Debate: Could war in Ukraine have been avoided?

"Robert Skidelsky argues that the West is partly to blame and John Lough argues that it is not"

Note: Below are two speeches from a debate in which I took part at King’s College London on 2 June 2025. The motion was: “Was Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Provoked by Western Foreign Policy?” I argued in favour of the motion. John Lough, Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, opposed it. The other speakers were Tony Brenton, former British Ambassador to Moscow, also on the ‘Yes’ side, and Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, on the ‘No’ side. Their contributions can be accessed at https://thecritic.co.uk/did-the-west-provoke-russia/.

This was one of the very first discussions of its kind to have taken place at a UK university since 2022—an extraordinary fact, given the existential nature of the issue. Even more remarkable is that this prolonged silence was not the result of political pressure or legal restriction, but rather a collective determination to avoid the subject altogether. It is a striking example of what sociologist Steven Lukes termed “agenda power”: the ability to decide which questions are even allowed to be asked, simply by excluding them from public discourse.

Robert Skidelsky:

In arguing that Russia’s invasion was provoked, I am not saying that it was justified. There are different ways of responding to provocation. The provocation was real, but Russia’s response in 2022 was fatally flawed. It overestimated the ease and speed of overthrowing Zelensky, and underestimated the support Ukraine would get from the West. One of its many adverse consequences was to turn most Ukrainians into bitter enemies of Russia.

Nor must we ignore the provocation offered by Ukraine itself. Ukraine is not plucky little Belgium. Ever since the 1920s there has been a strong nationalist, anti-Russian current, located in the Galician part of western Ukraine. Crucially, the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera raised a Ukrainian army to fight with Germany against Russia in the Second World War.

The contemporary aim of Ukrainian nationalists is to achieve what they call real independence by “de-colonising” Ukraine: limiting the use of the Russian language and raising an army to counter Russian threats, external and domestic. This helps explain the formation of the military Azov brigade in 2014, with its neo-Nazi symbolism, and the official designation of Stepan Bandera as a Hero of Ukraine. It also helps explain Putin’s otherwise mysterious pledge to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.

Western support for Ukrainian nationalism has added a crucial foreign policy dynamic to this toxic cocktail by linking it to the West’s aim of incorporating Ukraine into NATO. Hence the double Russian aim of keeping Ukraine out of NATO and protecting the Russian minorities inside Ukraine from what it calls cultural genocide.

In order to grasp the foreign policy background we have to understand that the Russians have never accepted the reality of their defeat in the Cold War. Our own account explains the collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western victory over what Reagan called the “evil empire”. The Russian story is that the Soviet Union voluntarily dissolved itself and gave up control of Eastern Europe. Hence the extraordinary importance in all Russian accounts of the betrayed American promise not to expand Nato eastwards.

The Russian story cites two betrayals: by the Americans for making a promise they had no intention of keeping and by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev for failing to nail down the promise in a new security treaty. For us Gorbachev is a hero; for Russians he is a traitor. When he ran for President against Boris Yeltsin in 1996, he received 0.5 per cent of the vote.

A vivid memory of my own is being shown by a Russian officer the line of plinths of former Soviet leaders along the Kremlin Wall in Red Square, just behind the Lenin Mausoleum On seeing a vacant plinth I asked, somewhat mischievously, “Is this is being reserved for Gorbachev?” To which I got the reply: “No, his proper resting place is Washington”.

Tony Brenton has shown how Western diplomacy heedlessly ignored Russia’s quest for a new European security system to replace NATO. “NATO”, the Russians were told, “is a purely defensive alliance, from which Russia has nothing to fear.” Tell that to any number of countries around the world which have experienced Nato’s peaceful intentions.

The immediate cause of the present war was the Maidan uprising of January-February 2014 which overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich and installed the nationalist president Petro Poroshenko in his place. We in the West portray this as a popular uprising against a corrupt and oppressive regime; the Russians see it as a CIA financed and orchestrated coup against a democratically elected government.

