It has become common in Moscow to reiterate that Ukraine is a proxy for the West to weaken Russia. It’s the Kremlin’s idea, but it has a significant group of speakers in the West. Following Moscow’s logic, Washington and its armed wing, NATO, are using Kyiv to attack Russia. A longwest generated target that, according to the siege mentality one witnesses these days in the highest domes of the Kremlin, has done nothing since the collapse of the Soviet Union but hatch plans to prevent Russia from fulfilling its glorious destiny. In other words, Russia isn’t a great power because the United States won’t let it be. Or rather, in Kremlin jargon, Russia is a great power, despite Western attempts to thwart it.
From the first moment this war is not only against Ukraine. By the way, in Vladimir Putin’s speech on Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War, May 9, 2022, two months and May after the start of the “special military intervention”, the enemy “Ukraine” practically disappeared. The inability to reach Kyiv prompted Putin not only to reformulate his war aims moving away from the capital and focusing on dombas but also to change the hierarchy of hostilities. From then on, the most dangerous contender in the war in Ukraine was the United States, with two armed weapons also hierarchically positioned. First NATO, with its familiar nicknames, followed by the “Ukrainian nationalists” who refuse to recognize Russian sovereignty over their territories. The most prominent among them are the “neoNazis” who awaken in the spirit of the Russian people the enemy defeated in the nation’s most glorious moment.
The truth is that this altered view of the conflict and the diminishing of Kiev’s existence as an enemy of Russia does exactly the opposite of Moscow’s official narrative. Ukraine is partly a proxy war. But it is Russia’s proxy to the United States and the West, not the other way around.
Let’s see: First, this war is taking place at a time when the United States was focused on China, competing with Beijing for power transition. Since 2017, this reality has been explained and underscored by the Biden administration in multiple speeches and in all strategic documents it has published. But the dispute against China is also as is typical with changes of power about upholding a number of current international rules, including the charter of the United Nations, which Russia grossly violated when invading Ukraine. With the United States as the guardian of that order, and with its very close European allies and democracy itself under threat, Washington’s international credibility (also) depends on Ukraine’s support. So, cautiously and to avoid escalation, the decision was made to intervene in the conflict by any means possible without a military presence. But the extraordinary resources Washington has expended weaken the country in the eyes of its rivals, particularly Beijing, which benefits from the conflict in this way.
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