powers in Kiev might give the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol to NATO with its nuclear-armed submarines. In other words, as much as the New York Times has bandied about claims of a Russian "invasion" of Crimea, the Crimeans requested Russia's intervention and up to 25,000 Russian troops were already there in the agreement with Ukraine over the naval base.
Reactor, Not Instigator
But the key point is that Putin was reacting to the Ukraine crisis, not instigating it. As even Kissinger explained to Der Spiegel, "The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia."
Kissinger added, "Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine."
In this case, Kissinger is clearly right. It never made any sense for Putin to provoke the Ukraine crisis. Yet, that became the lie upon which the United States has built its increasingly aggressive policies over the past year, with politicians of all stripes now shouting that America must stand up to the madman Putin and "Russian aggression."
This is a dangerous "group think" for a number of reasons, not the least the disturbing fact that both the United States and Russia have lots of nuclear weapons. On a less existential level, the "Putin-is-Hitler" analogy has prompted a major miscalculation on the right approach for the Obama administration to take vis a vis Putin.
As Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt has noted, the most effective response to a crisis is different if a foreign leader is an aggressor on the march or if the leader feels cornered. The former calls for a "deterrence model," i.e., a tough reaction. But a tough response in the latter case will only make the beleaguered leader more belligerent like a cornered animal, thus spinning the crisis into more dangerous territory under what's known as the "spiral model."
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