Backing the Russian version is the famous leaked telephone exchange between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who just happened to be in Kyiv at the time of the Maidan uprising, and the American Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, about the desirable composition of a post-Yanukovich government. When told that the European Union might object to their choice of prime minister, she replied, “Fuck the European Union”.

Of course this doesn’t prove that the Americans organised Maidan. That there was a popular uprising in Kyiv is indisputable; but open US official encouragement of regime change and covert financial and logistical support by the CIA was crucial to its success.

And then we have the failure of Minsk II. Maidan had led to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the insurrection of the Russian speaking provinces of Donetz and Lugansk. France and Germany brokered a plan to end the fighting, which included granting self-government to the rebellious provinces.

The Western narrative sees this as being sabotaged by Russian military support for the separatists. But there is plenty of evidence that Kyiv was never willing to grant autonomy to the Donbass region, and we now have the admission by former Chancellor Merkel and former French President Hollande that the Minsk negotiations were a deliberate deception to buy Kyiv time to crush the rebellion by force.

Finally, what are we to make of Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv on 6 April 2022, six weeks after the start of the Russian invasion? A draft treaty between Ukraine and Russia had been agreed which included provisions for Ukraine’s neutrality and security guarantees. The draft was never finalised. Davyd Arakhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator summed up the gist of Johnson’s intervention as follows: “Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the NATO powers] are not.” This amounted to an Anglo-American veto on further peace talks. Days after Johnson returned to London, a cascade of arms’ supplies from Britain and the USA was announced and Putin declared that talks with Ukraine “had reached a dead end”.

The story told by Tony Brenton and myself is not one of the unfolding ambition of Putin to restore the Russian empire but of a humiliated Russia desperately trying to cling onto remnants of its broken shield in face of relentless pressure by the United States, using Ukraine as a Trojan horse for its geopolitical ambitions.

We are guilty of egging the Ukrainians on by supporting, financing, and orchestrating anti-Russian nationalism. What distresses me most about mainstream British attitude to this day is its belligerence. Its causes are complex, but the bottom line is that Putin is a reincarnation of Hitler and that if he is not defeated now he will go “on and on”. Together with this goes a gross neglect of the moral value of peace and indifference to the killing in what Boris Johnson himself called a “proxy” war. The death toll of soldiers on both sides is reliably estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000 — about the same number as British soldiers killed in the whole of World War Two.

Of course, we should not take the whole blame. After all, it was Russia which invaded Ukraine. But we are guilty of egging the Ukrainians on by supporting, financing, and orchestrating anti-Russian nationalism before 2022 and by promising all the support needed for victory once the war had started — promises which we had neither the will nor intention of delivering. In short, we aggravated the provocation offered by Ukraine; and Ukraine would not have been so provocative had it not felt sure of our support.

It’s only by accepting our share of blame for the carnage and understanding that conciliation is not the same as surrender that we will be morally fit to take part in the healing needed for a lasting peace.

John Lough:

I believe I am not alone in this hall in regarding this motion as disrespectful to those millions of Ukrainian citizens who, well before the start of the “big war” in 2022, had shown that their allegiance was to an independent Ukraine, one free to choose its own destiny. Their choice is what provoked Russia.

The catalyst for this was the 2004 “Orange Revolution”. Millions of people went on to the streets to signal to the Kremlin that Ukraine was an independent country capable of electing its own leaders without guidance or interference from Moscow. Putin was shocked and humiliated by his miscalculation that he could simply shoehorn Viktor Yanukovych into the presidency. The desire of Ukrainians for their country to develop along European lines and not on the template of Putin’s Russia was the trigger for the invasions of 2014 and 2022. It was Ukrainian defiance that pushed Putin over the edge and persuaded him to intervene.

Of course, it is fair to say that Western institutions and the Western way of life were magnets in this process, but this is entirely different from claiming that the West provoked the Russian bear into taking such an extreme step — and made it attack a people it supposedly regarded as “brotherly”. The fact is that the Putin regime made Russia unappealing to vast numbers of Ukrainians who were previously well disposed to Russia and saw the countries as closely related. By contrast, Europe exerted the force of attraction.

