As the Russia–Ukraine war enters its fifth year, hard questions are overdue. In Part 1 of a two-part series, Michael McKinley examines the strategic history behind the conflict and Australia’s uncritical alignment with a US-led approach that offered Ukraine little prospect of victory.

Now that the bloody and destructive Russia-Ukraine war is about to enter its fifth year, questioning the Australian government – an erstwhile supporter of Ukraine – is surely overdue. What Yeats asked in Easter 1916 is insistent: “was it needless death after all?” Any considered response will force an uneasy examination of the collective conscience.

Insistent, yes, but avoidable with deft manipulation of the narrative. And that is because all accounts of the Russia-Ukraine war in politically polite society inevitably and necessarily start with the declaration that nothing condones Russia’s Special Military Operation against Ukraine.

That is true. It is an illegal, devastating invasion and constitutes such a war of aggression; ergo, all measures taken by the international community to thwart it are, without question, justified. But it is not the whole truth because it is a story that concentrates on a singular event to the exclusion of other material influences.

Rather it is both a comfortable narrative for those taking action and a solvent for decades of deliberately avoiding, misunderstanding and misrepresenting the causes of the conflict. It foregrounds Russia’s indisputable guilt while rendering invisible US (and in some cases, western) perfidy and provocations which were cumulatively responsible for the situation in February 2022.

It is in this context that Australia has donated military and other equipment and assistance to Ukraine at a cost approaching $AUD2 billion. Thereby, it is the context in which Australian policy has encouraged Ukraine to continue its war against Russia despite the evidence that a Ukrainian victory was always and remains chimerical.

There are, therefore, unavoidable questions for Canberra: in the context of geostrategic intrigue, how much did Australia know about Ukraine; did the relevant government agencies exercise due diligence in providing such knowledge; did government care whether it knew what it should have known, or was the need to be on the US bandwagon against Russia both too easy and overpowering?

And then there are questions relating to the rampant corruption in and concerning Ukraine. These will be examined in Part 2.

All are important questions because, to the extent that the answers were not pursued diligently, the only conclusion is that a form of strategic laissez-faire operated in Australian policy – which is to say nothing was allowed to restrict what was being encouraged malevolently and elsewhere irrespective of the status quo prior to Russia’s invasion.

For Australia, that status and the war’s catastrophic evolution since 2022, should have suggested extreme caution when it came to endorsing a US-led policy of being extraordinarily generous with the blood of Ukrainians.

This conclusion is given force in the knowledge that there existed a foolhardy but dominant state of mind among successive generations of the strategic elite in the US which courted proxy, or hybrid war against Russia, with Ukraine as a pawn throughout the Cold War and after.

The knowledge of this is the first of several waypoints which allow Australian knowledge and policy to be charted and understood over time.

From as early as 1948, this strategic elite held to the belief that US strategic objectives would be served by the waging of covert war against the USSR/Russia by using Ukraine (or anywhere else for that matter) although Ukraine was regarded as particularly suitable.

Why Ukraine? The answer is found in the influential 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, but is geo-strategically obvious in any case: under certain regimes of political control, it can become the “pivot” for hegemonic control of Eurasia and an ideal springboard from which to destabilise Russia.

According to a US government study, such operations, under the cryptonym CARTEL (subsequently AERODYNAMIC) were undertaken under the aegis of the CIA and executed by former Gestapo-trained Ukrainian fascist collaborators. The relationship continued until and beyond Ukrainian independence in 1991. Indeed, area specialists have identified a direct link between the US-backed 2014 Maidan coup against the democratically-elected Ukrainian government and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.

Paradoxically, other nodes of US strategic thinking did exist and argued their cases robustly. In general, caution and restraint were strongly advocated immediately following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Taken collectively, they might be described as luminaries of Cold War diplomacy, commentary, scholarship and analysis.

As well, they were numerous, articulate, generally knowledgeable, prominent, and frequently distinguished in their respective fields. Moreover, they were disparate and ideologically diverse in so many issues of global politics and yet united on one: they were opponents of NATO enlargement and backed the US promises that it wouldn’t happen.

