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Protest in Yerevan following Azerbaijani military operation launch in Nagorno-Karabakh.
UN Security Council debates Nagorno-Karabakh
It was a quieter day at UN headquarters on Thursday. With US President Biden back at the White House – accompanied by Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky – the crowds had thinned somewhat and fewer delegates could be found attending the debate in the UN General Assembly hall.
Much of the focus was on the crisis in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where this week Azerbaijan launched a fresh assault on ethnic-Armenian separatists there, who then reportedly agreed to surrender and disarm as part of a ceasefire.
(For more on the recent flare up and its historical context, see our write up here.)
This was the focus of an urgent UN Security Council meeting called by the French delegation on Thursday afternoon. Though they aren’t currently Council members, both Armenia and Azerbaijan attended the session to voice their grievances.
The focus of the Armenian representative reflected a sentiment that has been heard many times throughout the week, namely, that the UN Security Council is broken.
Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan said that the chamber had failed to respond to previous warnings from Yerevan that the Azeris had been upping their attacks on the enclave. Indeed, this came a day after President Zelensky took aim at the Security Council for falling short of its stated mission by letting Russia torpedo efforts to stop the war. (See GZERO's explainer on Instagram on this ensuing debate.)
Despite Karabakh’s acceptance of a ceasefire, shelling continues, Mirzoyan said. The US, for its part, backed this claim, with UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield telling the Council that the “situation on the ground remains dire.”
What’s on deck tomorrow?
Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu will address the Assembly, along with Dutch PM Mark Rutte, Bangladesh’s PM Sheikh Hasina, and Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House.
Zelensky had his work cut out for him in Washington DC
After a marathon few days in New York where he attended the UN General Assembly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Washington on Thursday where he attempted to convince US lawmakers that continuing to fund Ukraine’s war effort is an investment worth making.
Zelensky met with President Joe Biden at the White House, after which a Biden aide said that the administration would continue to provide Kyiv with military aid, emphasizing new air defenses.
But the White House stopped short of committing to provide Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS – ballistic missiles with a range of up to 190 miles that could fit in Ukraine’s existing rocket launchers – that Zelensky has been requesting since last year.
“US reluctance has been driven primarily by concerns that providing ATACMS to the Ukrainians could lead to a jump in US-Russia tensions,” says Eurasia Group’s Russia expert Alex Brideau, noting that this is “either because of the transfer itself, or if Ukraine were to use the missiles on targets on Russian territory.”
The Ukrainian president had his work cut out for him on Capitol Hill, where he was trying to convince lawmakers to green-light $24 billion in military aid requested by the White House. Dealing with growing opposition to additional funds for Ukraine within his caucus, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy refused to let Zelensky address a joint session of Congress, saying he was able to do so last December. While other lawmakers – particular Senate leadership – were much more deferential to Zelensky, one key question kept coming up on the Hill: What is the plan for victory?
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is seen on a video monitor in a booth above the United Nations Security Council floor.
Zelensky takes aim at the UN Security Council
It was another big day at the UN General Assembly. Again, much of the attention centered around Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky who attended a prickly meeting at the UN Security Council.
Ukraine, for its part, is not currently a member of the UNSC, but was invited to attend the session where, sitting across from the Russian Ambassador, Zelensky called Russia a “terrorist state.” Zelensky left the chamber before Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat down, avoiding a potential confrontation.
Still, much of the Ukrainian president’s speech was directed not at the Russian delegation but at the Security Council itself. He joined the chorus of others calling for urgent reform of the powerful body, arguing that Russia's veto power is undermining the Council's mission. “Ukrainian soldiers are doing with their blood what the UN the Security Council should do by its voting,” he said.
While President Joe Biden said this week in his address before the General Assembly that the US supports such reform efforts, it’s hard to imagine that any of the permanent members of the Council that have the veto power– the US, UK, China, Russia, and France – would be willing to dilute their own clout.
Crucially, Zelensky proposed a change to rules that would allow the UN General Assembly – composed of 193 states – to override UNSC resolutions with a two-thirds majority. But as things are currently structured, that vote itself would be subject to … a UN Security Council veto.
Continuing his shuttle-diplomacy efforts, Zelensky met with Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, where he said the two discussed the prospect of coordinating a Ukraine-Latin America summit. Boric’s embrace of Zelensky has been notably different from other Latin American states, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, that have in fact abstained from at least one UN resolution condemning Russian aggression.