Putin has had a terrible record of reading Ukraine over the past 25 years. He has clung to the idea that Ukrainians are really Russians who are simply in denial about their identity because of the flawed nationality policies of the Bolsheviks. This includes, in his view, the fateful decision by Stalin to move Poland’s borders westwards and make Galicia, the source of Ukrainian cultural nationalism, part of Soviet Ukraine.

In 1991, Russia recognised Ukraine’s independence. But from the early 90s, it was clear that there was a strong consensus in Moscow that Ukraine, like the other CIS countries, continued to belong to Russia. In the case of Ukraine, the depth of the historical relationship, the shared border, the highly integrated economies and the millions of inter-marriages made it inconceivable for the Russian elite that there would be a fundamental break with Ukraine. This was not a genuine acceptance of Ukrainian independence.

Tentatively under Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s second president, the differences in political culture between Russia and Ukraine began to become more discernible. Ukrainians’ instinctive desire for freedom and their discomfort with strong centralised power that they associated with foreign rule encouraged the rapid development of civil society. At the same time, differences between the West and East of the country became more visible as society de-Sovietised at different speeds — something Russia would play on later as it took up the mantle of defending “Russian-speakers” in Donbas.

Political processes were running in separate directions, making a collision of interests inevitable. Russia became more repressive in the early noughties as the Putin system cemented its rule. In parallel, Ukraine was becoming freer and society was developing a voice. The “Orange Revolution” was a stunning manifestation of this, and its power deeply scared the Kremlin. Ukrainians and Russians were one people, after all, so it was possible this could happen in Russia as well.

And it did start to happen — in late 2011 after Putin announced his intention to return to the presidency. These were the biggest protests seen during the Putin days and they were driven by opposition parties demanding free and fair elections — not dissimilar to 2004 in Ukraine. The authorities held their own “anti-orange” protest. This was the first real indication that the Kremlin saw that Ukraine had the potential to be what they later called “anti-Russia”. By this they mean a democratic alternative to the Putin model of governance, and therefore, a threat to it. Let’s remember, the Kremlin spent 15 years systematically destroying civil society in Russia to prevent the emergence of forces that could challenge the regime.

The annexation of Crimea and Russia’s establishment of separatist regimes in Donbas in 2014 galvanised the process of “Ukrainianisation”. This was not at root an issue of language. It was one of identity and values. You could be Ukrainian and speak Russian as your preferred language. By rejecting Russia’s veto on their desire to move closer to the EU, Ukrainians showed that they were not prepared to be subsumed into Putin’s backward-looking “Russian World”.

The rest is history. I dwell on Ukraine because what I find disturbing in the positions of those who say the West provoked Russia’s war on Ukraine is the unwillingness to treat Ukraine and its citizens as subjects rather than objects of policy. Instead, they wish us to believe that Ukrainians are destined to take orders from Moscow because Russia is entitled to a zone of influence on its borders. If Ukrainians were happy to be a buffer state subservient to Russia, there would be no war.

Ukrainians are bravely challenging the notion that might is right in international affairs. Sadly, such “old” thinking is widespread. As an example, I cannot resist quoting a letter to the Financial Times by Tony Brenton in 2014. Days before Russia occupied Crimea, he had dismissed Russian military intervention in Ukraine as “a dark fantasy” on the FT’s letters page. Tony wrote ten days later to apologise for his error after Russian forces had occupied Crimea. I am still struck by the words of that second letter:

It will be argued that … Russia’s action is a throwback to a now extinct era of “hard power”. I’m afraid it has always been a fond delusion that great power politics today operate any differently from in all previous times. Thucydides is still right.

To accept this argument in Europe requires jettisoning belief in the core principles of security embedded in the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris. As Europeans, Ukrainians are bravely challenging the notion that might is right in international affairs. I am in no doubt that they will eventually prevail because they are morally right. Ukraine will preserve its independence and find its path to becoming a full member of the European family.

In the meantime, let there be no confusion about the cause of the war.