If their logic could be distilled, it was this: since NATO expansion would be an act that Russia would regard as hostile, the post-Cold War grand strategic objective must not be a larger NATO but a secure Europe which, perhaps and eventually, would need to include Russia. Suffice to say that their warnings were loud and clear on the likely consequences of presenting an existential threat to Russia and they all pointed to what we have today.

Even after NATO enlargement was a fact, they counselled the need to avoid another war in Europe/Eurasia: informed by history they were conscious of the scale of warfare revealed by Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kursk and, more recently, the Chechen wars which were marked by extensive destruction, large scale loss of life, brutality, and humanitarian crises.

Their forewarnings were in vain; over time US strategy, as though succumbing to a senile geostrategic itch, followed the contours of opportunity which favoured proxy, or covert war.

From Canberra, a series of waypoints were easily plotted in quick succession following Ukrainian independence and they all denoted a course into extreme danger. These included:

• the emergence of ultra-nationalism in Ukrainian politics and its support – financially, rhetorically, and militarily – by the Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump administrations;
• the US fomented 2014 coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government by groups leaning towards the US/EU which deepened the East-West fractures in the country and exacerbated the separatist demands by the Russian-speaking population to the point of no return;
• Ukrainian nationalism’s violent turn, under the direction of Washington’s hand-picked Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and under the guise of an “anti-terror operation,” following the violent uprising of 2014, against the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the 2014-2022 civil war which killed 13,000 and displaced 1.3 million.
• The coup, clearly, was not an end in itself but the catalyst for further developments designed to antagonise, threaten, and ultimately weaken Russia and they were, moreover, available in plain sight; the question was what forms they would take.
• A 2019 report commissioned by the Pentagon and undertaken by its think tank of first recourse, the RAND Corporation, and entitled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, provided the details of a lengthy planning process that mocks any claim to Russia’s Special Military Operation being unprovoked.

Unsurprisingly, an almost congruent version of this document is integrated into US strategy and appears in 2020 under the auspices of the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment.

RAND’s recommendations, were all subsequently implemented. They evolved to include: providing lethal military aid to Ukraine; mobilising European NATO members; imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions against Russia; increasing US energy production for export to Europe; and expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive US liquefied natural gas supplies.

The historical context, which attentive observers would have been aware of, laid bare the ultimate objective: to impose such a level of military, economic, political, and social pressures on Russia that the Russian state would fail and the well-publicised fever-dreams of Dick Cheney, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and current European Union vice-president and High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, would be achieved – namely that Russia would be dismembered following which the successor states would be subject to the West’s hegemonic control and their vast natural wealth exploited.

As Admiral Bob Bauer, Chair of NATO’s military committee, boasted in September 2022, “The planning for that [the current war] began years ago but we’re now implementing it.”

The same year provided another waypoint. This was the revelation that the international agreements, negotiated in Belarus, between Ukraine, Russia, and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and overseen by France and Germany, and known as the Minsk Accords were negotiated in bad faith.

Rather than putting an end to the civil conflict in Ukraine, the Kyiv government and its Western partners, intentionally chose to sabotage the greater part of Minsk II (2015), the most important of the two. President Zelensky’s grounds were that their conditions were simply “unacceptable.”

His duplicity was undertaken with the full knowledge and support of Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande, both of whom, in 2022, confirmed his account. The rationale was that the faux agreement would allow time for Ukraine to become militarily stronger. NATO and the OSCE were, therefore, also complicit, not only in the deceit, but also in their support for Kyiv’s unabated war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass.

If additional confirmation was needed that the current war was, and remains, a war long sought after by the US, two official sources bookend the claim. The first is by then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in 2022. He not only fully disclosed that the pact’s objectives were in accord with the US objective of increasing tensions with Russia but, on several occasions, admitted that NATO’s enlargement – recent and potential – was at the heart of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine.

The second follows the four years of failed negotiations to end the conflict. Without denying Russian culpability for the actual war, General Harald Kujat, a former Head of the Bundeswehr, and former Chair of NATO’s Military Committee, is excoriating in his assessment of the responsibility for all these failures: they were the result of “the West’s lies,” deliberate sabotage (especially by Boris Johnson in 2022), and the fact that, “the Europeans never tried for peace, but only nourished the conflict.”

Who, or what, is being defended here? And the circumstances described above comprise only part of the need to demystify Australian strategic thinking. A great deal more follows.