Finally, Zelensky also met with his German counterpart Chancellor Olaf Scholz in what was broadly seen as an attempt to get Berlin to earmark more military aid for Kyiv.
Another interesting side meeting took place between Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. It was hardly the White House meeting Bibi had been hoping for – particularly after the Biden side released a cool statement saying the two had a “candid and constructive” conversation on issues including “upholding our democratic values.” This was likely a nod to the White House’s disapproval of the Israeli government’s current attempt to gut the power of the independent judiciary that’s led to some of the biggest protests in Israel on record.
Still, in the broader realm of geopolitics it was a pretty good day for Bibi: On Wednesday, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave a rare interview to FOX News where he said that Israel and Saudi were inching close to a normalization deal, a huge foreign policy priority for the Netanyahu government.
A damaged office building following a reported Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow.
More drone strikes on Moscow
Early Tuesday, a drone struck a Moscow skyscraper that houses Russian government ministries. It was the second drone attack on that building in just 48 hours. Ukraine’s government has not yet acknowledged responsibility, but its military is suspected for obvious reasons.
Though Ukraine has no way of matching the intensity and destructive power of Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities, there are several reasons why these drone strikes matter.
They demonstrate that authorities in Kyiv, once reluctant to speak publicly about attacks inside Russia, have become less concerned about Putin’s threats of retaliatory escalation. In recent days, senior officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have said publicly that targeting “symbolic centers and military bases” inside Russia is “inevitable, natural and absolutely fair.”
The attacks also make it more difficult for Vladimir Putin’s government to persuade Russians that its “special military operation” in Ukraine will impose few costs and no risks for Russian civilians. They grab the attention of Russia’s political and business elite by hitting targets close to their offices. They undermine confidence in Russia’s military by underlining its repeated failure to prevent attacks on the heart of the capital, which may have been launched from hundreds of miles away.
Finally, they signal that despite stepped-up Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, Ukraine’s government and military are only becoming more aggressive.
US President Joe Biden disembarks Air Force One as he visits Stansted Airport in the UK.
Will Biden meet Zelensky at the NATO summit in Vilnius?
On Sunday, US President Joe Biden kicked off a five-day trip to Europe. His first stop is the UK, where he will meet with King Charles III for the first time since the British monarch’s coronation, as well as PM Rishi Sunak. But the most important leg of Biden's European tour will be July 11-12 in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius for the 74th NATO Summit, where the controversial question of whether Ukraine could (or should) ever join the alliance looms large.
Before departing, the US president made the controversial decision to supply Kyiv with deadly cluster bomb munitions. Washington says the move was necessary because the Ukrainians are running low on ammo, even though the weapons are banned in many countries because they tend to kill or maim large numbers of civilians. Still, it's unlikely this will hamper Biden's efforts to shore up NATO unity on economic and military support for Ukraine. The bigger question is: Will Ukraine be given a path to membership?
Poland and the Baltic states, the alliance’s biggest Russia hawks, want NATO to offer Kyiv a pathway to membership — something that was vaguely promised as far back as 2008. But the US and Germany think that Ukraine isn’t ready yet, politically or militarily, and are worried that welcoming Ukraine would eventually drag the alliance into a direct conflict with Russia. Biden prefers something more like an “Israel” model in which its Western backers help arm Ukraine to the teeth, but not formally accept it into NATO.President Volodymyr Zelensky has been invited to the summit, but he is threatening to snub it if there's no progress toward Ukraine joining the club.
Ukrainian servicemen fire a multiple launch rocket system toward Russian troops near a front line in Zaporizhzhia region.
Is Ukraine picking up the pace?
As we wrote three weeks ago, the single most important (realistic) objective of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Russian invaders is to persuade backers in Europe and the United States that Ukraine can make good use of more weapons, training, and money to finally win the war. The immediate hope shared in Kyiv, Washington, and European capitals is that in the coming months, Ukrainian forces can drive a wedge to the country’s southern coast, separating Russian forces in Crimea from those in the eastern Donbas region.
So far, progress has been slow. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky has admitted that battlefield progress has been “slower than desired,” though he adds sensibly that lasting victory, not quick victory, is the attainable goal.
