@AlexandreEremenko, you seem to have an uncanny ability to make far-reaching conclusions from insufficient or outright absent information. Last time Steele worked in Russia, as a Guardian bureau chief, was between 1988 and 1994. He lives in London, and reports mostly on Middle Eastern wars these days. Besides, there are plenty foreign journalists working in Russia who can be very critical, but no one is throwing them out anyway.

Secondly, Sakwa dedicated the whole chapter (№5, Crimean Gambit) to Crimea. Indeed Steele did not mention it in his review, probably because he was focusing on other aspects. But here is the review from an Ukrainian professor at Baylor University in Texas: russialist.org/… He specifically pointed out treatment of Crimea by Sakwa in his Shortcomings sub-section, but noted, that besides those shortcomings, the book is still valuable:

> On balance, Frontline Ukraine stands tall on its merits. It offers a thoughtful and vividly written corrective to numerous existing ideological accounts of the Ukrainian upheaval. It also makes a compelling case that the dual crises in and around Ukraine are as much a doing of the political elites in Kyiv and the West as they are of Russia.

Now, you keep pressing on about Russian propaganda? See this article from the mainstream German magazine Der Spiegel the other day: spiegel.de/international/world/… . You know you are in trouble, when German government (Chancellory as well as parliamentarians) is alarmed at repeated exaggerations of top NATO general:

> The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as "dangerous propaganda." Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove's comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

> But it is the tone of Breedlove's announcements that makes Berlin uneasy. False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO -- and by extension, the entire West -- in danger of losing its credibility.

And about NATO being hostile from the get go. Here is the Pentagon's doctrine draft from 1992, that was declassified in 2007, but the relevants parts still redacted out: www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/…

New York Times published the excerpts in March of 1992, so you cannot really claim it as a Russian propaganda: nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/…

> Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

> There are three additional aspects to this objective: First, the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.

Note the "legitimate interests". They might have them, but "they need not aspire" to protect them.

> Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.

Which, of course, means continuing domination over Western European "allies" and Japan.

> It is improbable that a global conventional challenge to U.S. and Western security will re-emerge from the Eurasian heartland for many years to come. Even in the highly unlikely event that some future leadership in the former Soviet Union adopted strategic aims of recovering the lost empire or otherwise threatened global interests, the loss of Warsaw Pact allies and the subsequent and continuing dissolution of military capability

> would make any hope of success require several years or more of strategic and doctrinal re-orientation and force regeneration and redeployment, which in turn could only happen after a lengthy political realignment and re-orientation to authoritarian and aggressive political and economic control.

> Furthermore, any such political upheaval in or among the states of the former U.S.S.R. would be much more likely to issue in internal or localized hostilities, rather than a concerted strategic effort to marshal capabilities for external expansionism -- the ability to project power beyond their borders.

So, even if that describes our current situation, it seems that the rumours of evil Soviet empire re-emerging, bent on grand European conquest, are greatly exaggerated.

> NATO continues to provide the indispensable foundation for a stable security environment in Europe. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security, as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European security affairs.

> While the United States supports the goal of European integration, we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO, particularly the alliance's integrated command structure. . . .

Again, NATO is an instrument of continuing projection of US hegemony over European allies.

> The most promising avenues for anchoring the east-central Europeans into the West and for stabilizing their democratic institutions is their participation in Western political and economic organizations. East-central European membership in the (European Community) at the earliest opportunity, and expanded NATO liaison

NATO expansion was the goal from the beginning.

@theUG: you simultaneously raise too many issues to answer all at once. On motivation of the people were were discussing, this was only my CONJECTURE, as I said in my message. I did not study their biographies. It is evident to me that they are bisased. What's the reason of this bias I can only conjecture.

@theG: besides Russian propaganda, there other reasons of bias. You mention politicians like Merkel. Of course I assume that Merkel and Obama and other Western leaders have access to complete and correct information. The reasons for bias in this case is completely different: it is FEAR.

@theUG: Fear of Russian intimidation. Many years ago Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait. A broad international coalition almost immediately started a military action. Now Russia invaded and annexed a part of Ukraine, and wages a war in another part. Nobody reacts on this for two evident reasons: First, Russian huge stockpile of

nuclear weapons, and second, Europe is too much dependent on Russia economically. This is why Obama, Merkel and all the rest do not do anything, and to justify this, tend to belittle what Russia does.

And to forget their international obligations (I mean Britain and US who guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine).

Finally on NATO. I do not deny that US considered expansion of NATO coinciding with its interest. However in this case US interest coincided with the interests of those Eastern European peoples who wanted to join NATO so much.

