《走向深渊》
节选自第七章:乌克兰人眼里的北约
作者:弗拉基米尔·伊格申
January 2023
Did Russia invade Ukraine to prevent further NATO encroachment on its western marches? Or was such agita merely a pretext? For those who take Vladimir Putin’s ‘legitimate security concerns’ at face value, NATO is itself culpable for the war, by holding out the promise of Ukrainian membership while engaging in increasingly intensive military coordination with Kiev. By contrast, Atlanticist consensus rejects the issue altogether, on the grounds that every state has the right to determine its own foreign policy, not least accession to a purely ‘defensive’ alliance. Concerns voiced by two generations of Soviet and Russian leaders can thus be dismissed as a ploy, contrived to dissemble deep-seated imperialistic designs.
Whatever role NATO expansion played in bringing about war, Ukrainians’ attitudes counted for little. The grim irony is not only that NATO was far from extending formal membership to Ukraine, but that there was not even evidence of a stable pro-NATO majority in the country. In a typically colonial style, commentators on all sides tended to homogenize Ukrainians, without regard for political diversity in a nation of forty million people. Contrary to the Kremlin’s inclination to resolve Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation within a small circle of Great Powers, Ukrainian officials have insisted on the principle ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’. However, the problem is not only deciding ‘without Ukraine’, but also deciding ‘for’ a very diverse population as if all held identical opinions on the critical issues in question.
节选自第七章:乌克兰人眼里的北约
作者:弗拉基米尔·伊格申
January 2023
Did Russia invade Ukraine to prevent further NATO encroachment on its western marches? Or was such agita merely a pretext? For those who take Vladimir Putin’s ‘legitimate security concerns’ at face value, NATO is itself culpable for the war, by holding out the promise of Ukrainian membership while engaging in increasingly intensive military coordination with Kiev. By contrast, Atlanticist consensus rejects the issue altogether, on the grounds that every state has the right to determine its own foreign policy, not least accession to a purely ‘defensive’ alliance. Concerns voiced by two generations of Soviet and Russian leaders can thus be dismissed as a ploy, contrived to dissemble deep-seated imperialistic designs.
Whatever role NATO expansion played in bringing about war, Ukrainians’ attitudes counted for little. The grim irony is not only that NATO was far from extending formal membership to Ukraine, but that there was not even evidence of a stable pro-NATO majority in the country. In a typically colonial style, commentators on all sides tended to homogenize Ukrainians, without regard for political diversity in a nation of forty million people. Contrary to the Kremlin’s inclination to resolve Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation within a small circle of Great Powers, Ukrainian officials have insisted on the principle ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’. However, the problem is not only deciding ‘without Ukraine’, but also deciding ‘for’ a very diverse population as if all held identical opinions on the critical issues in question.