In recent days, however, there are signs of more significant Ukrainian gains. Pro-Russian online activity reports that Ukrainian forces have crossed the Dnipro River in the Kherson region north of Crimea and established an important bridgehead that can bring more gains. On Tuesday, a UK defense ministry spokesperson called it “highly likely” that Ukraine has recaptured land in the eastern Donbas region that Russian forces and Russian-backed separatists have held since 2014. Zelensky has hinted at recent military progress too.
Is the counteroffensive truly gaining steam? It will probably be weeks before anyone can have confidence that gains can be sustained and will continue.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong (not pictured) attend a media briefing in Cape Town.
African leaders make Ukraine peace trip
The leaders of half a dozen African countries traveled to Kyiv on Friday for a mission to advance ceasefire prospects in the war. They were welcomed by incoming Russian missiles and air raids. Leading the effort is South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who, despite being officially non-aligned, has cultivated close ties with the Kremlin recently – holding joint military drills and allegedly allowing arms shipments to Moscow.
The others in the group — Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, the Republic of Congo, and Zambia — differ in their positions toward Russia, but they share one thing: Like most of the Global South, they see the war almost entirely through the lens of higher food and energy prices, and they want it to end pronto. The group heads to St. Petersburg later today for talks with Vladimir Putin tomorrow.
But don’t hold your breath for the doves to cry. African leaders have little leverage with Moscow or Ukraine, and a ceasefire is a nonstarter while Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive gathers steam.
But it’s a wise move for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in particular, to take the visit. Although his main foreign audience is the US and the EU – that’s where he gets his guns and money from – he’s been reaching out more to the Global South lately, particularly since China began positioning itself as a potential peacemaker.
Last month, Z dropped in on the Arab League summit, and a few days later he held a bilateral meeting with Indian PM Narendra Modi at the G7. Engaging with African powers is smart politically, even if it won't turn the tide of the war – and we’ll be watching to see what case Zelensky makes to them.
Russian President Vladimir Putin against the backdrop of NATO, Ukrainian and US flags.
No, the US didn’t “provoke” the war in Ukraine
Is the US to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
That’s what Jeffrey Sachs thinks. In a recent op-ed titled “The War in Ukraine Was Provoked,” the Columbia University professor – a man I’ve known and respected for a solid 25 years, who was once hailed as “the most important economist in the world” and who’s played a leading role in the fight against global poverty – argues that the United States is responsible for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine 15 months ago.
This claim is morally challenged and factually wrong, but it is not a fringe view. Many other prominent figures such as political scientist John Mearsheimer, billionaire Elon Musk, conservative media star Tucker Carlson, and even Pope Francis have made similar assertions, echoing the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is but a victim of Western imperialism.
This strain of Putin apologia has taken root in China, pockets of the US far left and far right, and much of the developing world, making it all the more important to debunk it once and for all.
You don’t own me
Sachs’s first big claim is that the US provoked Russia through its “intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries.” According to him, this betrayed a promise allegedly made in 1990 by US officials to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never expand eastward. There are several issues to unpack here.
First, it’s a myth that the last Soviet president was guaranteed a permanent buffer zone between Europe and Russia back in 1990. Declassified transcripts from the talks show that neither Gorbachev nor other Soviet officials ever raised the prospect of NATO accession for Warsaw Pact countries, and Gorbachev himself denied that the West had ever committed to anything about NATO expansion beyond Germany.
Second, as a voluntary association, NATO has no unilateral ability to “expand” – and it has always been reluctant to do so. But Central and Eastern European states have agency, and they demanded to join NATO to protect themselves from Russian aggression despite initial objections from NATO members. It was the Ukrainian people – not officials in Washington and Brussels – that voted in 2019 to enshrine NATO and European Union membership as national goals, largely as a response to Russia’s threats (on which Putin has acted). Far from being pushed or imposed by the US and its allies, NATO enlargement was actively sought by Eastern European countries, which had to actively convince members to accept them.
Third, NATO enlargement never posed a military threat to Russia. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, a mutually agreed roadmap for cooperation between NATO and Russia, reflected the alliance’s strictly defensive nature. From 1997 until Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, NATO deployed no nuclear weapons and almost no combat forces on the territory of its new members. Putin himself expressed no concerns about enlargement in 2002 when the process was underway.