Most Ukrainians did not until 2014 (you can look at the polls). They just did not believe that Russia can attack Ukraine. I also did not believe, though already was not so sure after the Georgian war. Now I think majority of Ukrainians want to join NATO and they removed the non-aligned status from their constitution last fall. I stress LAST FALL, not BEFORE the Russian invasion.

In 1939, the Western democracies started a world war because Germany invaded another "small" Eastern European country. This time they decided to let Russia do it.

Of course in short term this decision will not affect the daily life of most citizens of Europe and US. What will happen in the long run, we will see. I do not know where Russians will stop. But everyone else of this kind (China, ISIS? ...) is watching, be sure of that. Watching what one can do and remain unpunished.

But we deviated far from the original topic. I challenge you to prove that Snyder is biased. On my opinion, he is a rare completely honest Western historian, without any pre-determined opinion. Can you challenge this ?

You cited one of those journalist witticisms "NATO has to cope with a problem it created". To this I can reply similarly: "Russia, by invading Ukraine created exactly the problem it claimed it tried to prevent: US troops in the Baltic states, and desire to join NATO by the majority of Ukrainians".

Both things had very little probability before Russia invaded.

@AlexandreEremenko, this is not journalist. It was a quote from a book by an English professor. Learn to read carefully. Also, US troops were in Baltic states prior to the current conflict (they conduct annual exercises) and their whole membership in NATO is nothing but a tripwire for US involvement, like it's been during the Cold War and in Korea, and Crimean annexation sort of prevents NATO easily advancing that way for the time being. Hold on, while I converse with another fellow here.

@theUG: I do not find this discussion useful. I think I understood more or less your point of view. And I stated my one. So let us stop it.

@SJuan76, so I was reading about Snyder a bit, and here seem to be a confusion. I had never heard of Historikerstreit before, but it appears a first large attempt in historical revisionism in Germany in the end of the 80s. Basically, they had tried to find excuse for excesses of Nazi brutality in the excesses of Soviet brutality.

To wit, this is what Joachim Fest wrote in the follow up to the Ernst Nolte article (quote from the article I shall link later):

> Or as Joachim Fest, co-editor of the FAZ, noted in a follow-up, Hitler “was prepared, as he said, ‘to counter every act of terror by Marxism with a response ten times greater.’” However outsized the Nazi response, therefore, it was Lenin who bore ultimate responsibility because he was the one who originated the concept of mass vengeance against an entire social category in the first place.

> Since Jews figured disproportionately in the Soviet repressive apparatus — Snyder informs us that, as of the late 1930s, about “forty percent of high-ranking NKVD officers had Jewish nationality recorded in their identity documents, as did more than half of the NKVD generals” — the implication is that left-wing Jews played a major role in developing the techniques that would later be their undoing at the hands of the ultra-right.

Wendy Lower in her (massively positive) book review of Snyder's Bloodlands in Journal of Genocide Research (free access PDF) explicitly states that Snyder disproves Historikerstreit initiators:

> In 1986, during the Historikerstreit, German scholars Andreas Hillgruber and Ernst Nolte compared the Holocaust to the Red Army’s mass crimes in 1944–5. This attempt to impose moral equivalence, which included the assertion that Stalin’s gulag led to Hitler’s Auschwitz, failed. Charles Maier, Hans Mommsen and others established that Soviet crimes were massive and horrible; but unlike Hitler, Stalin did not seek the total eradication of a people, such as the Jews, within his empire and beyond.

> [...]

> For those who wish, for whichever reason, to exaggerate the crimes of Stalinism while minimizing those of Hitler and his collaborators, Snyder sets the record straight.

Yet, in this scathing review in American leftist magazine, the Jacobine (article which I quote above with that Fest paragraph), author argues that Snyder, in fact, continues that drive unleashed by Nolte, and just as you had said, he puts two and two together without explicitly ascribing causation:

> This would be an explosive argument no matter who made it, but it was even more so in the hands of a German historian. This is why the controversy ended with Nolte getting his knuckles smartly rapped and why Snyder is now careful to avoid falling into the same trap. Instead of spelling out how one regime caused another’s misdeeds, he therefore limits himself to drawing endless parallels between the two and leaving it at that. [...]

> Like collectivization, like the Soviet NKVD — by harping on such likenesses, Snyder’s clear intent is to present the two phenomena as essentially the same. If it’s repeatedly pointed out that, like fish, whales have fins and live in water, then, unless the differences are carefully spelled out, the reader can hardly be blamed for concluding that they really are fish after all.