The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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with his December 10, 2003, editorial, “The Russian Reversion,” which urged resistance against the budding “cult of Putin” and his “one-party rule.”7 The Times subsequently denounced Putin’s “old-style KGB tactics” when he arrested oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky before he was to sell a majority of shares of his Yukos oil company to Exxon-Mobil.8 Columnist Nicholas Kristof suggested that the West had been “suckered” into believing “Putin was a sober version of Boris Yeltsin,” when he was a “Russified Pinochet or Franco” leading Russia to fascism. According to Kristof, a “fascist Russia was [actually] much better than a communist Russia, since communism was a failed economic system while Franco’s Spain, General Pinochet’s Chile and the others generated solid economic growth, a middle class and international contacts” and “lay the groundwork for democracy.” The United States, nevertheless, needed to take its cue from the Baltic states and Ukrainians and “stand up to Putin” and his “bullying tactics.”9
In February 2007, Putin delivered what Times correspondent Steven Lee Myers termed an “acerbic assault on American unilateralism” at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, which roiled feathers in Washington.10 When Russia subsequently sent troops to defend secessionists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were invaded by the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili with U.S. military support, Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that Putin “deserved a gold medal for brutish stupidity.” Many observers blamed Saakashvili, however, for starting the war, and the Russian intervention (orchestrated actually by President Dmitri Medvedev, whom Friedman called “Putin’s mini-me”) prevented South Ossetia’s absorption into a future NATO member state, restored pride in the Russian army, and prevented threatened ethnic cleansing.11
Anti-Putin Invective Grows in the Obama Years
The anti-Putin invective escalated throughout the Obama years, peaking in Obama’s second term during the Ukraine crisis when the Times supported the U.S.-backed Maidan “revolution” of February 2014 that resulted in the toppling of pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych.12 An article by C. J. Chivers and Patrick Reveel alleged Russian intimidation, military occupation, and electoral manipulation ahead of the March 16, 2014, referendum in which 95 percent of Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia. The authors wrote that the referendum had the “trappings of the election-season carnivals that have long accompanied rigged ballots across the old Soviet world.”13 These claims ignored that Moscow had thousands of troops in an agreement to protect its naval base at Sevastopol, and that the referendum results stemmed from longstanding ambivalence to Kiev and disdain for the post-coup regime among a majority of Crimeans, especially the many ethnic Russians.14
In April 2014, the Times published photos of Russian fighters in the Donbass and Luhansk regions that purportedly “proved” the charge of Russian aggression in the civil war that broke out in eastern Ukraine, though the photos were proven to be fakes and the Times had to issue a retraction. The Times editorial board still referred to Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine nevertheless, saying Putin’s actions revealed his “arrogance and contempt for international law,” which justified the levying of sanctions and possibly expelling Russia from the G-8 nations.15
The Times further violated journalistic standards when it published an unsubstantiated allegation by a conservative Russian oligarch that Putin had been provided advance warning of the pro-Russian Yanukovich government’s collapse, and planned in advance to exploit the ensuing chaos by annexing Crimea with the underlying goal of maintaining the gas supply routes that help Russia dominate European supplies.16 The Times subsequently helped cover up the massacre of thirty-eight pro-Russian demonstrators in Odessa after right-wing Nazi sympathizers burned the Trade Union House where they were taking refuge after their tent encampment had been ransacked.17
When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, Times columnist Roger Cohen mimicked Secretary of State John Kerry in claiming there was “an enormous amount of evidence” pointing to Russian culpability, including “damning audio and images that capture the crime.” Putin has been “playing with fire,” Cohen wrote, as the shooting down of the airplane “amounts to an act of war,” with “193 innocent Dutch souls dishonored by the thugs of the Donetsk People’s Republic.” The only viable response was to help “transform Ukraine’s army into a credible force,” which “won’t happen. Europe is weak [and] Obama’s America is about retrenchment, not resolve. Putin must be appeased.” At the time of these statements, however, no major criminal investigation had been conducted and Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence privy to all the relevant evidence, said there was “no smoking gun.”18 Cohen’s column was thus pure hyperbole and an incitement for war.
In August 2015, Andrew Higgins and Michael Gordon reported that “Russia had escalated tensions with Ukraine to the highest levels since its stealthy invasion of Crimea in the spring, sending more than 200 trucks from a long-stalled aid convoy into rebel-held eastern Ukraine over the objections of Kiev and, NATO said, conducting military operations on Ukrainian territory.”19 The latter operations, however, were unverified and the aid convoy was designed to assist local populations devastated from missile and other attacks by Ukrainian government forces. The Times furthermore omitted the United States, European Union (EU), and Canadian role in providing weapons, intelligence support, and training to Ukrainian regiments, which were led in some cases by neo-Nazi militias.20
Times writers Michael D. Shear, Allison Smale, and David Herszenhorn had invoked the Nazi blitzkrieg in referencing Putin’s “invasion” and “lightning annexation” of Crimea, which, they said, “shocked” the NATO countries because it revealed Russia’s “abrupt abandonment of the rules of cooperation and territorial integrity that have governed East-West relations for decades.”21
Amy Chozick and Ian Lovett reported uncritically on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comparisons between Russia’s issuing of passports “to Ukrainians with allegiances to Russia” to what Adolf Hitler did before Germany began invading bordering countries.” Though differentiating Putin from Hitler, the assertion that he had to go into Crimea to protect the Russian minority there was said to be “reminiscent of claims made back in the 1930s” when the Nazis asserted they had to invade Eastern European countries to “protect German minorities.”22 In Crimea, however, Russians are the majority at 65 percent, while Ukrainians and Tatars are the minority. Crimea was historically part of Russia and sacred as the place where Vladimir the Grand Prince of Kiev brought Christianity to Russia and Russian troops heroically fought Britain, France, and Turkey during the nineteenth-century Crimean War.23
Supporting NATO Expansion
Just as the British press whipped up fear about Russian aggression on the eve of the Crimean War, the “Newspaper of Record” is creating a new Red Scare by echoing U.S. government officials warning about the “re-Sovietization” of Central Asia and Russia’s “resurrection [under Putin] as a global disrupter.”24 Strong offense has been taken at Russia’s “furious” opposition to NATO’s expansion on its borders, despite the fact that Russia had been promised NATO would not expand there. In early 2017, the Times editorial board critiqued President Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis for calling NATO “obsolete” and suggesting the United States might not support NATO members that have not met their financial obligations at a “time the Western alliance was again facing an assertive and aggressive Russia,” an “especially worrisome” trend “given Mr. Trump’s possible links to Moscow.” In the Times version of history, these are “fraught times for the Western alliance, which even after the Cold War remains a critical unifying bond among the democracies of North America and Europe and whose members have worked together to confront terrorism in Afghanistan and promote stability in several Middle Eastern countries.”25
Russian Interference in the Presidential Election
The official indictment against Putin holds that he ordered an “influence