Fourth, despite Ukrainian aspirations, NATO membership was never a realistic prospect for Ukraine. While it’s true that at the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008, NATO promised Ukraine and Georgia accession at some indeterminate time in the future, it didn’t offer a roadmap for it. Indeed, when Ukraine applied for a NATO Membership Action Plan, NATO members rejected the application. The prospect of Ukrainian accession died a second death after the Russian invasion in 2014, as the alliance had little appetite to go to war with Russia. On the eve of the 2022 invasion, Ukraine was no closer to actually joining NATO than it was during the 2008 Bucharest summit 14 years prior.
Putin’s beef with Ukraine has never been about NATO “encirclement,” as evidenced by his muted reaction to the Baltics’ accession in 2004 and Finland’s last month. Rather, it’s always been about Ukrainian sovereignty. He invaded because he doesn’t think Ukraine is a legitimate country with a right to exist separate from Russia. We know this because Putin himself has repeatedly told us that the war’s aim is to reverse Ukrainian independence and recreate the Russian empire. That’s why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pledge not to join NATO just before the invasion didn’t stop the tanks from rolling in – and why nothing he could have plausibly offered would have.
We didn’t start the fire
Sachs’s second claim is that the US further provoked Russia and actually started the war when it “[installed] a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.” This one is problematic as well.
For starters, the US did not orchestrate the Euromaidan protests. They started organically when, under pressure from Moscow, Yanukovych refused to sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement – which had passed the Ukrainian parliament with a large majority and enjoyed broad support among the population. They had nothing to do with the US or NATO accession, and participation was mostly limited to students. Only after Yanukovych ordered the police to brutally beat the peaceful protesters and passed “dictatorship laws” curtailing freedom of press and assembly did the demonstrations turn massive.
Likewise, the US didn’t force Yanukovych to direct his security forces to shoot protesters, killing over 100 and triggering the Revolution of Dignity. Nor did Washington push him to try to create a separatist republic in Kharkiv before fleeing to Russia with a reported $1 billion in cash stolen from the central bank’s reserves. It was the Moscow-supported Yanukovych who chose to pull away from the EU, kill protesters, and try to split his country. In the end, his “violent overthrow” was achieved through a peaceful vote to oust him by more than two-thirds of the Ukrainian parliament.
Where I do agree with Sachs is that the war started nine years ago – not when Yanukovych was overthrown by his own people, but when Russia sent “little green men” to take control of the Donbas and illegally annexed Crimea.
If I could turn back time
Nothing the US, NATO, or Ukraine did or didn't do caused Russia to launch a war of aggression against its neighbor. Putin chose to do this, and the responsibility is his and his alone. Having said that, it’s clear in hindsight that the US and its allies did make a number of missteps that made Putin’s decision more likely.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West left Russia behind. Instead of making its prosperity, partnership, and cooperation a top priority like they did with the defeated Germans and Japanese after World War II, Americans and Europeans largely ignored Russia. There was no Marshall Plan for Russian reconstruction, no real effort to help Russia transition to a democratic market economy, to integrate it into the US-led global order, or to give it a proper stake in the European security architecture. Passing on the chance to turn Russia into another post-war Germany or Japan was a huge missed opportunity.
The West then failed to anticipate that the EU’s and NATO's eastward expansion would enhance Russia's threat perception in their backyard, something Russian officials in the early 1990s made clear and key US officials seemed to understand at the time. Even though no promise not to expand was ever made and it was the former Warsaw Pact countries themselves that demanded to join these organizations to safeguard their sovereignty from Russian threats, the West should have foreseen that this would feed Russia’s already acute sense of insecurity and humiliation.
Finally, the West failed to respond forcefully to previous Russian aggressions. When Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, the West did nothing. When Russia then invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, the West did pitifully little. This inaction was also a breach of a promise the US and the UK made in 1994 to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity – a promise that got Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons and make itself vulnerable to aggression in the first place. By failing to act in 2008 and 2014 (and by setting an example of disregard for international law in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the West gave Russia good reasons to believe that it could get away with invading Ukraine a second time.
Maybe if the West hadn’t made these missteps, Russia wouldn’t be a rogue regime with imperial designs and a chip on its shoulder. Maybe it still would. Either way, nothing the West did or didn’t do forced Putin’s hand. The blame lies entirely with him.