Russiagate Revisited: The Aftermath of a Hoax by Oliver Boyd-Barrett & Stephen Marmura

Author:Oliver Boyd-Barrett & Stephen Marmura
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031309403
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The AC Validation of the HW Assumptions

The Russia-Ukraine war has become an opportunity to validate the HW assumptions of the AC. According to these assumptions, Russia is an inherently expansionist power that uses all means available – military and non-military – to defeat the West globally. The AC experts take it as given that NATO and Ukraine are not threatening Russia, whereas the West is threatened by “Putin’s imperialistic ideology centered around the anachronistic notion of autocracy” (Blank, 2021). The war brought with it many civilian casualties. The AC experts promoted the narrative of Russia’s indiscriminate targets against the civilian population, systematic “acts of savagery”, and the “genocidal intent” on part of the Kremlin (Dickinson, 2022). According to them, such crimes were the gravest since the days of Hitler and Stalin (Ibid.) This narrative was assisted by Ukrainian authorities who sought to maintain close ties with the AC. For example, President Zelensky spoke at the Council at the 2022 Distinguished Leadership Award ceremony on May 11, 2022. Two days earlier, while addressing his nation, Zelensky (2022) compared Russia’s military operation in Ukraine to the Nazi’s war of aggression.

The AC pushed the United States and other Western governments to abandon any attempts to engage in diplomacy with Moscow. Instead, they advocated a focus on defeating Russia in Ukraine and punishing the Kremlin for its “expansionism” and “acts of savagery.” While Moscow sought to limit the military conflict to the territory of Ukraine, the AC argued for the conflict’s interpretation as indicative of Russia’s global expansionism and requiring a decisive defeat of Russia. In one of their assessments, the fear of provoking a nuclear war with Russia should not constrain Western leaders because the real fear was “the far greater danger of an unfolding genocide in the heart of Europe” (Ibid.) In another assessment, the logic should be simple: if Putin is not afraid to escalate, the West too should “not seek to avoid escalation, but should demonstrate a readiness to escalate more and faster. This is the only way to ensure that Putin fails and Ukraine wins (Åslund, 2022).”

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