OPINION:
Few remember Walter Duranty. Those who do remember him recall that he was the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times during the early 1930s.
The unlamented Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his adulatory reporting on Josef Stalin’s regime. He relied on and failed to question anything the Soviet government told him, making his reporting little more than regurgitated Soviet propaganda.
When the truth came out about the brutal nature of the Stalin regime, including the killings of hundreds of Soviet politicians for real or imagined disloyalty to Stalin and the intentional starvation of about 7 million Ukrainian farmers, or “kulaks,” Duranty’s reporting was thoroughly discredited. His legacy is a cautionary lesson for every journalist.
A column that could have been ghostwritten by Duranty’s shade appeared on this page about a week ago. It was headlined “My Weekend in Moscow.” The author, Judge Andrew Napolitano, was invited to Moscow and feted by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s philosopher Alexandr Dugin. Mr. Napolitano evidently absorbed everything they told him and, like Duranty, failed to check out what they said.
The author refers to Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, which is Mr. Putin’s label for it. He doesn’t mention that Russian troops, under Mr. Putin’s orders, have committed war crimes as a matter of policy. They have intentionally targeted and killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of civilians in their homes, hospitals, schools and churches. Those killings are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
The author then refers to a 2014 coup against a popularly elected president in Ukraine managed by the State Department, the CIA and the British MI6. He says that brought about a series of governments determined to attack the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine’s east. That is nonsense.
First, we must remember that Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and then annexed it.
Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, asked for Russian intervention when protests made it impossible for him to govern. He promptly fled to Russia. The governments that succeeded him had no intention to and did not attack the Russian-speaking population.
Mr. Napolitano proclaims Moscow to be a city of lights (isn’t that supposed to be Paris?) and writes that Russia “is thoroughly modern, generally happy, devoutly Christian Orthodox and yearning to interact commercially, culturally and even politically with the West.” He concludes by saying, “The Russia that Americans have hated no longer exists. Our trading partner and friend are in their place.” Mr. Trump can’t be that naive.
Russia may be devoutly Christian Orthodox, but under the Soviets, the church surrendered to communism. As Walter Laqueur explains in his book “Putinism,” “Generally speaking, the division between church and state has virtually disappeared.”
As if to prove that point, an April 2024 report by the Atlantic Council stated that the Russian Orthodox Church declared the war on Ukraine to be a “holy war” with the explicit aim of imposing direct Russian rule.
In 2005, Mr. Putin said, “First and foremost, it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” Mr. Dugin convinced Mr. Putin that his ability to restore the Soviet empire depended on conquering Ukraine first.
Without that, as Mr. Dugin wrote, nothing else can be done.
Mr. Dugin’s book “Foundations of Geopolitics” appeared in 1997. In July 2023, I wrote on this page, “About Ukraine, [Mr. Dugin] wrote in ‘Foundations’ that ‘Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness. … Its certain territorial ambitions represent an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.’”
Mr. Putin believes that and has, since 2021, taken actions to threaten and then invade Ukraine.
As Mr. Napolitano wrote, Russia is not a peaceful, idyllic country interested only in trading with the West. It is an enemy that must be opposed as determinedly as it was during the Cold War.
Mr. Putin lies when he says he wants peace. Last week, he gave a middle-finger salute to President Trump’s proposed peace deal and British and French proposals. There will be no ceasefire because Mr. Putin will not allow Ukrainian troops to remain in Russia and because Russian forces are making gains on the battlefield. He is a patient man who will keep trying to conquer Ukraine as long as he lives.
Mr. Trump has few options left. There is no point in pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make more peace proposals. He can, as he threatened, maximize economic sanctions against Russia, which have not proved effective. He can also continue to aid Ukraine’s fight for freedom.
President Biden was content to leave the Russian war against Ukraine in a stalemate. Mr. Trump can try to bring about lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia, but how he will do so is unclear. If he does, he will prove Mr. Dugin’s ideology of conquest to be another false dream of empires lost.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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