The remorseless shelling of the cities; the bodies unburied in the streets; the terrified refugees, atrocities, grief; the blackened, smouldering ruins; in Ukraine, the un reports nearly 2,000 verified civilian deaths so far, a number certain to rise, perhaps tenfold or more. The horrors of the Russian invasion have dominated the news for weeks, galvanizing an international upsurge of solidarity, at once anti-war—to halt and reverse Moscow’s murderous advance—and pro-escalation: calls to quicken the stream of Javelins, drones and Stinger missiles into a torrent of bombers and fighter jets; at the limit, for the us Air Force to bomb Russian airfields and impose a no-fly zone. Twitter is alight with blue and yellow flags. Hundreds of millions in charitable donations are flowing to help the refugees, matched by the unending columns of trucks heading east with fresh munitions.
It’s worth pausing here to register the proportionality of scale and response. Even as Russian forces bombard Ukrainian cities, the Ethiopian Army is shelling Tigray, under military blockade for a year, cut off from electricity, food and medical supplies, with an estimated 50,000–100,000 deaths from direct killings, plus 150,000–200,000 more from starvation. So, too, in Yemen, children are dying of cholera in ruined towns after seven years of near-perpetual air strikes and shelling by the Saudi–uae coalition, with us–uk support. Casualties are estimated at around 260,000 direct and indirect deaths. That world responses have been in inverse proportion to fatalities scarcely needs saying. Yemen gets hand-wringing un reports, the odd inside-page headline of a short-lived ceasefire; Tigray and its surrounding regions are cast in outer darkness.
If Russia’s invasion looms larger in Western consciousness, one reason is the scale of media coverage. In the Ukraine war’s first month, the major us networks devoted 562 minutes of airtime to the conflict, over a third of their news coverage. This compared to 306 minutes for the first month of the us invasion of Afghanistan, 414 minutes for the us–uk invasion of Iraq and 345 minutes for the us exit from Kabul in August 2021.footnote1 Density of coverage has combined with empathy of viewpoint. For once, this is not a nato war, but—metonymically speaking—a Russian war against nato. For the first time since the 1990s, the Western media is embedded on the side of the victims, the defenders. It provides a global platform for Zelensky as their leader, an eloquent emblem of the Ukrainian resistance. Few in the West can summon up the image, engraved in local memory, of an Afghan wedding blasted to carnage by us bombs, or picture the gruesome reprisals by Anglo-American troops in their siege and subjugation of Fallujah. The bodies on Bucha’s streets remain imprinted on the screen.
A single narrative, implicit in news reports and explicit in editorial comment, drives the media coverage. This is an unprovoked Russian attack in which, contrary to Putin’s declarations, nato’s eastward enlargement played no part. For the New York Times, it is ‘an unprovoked invasion’, for the Financial Times, a case of ‘naked and unprovoked aggression’, for the Guardian, ‘an unprovoked assault’. ‘Russia’s president has launched an unprovoked assault on his neighbour’, agreed the Economist. ‘He has come to believe that nato threatens Russia and its people’—‘he is obsessed with the defensive alliance to his west.’footnote2
Sustaining the argument that nato expansionism played no part in the crisis required some casuistic contortions on the part of the broadsheet press. ‘Analysts and historians will long debate whether Mr Putin’s grievances had bases in fact, whether the United States and its allies were too cavalier in expanding nato, whether Russia was justified in believing that its security was compromised. There will also be heated questioning over whether Mr Biden and other Western leaders could have done more to assuage Mr Putin’, admitted the New York Times. ‘The wisdom of nato’s post-Cold War enlargement to the east will be debated in years to come’, the Financial Times agreed, while insisting that, contrary to Kremlin claims, the West had never given any guarantees that this would not happen; that enlargement anyway responded to requests from the ex-Warsaw Pact countries; and that in any case, despite the fact that nato had announced Ukraine’s forthcoming membership in 2008, it was not on a path to join, even if the Western powers had encouraged the country ‘to integrate more closely with their institutions.’footnote3
Here a second line of argument blends with the first. On the hallowed principle of sovereign national self-determination, Ukraine has every right to elect to join nato, taking its place within a defensive alliance of liberal democracies. That Putin disagrees merely demonstrates his autocratic hatred for democracy. Opinions diverge on Biden’s policy of staying out of the war, while arming Ukraine and pressing Europe to join in punitive sanctions on Russia. If none have gone so far as the nyt, which has acclaimed Biden as ‘the resolute face of the world’s premier democracy and most powerful nation’, managing the crisis ‘with toughness, patience, resolve and dignity’, no major Western news outlet is pressing for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement.footnote4 The only question is how far to escalate.
This double issue of nlr offers a series of critical perspectives on the dynamics of the war and its possible outcomes. Charting the catastrophic effects of the Russian invasion, the political sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko provides a detailed account of the forces that came to the fore through the 2014 Ukrainian uprising: an alliance of westernizing liberals and Russophobe nationalists, political oligarchs and rebuilt security forces, that helped to derail the Minsk Accords and embed membership of nato in the Ukrainian constitution. Tony Wood weaves these developments into a fine-grained tripartite analysis of the forces in play: Russia’s assertion of its sphere of influence, nato and eu expansion into Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s political evolution, tugged between the two.footnote5 This contribution tackles the claims of the dominant narrative: that the us has played no role in provoking the war; that nato is a purely defensive alliance; and that joining it is a matter of Ukrainian national self-determination.