Conversely
they are not rooted, despite the evidence, in Putin’s weltanschauung.
In other words, his extremist Russian nationalism with its
concomitant imperialism is ignored and Progressivism’s revulsion to
unprovoked aggression is not invoked.

Cohen’s
narrative on many issues simply restates Putin’s pronouncements but
due to space considerations, only a few may be scrutinized. Arguably,
his rationalization of Putin’s actions is based on the proposition
that the West, particularly the U.S., have “demonized”
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. In attempting to present Putin’s
aggression as resulting from “understandable” security
interests threatened by the West’s policies of which NATO’s expansion
is the most ominous, Cohen presents a chronologically inaccurate
portrayal of NATO’s expansion, which has led him to abandon any
progressive principles and to become a “political bedfellow”
of Putin’s allies consisting of homophobes, extreme Russian
nationalist, the European extreme right such as France’s National
Front and here in the U.S. of people such as Pat Buchanan.

NATO
expansion has not taken place for the last five years and Ukraine has
not considered entry into NATO for at least the last four years.
Furthermore, as part of the Obama’s reset policy towards Russia the
antiballistic missile shield program that would have stationed
missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic was cancelled. In reality,
efforts that could be construed as part of a strategy to “encircle
Russia” were abandoned despite Russia’s invasion of Georgia in
2008. Curiously, in discussing NATO expansion the desires and fears
of the countries becoming NATO members seem to be overlooked without
whose application for membership expansion could not have taken
place. Clearly the Baltic states and Poland by applying for NATO
membership are expressing a perceived need for protection based on
fears rooted in past and current Russian actions and policies
vis-a-vis these countries. NATO expansion is not driven exclusively
by the whims of the West.

Putin’s
belligerence and the simultaneous deterioration in U.S.-Ukraine
relations may be chronologically traced not to NATO expansion but to
post-election protests in Russia. They took place in 2011 and 2012
and were blamed on U.S. interference. Since then Putin has taken a
more authoritarian turn domestically and intensified efforts to
expand influence in the “near abroad” or former Soviet
republics. During this period Russian military spending has
increased.

Putin’s
pretext for occupying Ukraine, that is of defending Russian
speakers in a country where Russian is the dominant language,
particularly of the more affluent and influential sectors of society,
is the height of absurdity and clearly must be dismissed by anyone
familiar with the language situation in Ukraine. Concurrently while
claiming that Russia is taking action to protect Russian speakers in
Ukraine legislation that requires fluency in Russian for residency
is awaiting the signature of President Putin. Non-Russian speakers
will not be able to find work. Which country has an agenda of
discriminating on the basis of language?

Therefore,
an attempt to explain Putin’s occupation and annexation of Crimea in
2014 as a defensive action defies the facts on the ground and the
reasons for these actions may be located in the imperial designs of
Putin related to his comment that the demise of the Soviet Union was
the “greatest geo-political tragedy” of the 20th century.
His most recent comments seem to indicate a nostalgia for Czarist
Russia when he noted approvingly that a significant portion of
Ukraine was a part of “Novorossiya” and according to Putin
“God Knows Why” it became part of Ukraine in 1920.
Apparently, despite Putin’s lament over the demise of the Soviet
Union, he does not subscribe to Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ characterization
of Czarist Russia as a “prison of nations”.

Recent
events in Ukraine derailed Putin’s plans for the Eurasian Customs
Union and a truly independent Ukraine that decides its own destiny
could not be tolerated by him. Putin’s displeasure with political
developments in Ukraine can be understood, but is occupation and
annexation the response that Progressives accept and resign
themselves to?

Stephen
Cohen finds himself with interesting “fellow travelers”
beginning with Pat Buchanan who writes about Putin’s policies that
“He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and
resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social
revolution coming out of the West. In the culture war for the future
of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of
traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John
Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its
embrace of a “culture of death.”

In
Europe, noteworthy is the support
for Russia’s annexation of Crimea by Jobbik, the National Front,
Golden Dawn, and Ataka, all extreme right wing parties. Meanwhile, in
Italy, the far-right National Social Front party distributed posters
throughout Rome declaring “I’m with Putin” and the
party’s leader, Adriano Tilgher, praised the Russian president for
his “courageous positions against the powerful gay lobby”.
Perhaps, most disturbing are the underpinnings of Putin’s
constituency in Russia itself, where as Timothy Snyder points out:

“The
authoritarian far right in Russia is infinitely more dangerous than
the authoritarian far right in Ukraine. It is in power, for one
thing. It has no meaningful rivals, for another. It does not have to
accommodate itself to international expectations, for a third. And it
is now pursuing a foreign policy that is based openly upon the
ethnicization of the world. It does not matter who an individual is
according to law or his own preferences: that fact that he speaks
Russian makes him a Volksgenosse requiring Russian protection, which
is to say invasion. The Russian parliament granted Putin the
authority to invade the entirety of Ukraine and to transform its
social and political structure, which is an extraordinarily radical
goal. It also sent a missive to the Polish foreign ministry proposing
a partition of Ukraine. On popular Russian television Jews are blamed
for the Holocaust; in the major newspaper Izvestiia Hitler is
rehabilitated as a reasonable statesman responding to unreasonable
western pressure. The pro-war demonstrations supporting the invasion
of Ukraine are composed of people who wear monochrome uniforms and
march in formation. The Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine
involves generating ethnic violence, not suppressing it. The man who
raised the Russian flag in Donetsk was a member of a neo-Nazi party”.

The
rehabilitation of Hitler is concocted by Andranik Migranyan, who
writes in Izverstia that “One must distinguish between Hitler
before 1939 and Hitler after 1939. The thing is that Hitler collected
[German] lands. If he had become famous only for uniting without a
drop of blood Germany with Austria, Sudetenland and Memel, in fact
completing what Bismarck failed to do, and if he had stopped there,
then he would have remained a politician of the highest class.” He
clearly implies that Putin’s policies and actions are analogous to
those of pre-1939 Hitler and worthy of praise.

In
Crimea Putin has installed Serge Aksyonov, an alleged former criminal
gangster with the nickname of “Goblin” as its ruler
(legitimate government?). Recently, it has been reported that Ksyonov
expressed crude racist comments about President Obama. Putin’s ties
to Eurasian empire ideologist Aleksandr Dugin and Dmitri Kiselyov,
appointed by Putin as head of a government owned news agency and who
according to The Moscow Times is ″the
Kremlin’s New Chief Propagandist,″ has made it clear that Russia is
the “only country capable of turning the United States into
‘radioactive ashes'”, provides insight as to what is, for Putin,
acceptable public discourse. 

For
someone like myself, who has actively opposed U.S. military
intervention in other countries, it would seem that Progressives
would be the first to oppose Putin’s violation of Ukraine’s
territorial integrity, which Russia had agreed to uphold in the 1994
Budapest Agreement. Progressives, seemingly would not ignore the
outrageous pronouncements, cited above, of Putin and his supporters.
His aggression can only be anathema to those who opposed U.S.
military interventions. Notwithstanding this deafening silence on
Putin’s actions, inexplicably, Mr. Cohen suggests that :”…proposals
made by Putin’s foreign ministry could be the starting point for
negotiations” to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. So the
aggressors’ proposals, which include the type of political system
Ukraine should have, would be the basis for the ultimate denouement?
Is there a role for Ukrainians in determining their own fate?

Finally,
it is difficult to understand what progressive principles Cohen is
invoking while trying to provide legitimacy to the jingoism,
nationalism, autocratic rule and corruption of the Putin regime?